During his decade singing for Japanese metalcore band Crystal Lake, Ryo Kinoshita was a hyperactive force – a man with enough charisma he could trigger moshpits during a soundcheck.

But offstage, at the height of his fame, he was struggling with a mental health condition called adaptive (or adjustment) disorder – an intense emotional or behavioural reaction to a stressful event.

In 2022, he quit the band, referencing his condition in a statement: “Sometimes everything becomes pitch black and you can’t move like a corpse,” he wrote.

“There were many times when I couldn’t stop crying before a live show.”

Today, he tells Hammer that he was “going to give up my musical career and open a taco shop”.

But a phone call from long-time friend Yosh Morita (of Survive Said The Prophet) changed everything.

“He told me I had to keep writing music, and that I was a treasure of the scene. He dragged me out of it.”

With his friend’s support, Ryo put together the band that eventually became Knosis. It might share some similarities with Crystal Lake, but there’s one crucial difference: “I’m not trying to be a tough guy or someone else,” he beams.

“In Crystal Lake, it was like I was bound by a kind of silent understanding of being a metal singer… I had to be a tough guy and behave a certain way, but not anymore. I’m free.”

Debut album Genknosis is an exhilarating combination of metalcore and hyper-aggressive techno, punk, and industrial. Despite the darkness, the overall message is a positive one.

“The lyrical themes can be dark, but it’s about overcoming the negativity. I want everyone to feel motivated and live a better life,” Ryo says. “When I was in Crystal Lake, I was always asking, ‘Why don’t I have this?’ Now I don’t take anything for granted. I’m living a dream.”

Genknosis is out now via Sharptone.

IN SHORT

SOUNDS LIKE: Over-caffeinated metalcore gatecrashing an illegal rave
FOR FANS OF: The Ghost Inside, Atari Teenage Riot, Crystal Lake
LISTEN TO: Yakusai

A few years ago, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler was asked about his band’s aspirations when they got together in the wilds of Massachusetts all those years ago.

“We weren’t too ambitious when we started out,” came his reply. “We just wanted to be the biggest band on the planet.”

It was typical Tyler: funny but honest, and brimming with bulletproof confidence. Most bands would have said the same, and those who didn’t were lying. But the difference was that Aerosmith delivered on that promise. Eventually.

The band’s stellar history is well documented. The commercial, artistic and chemical highs of the 70s; their against-the-odds resurrection in the 80s; the ongoing five-way soap opera that sporadically simmers, boils over then calms down again.

But their early years were a different matter. They might have wanted to be the biggest band on the planet, but they weren’t going to get there without a fight. There were obstacles and setbacks, failures and fights. And there were drugs. Lots of drugs.

Aerosmith made it, of course. But that bulletproof confidence would be tested to the limit.

They might be the ultimate Boston band, but three of Aerosmith’s founding members were New York-born and bred. Steven Tyler grew up in the Big Apple with original guitarist Ray Tabano, where they both ran with the same teenage gang. Tyler and drummer Joey Kramer were in different years at the same school in Yonkers, though it was pure coincidence that they ended up in the same band 200 miles up the coast a few years later.

Tyler came from a musical family. His Italian grandfather, Giovanni Tallarico, had been a classical cellist, and his father Victor was a Juilliard-educated pianist. The young Steven cut his teeth playing drums with his dad at social events. “Girls would come in, look at the band and go, ‘Ugh,’” he recalled. “I’d try to look over at them and go, ‘No, look, I’m cool, check it out, don’t leave.’”

The polite world of classical music and the natural-born wild child Tyler were always going to be a bad fit for each other. He began listening to The Beatles, the Stones and The Yardbirds, dropping acid, smoking pot and taking speed while he did it. The social events fell by the wayside. “In my mind I was always a rock star,” he recalled.

It wouldn’t be long before he was making that dream a reality. Or trying to. An early band, the Yardbirds-inspired The Chain Reaction, had released a couple of singles, but it hadn’t led anywhere. The fame Tyler craved remained tantalisingly out of reach.

All that changed in the summer of 1969. Tyler’s family owned a holiday lodge in the small New Hampshire town of Sunapee, and he split his time between there and New York. It was in Sunapee that Tyler was invited to watch a covers trio with the unpromising name The Jam Band playing a gig at a local club, The Barn.

Tyler grudgingly accepted the invitation. The Jam Band featured a lanky blond bassist called Tom Hamilton and a singer/guitarist with a mop of thick black hair and a jaw that could crack concrete by the name of Joe Perry.

“They were horrible, but the way they did [Fleetwood Mac’s] Rattlesnake Shake was something else. Joe was really into [Ten Years After frontman] Alvin Lee,” Tyler remembered. “And I went, if I can get this groove with this guy and start writing songs…’”

Perry and Hamilton knew who Tyler was. He would regularly come up to Sunapee to stay at his parents’ lodge and make like he owned the place. Sometimes he’d be with whatever band he was in at the time. Joe Perry worked at a local diner, and he’d sigh whenever Tyler and his crew came in.

“They’d be wearing clothes from Carnaby Street and real long hair,” said Perry. “They were loud and obnoxious, behaving like rock stars are supposed to behave – especially when they’re in a little town and nobody knows how not-so-big they really are. They’d come in and throw food and shit, and I’d have to clean up after them."

When this fast-talking brat approached Perry about getting a band together, the guitarist was understandably reticent, but some underlying ESP stopped him from telling Tyler to go screw himself. For starters, they were drinking from the same musical well: the British invasion bands, American R&B singers, blues rock pioneers like The Yardbirds and The Animals. It didn’t hurt that Perry and Hamilton shared the same burgeoning chemical proclivities as Tyler – the bassist had even been arrested as a teenager for dealing acid.

Perry and Hamilton didn’t take a lot of persuading. Within a few months, they had moved with Tyler down to Boston, then the centre of a burgeoning rock’n’roll movement headed up by local heroes the J. Geils Band. The trio were joined by Tyler’s old buddy Ray Tabano on second guitar. Not long after that, the singer’s former schoolmate Joey Kramer – who had moved to Boston to study at the Berklee College Of Music – had agreed to play drums. They had a band and, in a shared apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue, a base.

What they didn’t have was a name. At one point, they considered calling themselves The Hookers. Another time, they talked about calling themselves Spike Jones, after the 50s comedian and bandleader. The words ‘spike’ and ‘jones’ both had drug connotations – whether that was coincidental or not isn’t clear, though it did dovetail neatly with the band’s growing pharmaceutical activities (Tyler and Tabano had graduated to injecting cocaine, though they would ultimately prove to be early adopters rather than outliers within the group).

In the end, it was Kramer who gifted the band their name. He was a fan of Harry Nilsson’s 1968 album Aerial Ballet, and loved the sound of the word ‘Aero’. An old band of his back in Yonkers had called themselves Aerosmith, but they’d split up a few years ago. Why waste it? It didn’t mean much, but it was still better than The Hookers.

Aerosmith made their live debut at the Nipmuc Regional High School in Upton, Massachusetts in late 1970. They didn’t bother hiding their influences: the set consisted of Stones and Yardbirds covers, including their version of the latter’s take on the old blues number Train Kept A-Rollin’. During the gig, Tyler and Perry got into a ruck over the volume of the guitars. “So began an Aerosmith tradition,” a wry Tom Hamilton later said.

That tension would fuel Aerosmith from the start. Tyler was older and gobbier; Perry quieter and more stubborn. They frequently butted heads, but both knew it was for the greater good of the band. The same couldn’t be said of Ray Tabano. The guitarist was lagging behind his bandmates musically, but that didn’t stop him making a play for control of Aerosmith in the summer of 1971. “Ray gives the band this Looney Tunes ultimatum that he was taking over,” said Tom Hamilton. “He said, ‘Either you line up behind him [Tyler] or you line up behind me.’ From that moment on, Ray was gone.

Tabano’s replacement was 19-year-old guitarist Brad Whitford, a friend of a friend from Reading, Massachusetts who was playing with a band named Justin Thyme. They didn’t know it, but the classic Aerosmith line-up was in place.

There were few places in Boston that let groups play original material, and Aerosmith had too much ambition to play sets full of covers for too long. They hit the frat parties and high school dances instead. Occasionally they headed down the Eastern seaboard to New York to check out the competition.

“When we started I imagined that these people like Rick Derringer were like Lord High Doodledums who sat in the corner with servants pickin’ their toes,” scoffed Tyler. “But we played Max’s Kansas City with some of those guys and I knew we had more than they had.”

Aerosmith had picked up a manager along the way. Frank Connally was a Boston promoter with some shady friends. Joey Kramer recalled walking into a run-down greeting card shop run by associates of ‘Father Frank’. “It took me a while to realise it was actually a bookie joint and that they were basically gangsters,” said Kramer. “I think they loaned Frank money to finance our management.”

It wasn’t just mobsters that Aerosmith were mixing with. “Our best friends were drug dealers,” said Perry. “We identified with them because we felt like outcasts, outlaws, menaces to society.”

The dealers liked Aerosmith too, mainly because they were such good customers. But the music industry was taking longer to warm to them. Labels came to check out Aerosmith, only to pass on them, deciding that they weren’t ready or, worse, that they sailed too close to the Rolling Stones.

But their perseverance eventually paid off. In 1972, they finally bagged a deal with Columbia Records after label boss Clive Davis caught a show in New York. Davis was the music industry power player who had turned Janis Joplin and Carlos Santana into stars, and a good man to have in their corner. The $125,000 the band received for signing didn’t hurt either.

“God, I know we stayed up all night,” remembered Hamilton, “but we weren’t looking down the road. I don’t think anybody thought that everything was going to be fine from now on, and that we were going to have a thirty-year career just because Clive Davis said so. We still had to get up the next day and get to the next gig.”

Joe Perry would describe Aerosmith’s self-titled debut album as “the stuff we had been playing in the clubs. We just left out the Yardbirds songs.” The fluid songwriting partnerships that would help turn them into one of rock’n’roll’s biggest draws were yet to be established. Instead, Tyler was responsible the lion’s share of the songs, taking sole credit for five of the eight tracks that would eventually appear on the album. Among them were Mama Kin, written on a warped acoustic guitar Joey Kramer fished out of a garbage can, and Make It, a song that found Aerosmith wearing their ambitions on their voluminous sleeves.

But best of all was a showstopping slowie titled Dream On that Tyler had written in his parents’ living room in the lodge at Sunapee. He knew it was promising, but it was only when he brought it to Perry and Whitford that he realised how special it was. “Sitting there working it out on guitar and piano, I got a little melodramatic,” he said. “The song was so good it brought a tear to my eye.”

Aerosmith were a razor-sharp live band, but they would quickly find out there was a big difference between the stage and the studio. The five men who stepped into Boston’s Intermedia Studios in October 1973 to record their debut album were greenhorns in that situation.

“The band was very uptight,” remembered Tyler. “We were so nervous that when the red recording light came on we froze. We were scared shitless.”

Matters weren’t helped by tensions with producer Adrian Barber. The Yorkshire-born Barber had been the in-house engineer at Hamburg’s Star Club when The Beatles played there in the early 60s, before going on to work with the likes of Cream and The Allman Brothers Band. But he was oscillating on a different wavelength to these wired Yanks.

“Our producer was practically useless,” Perry later claimed. “When I heard the playback, I kept thinking, ‘We’re better than this. We should sound better than this.’”

Tyler: “It was like being with a retarded child in there, and I’m not sure if it was because he was so high, or because we all were.”

The singer wasn’t afraid to take matters into his own hands, albeit with a little chemical assistance. “I put the string section on Dream On sitting at this Mellotron while a friend of mine kept laying out lines of crystal THC that I was snorting while I was playing,” he admitted.

The finished album was a promising start, if not a great one. The bones of the band they would become are in place, but the muscle was missing. Much of this is down to the sluggish mix that irked Perry so much: One Way Street and the choogling Write Me A Letter are decent songs that sound like they’re dragging great bags of wet laundry behind them.

Weirder still is Tyler’s voice. The future Demon Of Screamin’ decided at the last minute to rework his singing style, swapping out his jive-talking rasp for a mangled attempt at old-beyond-his-years authenticity. “I changed my voice into Kermit the Frog, to sound more like a blues singer,” he later rued.

For all that, Aerosmith was far from disastrous. Make It and Someday were cocksure enough to paper over any cracks, while their cover of Rufus Thomas’ Walkin’ The Dog was a textbook example of early 70s white-boy R&B. And it possessed two out-of-the-gate classics in Mama Kin and Dream On. Ironically, Perry was initially unimpressed by the latter – a song which would eventually become one of the band’s signature numbers and draw up the template for the modern power ballad.

“To me, rock’n’roll’s about energy and putting on a show,” said the guitarist. “I didn’t really appreciate the musicality of it until later, but I did know it was a great song, so we put it in our set. We also knew that if you played straight rock’n’roll you didn’t get played on the radio and, if you wanted a Top 40 hit, the ballad was the way to go.”

At least that was the idea. Aerosmith was released in January 1972, and Dream On came out as single that July. Both were greeted with deafening silence by radio DJs and the public alike. The album shuffled embarrassingly to No.166 in the US charts.

“There was no nothing at all: no press, no radio, no airplay, no reviews, no interviews, no party,” said Perry. “Instead the album got ignored and there was a lot of anger and flipping out.”

The band had no choice but to hit the road. They toured with everyone from Mott The Hoople to jazz-rock pioneers Mahavishnu Orchestra. “[Mahavishnu leader] John McLaughlin and the band would meditate before they started playing,” remembered Tom Hamilton. “And as you might imagine, we weren’t really into meditating. We’d already found our own ways to meditate, chemically.”

The album hadn’t gone completely unnoticed. In the Midwest, future Guns N’ Roses guitarist Izzy Stradlin’ had fallen hard for it.

“Growing up in Indiana, I loved fucking Aerosmith, man,” said Stradlin’, whose vagabond image and Olympian drug intake owed a debt to Joe Perry. “Smoke a joint, listen to the first record.”

Aerosmith might not have flown out of the traps at the first time of asking, but at least they were doing something right.

It was Bob Ezrin who hooked Aerosmith up with the man who would help turn them into the superstars they wanted to be. Ezrin was the wunderkind Canadian producer who had helped mould Alice Cooper into America’s favourite bogeyman, and Columbia wanted him to work his magic on Aerosmith. Ezrin declined the offer, but suggested his friend Jack Douglas was the ideal man for the job.

“Bob said, ‘They’re two years away from being anything, they’re too raw, they’re just too much work for me, I can’t do it,’” Douglas later said. “But I like to get in on the ground floor with a group, and I’m an old Yardbirds fan.”

The first time Douglas saw Aerosmith play was at a high school dance outside of Boston. He was instantly sold. “It was full of sweaty kids going crazy,” he said.

The failure of their debut album had lit a rocket under the band’s collective backside. The biggest change was that Tyler and Perry had begun writing together. The first fruits of their labour would become the album’s opening song, the strutting Same Old Song And Dance, written in one drug-fuelled night in the front room of the apartment they were sharing.

Most of the groundwork for Get Your Wings was laid in an unlikely environment. “The preproduction work started in the back of a restaurant that was like a Mob hangout in the North End [of Boston]. They started to play me the songs they had for their new album. My attitude was: ‘What can I do to make them sound like themselves?’”

The band put in the hours in the studio, fuelled by whatever substances were available. “We had some hassles because we had some people there that shouldn’t have been there,” according to Douglas.

The band’s extra-curricular activities impacted on the recording process. Perry was otherwise indisposed when it came to recording the cover of The Yardbirds’ Train Kept A-Rollin’, so Douglas enlisted session musicians Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner to play on it instead.

“For some reason Joe wasn’t there to do it and I never really questioned it,” Hunter later said. “Jack called me up at like ten o’clock in the evening and I went in and did it and that was it.”

Studio stiffness and the occasional unavailability of some of its chief participants aside, Get Your Wings was more confident and recognisable as an Aerosmith record than its predecessor. Same Old Song Dance, Lord Of The Thighs and Pandora’s Box ramped up the grooves and, in the case of the latter, the not-so-subtle innuendo that would become a ’Smith’s hallmark.

Seasons Of Wither was another killer ballad, though the uplifting optimism Of Dream On was replaced by an altogether darker vibe – something that presaged the deep narcotic hole the band would soon find themselves in. And despite not featuring Perry, Train Kept A-Rollin’ remains a cornerstone of their set more than 45 years on.

Tellingly, Get Your Wings found Tyler reverted to his natural singing style. “On the second album, the songs found my voice,” he said. “I realized that it’s not about having a beautiful voice and hitting all the notes; it’s about attitude.”

But that attitude still wasn’t enough. To their annoyance, neither the songs nor the attitude supplied Aerosmith with the hits they wanted and needed. “We were angry as fuck at radio stations who weren’t playing Aerosmith,” said Tyler. The media had started to notice them, but most of the write-ups drew unfavourable comparisons with their idols the Rolling Stones, only compounding their frustrations. “I got pissed,” admitted Tyler. “I was using drugs at the time, so I was in denial.”

There was a silver lining, and that was that Aerosmith were becoming a popular live draw beyond the East Coast. Audiences were getting bigger and louder, and the band were only too happy to head to any town with a venue and a drug dealer or two.

“We were the guys you could actually see,” says Joe Perry. “It wasn’t like Zeppelin was out there on the road in America all the time. The Stones weren’t always coming to your town. We were America’s band – the garage band that made it real big, the ultimate party band.”

The guitarist was getting ahead of himself. It would be another few months before Aerosmith became “America’s band”. But they were well on their way. And once they got there, there would be no stopping them.

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents Aersomith

In 1974, Alice Cooper received a phone call from Elvis Presley's agent, inviting him to meet the King of Rock and Roll at his suite at the Hilton in Las Vegas.

When Cooper went to the hotel, where Elvis and his 'Memphis Mafia' entourage were occupying several floors, he found himself sharing a lift with his friend Liza Minnelli, rock and roll pioneer Chubby Checker, and porn star Linda Lovelace, of Deep Throat fame.

"I remember thinking, Three of us are going to be coming back downstairs tonight, and one person’s going to stay up there," Cooper recalled while telling the story to Classic Rock's Geoff Barton. "I wonder who it’s going to be?"

Cooper also told the story in detail during an appearance hosting BBC TV music quiz show Never Mind The Buzzcocks, in 2016, but suggested that the meeting took place in 1970. This doesn't actually seem at all plausible, given that Deep Throat wasn't released until June 1972, meaning that Linda Lovelace wasn't famous in 1970, so let's assume here that 1974 was the correct year, as he told Geoff Barton.

But we digress...

"So we went up, and they search us for guns," the singer told teams captained by comedians Noel Fielding and Phil Jupitus, "which was kinda silly, because there were guns everywhere once you got in."

"When he came in the room he was Elvis, he wasn't the fat Elvis, he was Elvis. He goes, 'Hey man, you're the cat with the snake, ain't ya?' I said, Yeah, and he said, 'That's cool man, I wish I'd have thought of that, that's cool man.' He said, 'Here, I wanna show you something.' We go in the kitchen, he opens a drawer, and takes out a loaded snub-nosed .38, puts it in my hand, and says, 'I'm gonna show you how to kick this gun out of somebody's hand.'

While the show's guests absorb this information, Cooper pauses, and then says, "The little devil here on my shoulder says, Shoot him! The little angel over here says, Don't kill him, just wound him. But before I could decide what to do, I was on the floor, and he had his boot on my throat. I was like, [choking voice] That's great Elvis, that's great.

"Of course, only three of us came down on the elevator that night," Cooper said, adding the punchline, "I don't know what he did with Chubby Checker all night..."

When the laughs died down, Cooper described Elvis as "an amazing character" and "a very funny guy".

Watch the clip below.

The Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan was the site of one of the most notorious examples of extreme rock ’n’ roll behaviour in history.

The Who drummer Keith Moon had already left a trail of chaos on the road, diving into swimming pools from hotel rooftops and blowing up toilets with cherry bombs, but it was in Flint where his behaviour reached its peak.

Following a large-scale food fight, the evening’s entertainment reached its climax when Moon steered a Lincoln Continental into the hotel’s swimming pool. Or at least that’s what he claimed he did.

Harvey Lisberg [manager, Herman’s Hermits]: Keith was bonkers. He had two personalities – one was wild and insane, and the other was a superb musician.

Peter Cavanaugh [DJ, WTAC Radio, Flint, Michigan]: I was at the show with a bunch of listeners, some of our DJs and some Detroit radio people who had come up. The Who just destroyed the stage. Everybody was blown away. After the show we went to The Holiday Inn.

Barry Whitwam [drummer, Herman’s Hermits]: It all started very innocently. It was Keith’s birthday party, and one or two birthday cakes had been delivered for him.

Keith Moon [speaking in 1972]: The Premier Drum Company had given me a huge birthday cake with, like, five drums stacked up on top of each other.

Barry Whitwam: The whole tour gathered in the dining room to view all the cakes. Everybody was ready for a party. Keith Moon put his plate down on the table and stuck his finger into the cream on top of one of the cakes and casually flicked it at [Hermits bassist] Karl Green who was standing next to him. The cream hit Karl in the face and everybody laughed – apart from Karl, who stuck his finger into the nearest cake and flicked some back into Keith’s face. Within seconds everybody in the room was throwing cake at each other. It only took five minutes to change the room into what looked like the inside of a cake.

Tom Wright [photographer, road manager]: The manager of the hotel comes up to Keith and tells him that this will just not do: “We’re going to have to stop this, right now”.

Keith Moon: As the party degenerated into a slanging match, I picked up the cake – all five tiers – and hurled it at the throng. People started picking up pieces and hurling it about. Everybody was covered with marzipan and icing sugar and fruit cake.

Tom Wright: I knew that wasn’t going to sit well with anybody. I told him [the manager] we’d wind it down and so on, and he left.

Peppy Castro [guitarist, the Blues Magoos]: The swimming pool had tons of broken glass in it from Keith throwing bottles in the pool. I was pissed off because of the damage he was causing.

Keith Moon: Half-a-dozen cars were parked around this swimming pool. I ran out, jumped into the first car I came to, which was a brand new Lincoln Continental. It was parked on a slight hill, and when I took the handbrake off it started to roll, and it smashed straight through this pool-surround fence, and the whole Lincoln Continental went into the swimming pool – with me in it.

Peter Cavanaugh: I was in a room. I heard the ruckus and I went outside, and the first thing I saw was the vehicle in the pool. We’d all had several beers, and some other stuff too, so things can get a little cloudy, but I clearly remember seeing the vehicle in the pool.

Keith Moon: So there I was, sitting in the driver’s seat of a Lincoln Continental, underwater. And the water was pouring in – coming in through the bloody pedal holes in the floorboard, squirting in through the windows. In a startling moment of logic, I said: “Well, I can’t open the doors until the pressure is the same”. It’s amazing how I remembered those things from my physics class. So I’m sitting there, thinking about me situation, as the water creeps up to me nose. When there’s just enough air in the top of the car to take a gulp, I fill up me lungs, throw open the door and go rising to the top of the pool. So I went back to the party, streaming water.

Barry Whitwam: There was no car in the pool, only all the pool tables and chairs, and Keith never came back dripping water.

Tom Wright: At one minute after 12, the hotel manager comes running back and says: “Goddamn it, this sounds more like a revolution than a birthday party…”, and you can’t do this and you can’t do that. He was just about to go into a big deal when Keith picked up what was left of the five-tiered cake and just shoved it into this guy’s face. Everybody in the room just went silent.

Barry Whitwam: Not satisfied with that, Keith went over to Karl Green, ripped Karl’s trouser leg from the pocket down to the knee, and laughed in his face as if to challenge him. So Karl walked up to Keith and pulled his trousers down so hard that the stitching ripped in every seam, and there Keith stood with no trousers. His underpants had been pulled down with his trousers and, to make it worse, he was only wearing a short T-shirt that didn’t do anything to cover his embarrassment.

Everybody thought this was hilarious, apart from the police officer who, up to this point, was supposed to be guarding us from the outside world. When he saw Keith’s private parts, he pulled out his revolver and walked over to Keith to arrest him for breaking the law in Michigan State. The funny thing was that the officer was still pointing his gun at Keith’s manhood.

Keith Moon: I ran. I started to leg it out the door, and I slipped on a piece of marzipan and fell flat on me face and knocked out me tooth.

John Entwistle: He was so pissed, he tripped and fell over and smashed his teeth.

Nancy Lewis [US publicist]: He was so out of it he wasn’t even aware what happened. He had to be rushed to the dentist.

John Entwistle: They operated on him without any anaesthetics, cos he was drunk.

Keith Moon: So he had to rip out what was left of the tooth and put a false one in.

John Entwistle: While we were at the dentist’s, the rest of the tour got extremely drunk and started spraying the car park with fire extinguishers.

Karl Green: We ended up having fights, raids with fire extinguishers, ripping the railings up around the pool and throwing them in, ripping vending machines off the walls to get crisps.

Barry Whitwam: Peter Noone and I decided to help clean off each other’s cake by using fire extinguishers. Little did we know, but the extinguishers had a chemical in the fluid that would remove the paint off cars.

Peter Noone [singer, Herman’s Hermits]: This fire extinguisher takes all the paint off the cars. So there was a big bill.

Barry Whitwam: Keith Moon was credited with most of the damage to the hotel but, in fact, he had very little to do with it.

Barry Whitwam: We were hit with a $25,000 bill for new carpets, wallpaper and ceilings.

Peppy Castro: The stucco ceiling in the restaurant of the Holiday Inn had to be redone because of all the cake that was thrown on it.

Keith Moon: Six of the cars had to have new paint jobs off. We’d also destroyed a piano. Reduced it to kindling. And don’t forget the carpet. And the Lincoln Continental in the bottom of the pool.

Peter Noone: That never happened. He would tell stories. He just forgot what happened.

Roger Daltrey: I saw it. We paid the bill [for the damages]. It was $50,000. It’s vague now, but I just remember the car in the pool. But then I read in the biography that never happened, so maybe I’ve been living someone else’s life, I don’t know.

Barry Whitwam: There’s no way Keith could have driven a car into the pool that evening without me knowing about it.

Peppy Castro: I personally didn’t witness Keith drive a car in the pool. So if it did happen they must have dragged the car out rather fast. I was there

John Entwistle: He never drove a car into the swimming pool. He couldn’t even drive.

This article was originally published in Classic Rock 175, in September 2012.

In 1973, David Bowie discovered Bruce Springsteen via the New Jersey singer/songwriter's debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J, and liked what he heard, to the extent that he decided to cover not one, but two, songs from the record.

In November '73, during the early sessions for Diamond Dogs, Bowie recorded a version of Growin' Up with The Faces' (and future Rolling Stone) Ronnie Wood on guitar, and a year later, while recording at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia for what became his Young Americans album, the English star taped a version of the closing track on Greetings.... It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City. A DJ who'd been supportive of Bowie's past releases was invited to drop into Sigma Sound to hear the work-in-progress, and when Bowie mentioned that he was recording a Springsteen cover, the DJ asked, "Do you want me to get Bruce down?"

Calls were duly made, and Springsteen took a Greyhound bus down to Philadelphia to hang out, arriving on the morning of November 25, at around 1am. The 25-year-old American was doubtless bemused to find that Bowie wasn't actually there when he arrived... and perhaps even more bemused when the English star showed up an hour later "out of my wig", as Bowie later admitted, with a hint of embarrassment, in a 1987 interview with Musician magazine.

Joking with writer Scott Isler, Bowie said he "vaguely remembered" Springsteen's visit, and added, "I remember chickening out of playing [It's Hard To Be A Saint...] I didn't want to play it to him ’cause I wasn’t happy with it anyway."

"I used to go and see him," Bowie continued. "I hated him as a solo artist, when he came on and did this Bob Dylan thing. It was awful, so cringe-making. He’d sit there with his guitar and be folky, have these slow philosophical raps in between the songs. As soon as the band came on, it was like a different performer and he was just marvelous."

Of the night itself, Bowie admitted, "I just couldn’t relate to him at all. It was a bad time for us to have met. I could see that he was thinking, 'Who is this weird guy?' And I was thinking, What do I say to normal people? There was a real impasse."

Springsteen departed at around 5am, right around the time, according to an onlooker, that Bowie started banging on about UFOs: the young American didn't get to hear his song. In fact, Bowie's version of It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City remained unreleased until it surfaced on the Sound + Vision box set in 1989. His take on Growin' Up emerged on the Ryko reissue of Pin Ups and, subsequently, on the 30th anniversary reissue of Diamond Dogs.

San Francisco’s Y&T were one of the greatest hard rock bands of the late 70s and 80s thanks to albums such as Earthshaker and Black Tiger and songs like Rescue Me and Summertime Girls, but their reputation as a hard rock powerhouse was never matched by their sales. In 2005, frontman Dave Meniketti sat down with Classic Rock to look back over the career of one of rock’s greatest but unluckiest bands.

Let’s be honest: most reunions suck. All too often thrown together through desperation, minus key personnel, regroupings usually fail to recapture the spirit and quality of the original incarnations. When San Francisco hard rockers Y&T, on the other hand, toured the UK in the summer of 2005 – the first time in 22 years they’d played these shores – their powerhouse live shows easily matching the performances of yesteryear.

The quartet must still seal the deal by returning to the studio, and rhythm guitarist Joey Alves is sadly absent from their ranks, but guitarist Dave Meniketti’s lungpower has diminished virtually nil, bassist Phil Kennemore must have been cryogenically frozen back in the late 80s and, despite slimming down drastically, Leonard Haze slams the skins with all the same fervour and finesse. Besides their skills as musicians, Y&T also have the luxury of an expansive repertoire.

“Most nights we don’t bother with what you’d call a real set list,” says Dave Meniketti, a couple of hours before a Mean Fiddler show that will surely bring back good memories for both band and audience. “We go out and play maybe half an hour of planned material, then throw the rest of the show open to requests – and we’re on stage for two hours. It’s up to the fans let us know what they want to hear.”

Formed in California’s Bay Area at the turn of the 70s, Yesterday & Today (as they were originally known) joined ZZ Top on the roster of London Records, releasing two albums for the label: 1976’s self-titled debut and Struck Down in 1978.

Newly abbreviated to Y&T (“It’s what the fans called us anyway,” Meniketti explains), they already had a following in Los Angeles where, among numerous appearances at the Starwood Club, Van Halen and Mötley Crüe opened for them, the latter making their own debut. It was the start of a longstanding friendship.

“Lots of bands that became big checked us out at the Starwood, wanting to get backstage afterwards,” Meniketti reminisces. “Bobby Blotzer [Ratt drummer] was a big fan, so was Blackie Lawless [of WASP]. Years later, we’d be out on the road and bands would tell us, ‘Oh man, we cut our teeth watching you guys at the Starwood.’ We heard that so many times I lost count.”

Y&T’s fortunes were kick-started by the aptly titled Earthshaker. A punchy, irresistible slice of commercial hard rock from start to finish, the 1981 album’s twin defining moments were Rescue Me and I Believe In You. Both introduced by melancholy acoustic passages, the former was a swaggering, chest-beating anthem, the latter lasted for seven mesmerising minutes, Meniketti’s vocals and squealing guitar building towards a climax worthy of Joan Collins in The Stud.

“We had no idea that Earthshaker would make such an impact, especially in Europe,” claims Meniketti. “It wasn’t until we came here to Britain to record [follow-up] Black Tiger that we discovered people even knew who we were.”

Indeed, incredible scenes greeted Y&T at a pair of now fabled June 1982 shows at the old Marquee Club in London’s Wardour Street; it has even been claimed that the venue’s sweltering conditions caused the rubber on a guitar stand to melt.

“Completely true!” swears Meniketti. “I even had heatstroke afterwards. They were almost crowbarring people into the place. Not only did it shock us, it made our booking agent [Rod MacSween] sit up and take notice.”

The second album as Y&T, 1982’s aforementioned Black Tiger, was recorded in Surrey with Max Norman and turned out to be as auspicious as Earthshaker.

“Being out in Surrey, amid rolling hills, sheep and 16th-century buildings, was amazing – it really rubbed off on the record’s vibe,” reflects Meniketti. “And having played those first amazing European shows… Jesus, you can also hear the shock factor of that.”

Mean Streak (’83) was inferior to its two predecessors (“We kinda stretched out a little with the songs, maybe alienating some of the real hard rock fans,” admits Dave). But Y&T had made an impression at the previous year’s Reading festival, and snapped up an offer to support AC/DC, who were promoting For Those About To Rock….

“The AC/DC guys saw us at Reading and remembered us supporting them at a few Texan dates while Bon Scott was alive,” the guitarist relates. “They had great respect for us; in fact, Bon chose to hang out with us more than them. He thought they were boring for not letting chicks onto the bus. We were still young, smoking dope and hanging out with groupies, so he came along with us.”

It was while Y&T were on the road with AC/DC that Meniketti received an unusual offer from Ozzy Osbourne.

“In Dublin he came backstage with Sharon,” relates Dave, still clearly amused. “And in front of my entire band, Ozzy got down his knees and said, ‘David, would you please join my band.’ I looked around and thought, ‘Oh no, this isn’t gonna go down well with the rest of the guys.’ I replied: ‘Thanks, but I’m kinda busy,’ to which Ozzy insisted that I teach his guitarist, Brad Gillis, how to be a rock star.”

Y&T themselves needed no tuition when it came to the art of hellraising. Indeed, Meniketti insists that Mötley Crüe’s tour manager once had to lay down the dressing room law, claiming his charges were being lead astray by their then support band.

“The Crüe were supposed to be the ultimate party animals,” he chuckles. “And two weeks into the tour we were being told, ‘Can you keep your guys away from our guys? Leonard and Phil are a bad influence.’ There was a lot of oneupmanship going on backstage; mass orgies and stuff. Nikki Sixx once put his cigarette out on Phil’s arm. Phil saw that as a challenge; we put decaying fish onto their microphones.”

Y&T went along with record label A&M’s suggestion of collaborating with songwriter Geoff Leib on their next album, 1984’s In Rock We Trust. “We thought we’d made a really deep record, but the UK the press slammed us,” he winces.

Flying in for interviews two days before that year’s Castle Donington festival, it was a thoroughly deflated Y&T that appeared mid-way up a stellar bill of headliners AC/DC, Van Halen, Ozzy Osbourne, Gary Moore, Accept and Mötley Crüe.

“We were praying the fans wouldn’t hate us, too,” admits Dave. “But after two days off being nailed by the press, and never having had anything thrown at us at a UK festival until then, we took those few bottles of piss that did hit us to heart.”

Y&T wouldn’t play again in Britain for almost two decades. The following year’s live album Open Fire included the studio cut Summertime Girls, its highly comical video featuring the rotund Haze preening amid bikini-clad beauties. Because Summertime Girls had been America’s tenth-most-requested song for a fortnight in ’85, A&M hooked them up with REO Speedwagon producer Kevin Beamish for that year’s Down For The Count. Red-hot in the wake of tours with Aerosmith and the Crüe, Beamish had wanted them to call the record Poised For Platinum, but band and label had reached the end of the road. Given the high-profile tours they’d been on, Meniketti doesn’t lay all the blame for what went wrong on A&M.

“In Europe and Japan they were great,” he says. “But in America it was a different story. They were constantly on our butts for us to try particular songs or ideas, even with record covers. Any other company that dealt in quality hard rock, such as Atlantic, would have broken us at least two albums earlier.”

Released from their contract whilst out on tour, Y&T met with Geffen executive John Kalodner, who snapped them up for Contagious and Ten; the former saw Jimmy DeGrasso succeed Haze, Stef Burns taking Alves’ place for the latter in 1990. “It was the 90s; there were drug issues, personal problems – you name it,” says Meniketti. “For some of us, motivation was getting lost along the way.” Worse still, the new record deal wasn’t turning out to be all it seemed.

“Kalodner told us, ‘A&M is the worst label in the world; my niece could’ve broken Summertime Girls’,” smiles Meniketti. But hardcore fans regarded the sugarcoated, Desmond Child-esque strains of Contagious’ title track with weary suspicion and Geffen were unable to triumph where A&M had already failed. “Contagious came out in the exact same week as two records you may have heard of: Appetite For Destruction and 1987 [by Whitesnake],” sighs Dave wearily.

The band had already decided to split if Geffen failed to back Ten, and two weeks of touring was all it took to make up their minds. “Our longevity was working against us,” explains Dave. “Grunge was coming in, the writing was on the wall.”

Y&T’s 17-year run ended on New Year’s Eve 1990, with a show at The Cabaret in San Jose, later documented as the Metal Blade Records double set Yesterday & Today Live. However, the group remained friends and returned to the same venue to usher in both ’92 and ’93 with reunion events. Two years later, a new CD called Musically Incorrect was put on sale for the Japanese market, followed by Endangered Species in 1997. With numerous best-of anthologies having kept their name alive, a well-received appearance at 2003’s Sweden Rock Festival encouraged Y&T to permanently reunite, John Nymann replacing the still-absent Joey Alves.

That same year, the new-look group joined Whitesnake and Gary Moore on a Monsters Of Rock arena tour of the UK. Having exhumed two solid CDs of archive material in twin volumes of Unearthed, the quartet’s next task is a new studio album.

“We’re back for good and we kick butt every night, maybe more so now than ever before,” states Dave proudly. “But if you’d asked me about a new record six months ago I’d have been doubtful. Does the demand even exist? The musicians in Whitesnake told me they’re desperate to release something new because they want to prove they’re good, but David [Coverdale] was like, ‘Why? Let’s just do DVDs.’ I don’t really understand that attitude. Even if no one cares except the band and a few fans, I still believe it’s something we should try our best to do.”

Originally published in Classic Rock 85. Since this piece was published, Leonard Haze, Phil Kennemore and Joey Alves have all passed away

December 13, 2001. The day dawns grey – and it’s about to turn black. The news breaks that Chuck Schuldiner, one of the most crucial musicians ever to inhabit the swamps of death metal, has died from a brain tumour at the age of 34.

Schuldiner’s former band, Death, were pioneers of the death metal scene, and linchpins of metal’s underground. But even after he steered the band away from their twisted, provocative beginnings into more technical and progressive areas, they never achieved the mainstream breakthrough they deserved.

Death began life in Florida in 1983 under the name Mantas, well before there was anything even approaching a death metal scene. The original line-up featured the 16-year-old Chuck – calling himself ‘Evil Chuck’ – on guitar, plus singer/drummer Kam Lee and bassist Rick Rozz.  The trio began to write and record demos, circulating them through the tape trading network. The 1984 tape Death By Metal would be an early landmark in the developing death metal scene.

“I love the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, bands like Maiden and Saxon,” Chuck later said. “But I wanted to combine their style with the harder end; with what Slayer and Venom were doing. I didn’t set out to create something new – it just happened.”

By the end of 1984, Mantas had changed their name to Death. The demo Reign Of Terror followed, along with several live tapes. But in a taste of what was to come, the line-up was thrown into chaos when Schuldiner parted ways with Lee and Rozz. He brought in bassist Scott Carlson and guitarist Matt Olivio from local proto-grindcore band Repulsion. Finding a drummer was harder.  

“There were loads of people in the local area up for it, and I could have settled for someone who was OK, but not brilliant. That wasn’t what I wanted,” Schuldiner recalled in the early 90s. “To make Death as good as I believed we could be, I had to have a line-up that kicked ass on all fronts. I even briefly moved to San Francisco in the search of the right man, but that didn’t pan out.”

Frustrated, and now a little desperate, Schuldiner returned to Florida. And feeling that perhaps he was never destined to get his project off the ground, he accepted the offer to join another band, Canadian thrashers Slaughter. “It was a mistake, but I didn’t know it at the time,” he recalled. “Now, I’m not knocking them, but they weren’t right for me. So, after two weeks, I went back home to Florida.”

Not that he was there long either. With a renewed focus, Schuldiner went back to San Francisco, and this time found drummer, Chris Reifert. Just why the pair had never met before remains a mystery. But things were really starting to accelerate. The duo recorded the Mutilation demo, and got a record deal with the growing Combat label.

It was this two-man line-up that recorded Death’s landmark 1987 debut album Scream Bloody Gore. Schuldiner played everything, apart from the drums, and the style of the album crystallised the entire concept of death metal. It took the thrash template and intensified it, adding guttural vocals, a style that few outside the tape trading network would have been familiar with. Scream Bloody Gore remains a work of warped brilliance.

“Did we set out to do something that was so unusual? No,” admitted Schuldiner, a couple of years later. “This was very much my concept, which may have helped. Apart from Chris, it was a one-man show. And when you’re virtually working on your own, it can sharpen the vision.”

Typically, Schuldiner then changed everything once again. He moved back to Florida once more, left Reifert behind (he would later form cult death metal favourites Autopsy) and teamed up once more with Rozz, by this time in Massacre. Rather than recruit and entirely new band, Schuldiner enlisted the other members of Massacre, namely bassist Terry Butler and drummer Bill Andrews.

It was this line-up that recorded Death’s second album, 1988’s Leprosy, a recorded that benefitted from being more of a band effort than its Schuldiner-driven predecessor. Death were also starting to get noticed outside of the death metal underground, even if they were greeted with derision by the mainstream metal press. But Scream Bloody Gore and Leprosy established them as one of the figureheads of a new movement that would soon supplant thrash as the benchmark for extremity in metal.

Typically, Death’s rising profile was marked by instability. Schuldiner’s revolving-door approach saw Death part ways with Rozz after a 1989 European tour. By the time the band recorded 1990’s Spiritual Healing, James Murphy was second guitarist (the latter would also play with Obituary and Testament).

By the time of Spiritual Healing, Schuldiner had tired of the gratuitous gorehound lyrical approach of the early days and turned his attention to more socially aware lyrics that centred around religious fakery, drug addiction and serial killers.

"I got fed up with writing about crap monsters,” he said in the early 90s. “What’s horrific about that sort of thing? The real evil in this world goes on in society. I’d just reached a time in my life as a person and as a musician when I felt angry enough to write about it.”

His vision for Death may have evolved, but things within the band were as combustible as ever. In 1990, Schuldiner turned down the chance to tour Europe, in the belief that things weren’t organised well enough. Amazingly, Butler and Andrews decided to go ahead without him anyway, bringing guitarist Walter Traschler and vocalist Louie Carrisalez (the latter actually Death’s drum roadie). Schuldiner was not amused, taking legal action against Butler and Andrews.

That was the final straw for the frontman. Rather than try and recruit a permanent band, he opted to use a revolving cast of session musicians for albums and tours. For 1991’s Human, he enlisted Cynic guitarist Paul Masvidal (who been Death‘s touring guitarist) and drummer Sean Reinert, together with Sadus bassist Steve DiGiorgio.

Human would be a turning point for Chuck Schuldiner. 1993’s Individual Thought Patterns, 1995’s Symbolic and 1998’s The Sound Of Perseverance (each featuring a different line-up, naturally) found the frontman moving away from the extreme metal genre he helped create towards a sound that was increasingly technical and progressive. Those albums are acclaimed today, but they baffled the more entrenched sections of the death metal scene. Schuldiner himself had pre-empted the reaction in the early 90s.

“Death is not a limited band where I want the same, simple beat through everything,” he railed. “I’m inspired by a lot of bands that aren’t death metal. I’ve got influences that come from different types of music, different types of metal. To say being technical isn’t allowed in this type of band, I just think that’s a narrow-minded statement. It’s coming from someone who doesn’t understand my direction. They don’t have to like it. But if you really wanna get into the reasoning of it, Death isn’t a band that I want to limit.”

By the time of The Sound Of Perseverance, Schuldiner was openly talking about folding Death and starting a new band. He delivered on that promise in1998, when he put Death on ice and Control Denied. Released in late 1999, the latter’s debut album, The Fragile Art of Existence, leaned fully into progressive metal. But that wasn’t the biggest change. Schuldiner had stepped back from singing duties to focus on playing guitar, instead enlisting vocalist Tim Aymar. who adopted a cleaner, more operatic singing style than Chuck. The latter insisted he made the decision to step back partly to put clear water between his old and new bands, and partly because of his dissatisfaction with his old singing style.

Control Denied toured in support of The Fragile Art of Existence, but then tragedy struck when Schuldiner was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Sadly, he passed away in 2001, leaving an incredible legacy – one that has never truly received the respect it deserves outside of death metal circles.

Like so many people before him who were single-minded in their pursuit of excellence, Schuldiner burnt out others at an incredible rate. “I can’t believe this band has lasted so long,” Schuldiner said in 1998 “Maybe the reason we’ve been going for so long is that I still haven’t made the  ultimate record. But I’m proud of everything we’ve done along the way. Will we ever get there? I dunno. I doubt that I shall ever be completely happy.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer Presents: The Devil’s Music

Former Jethro Tull arranger and keyboardist Dee Palmer has died, aged 88, after a period of illness.

Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson paid tribute to Palmer, saying, "We learned today of the sad passing of former Tull member Dee Palmer, who died at home in Shropshire, supported by some family members at the bedside.

"Dee had not been well during the last couple of years but last time we spoke earlier in the year, was still planning to record with an orchestra the music score of the ballet The Water’s Edge, which Dee, Martin Barre and I had written for performances by the Scottish Ballet in 1979. I had agreed to play flute on the new recording and assumed it was delayed but still on the cards.

"Dee first had written brass section parts and conducted them on the track Move On Alone, written by Mick Abrahams, for our first album This Was back in 1968. A few months later, I asked her to come up with the lovely string quartet arrangement for A Christmas Song, which was released on the B-side of our single Love Story in November 1969.

"Following on during the next years, Dee was to continue in the arranger and conductor role notably on the Aqualung, WarChild, Minstrel In The Gallery and Too Old To Rock And Roll…. albums, eventually joining Tull as second keyboard player covering all the string parts on electronic keyboards from 1976 until 1980."

Born in Hendon on July 2, 1937, Palmer studied at the Royal Academy Of Music, winning the Eric Coates Prize and the Boosey And Hawkes Prize. She was later appointed a Fellow Of The Royal Academy Of Music in 1994.

Palmer's early work in the industry was arranging and conducting recording sessions, and her first album project was Bert Jansch's 1968 release, Nicola. She came to the attention of Jethro Tull, having been recommended to the band's then manager, Terry Ellis who offered her work on This Was.

Having worked as an arranger on some of the band's seminal 1970s albums, Palmer jpined the band officially as a keyboardist in 1976, recording Songs From The Wood, Heavy Horses and Stormwatch.

Following the dissolution of the classic mid-late 1970s line-up for the band, ahead of the recording of 1980's A album, Palmer formed Tallis with fellow Tull keyboardist John Evan, although despite initial interest, no recording deal was forthcoming. A Tallis album by the name of In Alia Musica Spero was released through A New Day Records in 2021, featuring both Palmer and Evan and with contributions from Barriemore Barlow, John Glasock and Gordon Giltrap.

Palmer worked on various albums of orchestral arrangements of the music of Tull, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Yes and more, and in 2018 released her own solo album, Through Darkened Glass, which featured Martin Barre, with whom Palmer would appear at Cropredy festival a year later.

Pat Kent of Facebook's The Jethro Tull Group also paid tribute to Palmer, saying, "Her musical talents extended far beyond Tull. Dee’s knowledge of composition, arrangement and orchestration was extraordinary. She was one of those musicians who understood not just notes, but how music breathed and moved. Her fingerprints can be found across a body of work far broader than many realise.

"What always struck me, however, was that despite her achievements, she could converse with world-class musicians and famous artists one minute and then be laughing over a cup of tea the next with any fan. She wore her knowledge lightly, never needing to impress anyone because her work spoke eloquently enough on its own. She loved the fans and they loved her.

"As the years passed, our friendship grew, and I came to admire not only her talent but her resilience, her intelligence and her generosity. She was always willing to share her experiences, always happy to help people understand the music she loved so deeply. She spoke candidly of her life and her times in Tull. I am indebted to her help in helping me with a spin me back down the years."

Ville Valo is a man with a million stories to tell, and some of them are even true. He’s charming and witty, peppering conversations with brilliant poetic statements that could be printed on t-shirts. He could also sell you your own teeth. Because Ville Valo is a bullshitter extraordinaire. Not a liar, more a master in the art of twisted tales and exaggerated truths.

The story of HIM – the band he formed in Helsinki, Finland in the early 90s with schoolmates Mikko ‘Mige’ Paananen (bass) and Mikko ‘Linde’ Lindström (guitars) – has the kind of dramatic twists and turns that would make for a great Hollywood biopic. Albums recorded during historic storms, being handcuffed to a bed by armed police, actual brushes with death. As the saying goes, ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.’

“I think it’s more, ‘Don’t let your memories get in the way of a good story’,” says Ville, flashing a vulpine smile. “All the best stories are true – you might edit yourself or leave stuff out for drama, but I’ve always been a shit liar.”

Tall tales or not, it’s undeniable that HIM are one of modern metal’s most iconic bands. At their peak, they were topping charts at home and overseas, while their frontman became a bona fide 21st-century pin-up. Along with Nightwish and Children Of Bodom, they helped transform Finland from a metal backwater to a major international hub before splitting in 2017, breaking a million gothic hearts.

2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Him’s debut EP, 666 Ways to Love: Prologue, so it’s the perfect time to get the singer to look back on the rise, demise and potential resurrection of the band who put the ‘love’ in ‘love metal’.

“It can be quite a long-winded and boring story,” Ville warns Hammer. He’s definitely lying when he says that.

While the story of HIM doesn’t quite start in the cradle, it’s a near thing. Ville first met Mige when he was just eight years old and Linde when he was 12. Three awkward kids with an obsessive love for music, everything clicked when they discovered Black Sabbath as teenagers. Picking up tapes from mates and local record stores, they gathered at Mige’s house and decided to form their own occult-flavoured group.

“It was our first clandestine operation – four boys gathered in Mige’s mother’s larder listening to church bells tolling,” Ville says with a chuckle.

Dubbed His Infernal Majesty – later shortened to HIM – the band reflected its members’ shared passion for doomy, dark music.

“All the melancholy and darkness of HIM could be traced to my dog, Sami,” Ville says. “He was my furry brother. He passed when I was six, and it was my first real brush with melancholy.”

HIM weren’t alone in pursuing the darker arts. The likes of Type O Negative and Paradise Lost were blurring the lines between doom and goth, and HIM enthusiastically devoured their latest releases while trying to find their sound. In the early days, both Ville and Mige played bass, while the former tried his best King Diamond impression. But it wasn’t Paradise Lost’s Nick Holmes or Type O’s Peter Steele who gave them their eureka moment.

“Chris Isaak helped us find our own musical identity,” Ville reveals, of the US singer whose dark-hued croon and twanging presented a kind of gothic Americana. “I’d heard Wicked Game on the [1990 David Lynch movie] Wild At Heart soundtrack, so went to the public library, took out the LP, and me and Linde sat down working out the riffs.”

HIM recorded their own version of Wicked Game, swapping the original’s tremolo guitars for chunkier riffs and leaning into its darker inclinations while retaining the pop edge. After years of unsuccessfully shopping demos around, the song helped score them a deal with major label BMG.

Released in October 1996 and produced by Hiili Hiilesmaa, their debut EP, 666 Ways To Love: Prologue, was a pointer to the future, both artistically and commercially - and amazingly, it gave this little-known band a Top 10 hit in their homeland.

A little over a year later, the band released their full-length debut album, Greatest Love Songs Vol. 666. Decidedly more polished, this time the album peaked at No.2 on the Finnish charts, but also edged into the Top 50 in Germany. But while HIM had seemingly struck gold with a combination of thumping metal riffs and pop-friendly choruses, the fact they were sticking triple sixes on their records and had originally been called ‘His Infernal Majesty’ didn’t escape notice.

“I got some of my first TV interviews explaining to people that Him was more to do with the infernal aspects of the heart than burning down a church,” Ville says.

“Black metal was the punk rock of the 90s – it was the big spiritual vomit over everything. I loved it, but a lot of those bands took themselves very, very seriously. I was in a pub once with a guy from a black metal band and he goes, ‘You’ve never experienced darkness until you’ve strangled your own cat and looked into its eyes as it’s dying.’ That’s a terrible thing to do to an innocent critter. We were just pussies – Satan worship lite.”

If HIM’s debut album saw them step out of the shadows, the follow-up thrust them squarely into the spotlight. By the time they began work on their second album, 2000’s Razorblade Romance, they’d started to build a serious fanbase in Europe. But there was a problem.

Producer Hiili Hiilesmaa had helped the band find their sound on their first two releases. This time around, though, the songs they were recording sounded “like shit”. With recording costs rising, HIM were starting to feel the pressure.

“I think the label were always on the verge of letting us go,” Ville admits.

Scrapping the work they’d done, HIM met with producer John Fryer and started anew at Rockfield Studios in Wales. Fryer helped the band refine their electronic ideas into a “more Billy Idol, 80s-inspired record”.

The album’s breakthrough single was an accident. Asked for a track to put on 1999 sci-fi movie Thirteenth Floor, HIM offered the only song they’d actually finished at that point, a piano-led gothic power ballad titled Join Me In Death.

Their label weren’t enthused about the song but, with no alternative, they released it on November 2, 1999. Join Me In Death hit No.1 in both Germany and Finland.

“Mige and I were sat in the pub when the record company called from Germany,” Ville recalls. “They were cheering and toasting each other with champagne, and me and Mige only had two quid between us, so we had to share a pint.”

The song’s success was a sign of things to come. Released on January 24, 2000, Razorblade Romance topped the charts in Germany, Finland and Austria. They celebrated with their biggest European tour yet, including a show at Stuttgart’s Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, a 15,000-capacity arena. A month later, they were starting from scratch again at the rather more intimate London club The Garage.

“We were never just walking on roses,” Ville admits. “There was always a little struggle, and I think that was good for the band. You get a band like [2021 Eurovision winners] Måneskin, for example, who become humongous all at once. If I’d been in a band like that, I’d have died within six months.”

They came close anyway. There was an undeniable buzz around HIM on their first UK tour, and the charismatic frontman was fast becoming a star. The parties could get out of hand. At one, Ville almost slipped from a hotel balcony.

“There were two parties in different rooms, and I kept hopping between the balconies,” he explains. “At one point I just tried to jump out a window when I’d drunk too much. A friend was able to drag me down and slap me across the face.”

HIM also made one of their most important connections on that first UK tour. After their Garage debut, they were visited by Jackass star Bam Margera. Bam became obsessed with HIM and struck up a friendship with Ville, visiting him while making skating videos in Helsinki.

Within 12 months, Jackass had taken off globally. Bam used his newfound fame to spread the word of his favourite band and to bring them to the USA. After sharing European festival stages with the Bloodhound Gang, that band’s singer, Jimmy Pop, offered to put Razorblade Romance out in the US.

A name dispute with a jazz group meant the first pressings of Razorblade… in the US were actually attributed to ‘HER’, though it was resolved before their next album was released. HIM were caught up in a hurricane, except there was no calm in the eye of this storm.

“From 1999 to 2003, I can’t remember too much,” Ville says. “Not because I was drinking too much, but because so much was happening it was hard to take it all in. I just let myself go and see where the river of shit, piss and blood takes me.”

The follow-up to Razorblade Romance, 2001’s Deep Shadows And Brilliant Highlights, wasn’t the success HIM had hoped it would be. While it still topped the charts in Finland and Austria, label interference had hampered their creative process. Things were combustible within the band too.

“We were breaking up every other night,” Ville recalls of the touring HIM undertook after 2000. “But I was adamant about the whole rock’n’roll thing and didn’t let go. I’d go to all the parties, I’d write literally all the time. My thinking was, ‘This well might run dry’, and it took a good decade to realise that they’ll still brew beers even if I’m not drinking it. I’m not just talking about alcohol there, but experiences.”

It was with their fourth album, Love Metal, that everything changed once more for HIM. Released on April 11, 2003, it became their first record to chart in the UK, hitting No.55, while in the US it reached No.117 on the Billboard 200. Recharged and creatively refreshed, HIM were on their way to becoming a global phenomenon.

The iconic Heartagram design – conceived by Ville and featured subtly in past works – was front and centre on the album’s artwork. Before long, that logo could be found everywhere from t-shirts, hoodies and bags to tattoos, stickers and even car decals. But with this burgeoning fame came more invasions of privacy.

Ville blacked out the windows of his Helsinki home with bin-liners when overeager fans would camp out in hopes of catching a glimpse of him. Worse still, he recalls times some people turned up and started smashing those same windows.

“I had to call the cops a few times,” he says. “At the time, I just felt pissed off – my house was the one place in the world I had privacy and could just be me without any pressure from outside forces. Having that sacred space violated felt terrible.”

There were also times where he was physically threatened.

“A fan did attack me with scissors once,” he says. “She just came up laughing like a raving lunatic and cut a piece of my hair off. It was like a scene from a horror movie.”

Partly spurred on by events like that, HIM decided to leave Europe when they started working on their next album. The band had mixed Love Metal in Los Angeles while staying in the infamous ‘Riot House’, roving the streets like wide-eyed tourists pointing out the bars and clubs that had shaped rock history. So for the follow-up, they returned to the city to see if inspiration would strike.

“My idols were people like [famously dissolute author Charles] Bukowski, these walking disaster artists,” Ville says. “I thought it was all part of the experience, being out in Silver Lake, getting fucked up on Mai Tais in a bar, scribbling lyrics. I found that exhilarating – like I was part of a legacy of rock’n’roll in a way. Those were my ‘hobo goth’ years.”

Their time in LA was chaotic but productive. It resulted in HIM’s biggest commercial success: 2005’s Dark Light. The album amped up their glammiest aspects while still being undeniably gothic, producing massive singles like Wings Of A Butterfly and Killing Loneliness. It earned HIM a gold certification in the US – the first for any Finnish metal band.

If things were flying professionally, they were less healthy for Ville personally. He’d always loved to party, but things were getting out of control. There were gigs where he’d be too drunk to perform.

“It was a really messed-up time,” he admits. “Not a lost weekend, but a lost couple of years. All the things you see in the movies, you end up there and realise it’s not actually that interesting.”

By 2007, Ville was a wreck. He reached a point where he couldn’t even sleep through the night without waking up to have a beer. He was shitting and vomiting blood (he remembers looking down and thinking, “That can’t be good”, but didn’t have time to see a doctor). Rumours abounded the singer had cancer (he didn’t). After splitting with his longtime partner, he was more isolated than ever. And then he had a nervous breakdown.

“I woke up on a sofa to the hooting of an owl,” he says. “I remember feeling like it was almost something from a movie. I didn’t know who I was, what I was doing or why I was there. Everything just crashed down around me.”

Although he recovered, it was only enough to get underway with writing the next HIM album. 2007’s Venus Doom is by far the heaviest thing the band released, clearly linked to the dismal mental state of its creator at the time. But Ville also found comfort in returning to the music that had inspired HIM in the first place.

“I found my refuge in doom metal while working on that album – it became my sanctuary from the world,” he says.

As soon as Venus Doom was completed, Ville checked himself into rehab in Los Angeles.

“I was staying very near to the place where [hellraising 80s comedian John] Belushi died, so [dying] was on my mind,” Ville says. “But our manager, Seppo [Vesterinen] was really helpful. I told him I needed help and he was like, ‘It happens to the best of us, don’t worry about it.’ He’d dealt with Andy McCoy and Michael Monroe, all the crazy Hanoi Rocks guys back in the day, so he was really mellow about it, which helped because I was so ashamed.”

Getting sober didn’t just save Ville’s life, it saved the band. But it wasn’t easy by any stretch. In 2007, HIM got a once-in-a-lifetime offer to support Metallica around Europe, ending with a massive performance at Wembley Stadium. It was a dream gig, but incredibly difficult for the freshly sober Ville.

“I just felt naked and sensitive. It was like being a baby – everything was too loud and too much,” he admits. “There’s no school and no teachers for this stuff. Nobody is going to tell you in advance when burnout is going to happen – you just keep going until you do. Everybody has their war stories, but nobody’s been in the same war.”

If the story of HIM really was a Hollywood biopic, this would be where the freshly sober Ville and the gang would make a dazzling comeback. Real life didn’t quite work out like that. 2010’s Screamworks: Love In Theory And Practice was a reaction to the darkness of its predecessor, with the band sounding poppier than ever before.

Although Screamworks achieved respectable chart placements, there was a sense both internally and externally that HIM’s star was on the wane and life was catching up with them fast. Plans to quickly record a follow-up to Screamworks stalled when drummer Gas Lipstick was diagnosed with repetitive stress injury, the band instead taking a breather to see if their drummer could recover. He did, returning for 2013’s Tears On Tape.

“After Venus Doom, the vibe had not really felt right,” says Ville. “I’m not sure how that would have been affected if we’d put out something really successful, but we just weren’t feeling it,” Ville admits. “It felt disjointed still being in a band at that point – nobody particularly enjoyed it.”

Released on April 26, 2013, there was no indication at the time that Tears On Tape would be HIM’s final album. But on January 27, 2015, Gas Lipstick announced his departure from the band. Though they had weathered the departure of members before, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“It was a huge crisis,” Ville recalls. “He told us out of the blue, which was weird because we had been together for, like, 20 years at that point. There was no discussion with anyone in the band over coffee or at soundcheck, it was just, ‘I’m leaving.’ Our jaws dropped and we figured, ‘That’s it.’”

It wasn’t, not quite. HIM limped on, recruiting Jukka ‘Kosmo’ Kröger to fulfil drum duties on the Tears On Tape tour. The band even worked on new material with him, but never recorded anything. Then, in March 2017, HIM announced they would be calling it a day after 26 years. The band would play one last tour – the Bang & Whimper tour – across 15 countries, ending with a New Year’s Eve gig at Helsinki’s Tavastia, their favourite NYE concert venue.

“The bittersweet thing about it was that we were still good friends, we’d just grown apart,” Ville says. “In regards to the farewell tour, it was nice to play when we had a finite date that it was going to end. By setting the end date first, you don’t have to have reserves. Every night felt like it was our last in a way.”

Although Him were laid to rest in 2017, Ville returned for his goth metal throne with 2023’s excellent Neon Noir – an album that carried more than a whiff of HIM’s horny, doomed romanticism. His solo project wrapped up activity with a sold-out show at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 2024, on the same night the aurora borealis lit up the skies over Britain.

“These things just happen to me,” Ville says with relish. “But the solo project was great, because we set a framework for what should happen. It’s something I wish we’d done in HIM sooner, but what’s done is done.”

Is it, though? In October 2025, the rumour mills went into overdrive when the ‘Heartagram’ account – effectively Ville’s official Facebook page – updated its cover image to an eye with a Heartagram, as opposed to the modified VV design he’d created for his solo project. Could HIM be about to make a comeback?

Almost 10 years on from their farewell gig, you can still hear the wistfulness in Ville’s voice as he talks about the band, a sense that they didn’t end with the bang that they deserved. Besides, they could still come back and be even bigger than they were the first time around. It’s happened in recent years for everyone from Mudvayne to Acid Bath. So, Ville, is it on?

“Of course I would love to play with the lads again someday. When and if so… I don’t know. I haven’t really been in touch with them much,” he says. “But I miss those fellows. They are my brothers. But there’s also beauty in the fact we didn’t strangle each other at the end, or start travelling in separate limos. So there is that to be said. I felt it was the right way to bury the corpse. HIM Iwas and is my life. It was very hard to let go of that.”

And that is all he has to say on that. For now. Who knows what the future holds – or even the present. Because, as we know, Ville Valo is a silver-tongued devil and there’s every chance the HIM story isn’t over yet.

Max Cavalera was born in the city of Belo Horizonte in 1969. He helped build Brazilian metal from the ground up, alongside his younger brother, Iggor, forming Sepultura in 1984 in a country with a crumbling economy, no industry support and little global visibility.

What followed was one of the most startling ascents in metal history: a run of albums that took the precision of thrash (1989’s Beneath The Remains, 1991’s Arise), injected it with hardcore urgency (1993’s Chaos A.D.), and then detonated the rulebook entirely with 1996’s Roots, a record that fused downtuned grooves, the rhythms of Brazil’s Xavante tribe and politically defiant lyrics into a blueprint that would ripple through metal for decades.

Yet Max’s story is not one of uninterrupted triumph. The death of his father at a young age led to the sudden collapse of his family’s security. His stepson, Dana Wells, died in a car crash in 1996 in circumstances that remain disputed. That year, he acrimoniously split from Sepultura and was estranged from his brother Iggor for 10 years.

All left deep scars that have shaped his music. After Sepultura, Max formed Soulfly as a vehicle for spiritual exploration, global collaboration and unfiltered heaviness. He’s also spun off a constellation of side-projects, encompassing the nihilistic industrial rage of Nailbomb and the all-out ferocity of Go Ahead And Die, and continues to collaborate with Iggor in Cavalera Conspiracy.

Today, Max stands as an elder statesman who still speaks with the urgency of that angry kid who found salvation in distortion and speed. A pioneer of what we now call ‘global metal’ – music that integrates the sound and spirit of its country of origin – and a well-loved lifer of the metal community, he bridges cultures, generations and extremes.

What were your early years like?

“My dad worked for the Italian consulate in São Paulo. I remember being little and getting dragged into these huge dinners with politicians and famous people, and my dad was right in the middle. We had a beach house in Praia Grande on the coast of São Paulo and we’d go there on the weekends. We were middle class. My dad made pretty good money and we had a nice car and a nice apartment. But then he had a heart attack and died.”

You were just nine years old. What do you remember about his passing?

“It was very traumatic because we went fishing in this lake – Interlagos – and he was complaining of chest pains when we were in the boat. We brought him back to the car and I held him in the back seat. I could feel his heart through his chest and he passed away right there in the car. I remember feeling, ‘That’s it. He’s gone.’ They took him to the hospital, and after an hour, my aunt came to talk to me, and before she said anything, I told her, ‘I know. He’s gone, right?’ And she said, ‘Yes. He passed away.’”

How did things change for your family?

“My mom didn’t really know what to do. Dad didn’t really have any insurance or any money that he’d saved, so suddenly, we went broke. My mom moved us back to Belo Horizonte and we lived in this little shack behind my grandmother’s house. We lost everything, including the beach house. It was, ‘You’ve got to go to school and get a job. Forget about childhood shit, you’ve got to be a man now at nine years old.’ That pushed me towards metal. I embraced metal with everything I had. I needed it like oxygen. I needed that true rebellion.”

Where did you first connect to metal?

“Around 20 of us started the scene in Belo. You couldn’t really get imported records in Belo at the time, so each weekend we’d select a guy to grab everybody’s money, go to São Paulo by bus – which was a 12-hour ride – and go to Woodstock [Rock Store] to buy a bunch of imported records. I remember getting Voivod’s War And Pain, Slayer’s Show No Mercy, Mercyful Fate’s Melissa… Every weekend we’d go to somebody’s house and listen to this goldmine! Once we found Slayer, it was like, ‘This shit’s over.’”

You formed Sepultura in ’84. Did you know it was going to be your career?

“Iggor did. He was a born drummer, a natural talent, but he didn’t have a drum kit until [third album, 1989’s] Beneath The Remains. I wanted to be a drummer at first, but he was way better than me, so I had to pick a new instrument and guitar seemed like the right choice. I didn’t know how to play. I still remember when I learned the first riff of [Black Sabbath’s] Heaven And Hell, I ran out and did laps around the backyard. I was like, ‘I made it! I’m somebody!’ Ha ha ha! It was like a moment in a comedy movie.”

What do you recall about Sepultura’s first gig?

“I remember playing with this band Overdose and they were really good, like a Brazilian version of Maiden. The girls loved them. We were the opposite. The girls hated us, we didn’t know how to play. The guitar player from Overdose took my guitar and everything was out of tune. He said, ‘Let me tune the guitar for you, bro’, but it didn’t help my playing. It was just noise. But there were two guys wearing Motörhead shirts and they fucking loved the show! ‘You guys are the greatest thing ever! It’s noisy, it’s crap, and we fucking love it!’ Two guys out of a hundred. Ha ha ha!”

You eventually got signed by Roadrunner Records, in the States. How did that happen?

“I had a free ticket with a guy that worked for [airline] Pan Am. My mom bought this really cheap suit, I pulled my hair back and I wore a Pan Am tag so I looked like an employee of Pan Am. I had to fly like that because it was a free ticket. I had a bunch of [1987’s second album] Schizophrenia records with me, and I went to Noise Records and Metal Blade, Combat, and Roadrunner, too. Dressing up, wearing a tie and flying to New York, that’s hustle. Eventually we ended up getting signed. That was one of the greatest feelings of my life.”

You ended up marrying your manager, Gloria. What were your first impressions of her?

“When we first met, I was like, ‘Ooh, OK, I like her!’ We played The New Ritz in New York, opening for King Diamond on Halloween night [in 1989]. Sold out. She was there and she approached us. She told us that she managed Sacred Reich and I thought that was cool. Me and Andreas [Kisser, guitarist] didn’t even have picks – we had to share a pick. She was like, ‘We’ve got to get you guys picks. We need to get you guys some endorsements.’ We were like, ‘Oh yeah, that’d be cool!’ Ha ha!

She said that she needed to renegotiate our contract. She said, ‘Listen up, I’ll work for free for a year. If you guys don’t like me, you can fire me, but I’ll try for one year.’ And she worked a whole year for free, and she did all that. She changed the contract, she got us endorsements and I wouldn’t be here talking to you if it wasn’t for her.”

How did your personal relationship come about?

“I ended up falling in love with her, which I couldn’t help. We tried to hide it from the rest of the band for a while, but that was crazy. I think it was in Mexico when my brother walked into the room – he had the maid open the room – and me and Gloria were in bed and my brother was like, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ Ha ha! It was the beginning of something very special.”

After a run of successful albums (1989’s Beneath The Remains, 1991’s Arise, 1993’s Chaos A.D.), Sepultura released Roots in 1996, which catapulted you onto the global stage. When did you realise you had just changed the face of metal?

“I just wanted to make a strong record with this theme of roots around it. The more that time passed, the more we realised that it was a special record; it branched out to different parts of the world and people loved it. The tribal thing got integrated. Heavy metal was never the same after Roots. There was metal before Roots and metal after Roots. But when we were doing it, we weren’t thinking about that. You never enter the studio thinking, ‘I’m making a classic’, or ‘I’m changing music’, or none of that. That’s all bullshit.”

What do people still misunderstand about your split from Sepultura in 1996? The band carried on without you, but fans were upset.

“The main thing that gets me is mostly the situation with Gloria. Most people think she got fired and that’s totally a wrong statement. She never got fired, her contract was done. I’m telling you right now, the things that woman did for us – for Sepultura – were incredible. The stuff we achieved with her... You’ve kind of got to be out of your mind to have wanted to replace that.

I still don’t understand that, because everything was so good. The shows were getting bigger and bigger. I could only imagine where we would have been if we stayed. But that thing, it got broke somehow, some way. Then my relationship with those other guys erupted. So it was kind of like, ‘I’m done, I’m just gonna do my own thing.’ That’s the main thing that bugs me. That whenever you go online, it’s, ‘Oh, she got fired because she was protecting Max’, and this and that. It’s all bullshit.”

You also lost your stepson, Dana, that year. How did writing Soulfly songs like Bleed, First Commandment and Pain work into your grieving process?

“It was really important. [When he died] we were headed to Donington [for Monsters Of Rock] – we arrived in England and we got a phone call. Again, the black cloud, just like my dad. I’m not the biological father but we lived together in the same house, and we were very close. It hit me real hard. Bleed was one of the biggest songs we ever did, on the first Soulfly record. It’s about paying homage to the fact that a young life was cut short. He had a full life in front of him. He’s always here with me in spirit.”

Your list of collaborations reads like a who’s who of metal. Who surprised you the most?

“All of them did in their own way, but one of the most exotic ones was Sean Lennon on Son Song [from 2000’s Primitive]. That was so off the wall! The way it happened was that we were travelling to Australia and we ended up sitting next to each other on the plane. I saw him drawing, and he was drawing the album cover from the first Soulfly album.

I looked over and said, ‘Oh, cool! You’re drawing my first record.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m a huge fan.’ It was cool, writing that song about our dads and how we felt as people who lose their dads when they’re young and how they deal with it. He didn’t want to stay in a hotel, so he stayed here with us in our house.”

After 10 years of estrangement from your brother, you and Iggor reunited and formed Cavalera Conspiracy. What was it like seeing each other again after a decade?

“He reached out to me but first he talked to Gloria, which I thought was really cool of him. He asked her for forgiveness for what happened. Gloria’s a very compassionate person and she totally accepted him back. After she talked to him, she gave me the phone and I talked to him.

He was like, ‘Listen, man, I want you to know my kids and I want you to know my family. I don’t want to grow old not knowing your family, just because of something that happened 30 years ago.’ The first time he came to Phoenix, we picked him up at the airport. We had flowers and I was so nervous! I hadn’t seen this motherfucker in 10 years, what the fuck?!

I didn’t know what to do or say, so I just gave him a big hug. We had a show the same night and that’s when I asked, 'Do you wanna play Roots with us tonight?' And when we played Roots, the whole place exploded. The universe was telling us that we needed to work together. So we started Cavalera Conspiracy.”

Chama, Soulfly’s latest album, is about a young boy who grows up surrounded by poverty and gang violence and finds a deep connection in the forest. How much of this story is autobiographical?

“Some of it. The part of him losing his mom and talking to the mom in dreams is very close; I had recently lost my mom. The story was created by my son, Igor. He’s a great writer. He writes Stephen King-type novels. I asked him if he could make a story to go with this record, almost like a concept album.

So he wrote the story of Chama, who grew up in the favelas in Rio, around violence, drugs, gun running. His mom died and she comes to him in a dream and tells him, ‘You have to leave the favela and go into the jungle and find the spirits of the forest. Go be with the forest.’ He goes there and stares at the fire and flame – that’s where the album title comes from, ‘Chama’ means ‘flame’ – and eventually he fulfils his destiny. You could make a movie around it.”

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned in life?

[long pause] “Do what you love, surrounded by the people that you love. To share this journey with Gloria, with [sons] Zyon, with Igor Jr., with Richie and with our friends, it’s priceless, man. To me, that’s more important than Grammys and awards. Watching one of the Ozzy documentaries and seeing how frail he looked in the end… it’s inevitable. One day your body’s going to shut down. Until that day comes, I’m gonna fucking live, man, doing the things I love.”

What do you hope the world remembers about Max Cavalera in years to come?

“I hope I’m remembered as somebody that took risks to get the things that I did and to do the things I did. I was put on this planet to do this. Nothing else matters. Nothing. All the other stuff is all bullshit. And that I really loved what I did. Music saved me. It took me out of Brazil and brought me all of the things I have. I came here with a purpose and I did it. When it’s all said and done, I know that I came and I left a mark on the world.”

Chama is out now via Nuclear Blast.

No one else in Gothenburg looked like Tomas Lindberg. When twin brothers Anders and Jonas Björler first met their future At The Gates bandmate at a bus stop in 1989, he stood out like a snow-plough in the Sahara. His hair – bright blond at the time – flowed past his shoulders, he was wearing a knee-length leather trench coat and a t-shirt featuring the name of some obscure and long-forgotten death metal band, and he had the bushiest beard that the Björlers had ever seen on a 17-year-old.

“I’d never seen anybody who dressed like that,” remembers bassist Jonas, the older brother by 15 minutes. “With that huge beard as well, he looked like an old man.”

“When we went to his room at his parents’ house, he had obscure demo covers and fanzine clippings all over his walls,” adds guitar player Anders. “He had a cast of a human skull, because he was interested in the occult in his early days. It was like entering this weird kind of new world.”

It was impossible to know at the time, but that striking character would soon be the face of the city’s most important metal band. With Tomas’s anguished snarl and imposing stage presence front and centre, At The Gates became masters of the Gothenburg Sound: a reinvention of death metal that fused the harmonised guitars of classic metal and the rampaging speed of thrash.

In their original incarnation, At The Gates only lasted from 1990 to 1996, but they made a huge impact – their landmark fourth album, 1995’s Slaughter Of The Soul, influenced a generation of American bands, including Trivium, Killswitch Engage and Lamb Of God. They reunited in the late 2000s and continued to record and tour, until Tomas underwent surgery to treat adenoid cystic carcinoma, a rare cancer of the mouth and palate, in early 2024. Following complications in his recovery, he died last September, aged 52.

At The Gates’ new album, The Ghost Of A Future Dead, is an epitaph to their late frontman. Written in 2023 and recorded the following year, it uses vocal demos that Tomas tracked before his surgery – some parts, the day before. He approved every detail, from the artwork to the sequencing, before his death.

“He went into surgery just as I started drum tracking,” says drummer Adrian Erlandsson. “It was like, ‘OK, that was a good take’, and I was straight on the phone: ‘How’s he doing? How’d the surgery go?’ It was an uncertain time and a bit unsettling, but I don’t think there was even a consideration that he wasn’t going to make it.”

To people who didn’t know him personally, the man nicknamed Tompa seemed like the most intense person in the world. He strode all over every stage he played, often making war-faces at the crowd as he did so, and he screamed lyrics about suffering, politics and existentialism with intimidating ferocity. But what his bandmates remember about him first and foremost is how kind he was.

“He wasn’t only this metal singer and the godfather of the Gothenburg scene,” says Anders. “Everybody that met him knows he was a really humble guy. He was always making sure, if somebody was left out, that they were introduced and felt welcome.”

Born into a middle-class family on October 16, 1972, Tomas grew up in Billdal, a suburb half an hour south of central Gothenburg. He had two sisters, but was 15 years younger than them.

“They moved out pretty early in his life, so he was alone with his parents,” says Jonas. As the only kid in the house, it’s no surprise that his two favourite pastimes by his mid-teens were solo activities: reading books and listening to music. He enjoyed shoegaze, post-punk and everything under the Sub Pop Records banner, but his greatest loves were metal and hardcore, which he discovered through school friends blasting Metallica’s Kill ’Em All. He started writing and editing fanzines about the Stockholm death metal underground not long after.

“He really enjoyed discovering new things,” says Adrian, “and that’s something that went on throughout the years. He’d discover a new genre of music and he’d go deep in to find the root of where that scene came from. With death metal in particular, there was an aura around it – horror, death, decay – that suited him to a tee.”

With that same insatiable curiosity, he was constantly picking up books and putting other ones down. Through metal, he found horror greats Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley and H.P. Lovecraft. Then came a short-lived Aleister Crowley obsession (hence the occult stuff and the skull in his room), and from there it was a blur no one could keep track of.

“I remember when he was writing lyrics for [At The Gates’ 2014 comeback album] At War With Reality, sending me excerpts of books he was reading,” says Adrian. “I was just like, ‘Man, I really don’t understand!’ Ha ha ha! I was into techy things like games consoles, and when we were travelling, he’d be like, ‘How can you be bothered to carry these things with you?’ And I didn’t understand how he could take six to eight books with him on a tour, read them all and buy more along the way.”

Wanting to bring the Stockholm death metal sound to his hometown, the singer formed Grotesque with guitarist Alf Svensson in 1989. One of their gigs was a Christmas disco at Anders and Jonas’s school. They played three songs before being forced offstage.

“The PTA stopped the show because Grotesque were so Satanic,” Jonas recalls. “They had corpsepaint and one-metre upside-down crosses.”

“People were surprised,” adds Anders, “because the local scene back then was all white sneakers and thrash: Testament, Exodus, Metallica-style.”

After Grotesque split in 1990, Tomas and Alf started At The Gates. They took the name from the Fields Of The Nephilim song At The Gates Of Silent Memory, which sampled an Aleister Crowley speech. The Björlers joined soon afterwards, with Adrian completing the line-up after meeting Tomas on a coach to a Morbid Angel show.

“He told me, ‘You can’t be in the band! You’ve got short hair!’” the drummer laughs. “But then we had a few beers and he asked, ‘Can you play double-bass [drums]?’”

Their early albums were bizarre by their later standards, featuring violin solos and riffs that Alf wrote by playing old demos backwards, but Tomas’s lyrical identity was clear from the off. The title track of 1992 debut The Red In The Sky Is Ours voiced his left-wing beliefs and called for revolution.

Even though At The Gates simplified their songwriting after Martin Larsson replaced Alf in 1993, with the new approach reflecting Tomas’s roots in thrash and punk as well as the Björlers’ love for early-80s metal, that political focus carried on. Lines throughout ’94 EP Terminal Spirit Disease and Slaughter Of The Soul spoke about how contemporary society was corrupting the human spirit.

The latter album put At The Gates on the map, but, barely in their 20s, they couldn’t deal with the sudden demand. They toured for eight months nonstop, hitting the US with Morbid Angel and then Napalm Death, yet made next to no money. Burnt out, Anders quit. Rather than continue without a founding member and key composer, the band broke up.

“[The schedule] affected me more than anyone else,” he reflects, “and I think the other guys were really let down by my departure. But I’m really easily bored. I need constant change. I can’t stand waiting around at airports and sitting on tour buses. I felt like a travelling salesman.”

Jonas admits that the brothers and Adrian didn’t talk to Tomas for a couple of years.

“We had different friend groups,” he explains.

Post-At The Gates, the Björlers and Adrian reunited in thrashers The Haunted, whereas Tomas, true to his restless nature, joined an array of projects, including crust punks Disfear, hardcore/metal band The Great Deceiver and grindcore supergroup Lock Up. He settled down with his first wife and her daughter, had a son and pursued a career as a social studies teacher. Adrian reconnected with Tomas at the frontman’s wedding in 1998.

“It was like time had stood still,” he remembers. “There was some house band playing, and I asked him, ‘Should we play a few songs?’ I think everyone was too drunk at that point to pull anything off.”

With the fences mended, Tomas started attending local Haunted shows and talking to the Björlers again. Jonas says that the singer’s newfound fatherhood made him more “mature”, and as interest in Slaughter Of The Soul continued to grow amidst a new era of bands touting its significance, they began talking about a reunion. In 2008, At The Gates played their first shows in 12 years.

“The chemistry was great,” Jonas remembers. “Everybody was friends. The main intention was to make sure that every fan got to see us but, egotistically, we kind of missed doing it.”

Tomas lived something of a double life, balancing his role as a death metal screamer with a career in the classroom. The two rarely intersected. The singer told Loudwire in 2021 that he wanted to be a “nice-but-a-bit-boring teacher”, although he did let his students stand side-stage for an At The Gates show in 2015.

“They looked really freaked out,” Adrian laughs. “I think it’s quite a lot to take in: seeing your teacher screaming at the front of a stage when there’s a few thousand people in the crowd.”

At The Gates’ first three post-reunion albums tapped into what Tomas was reading in some way. At War With Reality was about the literary genre of magic realism, 2018’s To Drink From The Night Itself was based on Peter Weiss’s antifascist novel The Aesthetics Of Resistance, and 2021’s The Nightmare Of Being was inspired by texts on philosophical pessimism.

Written before the singer’s diagnosis, The Ghost Of A Future Dead bucks that trend and digs into his greatest fears.

“What frightened him the most was the vastness of the universe and the deep sea, and combining those things with the smallness of man in the grand scheme of things,” says Jonas. “We had a general idea of what he wanted to do, but it’s too bad we never got to ask Tomas about it, because we never thought it would end like this.”

Tomas was told he had adenoid cystic carcinoma in December 2023, although he kept his condition hidden from fans. Plans to record vocals in the studio in late 2024 were scrapped, as he’d need time to re-learn to speak and sing after surgery. Despite the initial shock, Adrian remembers morale being surprisingly high.

“We were just like, ‘It’s going to be tough but he’s going to pull through,’” he says. “After the surgery, they said they’d cleared all the cancer off, he’s going to have a prosthetic piece [on the roof of his mouth] and everything’s going to be fine.”

But from that point until his death, Tomas endured a series of dramatic ups and downs. In April ’24, after he’d been put on disorientating opiates to help him through radiotherapy and the after-effects of his surgery, he was concerned that he may never be able to sing or teach again. But in early ’25, he was cancer-free and went out for dinner with Anders, Jonas and Martin – their first time seeing him in-person since he started treatment.

“He told me it was the first time he’d eaten a slice of pizza since his surgery,” remembers Jonas. “He was in really high spirits and looking forward to the release.”

Adrian, who now lives in the UK and has a day job driving trucks, wasn’t given the time off to visit his friend.

“My boss was having none of it,” he says, the frustration audible in his voice. “It was pretty shitty, because that was my one chance to see him in good condition.”

Then, in late spring 2025, Tomas got the news that his cancer had come back, and he returned to hospital. He contracted infections, one of which spread to his brain, and complications from another surgery led to him being put on life support. He died on September 16, a month and a day after the band publicly announced his diagnosis.

Reports of Tomas’s passing started circulating on social media that morning, followed by a wave of tributes from fans and peers. Trivium’s Matt Heafy called him “one of the most important singers/screamers of any metal band”.

“As a frontman… he was awesome, plain and simple,” said Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt, adding, “Intellectually, he seemed to be a step above and beyond your generic metal musician.”

At The Gates confirmed the news that afternoon and remembered him as a “true friend, both compassionate and sympathetic”. Today, the Björlers can’t talk about their emotions around Tomas’s death.

“It’s too hard,” Anders says quietly, almost in a whisper.

Adrian is similarly is choked up as he recalls getting a phone call from Anders to say that Tomas had died.

“I was driving and I couldn’t answer it,” he says. “When I saw that it was Anders, I knew. It was shit, to be honest.”

Although some on social media have speculated about the band carrying on in some way or putting on a tribute show, none of the members have discussed what’s next with each other, because the idea of At The Gates without Tomas Lindberg just feels wrong.

“He was the heart of At The Gates, really,” says Adrian. “I can’t even imagine what we’d have sounded like without him. Even if you don’t consider his voice, just without him, I have no idea what the outcome would’ve been. He was the crown of the band.”

A family tragedy fuelled the creative fires behind Mastodon’s seventh album Emperor Of Sand. In 2017 Prog met Brann Dailor and Bill Kelliher to discuss the band’s proggiest release since Crack The Skye.

He’s out there somewhere: a lone figure in the middle of the desert. He doesn’t know how to go forward and he can’t go back. Eddies of sand swirl up around him until he disappears out of sight and becomes part of the landscape, a speck of sand among the endless swell of dunes. The sun’s almost at its highest and there’s no water and no shade.

Then, at the periphery of his vision, something moves on the horizon. He shades his eyes to make out the figure that’s approaching. His skin suddenly prickles, turning cold in the sweltering heat. Run, he thinks, but to where? The desert reaches out beyond until it falls into the sky. And the shadow is almost upon him.

“People always get lost in our songs and on our records; there’s always a character trying to find something or someone. It’s like dreams, confused, ‘Where the hell am I?’” Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher is also far from home. He’s flown from Atlanta to the UK, and Prog is sitting with him on the fourth floor of his label’s London office off Kensington High Street. Drummer Brann Dailor is seated next to him.

They’re here to talk about their seventh album, Emperor Of Sand, its concept and genealogy – and the bogeyman who haunts the grooves of the record and the dreams of the album’s protagonist. “He’s a metaphor, some kind of Grim Reaper,” says Dailor. “Not a good feeling from that guy, the Emperor.”

It’s a concept album with the hero on the run from a death sentence, with a fate worse than that haunting his every step among the endless dunes. So far, so fantastical – and so very Mastodon. But as Kelliher says: “It all came from a very real place.”

While the band were making the record, his mother was dying of cancer. He talks now about sitting by her bedside as she slept. After he’d fed her and held her hand, he’d put his headphones on, plug his guitar into his computer and write and play at her side as her life force diminished, bringing songs to life even in the throes of death. “I had to do something to stop myself going crazy,” he says. “To stop from crying my eyes out.”

There’s a cancer ad here in the UK where the patient is portrayed as vulnerable and lost in a faceless, icy tundra, the wind ripping at his clothes, the snow blinding his eyes until a nurse reaches out to him and brings him back to the world. Given Kelliher’s predicament and the fate of his mother, it’s not too difficult to make the transition from a frozen world to the baking sands of an arid, dusty hell.

“That’s how I felt when I lost my ma to cancer,” says Kelliher. “She was wandering lost in her own mind. If you can get a message out of the lyrics and the record and everything it’s, ‘Live in the moment, because you never know.’ When you get handed that death sentence, you’re searching for something – ‘What can I do? Where can I find a cure? What doctors can I call?’ Every day my ma was looking at her pill bottles, and I knew she was going to die, so I was like, ‘Put it down; don’t worry about it. Live right now.’ It’s the little things you get caught up in. You never know when your time’s going to be up.”

The old adage goes that art comes out of adversity, and the death was the spark that lit Mastodon’s creative fire. In Emperor Of Sand they’ve made an album that typifies the unique place they occupy in modern music. It’s enigmatic and driven, with a brilliant, almost compressed sheen; it oozes melody but clanks and hammers like an old steam train taking a hill. It’s full of surprises.

It’s 17 years since Dailor and Kelliher left Victor, New York, and movedto Atlanta to form Mastodon with bassist Troy Sanders and guitarist Brent Hinds. It’s 15 years since they released their debut album Remission. Though it lacked some of the subtlety and grace of their later work, its ferocity was to be admired and not ignored. Displaying a fascination with ‘Elephant Man’ Joseph Merrick, it helped define some of the band’s frenzied tropes.

“We keep evolving,” says Kelliher, “but it’s subconsciously. We’re human beings; we’re getting older – we’re experiencing more things. If you put that first record next to this record, it’s two totally different bands because we’re totally different people.”

In the space between their first and latest albums they dropped pills, drank liquor, touched the sky, and sang about Moby Dick, colonies of Birchmen and a Blood Mountain. They played prog, rocked out, made metal and crafted their art. In summer 2014 they released Once More ’Round The Sun, an album that embraced their experimental bent and spiraling, escalating arrangements with a newer, more cohesive sense of songwriting. It was an altogether sharper and more focused Mastodon.

“With the last few records, we’ve seen girls at the front screaming and singing along to the songs – I never expected to see that,” says Kelliher. “There are kids there going, ‘My dad turned me on to you guys.’ I’m like, ‘Your dad? How fucking old are you? How old am I?!’ But I feel that each record has to outdo the last and keep going on a trajectory to a different place – which I feel we do. I like this area we’re in right now; I love the type of songs we’re doing.”

For Emperor Of Sand they took a slight U-turn and reached out to producer Brendan O’Brien (Pearl Jam, Rage Against The Machine), who first worked with Mastodon on 2009’s Crack The Skye. “We were thinking maybe Tony Visconti at first,” says Dailor. “We were loving the new Bowie record – it reminded the world how great Visconti is too. I went to New York and I was going to meet with him, but I didn’t do it. I wasn’t sure where everyone in our band was at; are we really going to go to New York to do a record? It just seemed like a bad idea. Bill was going through a horrible situation; Troy was going through some stuff as well, I didn’t have the best situation going on, Brent was butterflying around, doing his GTO band…”

“And Brendan’s from the Atlanta area,” says Kelliher. “We wanted someone we could trust and we had a studio in mind, The Quarry, in Kennesaw. It’s a drive, but we could still sleep in our beds every night. We needed that base to make it work.”

“I think it was important for us to have some familiarity – and let’s not forget, it’s Brendan O’Brien!” says Dailor. “He understands that fine line between prog, catchy melodies, metal… He said, ‘You guys are writing pop music: it’s like a bunch of crazy people writing pop songs!’”

Picking up where they’d left off with O’Brien wasn’t a problem. “It was like seeing an old friend,” says Kelliher. “‘Let’s all make a beautiful record together.’ He was very excited about it and was there hands-on 24/7 – the band needed that. I felt more camaraderie with Brendan on this record, just because of where I was in my life. With Crack The Skye it was mostly Brent, his riffs and his songs that we all helped put together. It was more his vision, him and Brendan. With this it was kind of the other way around. I felt closer to it; not in control of the ship necessarily, but getting my input in and bouncing ideas off him. It was great.”

“Also, he’s very committed to a fast decision,” says Dailor. “Even when it comes to deciding where you’re going to eat! He has this spontaneity: ‘Did you say you had an idea for this vocal part? Go sing it; great, let’s keep it – that works, let’s finish it.’ And it doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it has the energy, which he’s great at capturing. On Crack The Skye he was like, ‘Let’s get into some percussion.’ I was like, ‘I don’t play percussion,’ but then I did!”

Bassist Troy Sanders has stated that Emperor Of Sand “ties into our entire discography,” adding: “It’s 17 years in the making, but it’s also a direct reaction to the last two years. We draw inspiration from very real things in our lives.”

Dailor reflects that the lead protagonist dies, and is yet saved, at the story’s end. Whether it’s an allegory for the ravages of cancer and the loneliness and suffering brought on by terminal illness, or simply the story of a lost soul trying to find his way through endless desert sands with Death at his shoulder, the message is implicit: Mastodon are moving forward, progressing ever further. Here they come, blinking into the light.

Within Temptation and Nightwish were the two biggest breakout bands of Europe's celebrated 90s symphonic metal scene, so for many, a collaboration between their two beloved singers seemed inevitable. It wouldn't be until 2013, however, that Sharon den Adel and Tarja Turunen - by then long gone from Nightwish - finally sung on a track together. In 2024, Metal Hammer sat both vocalists down to discover the story behind one of modern metal's great team-ups.

When Within Temptation and Nightwish released their debut albums in 1997, there wasn’t a name for the kind of music they made. Within Temptation’s Enter, released in April, took obvious influence from gothic metal bands like Paradise Lost, but its grandiose, elegiac compositions and symphonic undertones hinted at the direction the band would eventually take. Conversely, Nightwish’s Angels Fall First, released in November, approached metal from a different direction, drawing more directly and heavily on folk and classical music.

Ultimately, both bands would spearhead the symphonic metal movement of the early 2000s. But, anchored as it was around two charismatic women – Sharon den Adel and Tarja Turunen respectively – history tells us surely there must have been some rivalry. Symphonic metal’s answer to Blur vs Oasis perhaps, or Mustaine vs Metallica?

"You look so beautiful, Sharon!” beams Tarja, as her counterpart joins a Zoom call. Erm... maybe not then.

Hammer is speaking to both vocalists more than a decade on from their collaboration on the Within Temptation song Paradise (What About Us?), the lead single from 2014’s Hydra. As soon as Sharon joins, any notion of tension is quashed. Tarja’s expressive face lights up and the pair chat animatedly.

There’s a clear camaraderie between them as they joke and discuss new developments. Which raises the question, was the ‘rivalry’ just a load of bollocks?

“Oh my God! There was so much talk, like, ‘I bet there’s a real rivalry going on between you and Sharon’,” Tarja says, hissing like a cat to illustrate her point. “I was just very happy to see more girls singing in bands. It made me feel really proud of the movement. I still am!”

“We didn’t even really become aware of the idea of ‘symphonic metal’ until later when journalists started giving it a name,” Sharon admits. “I don’t think there was much overlap between Nightwish and Within Temptation. The music was very different but because there were some similarities, people had to give it a name!”

Those similarities were enough to turn Within Temptation and Nightwish into leaders of the burgeoning symphonic metal movement, however. Sharon and Tarja were soon upheld as inspirations for a subsequent wave of symphonically inclined artists that included Epica, Leaves’ Eyes and Delain, dispelling the notion of metal as a boys’ club.

“We often felt like the strange duck on the festival bill because there was
a woman in the band where most bands had male singers,” Sharon says. “Plus, I wasn’t really from the scene when I started out – I was a big grunge girl!”

“I started out in classical music so I was a complete weirdo in metal, too!” Tarja chimes in. “Though I never let that experience bother me. I felt the embrace of the crowd, but also our colleagues were really nice, so I never needed to grow balls. Although, maybe I got used to it, because I had two brothers at home and was the only girl in my primary class. Six years with nothing but boys! Urgh!”

Although separated by more than 2,000 kilometres, it wasn’t long before the pair became aware of each other’s work.

“When I first heard Within Temptation, I was like, ‘This woman has such an angelic voice’,” recalls Tarja. “We must’ve still been working on that first Nightwish record, so I’ve been aware of them from the very beginning, really!”

“The first time I became aware of Nightwish, we played a festival together,” says Sharon. “People were really excited about the band so we went to see them. We were blown away by Tarja’s presence onstage. It was so powerful... so diva!”

However, the bands’ chances to cross paths proved surprisingly few and far between. By the end of the 2000s, Within Temptation were undeniably still symphonic metal scene leaders. They’d also grown tired of the tag. Both 2004’s The Silent Force and 2007’s The Heart Of Everything had topped the charts in their native Netherlands – as well as charting internationally – but the group were getting increasingly itchy about where they could go next. 2011’s The Unforgiving was a sprawling, multimedia concept record that saw the band incorporate more pop influence into their music. Now the pressure was on to reinvent themselves again.

“Hydra was our most difficult album,” Sharon acknowledges. “We were very much searching for direction, because we’d already achieved our biggest sound. So it wasn’t like we could go much bigger than that, particularly in terms of symphonics. We were searching for a way to evolve and take inspiration from something new.”

As it turned out, Tarja was delighted by the opportunity. She’d been trying to catch up with Sharon over the years, but their schedules had never aligned. Now they were working together, they could connect properly.

“It felt like I’d known her forever,” Tarja says happily. “I kind of felt that connection even before we met; Sharon must have gone through so many similar things to myself. We could recognise each other.”

Although they were bonding, there was still a distance between Tarja and Sharon – physically, at least. Tarja provided her vocals remotely from a studio in Buenos Aires, where she was living with her husband and infant daughter.

“I was bubbling with the joy of being a new mother and my family travelled with me everywhere, even to the studio when I recorded [2013 album] Colours In The Dark,” Tarja says. “I’d faced a lot of challenges of my own; I wasn’t really trusting in my abilities as a songwriter, for example. Paradise helped me so much, because it was so nice to even be asked about something like that. I think I had been waiting – without knowing – for something big to really happen. I didn’t doubt for a millisecond that this collaboration would be special!”

It was an exciting time, but the creative tumult meant some ideas almost got scrapped entirely.

“Paradise (What About Us?) was one of the few more typical Within Temptation songs on that album, but that whole record took a lot of searching,” Sharon remembers. “I actually wrote it with our keyboardist, Martijn [Spierenburg], and when I first looked back on it I was like, ‘Urgh, this is too much!’ It was Robert [Westerholt, guitars and Sharon’s husband] who insisted it was really good, and he wrote the song’s main riff. I had originally written it with just lines on the piano, but he added a whole different flavour to it that really worked. Otherwise Paradise might’ve ended up in the waste bin!”

During the writing process for the record, Within Temptation decided to reach out to a number of guest vocalists, feeling they could add unique flavours to the music. They signed up former Killswitch Engage vocalist Howard Jones, Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner and even rapper Xzibit, but by far their biggest coup was enlisting Tarja to sing on lead single Paradise (What About Us)?.

“There were two reasons we wanted Tarja for Paradise,” Sharon admits. “Not only for her voice – we felt like she could really add something – but also because in a more literal sense we figured it would be paradise for the fans! Ha ha ha!”

As it turned out, the distance also helped Tarja interpret the song, and gave her a bit of breathing room to work on ideas.

“I was really nervous!” she admits. “I think if Sharon and the guys had been next to me, that would have been something completely different. Because I was somewhere else, I could get into the song in my own way.”

“That’s also beautiful, because it means Tarja’s meaning for the song became its own thing,” Sharon adds. “For me, the song was about how we never learn from our mistakes as human beings. Because it’s such a big and cinematic song, Tarja’s voice added that enormity to it. She’s the empress!”

Released on September 27 2013, Paradise (What About Us?) finally united two of symphonic metal’s leading ladies. Predictably, the response was ecstatic from critics and fans alike, and to date the song has amassed more than 30 million streams on Spotify, as well as more than 100 million on YouTube.

In turn, when its parent album, Hydra, was released on February 4, it quickly became Within Temptation’s most successful release to date, topping the charts at home in the Netherlands while landing a Top 10 position in the UK (No.6) and Top 20 in the US (No.16).

More than a decade on from its release, Paradise (What About Us?) feels like the moment Within Temptation drew a line under everything that had come before, saluting the original leading lights of symphonic metal while also elevating them beyond the genre and into arena-conquering territory.

“Doing a song together, when nobody expected it, was so positive on every level,” Sharon says. “We still have this connection after all these years, and our friendship has only grown from that point.”

“It gave me a new friend in my life,” agrees Tarja. “It’s a song of friendship to me. I’m so happy we could bring people joy and love by working on this together.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer #393

By August 2021, Dymna Lotva frontwoman Katsiaryna Mankevich had been in hiding in her home country of Belarus for almost a year. The previous summer, she and her bandmates – along with more than 100,000 other people – had taken to the streets to protest against the country’s authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko.

The government had started arresting anyone associated with the protests, and banned Dymna Lotva’s gigs. Katsiaryna understood she would soon have to leave behind everything she knew.

“They searched for me for about a year, but nobody knew my address,” she recalls. “I would not even answer phone calls from my mum. When the police came for our guitarist, we understood that it was time to run. So, in the next three days, we escaped with one bag, one guitar and my cat.”

A landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the east, Ukraine to the south, and Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to the north and west, Belarus is widely considered ‘Europe’s last dictatorship’. Since 1994, it has been ruled by Alexander Lukashenko, who took control in the first free election since Belarus declared independence from the Soviet Union.

Although elections have been held in the decades since, these have widely been dismissed as shams. In the run-up to the elections in August 2020, two of his rivals were prevented from running and jailed, while one fled. Lukashenko won a landslide victory, but there were allegations of vote-rigging.

The European Union said it did not recognise the results. Members of the public, already angry about the way Lukashenko handled Covid-19 – he suggested tackling it with vodka, saunas and hard work – enacted the largest anti-government protests in Belarus’s history, but the authorities quickly cracked down. One man was found hanged in the woods – police said there was no evidence of foul play – land was seized from those who fled the country, and authorities ordered banks to seize money raised to help protesters.

“Every presidential election after his first one has been stolen,” Katsiaryna outlines with fierceness. “It’s not normal. Opposition has been put in prison, some of them murdered, hanged in the forest. Murders, repression, stolen money, stolen land: that is dictatorship in Belarus.”

Katsiaryna, who goes by the stage name Nokt Aeon, is speaking to Hammer from Poland, where she now lives with her cat, fellow Belarusian refugee Beelzebub. She, bassist Jaŭhien Charkasau and guitarist Mikita Stankevich were granted international protection status in the country in 2022. But their home government has not forgotten about them.

In December 2025, several of their music and concert videos were labelled ‘extremist materials’ by the Belarusian authorities, joining a thousands-long list that includes books, political manifestos and even TikTok accounts. Now, anybody in Belarus who shares those clips or engages with Dymna Lotva runs the risk of imprisonment.

“We feel like we’re in good company!” Nokt says with an impish grin and flash of the Devil horns, despite the ordeal she’s been through. “You just need to go through that list if you want to find new bands and new books.”

Drawing inspiration from the history and culture of Belarus, Nokt and Jaŭhien formed Dymna Lotva in 2015. On their first two albums, The Land Under The Black Wings: Swamp and Wormwood, they evoked the mystical fog and ancient marshes of their homeland, Nokt Aeon’s terrifying howls set atop shiveringly cold and desolately beautiful instrumentals that bridged post-black metal, doom and Belarusian folk.

In conversation, Dymna Lotva don’t seem like scary radical extremists. The three Belarusian members of the band – along with Polish drummer Bocian, who joined when they settled in the country – are regular, down-to-earth metalheads.

Their teenage influences are relatable to many further west, with Nokt crediting HIM and the crepuscular appeal of Ville Valo for getting her into metal, while Jaŭhien nods to the nu metal era of Slipknot and System Of A Down. Belarus has had some metal bands, but Lukashenko’s administration has repeatedly squashed them.

“So many bands have been imprisoned for playing metal music,” Nokt explains. “You cannot organise any underground concert, clubs are forcibly closed. Every generation starts new bands who are then forced to emigrate or disband. It’s a miracle that we have one metal band who have played since the end of the 80s: Gods Tower.”

While Dymna Lotva weren’t explicitly an anti-regime band at first – their initial idea was to write music based on the fiction of Edgar Allen Poe – they have reclaimed parts of Belarusian culture that Lukashenko’s predominantly Russian-speaking administration has tried to suppress.

“He hates our culture and language,” Nokt spits. “I’ve been in love with Belarusian culture since I was a teenager, and I started to collect books about native language and pagan traditions. We based our lyrics and concepts on legends, literature and history.”

2020 was a real turning point for Dymna Lotva, as they threw themselves into the mass protests, performing music and opening their homes to offer food and medicine to those who were injured. But Dymna Lotva knew their time in Belarus had run out when two members of the band Irdorath, and singer Lesley Knife of Gods Tower – with whom they’d recorded the protest song, Да Волі (‘To Freedom’) – were arrested.

“We had some shows planned, and the promoters called us to say that someone from the Ministry of Culture had pressured them to remove us from their events, else they would be imprisoned and their clubs closed,” says Nokt. “We started to live places we weren’t renting officially, so that they would not find us. Eventually, we knew it was time to go.”

The band decided to go south to Ukraine, but couldn’t travel directly due to tight security on the border with Belarus. They planned to go via Russia instead, where they could cross without visas. To call the journey tense would be an understatement.

“We got into Russia by train, and there was a document check near the end of our journey,” Nokt reveals. “We stayed and hid inside the train a little longer! Our journey was easier than Lesley’s. He had to escape at night through the swamp between Belarus and Russia like in some Hollywood movie.”

In August 2021, the band settled into their new home in Irpin, a city on the river in northern Ukraine, 30km from the capital, Kyiv. But just six months later, their world was flipped upside down again when Russia invaded, killing more than 450 civilians in the city of Bucha, 5km away.

Without a vehicle, the band were unable to escape, and found themselves under Russian occupation. Understandably, they’re reluctant to go into detail about the two weeks they spent in hiding there.

“It’s changed our lives,” Nokt considers quietly. “It was terrible. Even in Irpin, you could compare different streets and how they were treated, and we were lucky. Yes, it was cold with not much to eat, together with people we didn’t know, but nobody died. If we had gone to the nearest official shelter to our flat, we would be dead right now, because it was bombed and nobody survived.”

Dymna Lotva eventually escaped with other civilians in Irpin by perilously wading through the river from which the town takes its name. The band went to Poland, the one neighbouring country allowing non-Ukrainians to enter without an EU visa.

Finally able to restart the business of being a band, Dymna Lotva released a third album in 2023, The Land Under The Black Wings: Blood, and made an emotional return to the stage at Germany’s Prophecy fest.

“We had just released our new album, so we thought that nobody had heard about Dymna Lotva,” Nokt says. “When we came to the stage and saw this big crowd, it was like, ‘Whaaaat?!’ Our bassist Jaŭhien was in Warsaw, because his new Polish documents weren’t ready in time. So we placed his bass on the stage, put the Belarusian national flag on it, and I told the public our bassist is a ghost.”

Although Dymna Lotva left Belarus half a decade ago, news still reaches them from their old lives. In Ukraine, two interim guitarists for Dymna Lotva and their sound engineer are now fighting in the Ukrainian army. Things are more complicated when it comes to home, with significant risks for any friends or family who might want to help them out.

“We need to take care of their safety,” Nokt says. “But we meet Belarusians and Ukrainians at every concert, in every country.”

The Belarusian government’s ban on Dymna Lotva’s music has made them determined to continue, and they’re currently writing their fourth album. It incorporates their experiences, using a concept about passage through the Underworld as an allegory for emigration out of one’s country due to war and oppression.

Settled in her Polish apartment with Beelzebub, Nokt is doubtful as to whether they’ll ever be able to play in Belarus again – though she will always long to return.

“Every year we are further away from Belarus,” she admits. “Two years ago, all of us would have said, ‘Yes.’ Now, we’re not so sure. I definitely want, when the regime falls, to stage our own metal festival in Belarus. I want to go home and make something good for the scene there. It would be hard though, because most of the people we love are not in Belarus anymore.”

She pauses. “I have already found a good place for my grave, though. When I die, I’ll be in Belarus.”

The Land Under The Black Wings: Blood is out now via Prophecy

Nina Saeidi can pinpoint the exact moment she knew she wasn’t destined for a normal life. She was 23, sardined between three or four sweaty commuters on a packed 8am Northern Line Tube train in central London, six months into a corporate job she hated. She was wearing the same fatigued expression as just about everyone else around her, staring into the distance as another day of the grind loomed. And then, a man died on her.

“It was so dramatic!” she says now with a nervous chuckle. “It was rush hour, so it was so crammed that when he died, he couldn’t actually hit the floor. He just slumped on my shoulder, pooped his pants, the whole shebang.”

You might be surprised to find that a dude literally dying on her isn’t even the image from that day that has stayed with Nina the most. It was the reaction of everyone immediately after – or rather, the lack of it. “He was dragged off the train and no one said anything,” she adds. “No one made a noise. It was like everyone was dead inside. It was…” She pauses to scan for the right word. “…unceremonious.”

And in that unceremonious moment, something inside Nina snapped. She quit her job that day and never looked back.

“I just remember thinking, ‘You know what? I don’t want to live the rat race.’ And I decided at that point that I was going to be a creator.”

Fast-forward 11 years, and it’s safe to say that Nina made the right decision. Today, we’re chatting over a pot of chāyee in a quiet Iranian cafe on a blustery spring afternoon in North London, and her life could hardly be more different. Dressed in a woolly magenta top-and-trousers combo (“They’re technically pyjamas!”), black New Rocks and a chunky silver cow skull necklace, long dark hair flowing freely over her shoulders, she looks a million miles removed from a corporate stooge.

These days, she works as a jeweller, is a passionate activist and fronts one of this country’s most exciting bands – Lowen, the genre-crossing, culture-meshing riffzillas who have bewitched the underground metal scene. They formed in 2017, but it was 2024’s acclaimed full-length debut, Do Not Go To War With The Demons Of Mazandaran, that put them on the map.

That album was a tasty serving of slab-thick doom metal, wrapped in Middle Eastern melodies and lyrics coloured with Persian mythology and the turbulent legacy of Iran, a nation whose recent history intertwines with Nina’s own. Her powerful voice and use of the Persian tahrir vocal technique completes a dynamic that sounds unlike anything else in modern metal – quite remarkable for someone who tells us she was once convinced she had no musical abilities whatsoever.

“I’ve always been told I can’t sing!” she laughs. “Even my own family were like, ‘Nina, you can’t sing, what are you doing?’ I still honestly believe this is all some kind of a joke.”

Nina comes across warm, thoughtful and insanely well-read, dropping references to European literature, Middle Eastern geopolitics and ancient history that have Hammer scrambling for Google on the way home. She retains a quiet confidence throughout our chat, permeated only by hilarious moments of self-deprecation when it comes to her own musical talent – understandable, perhaps, given that Nina’s had to fight hard to make music a big part of her life at all.

Nina says that when she was growing up, her father banned music from the house, meaning she and her more artistically inclined mother would have to sneak listens of traditional Iranian folk and a sparse collection of Abba, Little Richard and Creedence Clearwater Revival MiniDiscs when he was away. Nina no longer talks to her father, but she speaks of him more matter-of-factly than with any hint of resentment.

“I wasn’t allowed to make noise,” she recalls. “My mum was the opposite. She was an artist. She wanted me to make noise. But I had to grow up in extreme silence.”

If Nina’s family dynamic is complex, their history is too. Her parents were born in Iran, but fled the country following the 1979 revolution that toppled the reigning monarchy and replaced it with an authoritarian Islamic Republic. Religious autocracy has followed; women’s rights have been eroded, and dissent is met with imprisonment, torture or even execution.

And yet, there is another side of Iran that Nina believes deserves recognition. She was born and raised in London, but her parents ensured she was keenly aware of her roots - for better and worse.

“I remember being really young, and our family would gather every week or two and talk about Iran,” she recalls.

“It would sound like this mythical, beautiful place, but also this traumatic, terrible place at the same time. There’d be stories of driving to the Caspian Sea and eating herbs in the mountains or having barbecues on the beach, but then there’d also be stories of my mum living in hiding for several years. One of her cousins was one of the first people that was executed during the revolution. Why? For being against the regime.”

Nina says her father’s behaviour had nothing to do with religion, but she eventually found herself rebelling against it nonetheless, marching into an HMV when she was 15 and buying three of the loudest metal records she could find: System Of A Down’s Hypnotize and Mezmerize (“They had the Middle Eastern influence”) and Antichrist, the 2007 album from besuited British extreme metallers Akercocke (“I liked how they looked like these rich Englishmen doing Satanic rituals. That was sexy”).

Those LPs forged a love of heavy metal that has only strengthened over time, and has come to define the last few years of her story. She met guitarist Shem Lucas at an Akercocke show in London in 2017, and the two decided to work on a project together. By 2018, the project had a name, Lowen – a riff on the Germanic word for lion – and an EP.

A handful of gigs followed over the next few years, but it was in the aftermath of the release of Do Not Go To War… in October 2024 that things accelerated. By the end of 2025, Lowen had played Europe for the first time, debuted at hallmark UK prog metal festival ArcTanGent and toured with Zakk Wylde’s Zakk Sabbath. It was a 12-month period that left Nina’s head spinning.

“It was really surreal,” she says now, eyes widening. “I’ve not had a moment to really sit down and process it, because it’s been so fast. It’s just felt like floating on a cloud most of the time.”

There’s another layer to Lowen’s explosion in popularity: Nina has found herself in the strange position of being metal’s most prominent voice for the British Iranian diaspora. On February 28, the US and Israel launched an attack on Iran that sparked a hugely controversial war in the Middle East, ongoing at time of writing.

On the first day of attacks, Iran’s despotic Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed. It provoked scenes of celebration among many Iranian communities, but there was also widespread anxiety over what could come next, and despair at the civilian casualties caught in the middle.

After some soul-searching, Nina decided to release a public statement regarding the conflict on behalf of Lowen, using her platform to call for unity and throw her support behind the right for the Iranian people to determine their future.

“Not one of these warring governments is innocent,” she wrote. “There is no justification in violence and no one wins in war.”

“My instinct when it all happened was that I didn’t want to say anything,” she tells us now. “I just wanted to hide. I wanted to be grieving alone. But I also felt like it was really important to speak. I owed it to other Iranians to say something, even if they don’t agree with me.”

There may have been hesitation to speak up, but activism runs in Nina’s blood. Her aunt, the writer and political activist Nasrin Parvaz, was jailed and tortured in Iran for eight years before fleeing the country to the UK, and was a huge influence on Nina growing up. In March, the progressive activism group Led By Donkeys projected a video of Nasrin onto the Houses Of Parliament, in which she read a letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer imploring him to keep the UK out of the war with Iran. It’s a huge point of pride for Nina.

“She was very big in how I grew up and who I became,” she explains. “I’ve been editing her work since I was 12 years old, and she’s an amazing person. Seeing her on Parliament was just wonderful. It was a moment where she really got to have her voice be heard.”

It was a moment of strength in a difficult time. As we speak, it’s the tail end of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, a 3,000 year-old tradition that celebrates the arrival of spring. The cafe we’re in has a small Haft Seen table set up near the entrance, adorned with seven items all beginning with the Persian letter S, which represents hope and good fortune for the year ahead, the number seven considered sacred in Persian culture.

Traditionally, this would be a time where Nina would be reaching out to her extended family in Iran, catching up and exchanging goodwill messages. That is not currently possible. Since the conflict began, Iran’s government have initiated a country-wide internet blackout, cutting its people off from the rest of the world. Nina hasn’t heard from those family members for weeks now.

“It’s huge,” she sighs, looking down and running her fingers around the rim of her chāyee glass. “I don’t know anyone [from the British-Iranian community] that’s not affected. I already know people who’ve lost family members. And then having to be ‘normal’, write an album, be online, all this Western world stuff at the same time. It’s a very strange time to be making art and just existing.”

And yet, Nina is existing and is still finding space to create, albeit at a slower pace than before. Lowen will play Download festival for the first time in June – another milestone – and a new album is on the way, though any timeline for its release has been muddied by the war. The band recently wiped all their socials save for Nina’s public statement and cancelled plans to release a new single (“now is not the time to be taking up space with that kind of thing”).

Instead, she’s going to take her time, create in the pockets that open up between the grief, and make sure Lowen can forge the right kind of legacy for the band and their fans. Nina may well be the first British-Iranian figurehead in the metal scene, but she refuses to be the last.

“I would love Lowen to be a space that people can feel free and safe in,” she says, smiling. “I think metal is in a really beautiful, diverse place, but I want more people like me here. I want someone else to come in and be better than me, feel like they can keep climbing those steps and be able to reach higher. I’m very privileged to be here, but I want someone else to be more privileged than me. I want to prepare that ground.”

Do Not Go To War With The Demons Of Mazandaran is out now via Church Road. Lowen play Download Festival on June 13.

In October 2024, Poppy hosted a surreal variety show on Veeps called Improbably Poppy. It was a mixture of sketches built on skewed humour, violence and crude sexual references – the kind of show you would watch on Adult Swim at 3am after a night out. Across the six episodes, she would talk to a panel of three puppets that looked like Muppet rejects and, at the end of each episode, sing a song accompanied by a band called Rodent’s Revenge, featuring a weasel father and son.

One brilliantly strange sketch features a pale yellow puppet called Mr. Scib. It turns out that Mr. Scib is sad. Why? Because someone has started a rumour about him.

“What’s the rumour?” asks Poppy. “’Cos sometimes rumours can be true.”

“People have been saying that I don’t have any pubes,” he answers, downcast.

“Mr. Scib, that’s terrible! I’m gonna to get to the bottom of this rumour,” declares Poppy, and her outfit transforms from a monochrome polka dot onesie into a beige trenchcoat, a magnifying glass in her hand. As jazzy film noir music plays, Poppy crawls across the studio floor and interrogates a crew member, before a man in a black trenchcoat and fedora gets her attention. After agreeing to babysit for the man in exchange for information, he offers the truth: Poppy herself started the rumour.

“You’ve been telling everybody he has no pubes,” he explains, exasperatedly. “Several people have told you to be more discreet, but you just keep saying it. Was that helpful?”

“Incredibly,” says Poppy. “I’ve cracked the case.”

After Poppy reveals she’d had her fingers crossed when she promised to babysit, so won’t be doing it after all, the man is left shaking his head in admiration – “What a woman.”

The sketch plays with stereotypes, casting Poppy as both detective and femme fatale: intelligent, sexy, deceptive. The case, about a puppet’s manhood, underscores the absurdity of the patriarchy while highlighting the power of understanding it and subverting it: she can start an embarrassing rumour, claim credit for doing the job, doesn’t have to babysit because she doesn’t want to, and still be admired.

Or maybe it’s just a silly puppet show.

Poppy is a character. A YouTuber turned musician who has continually reinvented herself across seven albums, and toys with people’s perceptions. There are so many rumours and ideas about Poppy, drawn from her sketches, behaviour and songs, that fans even made an iceberg chart for her, listing stuff ranging from ‘reversed messages’ to ‘Illuminati’.

In a world where modern metal artists either document everything on social media or hide behind a mask, she’s essential – enigmatic and never boring. Later, we will ask Poppy how she feels when she works with puppets – whether it’s about pure comedy or something else.

“I see them as extensions of myself,” she says simply.

Before we chat to Poppy today, we want to know how to address her. Would she prefer if we called her Poppy, or her birth name, Moriah Rose?

“Definitely Poppy,” she says, without hesitation. “Nobody calls me the other one.”

We’re speaking to Poppy via Zoom. Her camera is off, so we ask if we should turn off ours. She’s indifferent, but prefers “a phone call type of situation”. We turn it off. It’s 8am and Poppy is in a room on the 20th floor of a hotel, in LA for recording reasons she can’t disclose, and wearing “sleepytime clothes”. The scene through her window is one of construction, high-rise buildings, and fast cars. Two days ago, she came back from Perth, Australia, after completing the first leg of her Constantly Nowhere tour. Despite the 49-hour journey, she is not jetlagged.

“Jetlag doesn’t exist. I think it only exists if you think it’s real!”

For her longtime fans, Poppy’s appeal is that she inhabits a playful character with a surreal take on life, who’s fun to figure out. Her early YouTube videos were like performance art, featuring Poppy – placid smile, deadpan delivery and outfits to idolise – talking to mannequins and reading from the Bible. Her breakthrough, 8-bit-inspired hyperpop single, 2017’s I Am Poppy, saw her intoning her name like a robot (‘P-O-P-P-Y – I’m Poppy!’).

Newer fans have had a different experience of Poppy, drawn in by heavy, genre-blurring collabs, with everyone from Bad Omens (V.A.N.) to Knocked Loose (the Grammy-nominated Suffocate). Her latest albums, 2024’s Negative Spaces and this year’s Empty Hands – produced by ex-Bring Me The Horizon man Jordan Fish – feature some of the catchiest songs since nu metal, while her rabid screams and anguished singing conveys an authenticity that’s prized in the metal community.

Listen to those albums back-to-back and you might come away worried for Poppy’s welfare. There are tumultuous lyrics with hints about toxic relationships and situations, and a strong sense of trying to escape and overcome – it’s relatable material. On Dying To Forget, from Empty Hands, she screeches: ‘For a heretic, you got a lot to say, but you’re the motherfucker in my way / Drain out the poison, now tell me what remains, rot in your piss in your shallow grave.’ Is she… OK?!

“Ha ha ha! I’m OK! Just don’t worry, I’m on the road. I’m in transit between one place and another, that’s been the last two-and-a-half years or so,” she says, in her soft, high-pitched Poppy voice, as if she’s making an announcement about staying calm while you’re on an aeroplane falling out of the sky.

There’s a really strong sense that you’ve been through some stuff, and have had to reclaim some agency. Is that fair to say?

“I think in the past, that’s been a bit more of the narrative, or where the press has tried to lead it in that direction – where I’m just a soul that’s been beaten down by the world,” she says. “But it is actually quite the opposite nowadays. I’m beating the world down.”

It’s difficult opening a conversation with Poppy, because she doesn’t like interviews. It’s something she’s expressed on her socials, and that comes up in our conversation later – “It’s unnatural for me to talk about what I meant at a time when I meant it, and it’s something that I hold so close. So it’s actually quite anxiety-inducing.”

Fifteen minutes before today’s chat, we get a phone call from Poppy’s PR, asking if we can avoid the topic of men.

You mean, like her former collaborator, Titanic Sinclair?

Yes, and Jordan Fish, comes the reply. Apparently, Poppy’s team want the focus to be on her, and not overshadowed by anything else.

That’s fine, we say – we were actually just putting together some questions about feminism…

This pre-emptive offensive is likely because of YouTube videos and online chat about Poppy’s past. In 2019, she acrimoniously parted ways with Titanic. No one deserves to have their past raked over without warning.

Meanwhile, some fans think Jordan has exerted too much influence over her current sound, seemingly unwilling to concede that Poppy is her own person. But we’d rather talk about why Poppy is such an exciting artist right now.

It feels like Poppy has undergone a shift, from projecting a deliberately artificial persona to putting more of herself into her work. While previous songs have been a 50/50 split between personal experience and storytelling, she says, on Empty Hands, “about 90% is real”.

In the last couple of years, Poppy has spent a lot of time touring. Getting on and off the bus in different cities, going from show to show, living an existence most people can’t understand, has been difficult for her.

“The in-between moments allow for a lot of twists and turns in your mind,” she notes.

Conversations with the likes of Jordan, songwriting collaborator/House Of Protection singer/guitarist Steve Harrison, and Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante have helped keep her grounded, and although she won’t reveal any advice they’ve given, she does offer an insight into her own state of mind: “I would just say to anybody that’s reading this later, that sometimes when you’re doing something you love, it’s OK if it makes you feel indifferent, too.”

When she feels indifferent, she writes in her journal, and later turns those scribbles into songs.

“Constantly Nowhere was written with a bit of that in mind,” she says, referencing the most bare-bones song on the album, which sounds inspired by Imogen Heap’s vocoder-driven Hide And Seek. “And in turn, that’s how we decided to name the tour, because it was how I was feeling – constantly nowhere,” she explains.

Poppy has been journalling for 20 years, and conceived of Poppy in her 2011 pages.

“I’ve always been into the performing arts,” she explains, “First I was a dancer, and then I wanted to sing, and I always wrote songs, and I felt like I needed to be the one to sing them.”

The first song that really unlocked the feeling of being Poppy for her was something unreleased that she won’t disclose. Of the ones in the public domain, unsurprisingly, it’s I’m Poppy.

“It was the introduction to who I am, and if you can make a hook out of your own name, I feel like it’s pretty important,” she says. We picture her like she’s appeared in videos – a knowing smirk creeping across a pink-lipsticked mouth.

The second song that unlocked Poppy, “more recently, on this route that I’ve been”, was New Way Out – the first song she and Jordan wrote together, and the lead single from Negative Spaces. Again, its lyrics speak to overcoming… something.

“It’s about a couple of situations I felt. To loosely name one of them… I had a conversation with my manager about wholeheartedly pursuing this, and a refocus of what I wanted to do,” she explains. “Up until that moment my focus was a bit scattered, and I wasn’t feeling as inspired by what I was working on at the time. I had scrapped an album I made that I found to be boring to me, and I didn’t want to play it live. At the same time, Jordan told my manager about this new venture he was gonna go on [after leaving Bring Me The Horizon], and he thought we should all work together. So, it felt a little serendipitous.”

It’s a welcome moment of candour from Poppy, but she soon reverts back to type, offering a prosaic and emotionally detached reply when we ask what the difference is between the Poppy that wrote I’m Poppy and the Poppy that wrote New Way Out.

“I don’t really think there’s a great difference other than experience, in the timestamp of life and when they were written and recorded,” she answers. “I’m still very much Poppy.”

If there’s some truth to what she’s saying, it’s that Poppy always looks and sounds like Poppy, even when collaborating with some of metal’s biggest and most diverse artists. When you see her brilliantly screaming in a forest, wearing a wedding dress, in the video for Knocked Loose’s Suffocate, while also stroking a beautiful white horse, you think, ‘Of course she’s doing that. She’s Poppy.’

She brought in Fever333 for Scary Mask in 2019 and sang on Dead Flowers with Health in 2021, but got more attention in 2024/2025 when she worked with Knocked Loose (morphing into a hardcore version of Poppy, appearing on Jimmy Kimmel), Bad Omens (industrial Poppy) and Babymetal (kawaii idol Poppy). Then there was the huge, triple-threat Amy Lee/Courtney LaPlante/Poppy anthem, End Of You (goth Poppy). Seeing three icons of modern metal singing about self-determination – ‘the end of you is the start of life for me’ – felt like a historic moment. According to Poppy, she chooses her collaborators based on vibes.

“It’s definitely important to me to have a friendship and a trust with the people that I’m working with,” she says. “And when I’m considering it, even before a song or a recording session, I want to meet them first for tea or conversation, because otherwise you’re trapped inside of a room you don’t want to be in, with somebody that’s boring. I’ve done that in the past, and it’s not how you get a good result. You can tell a lot from a handshake and a conversation.”

Evanescence were a band Poppy listened to growing up, and she and Jordan went to meet Amy Lee at home in Nashville. Amy had a glass of wine, while Poppy had a water. “She’s very warm, she’s very sweet and conversational.”

Amy recorded her part in front of Poppy and Jordan, but Poppy wasn’t keen on doing hers on the spot, despite Amy’s encouragement.

“Hearing Amy’s voice in a room was so incredible,” Poppy says, a smile in her voice. “It’s so iconic. She was like, ‘OK, now you can do your part.’ And I was like, ‘It’s OK, I’ll record it when I get to my studio!’ And she was like, ‘I’ll leave the room’, and I’m like, ‘It’s OK, I’m in your house, I’ll just do mine later!’”

We wonder if Poppy had some nerves over it, but she talks around the subject carefully.

“I think I’ve always been somebody that prefers to track vocals with only the engineer in the room, because I like to be able to do as many takes as I want, and have the freedom to choose by myself,” she says. “I don’t like spectators in the studio, I’m pretty precious about that. It’s such a sacred time for me that I don’t want anybody to be in there. Some bands will invite their friends over when they’re working, but I just like to work, and nobody gets to hear it until it’s presented.”

It’s clear she doesn’t want to get too vulnerable – to give anyone a reason to speculate about her motivations or actions. A question about whether she has any doubts or insecurities about her career as Poppy, or any worries for the future, is met with short shrift.

“I just… am focused on now, and my internal barometer, and keeping the channel open and not letting other people dictate the speed of the operation. It’s not a narrative for other people to weigh in on. I think communicating any sort of personal apprehensions gives the spectator room to diagnose something in their WebMD-certified brains. I’d prefer to keep that personal.”

She adds: “I don’t like to hear chatter from people who I don’t know, and don’t have respect for. The people I have respect for are people I aspire to be like, who I have met in person, or maybe I haven’t met them, but their work has resonated with me, and I look to them for guidance or inspiration.”

Those people include Trent Reznor, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Outkast’s André 3000, David Byrne and David Bowie. We ask what she thinks of the recent 2016 trend, when people shared photos from the year Bowie died, and talked about how life was better back then.

“I don’t know the whole scope of what they were referencing, but it was a different time. It just feels very oversaturated and too much now. When you go to use the internet, you’re seeking out one thing, but then 100 other things get thrown at you, and you get distracted and derailed,” she says, describing modern overwhelm. “I try to mitigate exposure to that. And on the topic of David Bowie and his music, I think there are a lot of things that he was very on the nose about, musically and culturally, and now it just feels like everything’s a little bit much.”

David Bowie obviously had different personas. Is there a difference between Poppy and Moriah Rose for you, or are they the same thing?

“I am Poppy 100% of the time. Nobody’s called me that name in over 10 years or so now. My cat just woke up!”

If Poppy’s deflecting again, we can’t be mad. Cats are adorable. Hers is called Pi, and is apparently dressed in a duck shirt. She first took him on tour at five months old, so he could get used to travelling. On Crystallized, from Negative Spaces, she sings: ‘I was talking to kitty / Seldom broken and bored.’ Every cat parent knows what she’s talking about.

“He’s very communicative,” she explains. “I am thoroughly convinced that there’s a human inside there. At first, people thought I was a little… unstable. And then spending more time around him, everybody says, ‘Oh yeah, there is a man inside of Pi!’ He’s trapped. That’s why he could never go to a cat hotel, because he would probably try to hurt me.”

Whatever Poppy’s been through in the last few years, it’s clear she’s tried to heal from it. Again, it’s something most people – especially women – can connect with. We live in an age of wellness, of emotional and nervous system regulation. Besides writing cathartic music, she’s done energy work and talking therapy.

“Everyone’s just trying to make sense of what this is, when we’re spinning around on a rock in space,” she says.

In 2022 she told Revolver that she had been to see a spiritual healer a few years prior, who helped her with a long-term pain in her throat. It was, the healer said, the result of not speaking up. It helped, although she’s keen to point out that the healer’s practices are rooted in the body rather than anything mystical.

“I don’t believe in the palm reading or the future telling, it’s more about body-based and energy healing,” she explains. “And I was a bit sceptical, but then I was kind of weighing it up against how many people she’s seen in her career, and there has to be some sort of a legitimacy to it when everybody’s living their human experience, and then there’s certain commonalities between people that come in and out of their practices, for them to be able to identify certain patterns.”

She’s currently into breathwork.

“It might sound a bit shallow, but it is very impactful. There are books about it. I’m actually reading one I can give the name of… I think it’s called just Breath, but I wanted to give the author.”

Is it James Nestor?

“Yeah!”

That’s a great book.

“Yeah, it’s a great book,” she echoes, without volunteering any more opinions.

Poppy is an actor, a singer, and a provocateur. She is everything she says and everything she doesn’t say. And she’s one of the most exciting artists right now, someone who embodies what metal is in 2026 but also what it has the potential to be. Poppy’s built her career on a character, but as her music evolves, you wonder how her public persona will.

You can’t see her dropping the facade long enough to do a book club, like pop’s Dua Lipa, yet her lyrics and delivery seem more human than ever, showing the pain of being hurt and the strength it takes to reinvent yourself.

The glimmers of personality she shows make her even more likeable. You almost feel like you could be friends. One of her famous fans is Gen Z icon Alysa Liu, the 20-year-old US Olympic gold medal figure skater who made headlines by returning to competition for fun after a period of burnout, sporting bleached platinum halos around her dark hair. When Alysa posted a photo of herself, grinning with a medal in each hand, Poppy commented with three emojis: a flexed bicep, two pink hearts and a sparkle. Whatever Poppy chooses to reveal is ultimately up to Poppy.

After she cracks the case of Mr. Scib in Improbably Poppy, the sketch show that seems as simultaneously revealing and unrevealing as anything she’s ever done, she returns to him. He wants to know: did she find out anything?

“Shut up, you dirty sock,” Poppy says dismissively, no longer sweetness and light. “What are you, five?”

“What a woman,” he replies.

Of course she is. She’s Poppy.

Leather Angel were supposed to be the “female Mötley Crüe”. That was the idea. That’s a great idea, actually. But what were Mötley Crüe, really? Were they a band? Like, a musical outfit? Not really. The first two records are pearl, but it’s just Sex Pistols meets Sweet in a garage, and the rest of their career was generic arena metal.

I apologise up front if you’re a hardcore Girls Girls Girls fan, but let’s put our cards on the table, for chrissakes. Mötley Crüe was really about bad behaviour. Mötley Crüe is what would’ve happened if you gave any random gang of fourteen-year-olds unlimited access to money, women, booze, and drugs.

You can pretty much sum up their career with a line I read from Nikki Sixx in some magazine – Hit Parader, Circus, one of those – around the Shout era: “I fucked in a coffin last night. It was cool.” That’s what everybody was really into, the unbridled suburban decadence of it all. That’s the Mötley legacy. That’s why they rarely, if ever, mentioned the music in their autobiography, The Dirt. And that’s definitely why Vince Neil still doesn’t know the words to his own songs.

So it would take more than leather bustiers and professional-grade mascara to make a female Mötley Crüe. Personally, I would love to see four similarly dangerous women recklessly take on the male-dominated world of heavy metal. I mean, holy smokes, what a sight that would be. Leather Angel, unfortunately, figured the looks and the riffs were enough. Not in the early 80’s, man. Dudes were biting the heads off of bats and lighting their legs on fire. Still, it was a noble effort.

In the beginning, there was Obsession. Obsession kick-started life in 1981 in Los Angeles. Four women with ratted-out hair, skin-tight leather pants, mascara, and enough spikes n’ chains to make Betsy Bitch look like a school girl. The original line-up consisted of Terry O’Leary (vocals), Cathy Amanti (Bass), Debbie Wolf (guitar), and Krissi North (drums), and by all accounts, the Obsession era sound was a raw and lethal mix of razor-saw metal and a punky punch. Kinda like early Mötley Crüe.

They built a solid and loyal local following in LA and Southern California, partly because they were women who could actually play rock'n'roll, and partly because they were women who looked good in leather. Either way was ok with them, and they took to calling themselves “The Queens of Leather Rock”. And everything was all right. Until a year or so later, when the lawyers showed up to point out that there was already a speed metal band in Connecticut with that name.

The band dropped Obsession and took to calling themselves Leather Angel, a much more descriptive and fitting moniker. Who wouldn’t want to check out a band called Leather Angel, right? Right. Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx, a fan/friend of the band, contributed a laughably primitive Leather Angel logo, complete with an obscure, semi-occult symbol (he was obviously saving the pentagram for his own band), and the band rocked on.

In 1983, Leather Angel released their debut and only record, We Came to Kill. Smartly, it features the girls on the cover in their best biker gear. If you look long enough, you will notice just how much they look like Mötley Crüe, right down to the three brunettes and one blonde hair colour scheme, the handcuffs-as-belts, and the kinda scary, Frankenstein-y guitar player, but such a doorway only leads to madness.

Musically, well, they sounded like Mötley as well, only with a darker, more dramatic edge. The songs on We Came to Kill are mid-tempo and crunchy, but only the title track, fueled by North’s pounding war drums, offers much in the way of heavy metal menace. We Came has the best riff, too, a snarly, mangy dog’s bark that neatly offsets O’Leary’s pseudo-operatic vocals.

However, the thin production (by their soon-to-be-fired manager, Keith Dyson) hampers the heavy-devy aspects of all the songs, and leaves tracks like Heartbreaker and Under Your Spell in a wavering no-man’s land between Sunset Strip metal swagger and bloozy bar rock, without taking root in either camp. It ends with a hilariously woeful cover of Whole Lotta Love. Of course, Leather Angel never thought this would be their last-ever record, so what the hell, why not massacre Led Zeppelin? There would be many, many chances to atone for such a rock'n'roll sin, right? Nope.

We Came to Kill did decent business as 1983 rolled on, but in a year when major labels had set up camp in Los Angeles and were signing every group of long-haired, Flying V-abusing jackasses on the Strip, Leather Angel had failed to snag the Big Deal, which is, frankly, ridiculous. They wore black leather halter tops, man. They were at least as good as Rock Goddess, and if a ridiculous trainwreck like Odin could score a deal in Hollywood, why not Leather Angel? I don’t get it.

They fired their manager and drummer and regrouped, working on new material with famed metal producer Michael Wagner (Scorpions, Accept, etc.), but suffered another blow when Debbie Wolf quit the band, leaving only two remaining members. The last Angels standing decided to change the band’s name once again, to the regrettable “Jaded Lady”, a rather desperate name that pretty much shrieks “doomed from the get-go”, as did a subsequent cameo on Penelope Spheeris's classic doc, The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years.

Leather Angel had one of the best handles in all of rock'n'roll, but ultimately, they failed to live up to all the Mötley-esque sleaze and sin and stink that the name suggested. Still, though, the female Crüe? Still a great idea. Let’s get that going. Somebody send some Warlock bass guitars to the LA women’s prison.

Crowbar have played shows with some pretty brutal bands over the years: Morbid Angel, Napalm Death, EyeHateGod, Pantera at their gnarliest… But when it comes to witnessing utter carnage, nothing tops the time they played Philadelphia’s This Is Hardcore festival in July 2014.

“It looked like somebody had been sliced to bits with a fuckin’ chainsaw,” Crowbar vocalist, guitarist and founder Kirk Windstein recalls. “There was blood everywhere, all these guys lying around with broken noses, black eyes. Some guy broke his neck during our set! If you can win that crowd over, you’re good.”

That’s some achievement for a band whose general velocity is roughly the same as an arthritic tortoise stuck in tar. Especially given they were sharing the bill that day with the likes of Agnostic Front, Turnstile and Nails.

“Naw,” counters Kirk. “We played all our faster, more hardcore songs over a 45-minute set and the crowd went apeshit for us.”

God knows what those mangled hardcore kids would make of the unexpected turn the band’s career has taken recently. Crowbar helped define New Orleans’ sludge metal scene in the early 1990s, alongside the likes of EyeHateGod, Soilent Green, Down and Acid Bath, with Kirk the sole remaining original member.

But recent months have seen them become an unlikely TikTok sensation, thanks to teens making videos to their songs, placing them in the unlikely company of Sleep Token and Deftones.

“I have no fucking idea how that happened,” he admits, chuckling like an airbag being squeezed to within an inch of its life.

The story of Crowbar began with a death. Mike Hatch was a guitarist and key figure in the 80s New Orleans underground scene, a fanatical record collector and one of the founding members of local hardcore punk crew Shell Shock.

“He was like a big brother to me,” recalls Kirk, who was actually born in Middlesex while his US airman dad was stationed in the UK, before moving to the Big Easy as an infant. “Mike introduced me to everything. He would come over and do things for my mom and dad, help around the house and they would cook for him, so we’d eat dinner together and then go listen to records in my room. He basically lived with us.”

It was Mike who gave Kirk – who had previously sung Metallica, Anthrax and Motörhead covers in a band called Victorian Blitz – one of his first proper breaks, offering him the job fronting Shell Shock. He played his first gig with them in July 1988, but just four months later, Mike Hatch took his own life.

“I was devastated,” Kirk says softly. “Mike was a part of my family, my best friend. I didn’t know what else to do.”

United in grief, Kirk and Shell Shock drummer Jimmy Bower decided to continue playing, albeit under a different name. Shelving the album they’d recorded with Mike, they christened themselves AfterShock, then Wrequiem and finally The Slugs, before settling on the name Crowbar. At the same time, their sound was evolving.

“We were really getting into the doom thing too – bands like Melvins and Cathedral,” he says. “We’d have [Peter Steele’s pre-Type O Negative band] Carnivore one side of a cassette tape and Trouble another.”

Kirk says the nascent Crowbar found their sound while they were working on the song Waiting In Silence. “The creation of Crowbar, I’d credit Jimmy Bower,” Kirk says. “We knew what we wanted to sound like and Jimmy just started hammering that drumbeat for Waiting In Silence. Somehow I instinctively came in with the guitars [makes slow, swampy, grinding noise]. You know the rest.”

Jimmy Bower had bailed by the time Crowbar released their first album, 1991’s Obedience Thru Suffering, his place taken by drummer Craig Nunenmacher, alongside guitarist Kevin Noonan and bassist Todd Strange (the band’s line-up has changed countless times over the years). Today, Kirk views it as more of a demo than a proper album, though the song Subversion got picked up by MTV’s Headbangers Ball show (“I remember watching myself on a proper TV with my mom and dad,” Kirk says proudly).

New Orleans in the early 90s was fast becoming a hotbed for underground metal, a scene that appeared to materialise out of the Louisiana swamps.

“Somewhere along the line the media picked up the term ‘sludge metal’,” Kirk says distastefully. “I don’t know where it came from, but I don’t really care for it. To me we’re just Crowbar. We just wanted to sound original.”

Original they may have been, but the NOLA scene was interconnected to the point of incestuousness. Other musicians regularly hopped between bands. Jimmy Bower went from Crowbar to EyeHateGod, before rejoining the former for a two-year stint in the mid-90s. Kirk points out that his band’s current drummer, Tommy Buckley, is actually married to the sister of early incumbent Craig Nunenmacher, while his own landlord is original Crowbar bassist Todd Strange.

“It’s a small town!” he laughs. “The vibe here is ‘Eat, drink and be merry.’ A lot of people are struggling, it’s very blue collar, but at the same time, the city has a mystique about it – there’s nowhere else like it in the United States.”

It was another NOLA fixture who produced the band’s second album, 1993’s self-titled Crowbar. Kirk had first met Phil Anselmo in 1985, shortly before the future Pantera frontman joined glam rock outfit Razor White.

“He came to see Victorian Blitz and said he really wanted to sing for us,” Kirk recalls. “He came and nailed it on one of our originals, but I was the singer at the time, so I basically was like, ‘I dunno man, he’s a bit young.’”

That didn’t stop a friendship blossoming between the two men. In 1991, Kirk joined Phil in NOLA supergroup Down (aside from a six-year hiatus in the 2010s, he’s been a member ever since). By the time it came to writing and recording Crowbar, Pantera were flying high on the back of Cowboys From Hell and Vulgar Display Of Power. Kirk figured the singer’s studio experience would make him the perfect person to produce the album.

“He came to band rehearsals,” Kirk recalls. “I remember playing Existence Is Punishment to him and he gives us this look with his arms folded. It was like, ‘Oh shit, he’s not happy.’ He’s like, ‘The song’s got one good riff and the rest is shit.’ He taught me a lot about songwriting.”

Released on October 12, 1993, Crowbar was the first album Kirk feels properly represented the band. It also exposed them to an entirely new audience when the video for Existence Is Punishment was played on Beavis And Butt-Head.

“They made fat jokes about us, but we didn’t care,” says Kirk with a laugh. “They liked it, that was the important thing. That was the rule, if they threw the horns at some point, they thought it was cool. Until the last couple of years, people would come up to us and be like, ‘I first heard your band through Beavis And Butt-Head!’”

Despite the blessing of America’s most hard-to-please animated critics, Crowbar never crossed over into mainstream stardom. Instead, like Kirk’s heroes Motörhead, they followed a path of dropping new albums every few years and touring relentlessly on the back of them. And like Lemmy, they weren’t given to wild creative swings.

1995’s Time Heals Nothing was doomy and dirgey with punk outbursts. 1996’s Broken Glass was punky with doomy, dirgey dives. 2000’s Equilibrium was… you get the picture. That’s not to say they didn’t tweak the formula sometimes. 1998’s Odd Fellows Rest, a fan-favourite, saw their sound taking on a more soulful edge. But otherwise, Crowbar’s lot was releasing albums to fan acclaim, with no real shot at mainstream success.

“For years, we would literally go on tour to play music because we loved it, and we could get free beer,” Kirk admits. “We weren’t making any money – none. We’d get home and get a shitty part-time job or something. We’ve really tried to stay on tour as much as possible because at least that’s something fun to do.”

There were moments of glory amid the grind. In 1994, Crowbar opened for Pantera on the latter’s arena tour, at the precise moment Far Beyond Driven hit No.1 in the US.

“They were above Michael Jackson!” Kirk marvels. “People were literally tearing the seats up in the arena and destroying stuff. It was a wild tour.”

But as Crowbar’s profile inched up, Kirk found himself becoming increasingly reliant on cocaine.

“I was 32 years old when I first properly did coke because before then I couldn’t afford it,” he admits. “It became a really bad thing for a long time – when I started making money with Down, it only got worse. Nowadays you have so much more reason not to fuck with it because of the fentanyl [mixed with the cocaine] and all that shit. But [to quit] all I had to do was erase my coke dealer’s numbers from my phone.”

Easy as that?

“Not quite,” he concedes. “I stopped going to the bars where I knew dealers were too. I remember one of the dealers came up to me when I was in a bar taking a piss and he hands me a bag of coke. I took out my key, did a bump each side, tied the bag back up and handed it back to him. He was watching me the whole time, thinking if I got a little taste I was gonna buy from him. I just smiled and went, ‘I’m good.’”

His relationship with alcohol is more complicated. In 2010, he pulled out of a planned tour with his doom side-project, Kingdom Of Sorrow, to enter an AA programme and “turn over a new leaf”. He still drinks, but strictly only beer.

“I can’t handle hard liquor anymore,” he says. “I can’t wait to taste a beer I like, but if it’s hard liquor it makes me wanna puke just thinking about it.”

For all the musical and non-musical diversions, Kirk has stayed true to Crowbar for well over 35 years. But having turned 60, he’s under no illusions about the strains that life in a band can take. He’s recently been suffering from back issues that turned out to be related to a synovial cyst pressing on his spine.

“I couldn’t really walk,” he says. “It was very, very painful and was mentally draining because I’m wondering, ‘Am I gonna be using a walker and sitting down to play for the rest of my career?’ A neurosurgeon talked me out of having any kind of surgery – the cyst can be drained – but he was like, ‘It’s not a very high-risk thing, but do you really wanna be that dude?’ I remember reading about [80s rocker] Don Dokken, he had bad surgery and said he can’t play guitar or even wipe his own ass now. Fuck that.”

Cysts aside, the future looks good for Kirk Windstein and Crowbar. Thanks in part to that unlikely TikTok success, their recent UK tour was a sell-out. They may not have made an album since 2022’s Zero And Below (their 12th), but these New Orleans warhorses are more popular than ever.

“Better late than never!” Kirk booms. “Thank God it’s happening. We’ve not changed anything, and all the songs and albums people are going crazy over are actually old. We have been busting our asses our whole lives playing music. But we are finally getting a pay-off from all the hard work and sacrifice.”

Crowbar play Damnation in November.

Benji Webbe is one of British metal’s national treasures. For almost 30 years, he’s been the rabble-rousing, ultra-charismatic frontman of Skindred, the ragga-metal four-piece who came rolling out of Newport, South Wales in the late 90s. But Benji was already a veteran of the music industry by the time Skindred were on the scene.

Born in Newport in 1967, he lost both his parents at an early age and was raised by his older brother. Before long, he became obsessed with music, with reggae, dub, punk and rock’n’roll dominating his listening. His first big break came with Dub War in the early 90s, sparking a decades-long career in rock – albeit one that has had its share of challenges along the way.

“I’m very grateful,” he beams, as he looks back over his journey. “Whether we play a club in Aberystwyth with six people or we play Brixton Academy with 5,000, I’m having a good time, all the time.”

Your father emigrated from the West Indies. How did he end up in Newport?

“My father was from an island called Saint Kitts. He spent some time in Manchester and then came to Cardiff and met my mother - she was from Aberdare [in South-East Wales]. She was a mixed-race woman. My mum and father loved each other and I grew up in a beautiful household; two brothers and two sisters, and I was the youngest so I was a spoiled little brat! But then my mother got sick.”

What was she sick with?

“She always had a heart situation going on from she was younger, but it just got worse and worse. One afternoon, she went to hospital and never came home. It was real tough for my father. And God bless him, after four years, he dropped dead himself!”

Your older brother brought you up from that point. Is it true you grew into a bit of a tearaway teen?

“It was feralness! You got to remember, this is the late 70s, early 80s, you’ve got the punk rock thing going on, you’ve got mods, you had weed-smoking Rastas, all this shit. We were a bunch of Black kids whose parents had passed away, and we was feral as cats, bro, running around the streets. We never had to be home at nine o’clock, so we could do what the fuck we wanted.”

So what did you do?

“We were just hanging around, doing people’s heads in, freaking people out, having a good time as kids do. Not too much vandalism. Newport was just full of characters, and I gravitated to the musical characters.”

How did music first come into your life?

“My mother was really into West Side Story, so I started watching musicals. But at the same time, we had this amazing record collection from the West Indies, and we also had David Bowie, T-Rex and Slade playing on the radio. I remember being in the school choir – aged about six or seven years old – because I could do this amazing vibrato with my voice, and the teacher held me back and she said to me, ‘You’ve got a gift, you have, and you really need to take care of it. That gift will take you anywhere you want to go!’ But I was a little boy, and I went home and totally forgot about it.”

When did music start to have a bigger impact on you, then?

“My brother was in a band. We’d get a microphone out on a Friday and Saturday, play records and just sing over them, making noises, having a good time. I remember that my brother’s voice always really captivated me, and when he left the house, he was off with his friends making music. One day he said to me, ‘Do you want to come to a concert with us?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve never been before, I would love to come!’ So we got in the van.”

So you travelled with your brother’s band to a show? What was that like for you?

“It was a magical moment. We were driving from Newport to Cardigan [in the West of Wales], and when it’s the first time you’re getting in a van driving, it’s quite far to go. I never really travelled as a kid growing up! We pulled up to this festival, people everywhere, mud, music, you know. The doors to the van open, and these guys help my brother and his mates all get their gear out. I just could not believe that my brother was being treated like royalty. They gave me a laminate!”

What was the show like?

“It was one of the most amazing days. My brother and his friends went onstage and they played the show, the lights were flashing, the smoke machine was going, I’m having a great time. You are talking a little fucking tin pot festival, but to me it was the biggest thing in the world. Then I could see the promoter paying my brother money! I stopped the movie, looked at the camera, and went, ‘Fuck me. He’s come here with his mates. They’re giving him booze. He’s smoking weed, having a great time, and then they’re gonna give him money? I gotta do this!’”

What was the first band you tried to put together?

“I was really drawn to the sound systems, which is basically 18-inch speakers and a microphone. Obviously, I grew up around a lot of Jamaican and West Indian people, so all that was in us. I was part of a sound system called Conqueror Hi Power from Cardiff, that was quite well known. After that fell apart, a friend of mine came to me and said that he had a band, and that he’d love for me to go and sing for him. So we were in a band called Bismillah, and we did a BBC TV show called Ebony in 1984. That was my first taste of being in a band.”

Were you always a natural showman?

“With Bismillah, I used to play a lot of shows when Jamaican artists would come to Wales. We were fortunate enough to get on the support slots, and honestly, I’m not just bigging myself up, but I killed it every time. Everyone who knew me said, ‘Fuck, I’ve known you since you was a kid; whatever you’re doing, you keep doing it because you’re special, bro.’”

You eventually formed Dub War in 1993. How did that come about?

“There was a friend of mine who went to prison, and when he came out, he said, ‘Listen, I know you can sing all different types of music Benj, but I’ve written four or five really cool rock songs. Do you fancy finding some musicians to do them?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do that!’ I wanted to be Lenny fucking Kravitz! So we found a couple of guys who played guitar and we did a demo, but nothing ever came of it. There was a band in Newport called the Blood Brothers who had recently lost their singer, and I was approached by them after they heard the demos that I did. They were blown away!”

What kind of music were they making?

“Punk rock! There was Ginge [future Dub War member Martin Ford] on the drums, and I went there three or four times, and I was screaming and doing weird poetry while they did punk stuff on top of it. It was really good fun. Then one afternoon we were jamming and Ginge said, ‘Benj, you know the dancehall stuff you used to do? We’re gonna do some real fast, flashy punk stuff, could you do the dancehall stuff on top of that?’ I was like, ‘Fuck that. I’m not doing that! I want to be in a rock band!’”

What changed your mind?

“He said, ‘Just fucking humour me, man. We’re gonna try it.’ They started making some noise with the guitars and I started doing this dancehall stuff over it, and after we did about a minute of it Ginge looked at me, all the guys in the band put their instruments down, and he said, ‘You know what? We’re really onto something.’ A friend of ours had a t-shirt that said ‘Dub War’ on it, and I said, ‘Let’s call ourselves that.’”

Dub War had a lot of momentum in the 90s. Was there a moment where it felt like things were blowing up?

“We were playing 1,500-cap rooms all over the UK, and it all sold out. And when a band like Manic Street Preachers ask you to go on tour, it’s a pretty big deal. That’s when I felt like we were actually happening, because a lot of people were talking about us. But we were on tour in Manchester, and someone from NME was there. We were all talking shit, and a Dub War roadie was saying how shit the Manic Street Preachers were. A week into the Manics tour, NME dropped this fucking interview, and they said Dub War was saying this and that, and the Manics chucked us off the tour. That was when things changed; the doors shut on us. It was never the same after that.”

After Dub War folded in the late 90s, you moved to LA for a bit. What was that like?

“I spent time in Los Angeles, working on different projects with [then-Ozzy Osbourne bassist and future Metallica member] Robert Trujillo. We wrote a couple of songs for Ozzy - I don’t even think Sharon heard them in the end, but we did work on that stuff! It was funny because I’d signed back on the dole [in the UK]. So what I’d have to do is sign on the dole, go to America for two weeks, and then come back and sign on again!”

You came back to the UK and formed Skindred. What were the early days of the band like?

“Me and Dan [Pugsley, bass] met in late ’98. We ended up writing all these songs, which later on became [2002 debut album] Babylon. And we got ourselves a little rehearsal space in Newport, and out of the blue, Ginge just turned up. He said, ‘Dude, this is fucking amazing. Can I play?’ Then we got Jeff [Rose, ex-Dub War], the guitar man. We travelled the world, got another record deal, got management, it was going great. We went over to America to record the album, came back and then we got dropped! It was pretty fucking heartbreaking.”

Did you consider just jacking it all in at that point?

“I knew other labels were interested, but by then Jeff and Ginge were like, ‘Nah, fuck that. I’m not doing it no more.’ So we went over to America, re-recorded about five songs, and wrote some more songs with Arya [Goggin, drums] and Mike [Demus, guitar].”

At what point did Skindred feel like a project that had legs?

“When we were going back and forth to America. The album was reaching radio, Top 5 in the fucking Billboard [Reggae chart]. And we did Conan O’Brien, for fuck sake! We were playing festivals with Hellyeah, hanging out with Dimebag…”

What was Dime like to actually hang out with?

“Hanging out with Dimebag was great! This is back in the day when people wasn’t so PC… I was on the radio, and I kept saying ‘n****r’ when I was talking to somebody, and the presenter kept saying, ‘You can’t say that!’ And Dimebag, he’s a bit of a Southern boy, so he’s listening and he’s pissing himself. When I come off the radio, he came up and said, ‘You’re hilarious, man, let’s get a beer!’ And that was really cool, I think. We bro’d down for about three days on this festival, and that was really amazing, to have Dimebag in your corner.”

Who’s your favourite band Skindred have toured with?

“We’ve been very fortunate. Papa Roach, Disturbed, Gogol Bordello, they all treated us really well. Three years ago, we supported Kiss on their last [UK] shows, and that was fucking amazing. I’ve never been a massive Kiss fan, but let me tell you, they were fucking brilliant. That taught me, as a frontman, the pinnacle of craftmanship onstage.”

When did the extravagant stage outfits start? You’ve rocked diamanté suits, top hats, flashing shades…

“I just got a couple of quid, bro! I’ll be honest: I’ve always loved Liberace. The fur, the outrageous costumes. I thought, ‘People don’t do that in rock music.’ I wanted to do something which was a bit more showman. It was an evolution; for me, getting dressed to go onstage, the pomp, it’s fucking brilliant. I love that part of it.”

Where did the Newport Helicopter come from? “There was a programme called Yo! MTV Raps, and there was a guy on there, Petey Pablo. He had a song, Raise Up, and in the song he said, ‘North Carolina, come on and raise up, take your shirt off… spin it like a helicopter.’ I watched this years before [we tried it], never thought of it again. But we’re at one of the major festivals, I’m talking to the crowd, and I said, ‘You know what? Everybody take off their shirts!’ I thought to myself, ‘That fucking helicopter thing… let me try that shit. I’m gonna call it the Newport helicopter.’”

How many grandkids do you have now? You’re basically collecting them at this point.

“I’ve got 19 grandchildren! Just so you know, I’m not a coochie-woochie grandfather.”

What’s that mean?

“I mean, I love my grandkids, they love me, if they want me, they can come and see me, but I’m not gonna go looking for them on their birthday. I’m not coochie-woochie, all proud of my grandkids, looking at pictures of them and all that shit. Don’t get me wrong: I’ll take them to town, buy them jeans or sneakers or whatever they need. But I’m not that guy. I don’t relate to it. Losing my parents so early, I had to toughen up.”

What kind of legacy do you want to leave behind?

“That people had a good time when they came to the show. That I left people with some sort of encouragement, hope and uplifting. I don’t know about money and all that, but the energy, the love and the good vibes I’ve given the people over the years? That’s something worth remembering.”

Skindred's new album You Got This is out now via Earache. The band play Blackbird Festival on June 27 and headline Radar Festival on August 1, before touring the UK from October 24.

Since joining Napalm Death in 1987, bassist Shane Embury has been an unstoppable force of both extreme creativity and creative extremity. He’s also in a billion side-projects exploring just about every avenue of extreme metal you can imagine.

From grindcore (Lock Up) and death metal (Brujeria), to ambient industrial noise (Dark Sky Burial) and hardcore punk (Venomous Concept), Shane has seen plenty in his career. With Veneomous Concept's new album The Good Ship Lollipop again asserting his brilliance, we asked Shane to share some of the most important experiences that have driven him to keep pushing boundaries for almost 40 years.

ROCK’N’ROLL WAS NEVER FAR AWAY

“I got into guitar stuff pretty early. I remember watching Top Of The Pops because it had the intro by Led Zeppelin and you’d have stuff like Slade and The Osmonds on, too. There was a lot of poverty in my hometown – this little village called Broseley [in Shropshire, in the West Midlands] – and we definitely struggled, but my mom was encouraging musically and she’d buy me a seven-inch each week.”

HAVING BLACK SABBATH ON MY DOORSTEP WAS A BLESSING

“We’d walk around the village fantasising about stage lights and logos. Sabbath, Priest, Zeppelin and Slade all had members from our area, so it felt like it could happen. Neat Records was a big thing at the time too, bands like Raven and Venom. I used to write to the label and they’d send me signed letters from Cronos and Mark Gallagher. They were very down-to-earth blokes, but they were my heroes.”

YOU CAN ALWAYS BE HEAVIER, FASTER, LOUDER

“With my first bands, we went right into the extreme stuff. Mitch [Dickinson, Warhammer guitarist/ vocalist] moved to Broseley when we were 10 and soon we were getting into thrash metal. Warhammer sounded like Bathory and Possessed because we were big on tape trading – we’d get stuff from [guitarist] Bill Steer from Carcass and [UK publication] Metal Forces.”

IT’S FUNNY HOW THINGS WORK OUT

“Warhammer split up because me and Mitch wanted to play fast after hearing the [Possessed debut] Seven Churches advance tape, but the other guys were more into Metallica. Next thing, we were out in Birmingham and someone tapped me on the shoulder: 'I see you’ve got Siege on the back of your jacket – my name is Justin [Broadrick], I play in Napalm Death.

I reckon you might like us.' We went to see them, Heresy and Amebix play, and I became really good friends with them. I quit my job pretty much to hang out with [early Napalm drummer] Mickey Harris.”

TAPE-TRADING MADE THE METAL WORLD GO ROUND

“When Napalm recorded the A-side of Scum – long before it was released as an album – we were instrumental in getting the word out about it through tape-trading. Later, a friend of mine, Atso, from Estonia, single-handedly took the second Napalm album [1988’s From Enslavement To Obliteration] all around the Soviet Union.

We played in Moscow in December 1991 and 15,000 people turned up, so that was strange. Tape-trading made you part of this wider thing, so you could go play Israel, China or Nepal, Kazakhstan, and people would know who you were.”

SOMETIMES CHEAP AND CHEERFUL DOES THE JOB

“We went to this reggae studio in Worcester to record From Enslavement To Obliteration. We had six rehearsals for the entire album and recorded the music in three or four days. It was pretty rough; we slept on the floor by the mixing desk and Pot Noodle was probably the culinary delight of the day. It was very quick – it only cost, like, £300 to make.”

THERE WAS NOWHERE LIKE FLORIDA IN THE 90s

“All our favourite bands were there. At the time, we were barely in the studio because we were hanging out with the Morbid Angel guys, Deicide, Obituary, Atheist! We loved it out there, though, driving around blasting out Public Enemy’s Fear Of A Black Planet at full blast, with a Subway and 64-ounce Big Gulp soda.”

YOU NEVER KNOW WHO MIGHT BE A NAPALM DEATH FAN

“I’ve seen Jim Carrey talking about Napalm Death a few times. Maybe that’s why Cannibal Corpse got the Ace Ventura gig! We’ve heard some strange tales that there’s a lot of comedians and actors out there who really like Napalm Death.

When we toured with Crowbar, Barney [Greenway, vocals] got their guitar tech a Villa top. A few years later we run into him, and he tells Barney that he works on film sets now as a key grip. He says he’s working on a movie with Tom Hanks, and Hanks comes over to say, ‘Interesting soccer top you’ve got there.’ He says thanks, and he got it from his friend from Napalm Death, and Hanks apparently said, ‘Napalm Death? They were shit after Utopia Banished.’ I’ve no idea if that’s true, though!”

MUSIC MEANS EVERYTHING TO PEOPLE WITH NOTHING

“There was a strange line between who had money and who didn’t in Europe after the Soviet Union fell – you’d cross into places like Serbia and Croatia and it was like the wells dried up. We were touring with At The Gates at the time and Tomas [Lindberg, vocals] had all this vodka and soda he was lugging around.

We passed a bunch of kids literally kicking rocks on the street. We pulled over, he took out all these cases of Coca-Cola and suddenly there were kids everywhere. He was like, ‘Well, these kids have nothing.’ Some of those kids lived and breathed Napalm – we meant everything to them.”

WE SING ABOUT WHAT MATTERS

“What Nick [Bullen, original ND vocalist/bassist] was doing lyrically was pretty typical of the 80s – following the same kind of path as bands like Discharge or Crass.

Barney actually came from a very similar background to me, but when he came into Napalm [in 1989], he really wanted to keep a similar lyrical stance – very outspoken, but in a humanist way. His angle is about things that should matter to everybody, but it all ties to what Napalm had always screamed about: freedom, equality and that person in the shadows who’d spent their whole lives being ignored.”

ITS NOT POLITICS – IT’S BASIC HUMAN DECENCY

“As a kid, my parents struggled, and my friends’ families struggled, so I always veered towards the left. But certain things seemed like common sense, really. Even coming from a village which wasn’t very racially mixed, I didn’t understand people’s attitudes. I liked people for who they were, not for the colour of their skin or their sexual preference.”

NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF

“Having Nazis try to break into our dressing room after we played Nazi Punks Fuck Off at a gig was pretty uncomfortable! I remember we did the New Titans On The Bloc tour with Sepultura and Biohazard, and a bunch of Nazi skins turned up to that and there was lots of violence.

But the worst was in Estonia in 1993 – we were doing a festival and Deep Purple were headlining, so we were on in the afternoon. Barney was talking to this band from Russia who’d helped bring us over, and they started saying this racial stuff. I’d been drinking Estonian beer all day, so I jumped through a window and hit one. Then they grabbed Barney and someone started choking me; I was basically blue by the time [ND guitarist] Mitch Harris rescued me. We weren’t a fighty band, but we’ve had our scraps. Fish from Marillion walked past and said, ‘You mad Brummie bastards!’”

TAKE LIFE AS IT IS

“We were invited to play Brazil the week after we finished recording [1990 album] Harmony Corruption, to play with Sepultura.I think Max [Cavalera] was getting it in the neck, because people were saying they’d sold out, but they were Sepultura, of course they hadn’t fucking sold out! It’s not their fault people thought they were amazing! They’re lifelong friends of ours.”

THE FACES CHANGE BUT THE PASSION STAYS THE SAME

“There’s always going to be difficulties in bands – it’s like a family. We’re brothers, but we’ll argue about things like setlists. Even on the last record, with Mitch [Harris] moving away to the States and me writing the songs, we still got him over, he was still part of it. John Cooke will be the guitarist from now on, but certainly from ’92 to very recently, we’ve all been close.”

DIO WAS A TRUE HEAVY METAL ICON

“Meeting Ronnie James Dio is the most starstruck I’ve ever been. We’d met Geezer [Butler] when we were rehearsing because he was using the same space, so he introduced us. Ronnie was with his wife and had this exceptional memory. He asked where we were from and I said ‘Sparkbrook’, and he just went, ‘Oh, excellent curry houses there!’ Later, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You know I like Napalm Death, don’t you? Never stop’, and I’d already been emotional, but that was it – I broke down. Ronnie James Dio made me cry!”

Shane Embury's debut solo album Bridge To Resolution is due June 5.

Attila Csihar remembers the exact date when his life was irrevocably changed. On May 23, 1992, he was out in his native Budapest with a friend, smoking weed, when he had an epiphany. It’s hard to describe exactly, he says, but he had a vision of the sun, and an understanding of it as something material, but spiritual too, as a universal source of life, but belief as well.

“It wasn’t the weed,” the Mayhem frontman recalls now. “I’ve smoked it millions of times without this experience, but I didn’t know what was going on. Before, I’d always been searching for something, but then something opened in my mind, and it definitely defined my life. I got in sync with nature, and I’ve been reading and researching since.”

What follows is a long digression about neutrinos, sun cults, the Baalbek monolith in Lebanon – where Attila once recorded an album named after it for his Void Ov Voices solo project – and the advanced, non-human civilisations who, it stands to reason, had the sole means to build them.

At one point during his discourse, he brings out a spoon looped in on itself by a Reiki master in front of him, later presented to his current Mayhem band members to varying degrees of credulity. As much as he can give Blood Incantation a run for their money in the cosmic conspiracy stakes, it all amounts to one fundamental principle.

“What it all is, is a mystery, and that’s my biggest driving force, one that’s very deep inside of yourself. It opens your mind and it releases something in you. I still don’t know exactly what happened, but something profound changed in me, and maybe the sun is just a symbol of it.”

Attila is speaking via Zoom from a hotel room in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Mayhem, the foundational and sometimes notorious black metal band he’s fronted on and off since late 1992, and whose history encompasses death by suicide, church burnings, murder and the creation of a groundbreaking debut album, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, have just played here as part of a world tour to commemorate their 40th anniversary.

Even if the shaved crown of hair cradling the back of his head and short tufts of moustache sprouting from each side of his mouth suggest an aristocrat in exile from a world governed by different laws of grooming to our own, he’s far more down to earth than you might expect. Constantly walking around the room as he holds his phone, he’s chirpy, chatty and, at 54, buzzing with genial energy.

The playful glint in his eyes suggests that the various wild guises he’s adopted onstage over the years – from decomposing anti-Pope to cowled wicker man, mirror monster, alien-birthing fish creature and mummy – aren’t just mediums to channel dark energy so much as stuff he still can’t believe he’s gotten away with. As he puts it: “Somehow I’ve always been dealing with the dark side of nature, and that’s pretty strange, because I’m not a dark person in life, it’s just part of the channel I have.”

True to form, Mayhem’s seventh album, Liturgy Of Death, marks a band still deeply in touch with their roots, yet still pushing the envelope for what black metal can be and still do. Sweeping in its scope, it’s a turbulent whorl of revelations scoured by Attila’s possessed, otherworldly croak as if a stormfront were taking on demonic form, and girded with cold-steel riffs heralding a terrifying new age to come.

“I always felt like Mayhem was futuristic somehow,” says Attila. “When people talk about why De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas is evergreen, it’s not just about everything that happened around it, it’s also that musically it was so advanced. There have often been futuristic elements since. We have our roots, and it’s good to be related to the past, but this album has a balance. It has old elements, but it’s still present-sounding, and it’s still futuristic.”

While some of their contemporaries have left black metal’s incendiary past behind them, for Mayhem it’s inescapable. They’re willing to take on the role as black metal standard bearers and chroniclers for the extraordinary legend they gave rise to.

The 40th anniversary tour, which will wrap up in Australia a month after we speak, has featured guest spots from original drummer Manheim and former vocalist Maniac, the latter of whom briefly fronted the band in the late 1980s before returning for a longer stint between 1995 and 2004, when he was replaced by Attila.

The tour also features footage of the three former members who lie at the heart of the Mayhem mythos: original vocalist Dead, whose 1991 death by suicide still reverberates throughout the scene; guitarist and black metal lore-giver Euronymous; and the man who stabbed the latter to death in 1993, arch villain and far-right ideologue, Varg Vikernes.

“It’s very emotional,” says Attila. “It’s a dedication to Dead and Euronymous, but we also have to face up to all parts of our past.”

Attila’s own, pre-revelation roots lie in proto-black metal primitives Tormentor, the band he founded in 1985 in his mid-teens, while going under the fortuitous stage name of Mayhem. His love of metal had been instilled by an Iron Maiden show in 1984, which took place in a parking lot of the Budapest Sportcsarnok stadium after Hungary’s then-Communist regime refused to let them play inside.

But he found his true calling after he discovered Venom’s Black Metal album in an underground shop. Tormentor’s first show was at a talent competition, with Attila sporting a “crazy” mask and black cape borrowed from a theatre school (remarkably, they got through to the second round). But as they gradually started gaining popularity within Hungary’s isolated metal scene, they were also receiving attention from the country’s crumbling regime. Official gigs had to be sanctioned by the state, and lyrics parsed for political content.

“The officials were more concerned about the punk bands,” Attila remembers, “but even then, we recorded an album, Anno Domini, and I had to send them the lyrics. But then the Communist system collapsed, and in all the chaos, the album never got released anyway.”

One of the album demos he’d handed out had made its way to Norway via the tape-trading network. In 1991, Attila got a “very polite” letter from Euronymous asking if he would be up for joining Mayhem because their singer had recently died. Euronymous sent him two tapes, one for their already released EP, Deathcrush, and the demos for what would eventually become De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas.

“I remember when I first heard that demo,” Attila recalls. “I was like, ‘Holy shit, I never heard anything like this ever.’ I never heard riffs like that before, I never heard drumming like that. Some of my friends thought they’d sped up the tape. This was something really special.”

Although Hungarians were allowed short trips to the West every three years under the previous regime, Attila’s first trip to Norway turned out to be a bit of a culture shock.

“Euronymous and Varg [then Mayhem’s bassist, having replaced Necrobutcher, who left temporarily following Dead’s suicide] met me at the train station. Euronymous was wearing a bullet belt, but Varg was in chainmail. He was really serious about it, he said he was wearing it to protect himself.

“We stayed at Euronymous’s place for a few days, and it was kind of gothic inside, with red curtains. We travelled up to Bergen to stay at Varg’s place. He had a very fucking nice flat. He had a washing machine and a dishwasher. He was definitely from a more wealthy background. He was still like a metal dude. He was more into Tolkien, fantasy worlds, and the dark stuff. Completely different to what he later became.”

With the wave of church burnings yet to begin, Attila’s outsider status left him largely unaware of the scene politics and growing fanaticism that were brewing at the time. Still reeling from the vision he’d recently experienced, and immersed in books about Egyptology, his newfound awakening became a germinating factor that took De Mysteriis… into realms not even his new bandmembers could have contemplated.

Rather than the screech that would become de rigueur among black metal vocalists, Attila produced a gnarled, throat-singing rasp – a fever dream of incantations contorting itself as if to bring something unbidden into being.

“I knew I wanted to do something different from what Dead had done, and I was also a bit influenced by [Slovenian avant-industrialists] Laibach,” says Attila. “But I was also under the influence of that mystery energy I’d encountered. I did the vocals with all the lights off, surrounded by candles. I didn’t know of course what the album would become, but I knew it was going to be something very special.”

It was, though it would be overshadowed by events before it even came out. On August 10, 1993, Varg Vikernes was driven from Bergen to Oslo by Snorre Ruch of solo BM project Thorns and stabbed Euronymous to death. Back in Budapest at the time, Attila was initially unaware of what had transpired.

“I didn’t know what was going on at all, everybody disappeared, and I thought they were on vacation,” he says.

“It wasn’t until October that someone pointed out a small news section in a Hungarian music paper that said Euronymous had been killed. I couldn’t fucking believe it. I totally lost my way for a few years after that. I thought the cosmos was against me.”

Euronymous’s murder meant that the release of De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas was delayed until May 1994. With their guitarist and animating force gone, Mayhem were no more. Instead, Attila began working on his own experimental projects, before rediscovering his love of industrial music by joining Italian electro-black metallers Aborym as guest vocalist on 1999’s Kali Yuga Bizarre album, subsequently becoming their full-time vocalist for two more records. By 2003, he was collaborating with Sunn O))), touring with them and appearing on 2004’s White2 album.

“Stephen [O’Malley, one half of Sunn O)))] invited me to play on their first European tour,” says Attila. “The first show was in Linz in Austria, and there were, like, seven people there, but that was a really cool show. It taught me that it doesn’t matter how many people are in the audience, you have to always give your best, because you never know what’s gonna happen. That was one of the best lessons in my life.”

Nevertheless, a return to Mayhem was never out of Attila’s mind, not just because of the way his initial stint had dissipated without resolution, but also because Necrobutcher had been intermittently in touch since the band reformed, floating the possibility of a reunion if circumstances allowed.

After tensions with then-singer Maniac reached a head in the mid-2000s, Attila met with his ex-bandmates at a Mayhem show in Italy. His second stint in the band began in 2004.

“I never got any money from De Mysteriis… because of what happened, but I wasn’t trying to fix the past – it was important to me to bring the energy of where I was then,” says Attila. “I was proud to be back in Mayhem, but also because we could all explore together again.”

He’s subsequently recorded four albums with Mayhem (2007’s Ordo Ad Chao, 2014’s Esoteric Warfare, 2019’s Daemon and the new Liturgy Of Death). But Attila’s seemingly unquenchable curiosity is reflected in the breadth of his work outside of the band. He’s been a guest presence for a host of other artists, from Norway’s Keep Of Kalessin and Ulver to Skitliv - the band created by Shining (SWE)’s Niklas Kvarforth and Maniac – and former Swans vocalist Jarboe.

Yet the project that still weighs on Attila is Sinsaenum, the death metal-orientated band he joined as co-vocalist in 2016 at the behest of ex-Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison. Their initial meeting came a decade earlier, following an eventful Mayhem show.

“Joey was at the Gates Of Metal festival in California in 2006, where we caused a bit of a scandal,” he recalls.

“For that I was the mad doctor, with a leather face that was actually the skin of a pig’s head I got from a butcher. I got called by a Norwegian newspaper the next day and I told them I was vegetarian, and that the pig must have thought humans were its god because it was feeding them, but then they slaughter you and throw your head in a bin. I think the pig would be happy that his head was freaking humans out after that. The reporter was like ‘Uh huh…’”

Blown away by the show, and sharing a love of 80s industrial bands such as Skinny Puppy, Joey suggested the pair put together a project he described as “an evil Rammstein”. The drummer was talked out of it by Slipknot’s management, but then contacted Attila again a decade later when he was forming Sinsaenum. He appeared alongside co-singer Sean Zitorsky on 2016’s Echoes Of The Tortured and 2018’s Repulsion For Humanity.

But as with Mayhem two decades earlier, Sinsaenum’s career was curtailed by the premature death of a key member – in this case, Joey Jordison.

“I still think of him every day,” says Attila, who appeared on last year’s posthumous In Devastation album. “When we do Mayhem shows, he’s one of the people I make an offering to, along with Dead and Euronymous. Everything he did was so much from the heart. I still have demos of the industrial stuff we did together, but since Joey is gone, I don’t know who to approach to ask about releasing them. I have respect for everybody and the family too, but I don’t know if they’d be cool with it. I’d put it out for free, or donate any royalties to them, but it’s something I’d just like to do for him.”

Beyond Mayhem, Attila still has new projects in the works, with long-time Tormentor fan Iggor Cavalera, and with Rhys Fulber from seminal Canadian industrialists Front Line Assembly.

“I’m still searching, still discovering,” says Attila of his inexhaustible muse. “It’s something in me. So I never stop. I can’t stop.”

Liturgy Of Death is out now via Century Media.

Few bands can genuinely say they changed the face of music. Truth be told, Converge probably wouldn’t make such a ballsy claim either – these metallic hardcore trailblazers are too modest and self-reflective for chest-beating braggadocio.

Yet this Massachusetts band have undeniably altered sonic extremity as we know it. Their 35-year-plus career has seen them become a truly singular entity, splicing speed, fury and face-clawing riffing with wounded-pterodactyl vocals, poetic lyrics and a knack for expansive experimentation.

“It’s a natural purging of emotion,” is how frontman Jacob Bannon sums it all up. “I scream at the fucking world and I try to put myself through the stage.”

He makes it sound simple, but Converge are a complex band, musically, emotionally and artistically. The run of albums they’ve released from 2001’s landmark Jane Doe onwards have inspired a generation of hardcore, thrash, screamo, sludge and post-hardcore musicians to get neck tattoos, torture their riffs into strange new shapes and pen 11-minute, heart-on-sleeve epics.

All that was unthinkable when Jacob formed Converge in Salem, Massachusetts in 1990. Back then they were schoolkids cutting their teeth on thrash metal and hardcore punk, gleaning intel on bands and the scene from Thrasher magazine and skateboarding videos. Jacob played bass.

“One of the covers we wanted to play was You Can’t Bring Me Down by Suicidal Tendencies,” says Jacob, talking to us from his office, where he’s taking time out from his parallel responsibilities as an in-demand graphic designer and head of Deathwish Inc., the label he founded in 2000.

“It was beyond our skill set and we didn’t even have a singer, so we kind of shifted stuff around. I moved from bass to vocals.”

Things changed when they were joined by Kurt Ballou, a metal-loving kid a year or two ahead of them in school. Kurt had a degree of musical proficiency his new bandmates didn’t – as well as guitar, he could play saxophone and clarinet.

“I came from a background where music was a discipline, not a hobby,” says Kurt, who’d played with his school orchestra and jazz band, and seemed on course for music school. “While I brought some of that discipline with me I also selectively ignored it, because the guitar gave me the opportunity to make something that was my own.”

Converge’s early line-up – also featuring bassist Jeff Feinburg and drummer Damon Bellorado – spent the first half of the 90s finding both their sound and their feet. Their earliest recordings projected a tough, rough’n’ready sound that wore the influence of Suicidal Tendencies, Biohazard and cult Ohio hardcore flagbearers Integrity.

“The name Converge sort of stuck through that whole iterative process of us discovering ourselves,” says Kurt. “There’s a history of the band with that name that kind of predates us really finding our voice. We were going to hardcore shows and seeing the third wave of Boston hardcore and being inspired by that, but at the same time we were watching [MTV metal show] Headbangers Ball in our living rooms. I think we were unconsciously trying to find a way to fuse those things.”

While Kurt isn’t overly fond of his band’s early rumblings, he acknowledges there was something to be said for the white-knuckle nature of DIY life.

“It was definitely a wild time and everything was much less professional,” he says with a smile. “On the first tour we did, which was really only a weekend, one of the venues burned down the day before we were supposed to play it. You’d go away for a week of shows, and maybe three of the shows would happen because the cops would shut things down. Crazy stuff just happened.”

Converge released their debut album, Halo In A Haystack, in 1994. Jacob partly financed it with earnings from his job working in a nursing home. It was unrefined by their later standards, but amid its mix of hammerblow chugs, Slayer-esque dissonance and emo-tinged prettiness lurked the seed of the band they would become.

Halo In A Haystack wasn’t a huge success – not surprising, given only 1,000 copies were pressed (the album has never been repressed, making it a prized rarity). But it reaffirmed Converge’s growing self-belief, and helped them make even more connections within the febrile hardcore scene.

After the album’s release, Converge played a handful of dates with Boston punk act Daltonic. Jacob stayed on to sell copies of the album at shows. Sliding around in the back of a U-haul truck and subsisting on tinned chickpeas and sweetcorn for three weeks might not have done much for his health, but there were far more sobering experiences to be had – like almost being beaten to death in a Louisiana car park as he mulled the ethics of a vegan buying a portion of McDonald’s french fries.

“It was like a movie,” he says. “A pick-up truck pulled up and a bunch of guys got out and surrounded me. Then our band of guys pulled up, and it was a whole fucking thing. I was with some of the people that were there recently and they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah that was fucking real. You were gonna get killed.’”

As Converge continued to find their voice, they became increasingly aware that they weren’t alone in terms of ambition and intent. Acts such as Rorschach, Starkweather and Deadguy had broken early ground with jagged, angular hardcore that looked far beyond Big 4 thrash for metallic inspiration, while the likes of Cable, Botch and The Dillinger Escape Plan were beginning to splice their own awkward, obstinate sounds.

“A lot of these things were bubbling up independently of each other,” says Kurt. “Some of these folks we knew, and some of them we came to know because we found out we had this mutual experience of not really fitting in anywhere.”

Converge’s abrasive, unfamiliar sound and ability to fire up a crowd caught the attention of Steve Reddy, owner of hardcore label Equal Vision Records.

“I talked to Steve about this and he mentioned seeing us for the first time at a music festival,” says Jacob. “He remembered thinking, ‘I don’t even know what the fuck this is. There’s young kids losing their minds over it, and it’s not like anything else.””

Equal Vision released an expanded version of Converge’s 1996 EP, Petitioning The Empty Sky. Lead track The Saddest Day became a live favourite thanks to its chaotic energy and savage blend of Meshuggah, Entombed and Slayer influences.

“That song is definitely worn out,” laughs Kurt. “We have a pact to never practise it ever again, so if you see us playing it, we have not rehearsed it.”

As well as Converge, the guitarist was embarking on a career as a producer. He’d used severance pay from his job as a biomechanical engineer to set up his own studio, GodCity, and embarked on a parallel career as a producer. One of his first production jobs was Until Your Heart Stops Beating by friends and contemporaries Cave In, whose guitarist Stephen Brodsky had briefly been a member of Converge.

“I actually felt guilty about it, because I’d witnessed surgeries where people’s lives were saved using devices that I helped engineer,” says Kurt of the contrast between his old job and his new vocation in music. “I felt I was moving from something benevolent that benefited humanity to this selfish, artistic career.”

Converge made another step forward with 1998’s ugly, writhing When Forever Comes Crashing, embarking on their first European tour the following year. But despite their growing success, internal problems were starting to rear their heads.

“It was pretty clear that the line-up was fragmenting and we weren’t really on the same page,” says Kurt.

Rather than rupture, Converge reconfigured. Bassist Nate Newton joined in 1998, while drummer Ben Koller came onboard in 1999 after being drafted in at the last moment when the band’s then-drummer failed to show for a gig. With the new line-up bringing strength and stability, the band began work on the album that would change everything for them, and for the metallic hardcore scene: Jane Doe.

Recorded in seven days but the result of three years’ worth of physical and emotional graft, Jane Doe saw the band emerge from their sticky, larval state as something bold, new and frequently terrifying.

“We knew we wanted to make something different,” Kurt says simply.

With Jane Doe, that’s what they did, and then some. Vitriolic, fraught and at times strikingly beautiful, the album saw Converge condense their jagged, dissonant hardcore into laser-focused blasts, while demonstrating an increasingly experimental edge that nodded to everyone from The Jesus Lizard to The Cure and Depeche Mode. It culminates with the 11-and-a-half-minute title track, a sour, soaring, doom-laden systems purge that channels the bleak grandeur of Swans and Neurosis through a fractured hardcore filter.

These were all elements the band had hinted at in the past, but this was the first time they’d been so effectively united in one pure, seething vision. For Jacob, the process of making the album was a visceral one, whereby he documented crushing despair and a collapsing relationship.

“I was trying not to be sad,” he says matter-of-factly. “I was suffering a lot, and I looked to art and music to turn it into something because that’s all I had. I felt like I needed to scream at the world around me, and this was my opportunity to do so.”

Jane Doe was released on September 4, 2001. With a now iconic cover designed by Jacob, featuring a sombre, shadow-shrouded image of a mystery woman (identified 20 years later as French model Audrey Marnay), it instantly blew punk rock’s established parameters wide apart. It has subsequently received innumerable benefit-of-hindsight plaudits, but for the band there was no sense at the time that they’d helped shift the needle.

“When it was released, most folks didn’t really get it or like it,” says Jake. “I’ve got a thick packet of photocopied reviews up on my shelf and it’s, like, 70% negative. The audience just wasn’t there for it.”

Jane Doe certainly didn’t transform the lives of the members of Converge financially, but it helped cement both the band and the members’ individual artistic endeavours – Kurt as a producer, and Jacob as an in-demand artist and graphic designer (his covers have adorned albums by the likes of Poison The Well, Every Time I Die and Underoath), as well as one of the driving forces behind Deathwish Inc., which has put out more than 250 releases over the years.

If Jane Doe helped define Converge’s sound, they didn’t let it define them. Like sharks that have to keep moving to survive, the band’s post-Jane trajectory has been marked by restless forward motion. You Fail Me followed in 2004, and while many might have been content to ride on the coattails of previous success, Converge instead delivered a raw, lean, ravenous album, pockmarked by subtle experimentation. In subsequent albums, the band have balanced their customary intensity with some surprises. For every slab of intense raging noise, such as 2012’s All We Love We Leave Behind and just-released new album Love Is Not Enough, there have been unexpected left-turns, such as 2009’s bombastic, prog-tinged Axe To Fall (featuring members of Cave In, Neurosis and Entombed, among others) and 2021’s Chelsea Wolfe collaboration, Bloodmoon: I.

The latter marked their most significant departure since Jane Doe. Rooted in a series of performances that reinterpreted a suite of Converge songs, it was sonically startling, closer to an elegantly doomed slice of film noir rather than nerve-flaying psychological horror.

It saw lyric-writing duties shared between many, including Jacob, Kurt, Chelsea Wolfe and old friend Stephen Brodsky, who also appeared on the album – something of a respite for the frontman.

“The effect of being vulnerable is that other people who are also in a vulnerable place want to connect with you,” he says of the Converge day-to-day. “I think that’s a very beautiful thing, but it can be very fucking dark. With Bloodmoon, I had a different connection to the music. It’s not to say that those songs aren’t deeply emotional as well, but it’s a different hat to wear.”

This protean approach to their music defines Converge in 2026. They give a fix of extremity for those craving it, but their unique strain of noise comes with multiple dimensions.

“We do things by our own compass,” says Jacob. “We’re not concerned with trying to repeat ourselves, we just write personal stories about these times in our lives. And they shouldn’t be the same, because while we’re the same people in blood, we’re not the same people when it comes to life experience.”

“I think there’s something to be said for never stopping,” says Kurt. “Everyone has their pride and everyone has their good days and bad days, but we all have the same goal even if we have different ways to get there.”

Those kids trying to play Suicidal Tendencies more than 35 years ago would be shocked at how long and influential Converge’s career has been.

“I’m angrier now than I was when I was 20,” says Jacob. “It’s much more layered and more complex, but it’s still very much there, and there’s still a need for this art form in my life. Just because you get the poison out one day, doesn’t mean that there’s not more the next, right? I don’t want to be dark all the time, and that’s what we do with our music – we work through that darkness, searching for the light.”

Love Is Not Enough is out now via Epitaph. Converge have also announced new album Hum Of Hurt for a June 5 release. The band play Outbreak Festival in June.

Imagine waking up one day to a life that is not your own. You’re adamant you’re in the right body, but something is off. Your wardrobe is filled with clothes that you hate, you have nothing in common with those who claim to be your friends, and you’re utterly unqualified for the job you apparently have. While it may sound like a confusing nightmare, this can be the reality for people living with dissociative identity disorder (DID) – and it’s exactly what happened to alternative/trap-metal artist N0trixx.

“For a massive amount of time, I was not me,” the Russian-born rabble-rouser explains today from her Lancashire home, face concealed behind a terror-inducing mask of entwined black wire. “As a teenager, my brain effectively split into two distinct parts. For 10 years, the other part was in full control. Then, we switched.”

As N0trixx tries to explain what it’s like sharing her brain with another person, words including “crazy” and “wild” occasionally slip out – the haunting song Hé Toi, from her upcoming debut record, A Catalogue Of Madness And Melancholia, sees her debating whether she is “going insane”. However, DID isn’t something inexplicable or dehumanising – it’s a natural protective measure.

“Sometimes, to cope with trauma, the brain can split,” N0trixx notes. “Therapy has helped me understand that my mind is protecting me from things experienced in my childhood. And the other person in my brain is like a mother, in a way. She protects me from that trauma, takes care of us both. When I am weak or struggling, she will come in and take over.”

“Once I had a really bad panic attack onstage at a gig in Turkey, and I almost switched onstage,” she remembers, sadly. “It was very scary. But I managed to power through. It taught me that I shouldn’t exhaust myself so much on tour.”

While DID can manifest as countless different ‘alters’ co-existing within one mind, N0trixx’s mind hosts just two identities – and they’re very different. To put it crudely, the pair of identities in her mind differ in an almost ‘right-brain’ and ‘left-brain’ sense.

“The other person is incredibly good at maths – she worked as an investment banker,” the artist reveals, her alter having interned on Wall Street in the US before going full-time back in Russia, even appearing as a TV talking head. “I, however, am bad at maths. In fact, when we first switched, she was really frustrated with me, because I couldn’t keep up with her job…”

Of course, this clash means that the relationship isn’t always harmonious. While N0trixx’s strait-laced alter allows her to pursue her dreams, there are some ground rules.

“Burning bridges is in neither of our interests,” the musician explains. “That’s why I wear a mask. She’s uncomfortable with my identity being known by the public – she wouldn’t want her kids to be impacted by the work I am doing.”

That’s right – beneath the barbed wire exterior, growling breakdowns and cut-throat rap bars, N0trixx is a mother of two. But that life is put on pause when she puts on the mask. Her music and art is where she can safely explore the darkest depths of her psyche, wading through torment to produce a fractured clash of feverish metal and anarchic industrial-rap that she describes as ‘bedlamcore’.

You can hear it in her gut-wrenching, self-produced debut, A Catalogue Of Madness And Melancholia. A self-described “eerie, psychological horror”, it’s an attempt at understanding her own neurodivergent mind. Harmless details her experience with borderline personality disorder (an intense mental health condition defined by its emotional instability and distortion of reality, often making you doubt your personal relationships) as she unravels like a wounded animal, vulnerable and raw, while the DID-musing Russian-French-English rap Hé Toi sounds as corrosive as battery acid.

“I wanted this record to sound terrifying and confusing, because that’s how it can feel when you’re just learning to cope with my disorder,” she notes.

Yet there are also moments of blistering strength, like the full-pelt rap onslaught of Narc (I’m So Happy That You’re Dead).

“That track is exploring my experience with a narcissistic abuser, at the hand of my mother, and I’ve carried those words for over 30 years,” she explains. “Gatekeepers might not love the lack of guitars, but I wanted it to sound like Eminem… Each time I perform it, it makes me want to cry, because it’s such a release.”

However, N0trixx’s debut also explores other states of mind. The harrowing Revenge On God is about a man with dementia who brutally murdered his wife, while Catalepsia is a gorgeous, earth-shatteringly tender ode to a man with schizophrenia who was interviewed in the 1960s, and just wanted to “play the piano for people”.

“He only wanted to make music, but his brain wouldn’t allow him to,” N0trixx explains, emotion colouring her tone. With her own creativity muzzled for over a decade, it’s something close to her heart. “I felt so connected to that. So I wanted to commemorate him and give him a tribute.”

The track enlists the piano skills of Warren Willis, a DJ who worked on Linkin Park’s final tour with Chester Bennington. The feature serves as a poignant, full-circle moment.

“When I was a teenager, my father died, and I listened to From The Inside by Linkin Park on repeat,” she recalls. “That really helped me survive. And that sound made me realise how music can save you – I want to create music that saves other people.”

A deep exploration of the psyche, A Catalogue Of Madness And Melancholia can get dark. But there are some lighter moments, from the meditative You Are Loved to the defiant middle-finger that is ADHD thumper St. Chaos.

“I receive a lot of messages from people saying that my music makes them feel seen, heard and understood – and that literally means the world to me,” she says, a smile shielded by her scratchy wire mask but evident in her voice. After being smothered for years, N0trixx is set on fully embracing her creativity.

“As soon as I took control, music just poured out of me,” she recalls. “The other person is the opposite of creative – the entire time she was in charge, she created nothing. She didn’t even listen to music! It was all kept inside, without any release. I’m making up for lost time.

“Staying in my previous career would have been safer, but I’m Buddhist, and I do believe that every single one of us has a mission in this world,” she continues, noting that the Russo-Ukrainian war was a huge wake-up call. “When the war started getting worse, all I could think was that my purpose was not investment banking.”

After attending protests in Russia and getting arrested, she released the bold FUCK WAR in 2022. Now, she can’t return to the country.

“My alter is not so happy with how I handled that…” N0trixx admits. “She thought I was being rash, and she thought she could have handled things better. But, when I’m on my deathbed, I will be proud of myself.”

With her debut album and first full UK tour imminent, it’s set to be a pretty intimidating year. But N0trixx is more than ready for it.

“I believe my mission is to educate people,” she explains. “I strip my soul bare on record to demonstrate how incredible the brain can be. That vulnerability comes with a lot of fear – but you do what you have to if it’s important. And this project matters.”

A Catalogue Of Madness and Melancholia is out now. N0trixx is currently on tour, for the full list of tour dates visit her official website. For support with mental health conditions, visit mind.org.uk.

Pentangle drummer Terry Cox, who also drummed on David Bowie's Space Oddity single, has died, aged 89, the band have confirmed.

In a short statement on their social media pages, Pentangle said, "Terry Cox R.I.P. One of Pentangle's five points of light - a drummer of rare instinct and imagination. Alongside Danny Thompson, he formed a rhythm section that redefined the boundaries of folk, jazz, and beyond. Our love and condolences go out to his family, friends, and all who knew him."

Cox's passing leaves singer Jacqui McShee as the sole remaining band member from the classic line-up that recorded the band's first six studio albums from 1968's The Penangle through to 1976's Solomon's Seal. Guitarist Bert Jansch died in 2011, followed by fellow guitarist John Renbourn in 2015. Bassist Danny Thompson passed away last year.

Cox featured in the band's 80s reunion, playing in a wheelchair at early shows after breaking his leg in an accident, and he appeared on the first two of three 80s albums, 1985's Open The Door and 1986's In The Round. He was also part of the reunion of the celebrated line-up in both 2008 and 2011.

Away from Pentangle, Cox also worked with Elton John, Alexis Korner, Mike Batt, Scott Walker, Rupert Hine, Long John Baldry, Rick Springfield, Charles Aznavour and more. In the early 70s he had a songwriting partnership with Lysneyt de Paul and The Alan Parsons Project's Lenny Zakatek, which resulted in two singles, under the Zakatek banner.

Back in 2011, I wrote a piece on Stuart Adamson and Big Country for Classic Rock. It opened with part of an interview I’d done with drummer Mark Brzezicki. It makes my toes curl now. I pointed out that Big Country used to do a great cover of Smokey Robinson’s The Tracks Of My Tears. The song opens with the lyrics: ‘People say I’m the life of the party/Cos I tell a joke or two/ Although I might be laughing/Loud and hearty/Deep inside I’m blue.’ Do you think, I asked Mark, that even with those words he was trying to tell us something?

I didn’t know the half of it. This year marks 25 years since Stuart Adamson took his own life. I’ve been working on his authorised biography since 2023. Stay Alive is about alcoholism, abuse, family, fame, addiction, depression and working-class pride. For the first time, both of Stuart Adamson’s wives, his children and bandmates tell their side of the story.

If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that – forget the lyrics of Smokey Robinson – Stuart used his songs to talk about his mental health and tell stories about abuse, about frightened children and beaten women, throughout his career and from the very start of his work with Big Country.

Let’s start in Brighton, February 1982, the opening date of the UK leg of Alice Cooper’s Special Forces tour. Big Country were the support band, playing just their second gig. It did not go well.

Decades later, it seems like a weird pairing – the Shock Rocker and the Jock Rockers – but you can see the thinking: Coop had been an influence on the punk scene, as well as on the goth scene that was still spreading across the UK, and his new album was an attempt to court fans of the new wave. But no one had told his audience.

“Everybody had long hair, leather jackets, denim with the patches,” says guitarist Bruce Watson.

Big Country, meanwhile: “We looked like Duran Duran, with headbands and eyeliner,” says then keyboard player Peter Wishart. “They wanted a standard heavy metal support, and here was us, challenging them with this sort of new wave Scottish music. It meant nothing to them.”

“You could hear a pin drop,” says former Big Country manager Ian Grant. “In a room of five thousand people.”

And then it kicked off.

“We got bottled,” says Bruce. “Bottles of pish. ‘Boo! Get off, fucking poofs!’”

The next night in Birmingham was even worse, and the band were thrown off the tour. “I called Stuart,” says Grant. “He was over the moon.” Adamson’s wife Sandra had given birth to their son Callum the night before the first show. It meant he could go home and see his baby.

At this point, Stuart Adamson was just 24 years old and already tired of music industry bullshit. A guitarist, songwriter, and now frontman, he had formed Big Country after leaving the Skids – the punk band he’d formed in Dunfermline in 1977 – at their artistic and commercial peak. His final album with the band, The Absolute Game, was their first to reach the UK Top 10.

But underneath it all, Adamson was cracking up. His final months with the Skids were characterised by disappearances and meltdowns, as he tried to balance life in a band with his desire for an ordinary domestic life, severe full-body rashes from allergies that drove him to alcohol just so he could sleep, and all the while reckoning with a childhood that involved some kind of abuse.

On the day of the Skids’ last gig on the UK mainland, at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, Adamson had disappeared, turning up just five minutes before the show. It was a pattern of behaviour that had characterised much of their short career. Before he’d had a hit, let alone tasted real fame, Stuart had already walked out on two major label recording sessions and left his band. Before the Skids’ debut album was released, before their single Into The Valley went Top 10, Adamson temporarily walked away and wrote a long letter to Record Mirror to explain his disenchantment with the music business.

“Artistic control is a joke,” he raged. “Unrestrained rock’n’roll exists only in the minds of hopeless romantics. Music only exists in the free meals and handouts of high-powered business executives.

“I don’t need it, that’s all.”

He went back, but by 1981 he’d had enough again. The Skids were a songwriting partnership with singer Richard Jobson, and Adamson was tired of compromising. He could write his own songs and he had something to say.

After the Alice Cooper tour, he reconfigured Big Country. Originally envisioned as an all-Scottish band, only Stuart and fellow founding member and guitarist Bruce Watson remained, and two Londoners – drummer Mark Brzezicki and bass player Tony Butler – were brought in. Butler and Brzezicki were pros: young session players with a background in prog rock, who’d recorded with Pete Townshend and had a ton of sessions behind them.

The new band gelled. Butler and Brzezicki were killer. The songs came to life. Record companies got excited. A&R man Chris Briggs got them a deal with Phonogram and put them in the studio with producer Chris Thomas. Thomas seemed ideal. He’d produced some of the tracks on The Beatles’ White Album, gone on to produce Roxy Music and Procol Harum, and mixed Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. When musical fashions changed, he changed with them, producing Never Mind The Bollocks by the Sex Pistols and the first two albums by The Pretenders.

This mix of session musicians and Scottish punks, this collision of prog and new wave styles, might benefit from a pro at the helm, Briggs thought. But something went wrong. The chemistry didn’t work. Chris Thomas rubbed people up the wrong way.

And then something terrible happened. On June 16 or 17, bass player Pete Farndon appeared at the studio. Farndon had been sacked from The Pretenders a couple of days previously for his drug use. He’d come to see Chris Thomas with some news.

“Jimmy’s just died,” he said. Pretenders guitarist James Honeyman-Scott had died from heart failure, brought on by cocaine abuse. He was 25 years old.

“Chris Thomas broke down,” says Bruce. “He couldn’t finish the session.”

There was no point in continuing.

“Stuart and I just went down to King’s Cross and got the train back up the road.”

Phonogram released a single from the sessions, Harvest Home. It peaked at No. 91 on the charts.

So as 1982 ended, Big Country seemed no further forward: an album that had been canned, a single that had flopped. Apart from supporting The Jam on their farewell shows at Wembley, “it was a bit of a lousy Christmas going into ’83”, says Grant.

There was a final member of the team, a piece of the puzzle, missing: producer Steve Lillywhite.

Steve Lillywhite’s productions for Ultravox!, Siouxsie & The Banshees, XTC, Peter Gabriel and U2 were beginning to define the sound of the 80s. He had just finished producing U2’s third album, War. In March 1983, War knocked Michael Jackson’s Thriller off the No.1 spot in the UK and stayed in the top 40 for the rest of that year.

“I was sent a few demos and the Chris Thomas recordings, which I agreed sounded flat and uninteresting,” says Lillywhite. “So they contracted me to record a single, to see how it went.”

They went to Mickie Most’s RAK studios and got to work.

Stuart’s biggest challenge was transitioning from a guitarist-who-sings, into a singer-and-guitarist. “And that’s when Stuart found his voice,” says Tony Butler.

On Fields Of Fire, Lillywhite put the frontman through his paces. Originally written in the key of D, fitting Stuart’s range, the producer asked them to do it in F instead.

The problem was that Stuart and Bruce used drone strings, a technique where you leave a lower string open and unfretted, but hit it consistently so that it rings out. Often used in folk music, Jimmy Page famously used it in Led Zeppelin. It’s also a feature of bagpipe playing. Bagpipes have at least one pipe that is not played – it produces a single, consistent note, with melodies played over the top.

To play Fields Of Fire in F, “We had to tune the guitars up physically,” says Bruce, “every string, something like about three frets, maybe even four. The strings are getting to breaking point. If you used a capo, the intonation would go out and you’d run out of frets anyway.”

Then once the band had nailed the backing track, Stuart had to sing on top of it, in a key that was way out of his range.

“Steve kept him at it,” says Tony, “for a day. He made him sing and sing and sing. And what you hear on the final record is this newborn singer. Stronger, more assured. It sounds natural, but it was done incredibly unnaturally. I remember Stuart looking like he was going to pass out at times. But Steve had worked with Bono. He knew what you could do with people.”

It was a breakthrough. Stuart once described Fields Of Fire as “thoughts on a train journey”, and that journey is almost certainly the one from Scotland to London. ‘Four hundred miles,’ goes the chorus, ‘without a word until you smile.’

Dunfermline is four hundred miles from London, the city taking him away from his own family, Sandra and Callum (‘Between the woman and the boy/Between a child and his toy’). ‘I will be coming home again,’ he promises.

In a classic Stuart Adamson move, he later suggested that Fields Of Fire was partly about the Falklands conflict of 1982 – describing train journeys to London in which he and Bruce chatted with guys from the forces – but there’s very little in the lyric to support that, beyond the title.

Fields Of Fire was the name of a novel from 1978 by James Webb, set in the Vietnam War, and exactly the sort of book that Adamson – a fan of Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s If I Die In A Combat Zone – would have read. The song can then be seen as a soldier’s feelings on leaving his family. Misdirecting people like this – suggesting that Fields Of Fire was about the Falklands and not about himself – was a great way of deflecting people from the personal material in his songs.

“That’s how he liked it,” says Sandra, “because people were left wondering. He would never tell anybody the truth. I still see a lot of crap written about his lyrics, and I think, ‘Oh, if only you knew.’”

Lillywhite brought the song to life. It was dynamic, uplifting, original. Stuart’s voice was strong, and Fields Of Fire introduced an exclamatory vocal tick that he would become famous for. In karate they call it the ‘kiai’: the cry that often accompanies a blow, designed to intimidate opponents, drive confidence and increase power, tensing your body. Big Country’s songs are full of kiais: ‘Shot!’ ‘Cha!’, ‘Haat!’ and more. In Fields Of Fire it’s ‘hup’ – an uplifting rhythmic ‘giddy-up’ to the band, which in concert would give the audience something to sing along with.

Fields Of Fire sounded like the work of a band, each member heard distinctly as they rolled into the fadeout: Tony’s bass soloing, Mark’s snare rattling, the guitars skirling elegiacally.

On February 26, 1983, it went into the UK chart at 64. Seven weeks later it was at No.10, matching the Skids’ highest-ever chart position.

The single’s B-side was Angle Park. It was the first song that Bruce and Stuart had worked on, and they had even named the band after it for a while. The song itself was named after an old house with high walls in his hometown of Townhill, and Stuart’s lyrics are dark, gothic imaginings of what might go on in such a menacing old house. The lyrics allude to abuse and violence, to children hiding behind their mother (‘The beaten cry behind white dress… While mothers wring their hands of tears/The spelling books are in arrears’). In the garden, the fountains crack and statues grin menacingly, and the lyric points to the source of this misery: the father. ‘The evil genius hugs his wife,’ Stuart sings, ‘as tiles ring with fear of life.’

The opening guitar line recalls the melody of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart. Released in June 1980, a month after singer Ian Curtis’s suicide, Love Will Tear Us Apart stayed in the UK Indie Singles chart for 195 weeks and was reissued several times. Bruce was a fan and Stuart had moved in similar circles to Joy Division, so possibly the melody is a deliberate nod to Curtis.

Deliberate or not, Big Country’s first hit single was a song about the anguish of leaving home, coupled with a song about domestic abuse that referenced a contemporary who had died by suicide.

A change in Steve Lillywhite’s schedule made him available to do Big Country’s debut album. The Fields Of Fire experience had energised Stuart. “When I’m good, this is what I can do,” says Lillywhite. “Stuart was inspired by the sound of Big Country. We gave them this great spirited, uplifting feeling and from that Stuart went off and wrote In A Big Country.

“I remember playing Bono the demo of In A Big Country, I was so knocked out by it,” he says. “I felt very honoured by that.”

“I think Steve actually burst into tears when he heard In A Big Country,” says Ian Grant. “Maybe not ‘burst into tears’, but became emotional. It clicked with him.”

In A Big Country had actually been kicking around as an instrumental for a little while, says Bruce. After Fields Of Fire, Stuart wrote words, added vocals and brought it back, complete. “It was like: ‘What the fuck… How did you come up with that?!’” says Bruce.

The lyrics for In A Big Country were incredible. In the song, Stuart addresses someone – possibly himself, possibly the listener, possibly someone in his life – and asks them to stay strong, despite all they’ve been through.

Sandra Adamson has wondered if it’s partly directed at her. Around this time, somewhere on the road, or in London – in the period right before he wrote the lyrics to In A Big Country – Stuart admitted to her that he had been unfaithful.

“I don’t even know her name,” she says. “And she was probably one of many, but she was the one I was aware of.”

The song is filled with great turns of phrase – ‘Dreams stay with you/Like a lover’s voice fires the mountainside/Stay alive’ – grand and romantic on the one hand, but realistic and grounded on the other: ‘I’m not expecting to grow flowers in a desert/ But I can live and breathe/And see the sun in wintertime.’ Just ‘because it’s happened’, he says – whatever it is – it doesn’t mean your life is over. ‘Stay alive,’ he exhorts.

Stay alive.

In a piece of studio ingenuity, Lillywhite took a drum break from Porrohman, the epic album closer that they’d already finished, and “snipped it, copied it onto another tape and put it at the front of In A Big Country,” says Bruce. “It’s the same part twice – that’s why it sounds weird.”

Drum intros became as much a part of the signature Big Country sound as the guitars. “From then on,” says Bruce, “every new song, Mark would be like: ‘I’m starting it!’” “What blew me away was when Stuart did his vocal,” says Bruce. “He did a double track of his vocal, and then he did a harmony, then he did a fifth. Instead of Tony and Mark doing backing vocals like we would do in a live situation, Stuart just went in, and he built it up, like the Beach Boys. I thought, ‘This could be a hit single!’”

Bill Nelson, formerly of Be-Bop Deluxe, had produced the Skids’ second album Days In Europa, and during the sessions had given Stuart an EBow. The EBow – or ‘energy bow’ – was a handheld effects unit. You held it with your picking hand over the strings of an electric guitar, and it reacted with the pickups, creating a field of magnetic energy that made the strings vibrate. With no picking involved, the notes sounded like they were being bowed.

It was a sound that became synonymous with Big Country. “At the time,” says Greg Heet, the inventor of the EBow, “and for a long time, people would reference Big Country as their inspiration for getting an EBow.”

But, as with the constant references to ‘bagpipe guitars’, the band became bored of talking about it. “The EBow has nothing to do with the guitar sound,” says Bruce.

They used the EBow on tracks such as The Storm to get a long, sustained note, almost like a violin. “But again, it’s like bagpipes,” says Bruce. “On their own, they sound fucking horrible. But when you add reverb and all that stuff, that’s where you get what people call the bagpipe sound. It gives you infinite sustain, and you’re better using it with a cleansounding guitar – with a distorted guitar it’s just too much.”

Quite early on, the two guitarists had settled on some rules. “There was no master plan apart from the fact that we didn’t want to do the Thin Lizzy/ Status Quo thing,” says Bruce. “We didn’t want to do that blues bendy kind of thing.”

Thin Lizzy’s twin harmony guitars and Phil Lynott’s Celtic influence do seem like an obvious precursor.

“If you were to pick a song, it would be Whiskey In The Jar,” says Bruce. “That would be the one that would fit alongside Fields Of Fire or something. But it’s more of a sound thing – the reverb on the guitars and a melody. But there’s a bit of string bending, and we didnae do that.”

Inwards had been written in Stuart and Bruce’s first songwriting sessions, but the lyric was written a month after Stuart left the Skids in May 1981. He was in London, he later told Sounds, and Sandra phoned him with news that his grandmother had died.

“I just felt a real mess inside,” he said. Inwards seems to be about trying to keep emotions under control (‘I pull everything inwards but everything’s loose… Pull everything inwards but everything’s shame’).

Musically, Tony saw it as an opportunity. “Inwards reminded Mark and I of our prog days and we thought, ‘Okay, let’s attack this.’ We got to employ such a range of styles and attitudes towards it, it became something. It’s almost five minutes long but it didn’t feel like it when you played it. It was a huge song and you could tell it was going to be a great live event.”

Chance had started life in Bruce’s kitchen. Back in the early days, Bruce and Stuart had used a four-track TEAC Portastudio to capture their ideas. Portastudios were changing how music was made, giving songwriters the ability to capture ideas and work them up – to add to them, to accompany themselves – without having to go into a studio. The same year that Bruce and Stuart worked on those early Big Country songs, Bruce Springsteen was sitting in a rented house in New Jersey recording what would become his next album, Nebraska, on the same machine.

Bruce asked Stuart if he could borrow it, and in his house, mucking around, he wrote what would become the intro for Chance. Almost two years later, Stuart added the melody, and turned it into another song about an abusive father – ‘Your father’s hand that always seemed like a fist’ – and a woman escaping an abusive family situation only to end up a single parent, trapped and aging before her time: ‘You never knew you were young.’

A Thousand Stars imagined a nuclear war. In the early 1980s, the threat of nuclear attack seemed so real that the UK government had created and distributed a leaflet titled Protect And Survive, outlining the steps the public should take in the event of a nuclear attack. “No part of the United Kingdom can be considered safe from both the direct effects of the weapons and the resultant fallout,” it said.

You can talk about ‘lucky stars’, sings Stuart, but ‘the luck of a thousand stars won’t get me out of this… Some say protect and survive, I say it’s over.’ This is humanity’s final hand. As the missiles rain down, he pulls his loved ones close ‘while all the city’s on fire’.

“There are apocalyptic images in the songs,” said Stuart. “It is something that’s with me constantly and it’s something that’s brought home quite hard, living in this area.”

Rosyth naval base, home to nuclear submarines, was just a few miles away.

“We’re a prime target here, make no bones about it. If anything does happen, it’s going to be bye-bye this area.”

The Storm imagines a different type of apocalypse. With its haunting EBow intro and layers of acoustic guitars, The Storm plays out like Celtic prog, lyrically evoking cruelty from some time in Scottish history. The chorus – ‘Ah, my James/They didn’t have to do this’ – has led some to assume it’s about the Battle of Culloden, with ‘James’ a reference to James Francis Edward Stuart, the son of deposed King James VII and II of England, Scotland and Ireland.

The source of its weird didgeridoo sounds are far less high-minded. “Steve decided that we needed a far-off foghorn sound,” says Tony. “He got myself and Stuart to stand over a couple of mics and fart as much as we could. Then he put it through harmonizers and digital delays and basically it just goes ‘PFFOOOOOOORT!’ all the way through the track and he mixed it in.”

Later, at RAK they were doing some overdubs of The Storm and there was an actual storm outside. “There’s lightning going off, the lights flashing,” says Tony. “It was like, ‘Oh. This is weird.’”

The lyrics for Lost Patrol dated from Stuart’s time with the Skids, and could have been inspired by The Lost Patrol by Dick North (1978), a detailed account of the search for a mail patrol in the Yukon in the early 20th century. More than just a straightforward telling of the story, Lost Patrol is also to be a bit of self-mythologising in the style of The Clash’s Last Gang In Town.

‘We lay the night in anguish/Snakes drawn out by the tide,’ go the opening lines. The men of the Lost Patrol died near the point where the Snake River meets the Peel River and heads to the sea. ‘The compass of decision/Falls always on one side’: The cover art for The Crossing features a compass, and the ‘compass of decision’ seems key to understanding the album: something to do with the choices we make and the directions we take. Like the men of the Lost Patrol, we could all be choosing a path that ends in death.

Close Action took its title from the 1974 novel Signal – Close Action! by Alexander Kent, a story of adventure at sea. Amid apocalyptic imagery (‘The continents will fly apart/The oceans scream and never part’), Stuart sings what seems to be a devotional love song, while the final verse suggests something dreaded arriving from the sea: ‘For endless hours the sirens wail/Await the tide that brings the sail/Cling to the walls and close the shore.’

The album ends with Porrohman, a seven-and-a-half-minute-long multi-part epic. “There was no noodling,” says Lillywhite. “We didn’t like solos in those days. Guitar breaks that were nicely structured were fantastic. Having said that, a song like Porrohman is sort of progressive rock.”

Porrohman’s title comes from Pollock And The Porroh Man, a short story by HG Wells from 1895, about a man hunted and then haunted by an adversary before being driven mad and killing himself. The lyrics use the same phrase ‘tiles ring with fear of life’ employed in Angle Park, that early song of abuse. ‘The fear of life is strong,’ goes Porrohman, and suggests that the course of our lives is just a matter of chance: ‘Our fate is in the hands of a demon or a god.’

“I wanted to go for this big, cinematic sound,” said Lillywhite, totally understanding the brief. “I tried to make everything larger than life.”

Musically, The Crossing was epic and inspirational. It was rock music, but not the rock music of Led Zeppelin, AC/DC or the Stones. It was modern – with guitar tones and effects that you’d find on records by U2 and New Order – but sometimes it sounded positively ancient. Its lyrics talked of mountainsides and ploughmen and harvests and the westerly winds sighing.

In Scottish music, its effect may be unparalleled. To young people growing up in central Scotland of the 1980s, the image of the country on TV was one of castles and lochs and Highland dancing at Hogmanay: a world of ‘Teuchters’ and tartan that seemed at odds with the reality of life in 1983. Scotland had not voted for the Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but got it anyway. Unemployment soared. Traditional industries closed. In the early 80s, Edinburgh became the AIDS capital of Europe. Heroin flooded the estates of Glasgow and Edinburgh, where sharing dirty needles was a way of life. The nuclear threat felt real.

The music of Big Country seemed to embody both sides of Scotland – a Scottishness that connected to the country’s history, but felt modern and vibrant. “When I first heard Big Country,” said the great Scottish comedian and actor Robbie Coltrane, “I thought The Clash had hijacked a pibroch player.” (‘Pibroch’ is the gaelic name for a piece of music written for the bagpipes.) It was music, he said, that made “every Scotsman in London eat a bus stop out of homesickness on the way home from the pub”.

“The storytelling is timeless,” says Sandra. “It’s visual. The stories that he tells can be interpreted loads of different ways. People ask me, ‘What do you think that song means?’ But if Stuart hasn’t already said it, there’s no way that I would ever talk about anything that he told me. It’s an experience – a Scottish experience or a war experience. A heartfelt experience.”

Many of the song titles on the album are obscure and don’t appear in the songs’ choruses. Even the single, Chance, takes its title from a line in a verse: ‘You played chance with a lifetime’s romance/ And the price was far too long.’ The idea of ‘playing chance’ – any game that involves luck and risk, usually involving dice – might have come from another source.

Peter Wishart remembers Stuart recommending a book to him. “Stuart said, ‘You have to read this.’ One of his favourite books was The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart. It was a book that actually changed my opinion and philosophy on life.”

Published in 1971, The Dice Man became a cult sensation. It’s about a man who feels suicidal and – instead of killing himself – puts his fate in the roll of the dice. The opening lines of the book are: “In the beginning was Chance, and Chance was with God… All things were made by Chance.” The word ‘chance’ appears 11 times in the first two paragraphs.

It’s tempting to read more into this, to see Big Country and The Crossing – an album filled with songs of depression, loss, abuse, persecution and death; an album that begins with a plea to someone, possibly Stuart himself, to stay alive – as Stuart Adamson’s last roll of the dice. If Big Country’s music had been depressing, like Joy Division’s, then it would have been more obvious. Instead, the lyrical content was wrapped up in music so passionate, so uplifting and beautiful, that its message was obscured.

Some people heard it differently. When Skids drummer Tam Kellichan heard Chance, he thought it was a suicide note. “When I first heard it,” he says. “I thought he wrote it for his own death. It was all in the chorus, all this, ‘Oh gawd, help me now.’ I thought, ‘Fucking hell, he must have been in a bad state.’ I thought it was the last song for him.”

The album took its title from one of the songs written by the first line-up, with credited contributions from Peter and Alan Wishart. The Crossing had also been one of the tracks that had excited Mark and Tony: an ambitious, proggy epic.

The song never made it onto the album, so why did it become the title – what is the significance of ‘The Crossing’, as a song or a phrase? A ‘crossing’ can be another name for a crossroads, a place where roads intersect and ‘the compass of decision’ is needed: Which road will you choose?

A crossing is also a journey by boat or ship, and there are several references to the sea in the song and the album. As a Merchant Navy seaman, Stuart’s dad would have made many crossings. The song The Crossing – and those words aren’t used anywhere in the lyrics – seems to be about someone’s return. On the face of it, they are returning triumphant (‘Your islands are conquered and you are returned/To the throne’) but, as in Close Action, their return is also dreaded: ‘Martyrs take penance and fill up the mattress/With stones.’ The returning person ‘wears out their welcome again’.

There is what could be a description of abuse or fear in the night, someone becoming alert in the dark as feet creep to their door: ‘Mornings hit hard with an uncontrollable light/Piercing the senses that click deep in the night/Crouched in a pillow of straw, feet on the floor/Creeping a path to the mat that holds back the door.’

You also cross the threshold of a door, maybe a door that you have no business crossing. You cross boundaries. You can cross people – double-cross them – betray people who trusted you.

In a room, sings Stuart, there are ‘scratches on walls’ that ‘draw out your loss’ – symbols of the damage caused. The chorus, meanwhile, suggests an escape from this returning threat, this thing that creeps into your room at night.

‘Pull straws with holy men,’ sings Stuart.

They could pray, but it’s just another game of chance.

‘Stain the atlas pink.’

Destroy the maps so they can’t be found.

And, finally, run away: ‘Find a beach, where we can cross our hearts.’

And what do you do when you cross your heart? You hope to die.

Maybe Stuart Adamson saw Big Country as his last chance, a final roll of the dice, and he constructed the band’s material – from their very first song, Angle Park, to their first album – to tell a story about abuse.

Maybe he couched these tales of frightened children, beaten women, these references to suicide, to the effort required to stay alive, in songs that were so life-affirming that their message – although right there in plain sight – wasn’t obvious.

Maybe talk of ‘Jock rock’ and ‘bagpipe guitars’ trivialised his grand artistic statement. Maybe he was such a charismatic performer and his talent so huge and obvious that we were blinded to what he was saying all along. Or maybe it’s a mistake to read too much into things.

On August 6, 1983, The Crossing went into the UK album chart at No.4, rising to No.3 the following month. It spent 39 weeks in the top 40 through 1983 and into ’84 and had gone platinum by February 1994. Big Country were big time.

Stay Alive: The Life & Death of Stuart Adamson, by Scott Rowley, is published on March 26 by New Modern.

A few years into his band’s career, Kreator’s Mille Petrozza learnt an important lesson. The German hellhounds were deep into a hot streak of albums that had helped turn their homeland into thrash metal’s second major stronghold, after the USA. Kreator already played fast, Mille reasoned. But what if they really took the handbrake off?

“I remember there was this one show when we were like, ‘You know what… What if we take speed? Maybe we can play even faster!’” he says now. “So I took speed before I went onstage, and yeah, I played faster, but also I played like shit. So I figured that out right away and I never did it again. We were definitely better without the drugs!”

It’s more than 40 years since Mille co-founded Kreator in Essen, a city in the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial heartland. Back then, they were young, unskilled and mostly fuelled by adolescent aggression, but the noise they created at their rehearsal space kick-started a legacy that continues to this day.

“The first music I got into would have been the disco bands like the Village People, Baccara, the Bee Gees,” says the 58-year-old. “But when it came to playing music it was Kiss. My first concert ever was Kiss. I was 12 or 13 years old, and Iron Maiden opened for them on that tour, so I came as a Kiss fan and left as a Maiden fan, and from then on it was all metal.”

Prospects for young, working-class Germans in the early 80s were not exactly thrilling. Mille’s dad was a coal miner, but the notion of exhausting physical work wasn’t appealing. Instead, he devoted his energy to music. By 1982, he and a bunch of like-minded friends had put together a band, initially named Metal Militia, then Tyrant, then Tormentor. Their early line-ups were nothing if not unwieldy.

“We built a rehearsal room and started rehearsing as a seven-piece,” he says. “People who were in it at that time thought you just turned up and you were a metal god. But it’s hard work. You can’t just hang a guitar around your neck and expect things to happen.”

Steadily whittled down to a three-man core of Mille on guitar, his childhood friend Jürgen ‘Ventor’ Reil on drums and Rob Fioretti on bass, the nascent group learned their trade by playing along to Judas Priest’s British Steel and Point Of Entry albums, but soon began to write their own material. At first, their songs were simplistic and steeped in heavy metal cliché, but as the band matured, they began to establish their own infernal personality.

“We were playing riffs by Raven, Ostrogoth and all this obscure early metal stuff, but then this album came out: Welcome To Hell by Venom,” Mille remembers. “Before, we had typical, early heavy metal lyrics – one song was called Shoot Them In The Head. But then when we heard Venom, all of our songs became Satanic songs.”

Still unable to legally drink, Kreator were not the most obvious candidates for a deal, but the vitriolic fury of their first rehearsal-room demo grabbed the attention of Noise Records, who would soon become major players in the evolution of European thrash. As metal got heavier, faster and nastier, Kreator were perfectly poised to become their country’s next big underground sensation, with a little help from Mille’s mum.

“The guy at Noise saw that SPV had just signed Sodom, and that had exploded in the underground, and he wanted a band just like that!” Mille recalls. “I was only 17, so my mother had to sign the contract for me, and she did. She knew that I was happy and that it meant a lot to me, and she was just happy that I was not on the streets and doing the stupid things that teenagers do. I was spending my afternoons in a rehearsal room, almost every day, and she thought that was great!”

The first Kreator album, Endless Pain, was released in October 1985, and became an instant hit with fans of metal’s dark and dirty underbelly. For Mille, the mere fact that his band had been able to release an album was a dream come true. But something happened between Endless Pain and its follow-up, Pleasure To Kill. Kreator got serious.

“We were just more aware of what we were doing,” Mille notes. “From Endless Pain to Pleasure To Kill we only did four or five shows, if that. We were not expecting to record a second album, but we got a message from the record company saying, ‘Are you gonna go back into the studio?’

“This was our chance,” he continues. “So we thought, ‘Let’s really come up with something killer!’ We were in the rehearsal room every day, and we were really obsessed with the music and listening to albums like Seven Churches by Possessed and Slayer’s Hell Awaits, and we were trying to make our own version of those records. It just happened.”

Released a year after the debut, Pleasure To Kill was a thrash metal benchmark. The efforts of the Big 4 aside, few albums from that era can claim to be anywhere near as influential as the music Mille, Ventor and Rob made in Berlin’s Musiclab studios in 1986. A fundamental inspiration for all the thrash, death and black metal that followed, Pleasure To Kill confirmed that Kreator were a very serious proposition, much to their own collective surprise.

“It was all teenage energy and naivety,” says Mille. “No, we didn’t think we were doing something important. All of a sudden, we were being taken seriously in the underground world. People like Katon from Hirax wrote to me, and the Possessed guys sent us a letter, so we were like, ‘Oh, they’re taking us seriously!’ For us, it was a fanboy dream come true. Nobody knew we were writing something so essential for the future.”

Pleasure To Kill was a critical hit and a major success for Noise Records, and from that moment on, Mille realised that a real career was now a possibility. The next few years went by in a chaotic blur, as Kreator refined their sound and made more acclaimed albums, including 1987’s Terrible Certainty, 1989’s Extreme Aggression and 1990’s Coma Of Souls.

Mille admits that Kreator certainly took the opportunity to party and enjoy the trappings of life as 20-something musicians, but career-threatening recklessness was never a real threat.

“There were a lot of distractions along the way, I admit that!” he laughs. “Especially on the tours for Terrible Certainty, Extreme Aggression and Coma Of Souls. We were partying very hard, but we were 20 years old and that’s what you do when you’re 20. Do I regret anything? No.”

While the 1980s were a triumph, the 1990s, as Mille cheerfully admits, “were fucking weird”. Traditional metal was in a state of nervous flux, with the dual threats of grunge and, later, nu metal elbowing the rowdy old guard out of the way. Kreator never downed tools during that time to take a lengthy hiatus, but the four albums they released during that decade weren’t always warmly embraced.

“We’d done five albums in the same style and we wanted to try new things,” Mille shrugs. “We wanted to strip down the riffs a little bit. We wanted to make it more trippy, more unique and strange. We were smoking a lot of weed! Ha ha!”

The result was 1992’s Renewal, an album that today sounds both dated and a little half-baked. But it was 1997’s Outcast that really upset the old-school faithful. Avowedly gothic, slow-paced and largely bereft of guitar solos, it gave the impression that Kreator were creatively lost.

“Outcast has maybe three good songs,” says Mille. “But I was really into the goth stuff at the time, and I still am.”

Endorama, released two years later, fared little better. “Endorama is a very good album,” he says. “But it took us a while to realise that just because you’re listening to goth music, you don’t have to make a goth album! You can write a metal album with goth influences, and that’s what we do nowadays.”

If the 1990s proved to be a challenge for Kreator, the 21st century has been much kinder. It began with the forging of a new relationship between up-and-coming producer Andy Sneap, formerly of Kreator’s Noise Records labelmates and touring partners Sabbat, who manned the controls for 2001’s Violent Revolution. A wholesale return to full-on, face-flaying metal, that album coincided with the rise of US bands such as Lamb Of God and Killswitch Engage, and the emergence of a huge, new and open-minded audience.

“The metalcore bands who came in, in 2004 or 2005, were talking about how thrash metal influenced them, and they were doing their homework and rediscovering bands like us,” says Mille. “It was a big push for us. Once we started working with Andy, things started to fall into place. We started touring the US again, and our band was really strong. We had a good line-up, and there was really strong energy around us.”

Firmly back in the zone, Kreator have spent the last 25 years touring relentlessly. Combined with a series of well-received albums, their commitment to the cause has enabled them to rise to the top for a second time. They are currently one of mainland Europe’s biggest metal bands, with regular headlining slots at major festivals and sold-out arena tours across the continent and beyond.

All of this would have been unthinkable to the 17-year-old who had to ask his mum to sign a record deal on his behalf, and yet Mille’s determination and passion for his band’s music were never to be denied. Fittingly, Kreator’s new album, Krushers Of The World, purposefully taps into the idea that anything is possible if we stick together and really give a shit.

“We wanted to write an album that encourages people, like an empowerment record,” Mille explains. “That’s why it’s called Krushers Of The World. We wanted people to listen to the album and feel good afterwards – to feel the energy! We’re living in weird times at the moment. Everything is so tense, the whole political situation in the world. There’s wars and there’s fascism, all that stuff, you know? We want our community to grow, and we’re telling people that they’re not alone with all the shit that’s happening around them.”

From working-class roots to world-conquering greatness, Kreator have navigated four decades with relative ease. Mille jokes that his current biggest problem is working out which songs to drop from the band’s increasingly lengthy setlists, but his delight at the way this unlikely career has turned out is self-evident. Krushers Of The World is another anthem-heavy triumph, the sound of a band with plenty of gas in the tank, and a strong desire to inspire unity among metal’s global community. For a band whose most influential song is about cold-hearted bloody murder, it’s all rather heartwarming.

“I’m not trying to be esoteric or spiritual here, but it’s the power of the mind,” says Mille. “When you have a strong vision, hard work and a little bit of luck, maybe you can go places. Being able to do this now, it’s amazing, and I’m just very grateful for how it is. We had to build it from scratch and there were ups and downs, but not losing faith in what you do really helps.”

Krushers Of The World is out now via Nuclear Blast. Kreator tour the UK in March.

It’s early December, and snowing heavily in Saugerties. That’s nothing unusual for upstate New York, but it is something of a novelty for Riley Pinkerton. The Castle Rat frontwoman moved here from Brooklyn last summer, but the band’s intense touring schedule has meant that it’s only now, some five months later, that she’s actually been able to spend time in the new house she shares with her boyfriend.

2025 was a crazy year for Castle Rat and Riley Pinkerton. They’ve gone from being relative unknowns – albeit relative unknowns with a fantastic, Dungeons & Dragons-inspired image – to one of the most talked-about new bands in metal. Videos of Riley, clad in a chainmail bikini and brandishing a huge sword onstage, have gone viral.

Their mix of doom, trad metal and nerd-bait fantasy lyrics has struck a chord with those on the lookout for something larger-than-life and unembarrassed to be ridiculous – Castle Rat’s second album, The Bestiary, came in at No.3 in Metal Hammer’s Albums Of 2025 list.

Right now, though, Riley and her bandmates – lead guitarist Franco Vittore (aka The Count), bassist Charley Ruddell (aka The Plague Doctor) and drummer Josh Strmic (aka The Druid) – are having a well-earned break. No touring, no writing, no recording, no nothing. So there should be plenty of time for the singer to leave her mark on her new abode. Except that those months on the road being immediately followed by an empty void has taken its toll on her.

“I’m struggling with that,” Riley admits. “I had a psychiatry appointment and I have anti-anxiety meds now, because I spun out as soon as I got home. It’s literally just been go, go, go, go, go – and my anxiety was building up on the road, too. I was like, ‘I need to talk to someone about this’, and at least give myself a safety net so that I can function. Because I can’t let this get in the way of my job, which is my dream job. I’m like: ‘Why am I anxious about my dream job?’ It’s because it means a lot to me, so then I put a lot of pressure on myself. So it’s been a wild transition."

“But I’m a homebody. I love being home – to the degree that sometimes I think it’s crazy that I’m a touring musician, because home means the most to me.”

When she is on tour – or at least when she’s onstage – Riley assumes the role of The Rat Queen. Her story is acted out onstage, as well as within Castle Rat’s songs. The narrative revolves around her battling her arch nemesis, The Rat Reaperess (Maddy Wright), in a fantasy world known as The Realm. Riley is its Rat Queen, wearing chainmail outfits and wielding a gigantic sword, modelling her look on the aesthetics of 1970s fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. It’s campy and self-aware, but it never undermines the glowering, doom-laden dramatics of the music.

When she’s at home, though, like she is now, she’s simply Riley Pinkerton – a normal human with normal worries, no chainmail in sight. Her flowing red hair is the only remnant of her character that remains. Of course, the two are still heavily intertwined. For a start, her onstage moniker stems from the fact that she was affectionately nicknamed The Rat by her family when she was a kid.

“I was probably more like a princess at that point,” she quips.

Secondly, she heavily infuses the band’s songs with her own, real-world emotions.

“I have major death anxiety, where I really don’t want to die,” she explains. “And one of my theories is that if I keep making a thing, I can’t be taken off this Earth because I have a job to do. That’s my deal with God, or whatever – if I’m really busy, you can’t take me yet.”

The Rat Reaperess is a metaphor for that anxiety; her way of confronting and combating it, albeit onstage, to feel a little more at ease when it comes to her own mortality.

“I go onstage, I battle death, I die, and I come back to life – because I don’t want to die,” she says about the epic showdown between the two characters. “It’s funny, because I didn’t set out to make a show about my death anxiety. I was like, ‘I think it’d be cool if I die and spit up blood and yada yada yada – but I have to come back to life because I still need to play another show the next night.’ And then I was like, ‘Oh, this is entirely about that.’”

There is also, she says, “a deeper level about the Rat Reaperess” that she “would love to go into in a comic book or book book”, but that’s for the future. For now, though, she’s focused on the music. She just wants it understood that, despite what that character represents, she doesn’t consider her a malevolent being.

“I never refer to her as evil,” says Riley. “I say she’s our arch nemesis, but it’s not a show about good versus evil. It’s life versus death. The Rat Reaperess is just doing her job, and we paint her as the bad guy, but really we’re completely going against the natural order in evading that. Honestly, in the natural world, we’re the bad guys, and that’s something that I want to explore, and I think is important for me. That tone is important – where death isn’t bad or evil, it’s just something that I don’t understand. The fear of the unknown freaks me out. So she more represents that anxiety than…”

She never finishes her sentence. Hearing something behind her, she turns abruptly to the source of the noise and her thought trails off. It turns out that it’s just one of the joys of country living – a rodent running around the house. “I have a mouse. Fitting!” she chuckles after a few seconds of distraction. “I just heard it in the stove. The stove isn’t on. We’re good.” She looks relieved – almost as if it could actually have been The Rat Reaperess herself.

Riley Pinkerton was born in New York, but mainly grew up in Michigan with her mother. She would, however, travel to New York and stay with her dad, who still lives there “in a tiny one-bedroom”. It was his sofa she crashed on when she first moved there with dreams of making it as a folk singer. There are, for the curious, still videos of that previous musical incarnation online, including one at a Sofar Sounds NYC gig.

“Oh God,” she says. “It’s so bad! I’ve got to get someone to take that down. Damn.”

She stayed at her dad’s place while she worked on finding a job and a place to live, and eventually did both. It sounds like both were quintessential New York experiences for her – she started working at a now-closed doughnut shop on St Marks Place, and found a place a few blocks away.

“There was this old drunk Irish guy who had a storage room in his six-floor walk-up in the East Village that I rented,” she remembers with a sly smile that reveals the folly, naivety and wonder of her youth. “I could stand in there and touch both walls. There was a lofted bed, so I couldn’t put my arms up standing in my room, but then if I went up there, I couldn’t sit up in bed without hitting my head on the ceiling. It was the smallest space ever.

“I worked at the doughnut shop and paid my rent, and that’s about it. We didn’t even have a working stove – it was tiny tiny. But I remember feeling like, ‘Oh, I’m doing it. I’m living in the East Village, dreaming about Debbie Harry and CBGB - I’m doing it!’ But I wasn’t really doing anything. I was just working at a doughnut shop and drinking a lot.”

Not long after, Riley moved to Brooklyn, and she stayed in different parts of the Big Apple’s hippest borough for about a decade before eventually relocating upstate. But that time was a formative period for her. Not only did she meet some “pretty legit dudes” at the doughnut shop pre-Castle Rat that she was “able to build more of a rock’n’roll band around”, someone she met early on in her New York days booked her first show. That same person also gave her the kick she needed to follow her real musical inspirations (mainly Black Sabbath) rather than do the folk thing.

“She started a band that was, like, full Sabbath worship, where she had an SG [Gibson SG, the guitar played by Tony Iommi and Angus Young, among others],” remembers Riley. “I went to see her and it was the first time I saw someone doing the thing. I was like, ‘Oh, you can just do it!’ It broke some wall I had up… To see someone get up there and do that blew my mind open. I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. Just do the stuff that you love. Like, why am I complicating it and trying to find whatever it is I’m looking for?’ And so that was really the impetus for leaning in.”

She’d owned an SG since she was 18, but resisted playing it because of the inherent burden that comes with doing so and being female. But after seeing her friend do it, Riley decided she was just going to follow her heart, and the medieval fantasy doom metal of Castle Rat was born.

“There’s this pressure,” she says, “that if you’re a girl playing guitar, you have to be really fucking good, or people are not going to take you seriously. But I don’t have a desire to be a shredder. People who do, will. They’ll sit down and obsess over scales, and that’ll be the thing that excites them, and they’ll become good at it. I’ve just never felt that way about guitar. I feel that way about songwriting and worldbuilding: that’s where I shred. That’s what really excites me.”

Somewhat ironically, that all started by chance. After playing their first two shows, their third was booked for October 31, 2019. For those first two they’d worn all black in an attempt to be less conspicuous. After all, they were still finding their footing and their confidence. Then, for that Halloween gig, they decided to dress up.

“It was so much fun,” remembers Riley. “And I felt everyone onstage sort of relax into their roles because they weren’t showing up as themselves. Our drummer at the time was not into metal at all – I’d worked with him on folk stuff – and he was like, ‘I feel like a poser up here.’ I was like, ‘Just don’t talk to anyone, and if they ask you about Sabbath, leave the room.’ So he was really into the costumes because it allowed him to play a character.”

The rest is history-in-the-making. After that gig, Riley wrote and devised the lore of The Realm and its characters, and they became a permanent, and intrinsic, part of the band’s identity. In 2024, they released debut album Into The Realm and – as the past six months have shown both the band and the world – things have snowballed ever since. And while they might now have a much-needed few months of nothingness, the future is looking incredibly bright.

First on the books after that rest and recuperation is opening up for Amon Amarth and Dethklok’s Amonklok co-headline US tour, which will see Castle Rat play the biggest stages of their career to date. For some people, that might be intimidating, but not for Riley.

What’s more, she’ll be playing those gigs sober. She stopped drinking five years ago, after partying too hard on her birthday “to a degree that was frightening and involved me vomiting up blood”. It wasn’t intended to be a permanent thing, but – in much the same way Castle Rat’s existence is a confluence of happy accidents and perfect timing – that’s just the way things worked out.

“The deal that I had with myself was that I wouldn’t drink until the pandemic was over and shows were back,” she says. “I couldn’t imagine getting onstage without a shot or two of whiskey and a cigarette as my vocal warm-up – what the fuck?! – because that was the only way I knew how to do it. But our first show back out of the pandemic was the day before my birthday. I was like, ‘Am I really going to end my sobriety one day shy of a year sober? That’s stupid.’ So I was like, ‘OK, maybe it’s worth seeing if I can do this sober. And if I can play this show sober, then I can pretty much do anything sober.’”

She’s more than proved that’s the case. For now, though, you’ll find her in upstate New York, hopefully defeating her post-tour anxiety by chasing mice, turning her house into a home, and making her Castle Rat dreams come true.

The Bestiary is out now via Blues Funeral Recordings. Castle Rat play Welcome To Rockville in May and Bloodstock Festival in August.

By 2005, The Darkness were too big to ignore. They had a worldwide smash in 2003 with the evergreen I Believe In A Thing Called Love, and won three BRIT Awards (Best Group, Best Rock Group and Best Album) the following year. Classic Rock was initially reluctant to engage with the excitement, suspicious of the band's much-vaunted sense of humour, but that all changed after Editor At Large Geoff Barton paid them a visit.

Summoned to the country residence of Dan Hawkins, guitarist with The Darkness, Classic Rock expected to be greeted on the doorstep by a man wearing a silver sequinned catsuit, and restraining a pet panther on a leash. But the reality was substantially different. We knock on the door of Dan’s Norfolk farmhouse and it opens to reveal… a scruffy roadie eating a bacon sarnie.

“The band members are all in there,” he grumbles, gesturing toward what we hope will turn out to be a glittering fairy grotto just inside. In actuality, we step forward and enter a typical country kitchen, complete with Aga and ceiling beams, pots and pans dangling from them. Very heavy, very Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

The bucolic image is completed by an old-fashioned clothes mangle in a corner and paintings of roosters hanging on the walls. There’s also a small blackboard chalked with the legend ‘Lawn Racing Lap Record’, accompanied by a list of names. Dan is the current winner with a lap-time of one minute, three seconds.

There’s a huge pine table in the centre of the kitchen. Dan’s brother, Justin, is sitting slumped in a chair reading the 3am Girls’ gossip page in the Daily Mirror. The Darkness frontman’s hair is lank and greasy, and his chin is unshaven. He’s wearing a colourful chunky cardigan of the type favoured by people who herd sheep in the Andes.

I remark on the Lawn Racing Lap Record chart and our conversation somehow shifts on to the subject of automobiles. (Probably because Justin recently appeared on BBC TV’s Top Gear, where he was the Star In A Reasonably Priced Car, thrashing a workaday Suzuki Liana around a circuit in the fastest possible time.)

“They even featured me in Top Gear’s Best Of show,” Justin beams. “In fact, I had to buy a car myself the other day. I tried Lexus – or Lexii, as Alan Partridge says in the plural – but they seem to be only made for small Japanese people. I’ve got a growing family, so in the end I plumped for a Mercedes-Benz. I liked the heated seats.”

We’re joined by The Darkness’s new bass player, Richie Edwards, the replacement for Frankie Poullain. Richie’s wearing a T-shirt from the 1981 Castle Donington Monsters Of Rock festival, featuring AC/DC, Whitesnake, Blue Öyster Cult, Slade, Blackfoot and More. You can tell immediately it’s authentic and not a Top Shop replica. What was probably once a Medium has shrunk over the years to an Extra Small, and it hugs Edwards’s body like a superhero suit. The T-shirt’s original black has become a mottled grey – something that can only be achieved via endless bombardment inside a washing machine.

Drummer Ed Graham arrives and finally we’re joined by Dan Hawkins, who ushers us outside to show us his pond filled with carp the size of small sharks. There’s a picnic table nearby, upon which is perched a giant hookah of the type favoured by mad-eyed opium warlords. “That’s not our bong,” Dan stresses. “It was there when I bought the place. Honest.”

He shows us into a ramshackle barn, which has been converted into The Darkness’s rehearsal studio (“My dad did it for me – he’s a builder”). Then we move into an adjacent study, complete with Darkness memorabilia on the shelves.

“I didn’t put all that in here,” Dan protests again, indicating gold and platinum discs and various photos of the band together with their new record producer, the legendary Roy Thomas Baker. “My girlfriend is responsible for all that. I’m not a big one for trophies.”

Justin – much taller than you might imagine, and with the beginnings of a beer gut hanging over the waistband of his jeans – lumbers in and grabs a phone. He places a call to the studio that’s designing the cover to The Darkness’s latest album, One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back.

“Make sure you get the right shade of purple smoke!” he barks. “Otherwise there’ll be hell to pay!”

It’s all so unexpected, seeing The Darkness as something other than star-spangled, featherboa’d, crotch-thrusting, high-pitched, over the top, in your face, sparkle-cheeked, glam’n’roll cartoon characters. It ain’t quite Vic & Bob doing Slade on vacation, but it’s pretty damn close.

So, have we shattered enough illusions for you, already? If not, there are more revelations on the way...

The Darkness haven’t been in Classic Rock much. We ran a short introductory feature on them in issue 49, and that – apart from the odd review here and there – has been pretty much it.

As we assemble for our interview outside in the garden in the unseasonable October sunshine, Dan Hawkins – who is very much the business brain of the band – muses: “We used to think, how can The Darkness be considered a classic rock band if we’ve only had one album out? I think it’s a bit of a weird concept to have new bands in your magazine, anyway. But having said that, I definitely thought we should be in there for the second Baker as producer. It all fits.”

To their credit, The Darkness seem blissfully unaware of the turmoil they have caused in the Classic Rock office over the past couple of years. As their 2003 debut album Permission To Land stormed off the shelves, the spandex-clad rockers were praised by many for bringing a dose of good ol’ guitar-flagellating fun back to a British music scene that had been dominated by humourless and sourfaced bands for a decade or more. But we at Classic Rock were unduly suspicious. After all, we’d been there, done that and seen David Lee Roth nut the mirrorball. Like grumpy old men with ear trumpets in the throes of Alzheimer’s, we felt rather cynical and crotchety about The Darkness.

Moreover, we couldn’t quite decide whether they were taking the piss or not. Doubts still linger. Listening to a preview copy of the band’s admittedly storming second album, the aforementioned One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back, our feelings were best summed up by the comment: “This is great, but is it okay to like it?”

Richie Edwards – the guy in the tatty Monsters Of Rock T-shirt, remember – pipes up: “Of course it bloody is. I’m just an aging rocker, really.”

“In a way we all are,” agrees Dan. “It’s not like we’re 19 years old or anything. It’s not like we’ve rifled through someone’s record collection and said: ‘Oh yeah, let’s form a band that looks and sounds like this’. It’s taken us 10 years of being aging rockers to fucking have a chance to do it. We’ve come up against this suspicion, as you call it, in every aspect of the band. People are always asking us: ‘Are you for real, or are you just having a laugh?’.”

We ask: what, in your experience, do dyed-in-the-wool British headbangers think of The Darkness?

Justin: “They get it, I find. It’s the people who read the NME and think they’re dyed-in-the-wool headbangers because they own a Black Sabbath record and they’ve seen Ozzy on the telly… they’re the people who don’t get it.”

Richie: “The first time I saw this band, before I started working with them [he used to be Dan’s guitar tech], I didn’t think they were anything other than a bunch of guys who loved rock music, and were a great rock group. I didn’t see it as any kind of piss-take. And I’m from the West Midlands – the home of Sabbath and Priest and all that. I’m the biggest rock fan I know, really.”

For Justin, the problem isn’t with The Darkness’s fans, it’s with people in the music press who write “inanities” (his word) about the band. Throughout our interview he casts mistrustful glances at a piece of paper we have in front of us, upon which we’ve made a few notes about the new One Way Ticket… album. It’s as if he fully expects to see we’ve scrawled ‘The Darkness are crap’ or ‘This song sucks’ or something…

“People who write for the NME don’t know what the fuck they’re on about,” Justin rages. “That’s not a rock paper. Not at all. As I say, dyed-in-the-wool headbangers spotted us for what we are – that’s a proper rock band – and the NME writers and readers who suddenly decided they wanted to get into rock just didn’t get it all.”

Surprisingly, The Darkness have a very old-fashioned approach to rock’n’roll music. Referring to the importance of album No.2, Dan trots out the tried and trusted cliche: “I felt a lot of pressure to make a really good record for the fans, really.” Yet you get the impression that this isn’t just some kind of bog-standard, preordained interview-speak. He really does believe it.

Dan continues: “When you reach the level we did on the first album, there’s no escape. No one’s going to forgive you if you make a shit second album. As far as your fans go, they’re all hoping and praying that you come up with the goods. They risk everything to have the name of the band they believe in on their T-shirt, and it you make a shit album then suddenly that T-shirt becomes totally uncool.”

Those comments conjure up visions of 70s rockers with Rush patches on their denim jackets, queuing up outside Newcastle City Hall…

“Yeah, definitely,” Dan concurs. “It’s a badge, isn’t it? A badge people wear with pride.”

The Darkness insists their uniquely wacky take on rock is affectionate, not sly or sardonic. But what about their much-vaunted sense of irony? Or should that be spelled ‘parody’?

Justin: “There’s been lots of bands through the years who have done rock music with a humorous narrative. I can give you millions of examples. I’ll start off with Van Halen, and you can move on to Queen, I suppose. The list is endless, trust me. But as you know yourself, there’s tons of humour in rock music – that’s one of the best things about it.”

Dan: “It takes balls to be playful.”

Justin: “There’s nothing dour or inward-looking about rock music. It’s all about being extensions of yourselves and expressing whatever it is you want to say in a bombastic fashion. If you’re tackling a difficult subject then it’s a rock band’s job slam it on the table and say: ‘That’s what I’m fucking talking about!’. Whereas it’s for people like James Blunt to whittle around the subject and dance lightly, being quite cryptic, so everyone thinks he’s deep. Nobody wants to be deep. The only thing that should be deep is our money resource. And the container that our backstage rider is brought to us in.”

Notwithstanding their formation in the hick seaside town of Lowestoft as long ago as 1998, The Darkness have come a very long way in an extremely short space of time. And they’ve impinged themselves upon several generations in the process. When I mentioned to my 78-year-old mother that I was going to interview The Darkness, she said: “Oh, I’ve heard of them.” But my 19-year-old son sniffed: “Bah – they’re a pop band, aren’t they?”. While my youngest son, who is 15, knew their song I Believe In A Thing Called Love and precious little else.

Ed Graham: “The age range of our fans has always surprised us. People in their 60s have been known to come along to our shows, and there also are a lot of quite young kids. Father and son combos, that sort of thing.”

Justin nods not-so-subtly in Classic Rock’s direction: “There’s people who are almost tainted by their knowledge of music, of what’s gone down in the past and all that stuff. It’s almost like they know too much – and it’s those people who have the cynical kind of approach to what The Darkness do. Whereas the kids see us as being something that’s fresh and different. They just get what they need to from us.”

The Darkness may not be trainspotters – in other words, a band that’s obsessed by the minutiae of rock’n’roll history – but they’ve very much clued into what their fans like, and what they demand.

During the course of our time with Justin, Dan, Richie and Ed, various gaps in their rock knowledge showed up: they didn’t know Jack Douglas produced Aerosmith, for example. They didn’t know Sammy Hagar used to be called the Red Rocker and wrote a song called I Can’t Drive 55. They looked baffled when we started extolling the virtues of Thor (understandably, you might say). And they didn’t know Rush recorded a song called I Think I’m Going Bald on their third album, Caress Of Steel – but we’ll deal with the follicly challenged issues elsewhere.

There again, why should The Darkness be berated for not being connoisseurs of rock trivia? This is a band whose reference point starts with Def Leppard, after all. “When we toured with Leppard in the early days I used to go out front and watch them,” enthuses Justin. “I was blown away because they were constantly moving, and filling each other’s space. They did that relentlessly throughout their set, and imposed themselves on the audience. By the end of the tour we’d managed to nick that from them. They’re so well crafted.”

Earlier, Dan mentioned the appointment of Roy Thomas Baker as record producer as being a pivotal classic rock moment in The Darkness’s career. Baker – famed for his audacious sonic approach with Queen, Journey and The Cars, to name but three – was always their first choice.

Justin sings Baker’s praises: “He’s the daddy. We also met Mutt Lange because the record company were trying to force us to work with him. But we wanted to make a great album, not a big hit album necessarily. Just a great album.”

Dan: “Roy’s commitment to The Darkness shone through – he really, really gave a shit from day one.”

Justin: “More than me a lot of times.”

Incredibly, the total running time for One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back is only just over 35 minutes.

“That’s right – 18 minutes on the first side and 17 minutes on the second,” agrees Justin.

Hang on a minute – compact discs don’t have sides, surely?

“One Way Ticket… was always conceived as a vinyl album,” reveals Dan, further emphasising The Darkness’s old school approach. “You might not know that Permission To Land was also a big seller on vinyl as well as CD. With the new record we tried to do it as close to our favourite classic albums as possible. Timings, the track listing, ending each side with a ballad, everything. There was a reason why things worked so well back in the old days. We’ll probably get people saying: ‘Shit, 10 tracks, it’s a bloody short album’. But I’ll say: ‘Okay, I’ll go out and grab five of the best rock albums of all time. Tell me how many tracks are on those’. It’s all about quality, not quantity.”

A lot of record buyers are used to having their CDs packed with at least an hour’s worth of music. Doing a vinyl album on CD might be a ‘knowing’ thing to do, but will mainstream punters get it?

Justin: “They only gave CDs that storage capacity based on one of Beethoven’s symphonies. It was 74 minutes long, so they thought that’s the longest you’ll ever need a CD to be. So it was music that dictated technology, really – it’s usually the other way around.

“Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms was the album that heralded the birth of the CD. My dad’s got a copy of that on vinyl but it also worked fantastically on CD. Dire Straits didn’t change the way they approached the album just because it was going to be on CD. Brothers In Arms defined the CD generation but it’s a vinyl record, essentially.”.

When One Way Ticket… comes out on vinyl, will it have a glorious gatefold sleeve?

Justin: “Of course. That’s the whole point. It’s absolutely the whole point.”

Dan: “The entire record was built for vinyl – artwork and everything. The artwork is massive and it’s designed to look amazing.”

Justin: “It is a gatefold – that’s why it’s called One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back. It’s like Blondes Have More Fun… Or Do They?”

With Roy Thomas Baker on board, some people predicted The Darkness would throw caution to the pop-rock wind and create a dense and challenging second album. Much like Queen did with Queen II – which, with mad tracks like Ogre Battle and The March Of The Black Queen, was as far away from Keep Yourself Alive and Liar than anyone ever thought possible at the time (1974).

The suspicion that The Darkness were going to go totally bonkers seemed to be borne out on last year’s arena tour of the UK when the band previewed some determinedly off-kilter new songs, including the mad-as-hell English Country Garden. In the event, One Way Ticket… is a somewhat schizophrenic album. It rollicks along with four straightforward rockers (One Way Ticket, Knockers, Is It Just Me?, Dinner Lady Arms) and a ballad (Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time), which effectively comprise ‘side one’, before a distinct mood swing occurs for the more far-reaching and ambitious ‘side two’. Justin, referring to Queen II: “That’s one of Roy’s, isn’t it? That’s his favourite Queen album. We’ve done half and half, haven’t we? We’ve done dense and challenging together with pop rock, ha-ha! But the dense and challenging ones aren’t likely to get covered in pubs. Well, not accurately.”

Dan: “We all feel there’s something magical about the new album. I can still pick holes in the first record. But for some reason this thing just took on a life of its own. Even in the mixing stage it changed into a completely different kind of beast, really.”

Justin: “Permission To Land cost us 20 grand – that’s including the mastering. We didn’t have a big record label behind us or anything like that when we started recording it. But then the bidding war began, and we were laughing. With One Way Ticket… we had the luxury of time and money to do exactly what we wanted. You say there’s some ambitious stuff on side two – but then again side one does kick off with the sound of pan flutes. Which you don’t hear very often on a straightforward rock album.”

Dan: “There was a hell of a lot of pressure, particularly when we hadn’t written a song for so long. We tried to fit writing time into our schedules. We were in Australia, I think, when we saw we had two days off – so we actually booked ourselves into a studio with our backline to try and do some writing. We knew we had a new album coming up but there wasn’t time to stop and think about it. So when we finally did stop it was a case of, ‘Fucking hell, what do we do now?’

“I found myself walking past an Ivor Novello Songwriter Of The Year award thinking, ‘It was a year-and-a-half ago when I last wrote a song’, and wondering if I could still do it.”

The day after our interview, Justin tells us, he is being fitted for a prosthetic Devil’s mask for The Darkness’s latest video. So it sounds like the band’s visual extravaganzas are going to continue in the usual endearingly ridiculous fashion…

Justin: “Yes. In fact, they’re going to get worse.”

Dan: “It’s going to carry on. It’s certainly not going to stop. You have the Americans saying to us: ‘Oh, you should do a video of a gig, and people will get that you’re a real live band’. We say: ‘Fuck that, if people want to see us live then they should come to a fucking show.’”

The secret to enjoying The Darkness is to consign scorn and scepticism to the dumpster and celebrate them for what they are: the latest in a long line of a genuinely eccentric, quintessentially English groups. From Freddie & The Dreamers, through The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, to early Pink Floyd, to Silverhead, to Sweet, to the Glitter Band, to The Heavy Metal Kids, to Queen… you name it.

“Yes, we are a very English group, aren’t we?” nods Dan.

Justin: “We’ve had these conversations before, not to journalists but among ourselves. When Frankie [Poullain] was in the band he wanted me to cynically globalise everything I was writing about. But I said no, we should be proud we’re from Lowestoft. We shouldn’t pretend we’re from Los Angeles. Everyone can relate to the issues of living in Lowestoft – because it’s all about humanity, you know. When people sing about Route 66 I’m sure they don’t worry too much. They don’t say: ‘Hang on, they don’t have a Route 66 in England, we’d better call it the A12’. It’s part of being honest. If you’re going to specifically talk about a place, you might as well name it – and shame it. There’s no need to globalise everything just so you can crack America. That’s the very last of our concerns.”

So, you’re not worried about success in the US?

Justin: “No, not at all. It either happens or it doesn’t. We’re not going to break our necks and go to all the radio stations in the US and say: ‘Please will you play our records’. Fuck all that. I really admire Oasis’s position on America – they don’t give a toss about it because they’re making so much money here in Britain. They don’t need to put up with the bullshit in the US.

“In America, if your record company doesn’t have a good relationship with the radio stations, you don’t get played on them. In this country, by and large, if the kids want to hear your record it’s the radio station’s responsibility to put it on their playlist. And they will, they have to, otherwise they’re going to go under. But the Americans don’t see that. They’ve got it completely fucking wrong. Until they learn that I’m not going to break my neck to do things their way.”

Justin strokes his unshaven chin and adjusts the sleeves of his Andean sheepherder’s cardigan.

“People just think about the catsuit and you immediately get dismissed by a lot of folk,” he complains. “Have we finished now? Be careful of the panther on your way out.”

We made up the last part of that quote, by the way.

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock issue 87, published in December 2005. These days, we love The Darkness unreservedly.

Ronald Frederick Lane was a star but he never took his stardom that seriously. “I like showing off, doing a song and shaking a leg on stage, but I don’t want to play all those silly games that go on, any more,” he said in 1975. Sixties rock icons, of which he was one, didn’t float his boat: “As far as I’m concerned, if half of them had never been stars they would have done something better; it’s totally stardom that’s fucked them up. Or this illusion of stardom – it’s not even real. Alright, let the little girls’ magazines say it’s glamorous and all that, but Christ, we’re grown men aren’t we? We should know better. But no. All the ‘stars’ think it’s glamorous too…”

He was a man of his word. Two years earlier, Ronnie had walked away from his gig as the bassist with The Faces, the boozin’, carousin’ reprobates who had risen from the ashes of his earlier band, the Small Faces. But the man who his old muckers called both ‘Plonk’ and ‘Three-Piece’ didn’t just quit his band – he quit the rock’n’roll world, upping sticks and moving to a rundown farmhouse on the Welsh borders, where he put together a new band, Slim Chance, and lived out his nomadic dreams.

“Ronnie really dropped out,” says bassist Steve Bingham, who played in the original Slim Chance and is part of the line-up that re-formed in 2010. “Him and his wife, Kate, embraced the whole cosmic gypsy look. What a mischievous geezer and wind-up merchant he was.”

It was his old mate, Ian McLagan who nailed Ronnie Lane. “Short and sweet was our Ron,” said McLagan, who played with Lane in the Small Faces/Faces. “He loved a joke. He used to cry with laughter. He had that real cockney knees-up attitude. He didn’t know the meaning of ‘pretentious’.”

But Lane had raised eyebrows in the Small Faces when he developed a voguish interest in Eastern religion. Funny, weird little Ronnie set up a shrine in his dressing room, complete with a hippie scroll and a peach cut into quarters, around which he burned incense. The others weren’t impressed. “When we saw him, we ate the peach and burnt the scroll,” said Small Faces singer Steve Marriott. ‘Cor blimey, Mrs Jones, ’ow’s your Bert’s lumbago’ was what the Small Faces wanted. Not this oddness. Ronnie bit his lip but he didn’t button his attitude. He marched to his own beat and no one else’s.

He was still marching to his own beat on June 6, 1973, when The Faces played the Sundown Theatre in Edmonton, North London. As their customary encore of We’ll Meet Again drew to a close, few outside the band and their nearest’n’dearest knew it was Ronnie Lane’s last show with the old gang. Watching footage of the show now, everything seems hunky dory until you notice the if-looks-could-kill glances aimed at Rod Stewart’s back by the embittered bass player during Jealous Guy.

Ronnie’s hostility towards the singer had been building until it reached boiling point. Stewart – or “that cunt Rod”, as he habitually called his bandmate – had not only usurped the rest of the group and turned them into his glorified backing band, but he’d also bad-mouthed their most recent album, Ooh La La, in the press.

“A stinking rotten album,” was Rod’s assessment, though his absence from half the sessions hardly gave him much authority. The bassist, who had written the entire second side of the record (including the title track, which had only been green-lit by Stewart after insisting guitarist Ronnie Wood sing it, as Rod couldn’t find the key and didn’t like Lane’s rendition), was livid. He couldn’t wait, he said, “to fuck off”.

Matters came to a head during the Faces’ 1973 US tour. On May 10, after a gig in Nassau County, Ronnie told the others he was leaving. The tour ended the following night with an onstage riot after Lane swore viciously at Ian McLagan, who responded by throwing a drink at his bandmate’s head and aiming a kick at his nuts. A month later, after the gig in Edmonton, Ronnie was gone. No tears were shed, no party was thrown for ‘Three-Piece’. More a case of goodbye and good riddance.

“Ronnie had it with all the cocaine, champagne and the private jets,” says the Faces’ tour manager Russell Schlagbaum, who was on the road with them in the States when it all fell apart. “He started travelling with his wife, Kate, and he brought the family, which was a no-no. The rule of the road was ‘no girlfriends’. Do all the drugs and fuck all the groupies you like, then get back to normal in England. Here were Ron and Kate carrying a child in a wicker basket, making no eye contact with the others. Everyone’s thinking: ‘What’s happened to Ronnie Lane?’ He was dressed like a gypsy with earrings and shabby clothes.”

At the time, Faces drummer Kenney Jones recalled Ronnie and Kate as “this grubby, dirty-looking couple. And we started seeing a lot of Kate. Too much.”

The Small Faces’ mod gear had long been confined to the wardrobe, replaced by tweeds and battered boots. Modernist chic became Celtic hillbilly. But Ronnie always had a tinker’s soul. His folksy, vulnerable side showed in songs such as Devotion, Stone and Flags And Banners. Although his undeniable masterpiece was Debris, from the Faces’ A Nod’s As Good As A Wink… To A Blind Horse. Sung in Plaistow vernacular, it was a portrait of his dad, Stan Lane, laid off from his job as a long‑distance lorry driver, sifting through the ‘odds and ends’ at an East End Sunday market.

“Debris is about my old man,” Ronnie explained. “The Debris was down… not Petticoat Lane, which is famous, everybody knows about it, but an adjoining market called Club Row. People came out there with all their chuck-outs and flotsam and jetsam and spread it out on the Debris. Every Sunday morning, he’d take me down there and he’d root around for hours in all this shit. It wasn’t until I was in New York that I realised I missed it. I was feeling homesick at the time.”

By the time Ronnie was back in Blighty and out of the Faces, he made up his mind: fuck ’em all. In the summer of 1973, he and Kate – his second wife, whom he’d met in 1972 while she was married to Mike McInnerney, sleeve artist for The Who’s Tommy – bought a 110-acre farm, Fishpool, near Hyssington on the border of Shropshire and Montgomeryshire.

The couple renovated the derelict cottage and turned the barn into a rehearsal space. The East End it was not, yet Ronnie felt at home. For one thing, it was miles from the nearest coke dealer. For another, Ronnie and his friends could smoke dope with impunity before moseying into the village to pick up crates of Barley Wine from the boozer. Parked outside the main cottage was his Airstream trailer, which he turned into a 16-track mobile studio – a cash cow when leased to the likes of The Who, Eric Clapton and Bad Company.

The move to this rural idyll was Kate’s idea. She kept a cauldron of soup going on the stove and washed Ronnie’s favourite silk suits in boiling water before, literally, mangling them. “Ronnie followed me to Wales after we sold Wick Cottage [in Richmond] back to Ron Wood,” Kate says today, from her home in Wales. “We did a runner because the shit hit the fan when he left The Faces. We wanted to live on the road and we’d already travelled around Ireland in a Land Rover with [singer-songwriter] Billy Nicholls, singing in pubs. The farm was a different way of life.

“Was Ronnie hands-on? Ha ha! When he remembered. He liked the concept, but doing a hard day’s labour was a little exhausting for the poor love, though later he went to Newtown and did some classes at agricultural college.” (“I dunno if I can hack this, Kate. I got 15-year-old farm boys flicking rubbers at me,” was her husband’s assessment of his time at college.)

Ronnie had worked with other musicians during his time in The Faces, contributing to Pete Townshend solo album, 1970’s Happy Birthday, and the 1972 Townshend collaboration I Am (the two shared an interest in Eastern religion, and both albums were dedicated to Townshend’s spiritual guru, Meher Baba). He’d also worked with Ronnie Wood and producer Glyn Johns on the soundtrack album Mahoney’s Last Stand in Ooh La La downtime (the record would eventually emerge in 1976, four years after the film itself).

But now it was time to put together his own thing. Lane invited a raggle-taggle bunch of musicians to the farm: Irish guitarist Kevin Westlake, guitar/mandolin player Steve Simpson, bassist Steve Bingham and the Scottish duo Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle, formerly of pub-folk outfit McGuinness Flint.

“‘Bring your mandolin,’ he told me on the phone,” recalls Gallagher. “Staying in Fishpool was lairy because I had two sets of twins – the caravans all leaked but it was great to wake up and go to the barn for recording.”

Lane called the group Slim Chance, a name had that been knocking around since the Small Faces split (Lane suggested that The Faces’ debut album First Step be credited to Fat Chance or No Chance, both of which were deemed too negative). Their magnificent first step was the Dylan-meets-George Harrison-esque single How Come. It made No.11 in the UK charts in January 1974. Not Maggie May, but good enough.

“There was a sort of formal democracy but Ronnie was in charge,” says Steve Simpson now. “Organic but with direction. He’d come into the barn with his lyric books, which he kept very private – we weren’t allowed near them – and we created the songs in a lateral fashion. It was completely rustic. Locals and friends would wander in and it felt more like a gypsy camp than a hippie commune.”

This air of anything goes fed into their debut album, Anymore For Anymore (credited as a Ronnie Lane LP, though he was backed by Slim Chance). Ronnie had recorded a version of the title track with The Faces in 1972; when Rod Stewart heard it, he’d sniffed: “Who wrote this tripe?” Elsewhere, the album conjured up a transcendental image of the English countryside. On the single The Poacher violinist Ken Slaven and saxophonist Jimmy Jewell melted into Jimmy Horowitz’s glorious string arrangement. It was British pastoralism taken to another dimension.

“Ronnie’s strength was putting human melody and storyline together,” says Benny Gallagher. “His phrasing was unique; he was one of the most underrated singers in the UK. The scene was quietly crazy. He even had his builders, the Tanner brothers, and their families singing on the album. You can hear the chickens in the background and the noise of children.”

Not everyone was so enamoured with the set‑up. Jimmy Jewell played on both How Come and Anymore For Anymore. “The farm had a swamp at the back that was being excavated,” says Jewell. “I think he’d been ripped off by the vendors cos he was pleading poverty, but there were piles of cash lying around, US and Aussie dollars and yen.” Nor was Jewell enamoured of Lane’s new lifestyle: “I thought Lane was playing at being a gypsy which was most odd, and I also don’t think he respected me as a musician.” (In fact Ronnie described Jimmy as a magnificent saxophonist – they fell out later).

Anymore For Anymore was released in July 1974. The sleeve featured an atmospheric silhouette of a pair of travellers on a horse and cart against a golden sunset. Ronnie wanted to advertise the album in Exchange And Mart. If anyone was still unsure as to where Ronnie’s head was at, here was all you needed to know.

But while the bonhomie might have been tangible, the public weren’t buying it. Anymore For Anymore bombed, scraping into the Top 50 for one week. But that was the least of their worries.

Lane had publicly unveiled Slim Chance on November 11, 1973 – Armistice Day – on Clapham Common, South London, in a Chipperfield’s Circus tent. Enthused by the chaos, he decided to take his own version on the road. It would be called The Passing Show. Ronnie was euphoric. “It’ll be more carnival than circus,” he enthused. “The audience will come because it’s music, and there won’t be any animals or trapeze acts. But we’ll have dancing girls and a good comedian/compere. We’re now in the process of buying a load of old single-decker London Transport buses, cos they’re in good nick. We’ll put bunks in and turn them into box offices.”

It was a grand idea that fitted in with Ronnie’s Romany-esque vision of life. But while it looked good on paper, the reality was very different.

The Passing Show premiered in Marlow, Buckinghamshire in June 1974, on the local football team’s training pitch. The show went well, but there were complaints from local residents. The buses Russell Schlagbaum had bought from London Transport for the tour turned out to have been stored behind the sheds at their Acton depot. Far from being “in good nick”, they could barely negotiate Britain’s rural byways, and most of them fell apart on the motorway.

This travelling circus had the right spirit. Its caravans and rickety buses were home to the band and assorted professional circus performers, as well as Captain Peter Hill, an authentic traveller hired by Ronnie.

“He knew everything about the circus so he was in charge of the clowns – whom the band hated because they were so useless – the fire-eaters and the dancing girls,” says bassist Steve Bingham. “On the road most of the vehicles broke down. The caravans were so rickety we only travelled at 20mph and we were constantly pulled over by the police and harassed by the council. But Ronnie would produce a bottle, fill ’em up and it would eventually be fine.”

Ronnie and Kate were in their element. “We were on the Chicken Shit Express, all very nostalgic. I organised the can-can girls – me, Russell [Schlagbaum]’s girlfriend Barbara and Josie Livsey, the wife of our American keyboard player Billy. I got us costumes from Sotheby’s so we looked like a cross between those girls in Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec paintings: the card up the sleeve. The audiences loved us and the level went up once we arrived for Ooh La La and Ain’t No Lady.”

Some people got into the spirit of things a bit too much. Former Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band leader Viv Stanshall was hired as master of ceremonies, but was asked to leave after drunkenly pouring drinks into the amplifiers and breaking Ken Slaven’s violin at the first show. The final straw came when Stanshall was found in guitarist Kevin Westlake’s caravan, glass in hand, trousers round ankles, asking: “Got any toilet paper, old bean?”

But the high jinks masked the fact that The Passing Show was losing money hand over fist. A stop-off in Newcastle drew barely 50 people across three shows. At Chester Racecourse, there were more people in the circus than in the crowd.

Jimmy Jewell has less-than-rose-tinted memories of the tour. “It was a great idea but the figures didn’t add up,” he says. “We got pissed a lot. He’d buy us bottles of Blue Nun – horrible stuff – where it was Guinness, Barley Wine and a bottle of Courvoisier for Ronnie. I got fed up because I was dragging my wife and child in a broken-down caravan and getting paid thirty quid a week. Nuts. Cost me more in petrol. I asked for a pay rise. He said no. So I said, ‘Enough.’ I left a note on his door – ‘Goodbye cruel circus, I am off to join the world.’”

“Of course it went tits up, but I was glad it did,” says Kate now. “Added to the fun. It lost a lot of money though, which scarred Ronnie cos this was his dream.”

For Lane, The Passing Show was a success purely because it happened. “Some people didn’t like The Passing Show because it just wasn’t heavy enough for them – but I’m not into that anyway,” he said. “I’ve been all through that heavy stuff. It just doesn’t exist. It’s a total illusion that some people live under. What I can do is for people. That might sound incredibly pretentious and it does, but I happen to mean it. I don’t want anything. All I want out of it is a life. Something well spent. That’s all I want.”

After The Passing Show limped to a halt, Ronnie retreated back to Fishpool, where he bought sheep and planted barley. Slim Chance made two more albums, 1975’s Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance and the following year’s One For The Road.

“Slim Chance didn’t even get reviewed and One For The Road did terribly,” says multi-instrumentalist Charlie Hart, who played on both records and lived at Fishpool for two years. “But that wasn’t the point. Ronnie was ahead of his time. Unplugged before anyone else. And he kept that Small Faces’ sense of humour and knew how to harness creative energies.”

There were impromptu gigs in local pubs such as The More Arms, The Drum And Monkey and The Miner’s Arms. Old pals such as Alexis Korner and Eric Clapton would drop by. “Eric wrote Wonderful Tonight at ours, sitting on a wheelbarrow,” says Kate. Clapton recorded the song on the spot in Ronnie’s Airstream trailer studio.

Lane’s spirits were high, but his finances were in disarray. “His books were a shambles,” says Russell Schlagbaum. “There was money, he was far from broke. But nobody knew where it was. Some of it was in Jersey, but not even Barclays [Bank] in Montgomery could make sense of his accounts.”

With creditors knocking on the door, Lane reluctantly agreed to a Small Faces reunion in 1977, after Ian McLagan and Kenney Jones visited him in Wales. Ronnie attended one rehearsal, got horribly drunk and abusive, and stormed off.

What no one knew was that he was starting to show symptoms of multiple sclerosis. His mother Elsie had suffered from the disease, and Ronnie still remembered how he and Kenney Jones used to carry her down the stairs of their flat in Plaistow. It was a painful memory, and Lane feared he would inherit the illness.

His friends, meanwhile, had no idea what was going on. Pete Townshend, who collaborated with Ronnie on 1977’s ambitious Rough Mix album, was baffled by his friend’s behaviour. “I thought he was drunk,” said the Who guitarist. “He was slurring his words, yet he hadn’t had a drink.”

Russell Schlagbaum had noticed a change a year earlier. “Ronnie couldn’t always hold a plectrum,” he says. “I thought it was the after-effects of too much Barley Wine or cocaine. It wasn’t. It was the onset of MS. He refused to admit it because his mother had the disease and he was petrified.”

One For The Road was the end of Slim Chance, although Ronnie did make a final album, 1979’s See Me, with some of the old crew. By that point he’d gone public with his MS diagnosis (he lived with it until he died in 1997). He’d also left Kate.

“You can’t keep a horse locked up,” she says. “When he left he told me, ‘I loved you cos you’re all woman, but you think like a man.’”

Oh, that restless spirit. With the smell of The Passing Show still in his nostrils, Ronnie Lane gazed into his crystal ball and told his own fortune two years earlier. “I can’t see me settling down to living in a house. Nah, I like to be a stranger. It’s easier, see. You pass through things… there’s this cluttering up business whenever you settle.”

He wouldn’t be doing that. No chance.

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 219, published in January 2016. Slim Chance's most recent album Live at The Greystones, was released in 2024. The current lineup features two members of Lane's original band, Steve Bingham and Charlie Hart.

Ian Fraser Kilmister didn’t just live rock’n’roll, he was rock’n’roll. For 40 years, this roaring warlord led Motörhead on a crusade to show every other band that had ever existed up for the makeweights they were.

During that time, no bottle of Jack Daniel’s was left undrunk, no cigarette left unsmoked, no line of speed unsorted, no eardrum unbattered. It wasn’t so much a badge of honour as instinct. He was Lemmy. That is what he did.

2025 is a year of Motörhead anniversaries. It marks 50 years since the band formed, and 10 years since their frontman died. Lemmy passed away on December 28, 2015, four days after his 70th birthday and 17 days after what would turn out to be Motörhead’s last gig – exactly the same amount of time between his great friend Ozzy Osbourne’s farewell at the Back To The Beginning show and his own passing a decade later (maybe the old reprobates had planned it in advance).

Lemmy may no longer be with us, but his legacy definitely is. This is the story of the real man behind the myth, by the people who knew him.

Lemmy was born in Stoke-on-Trent on Christmas Eve, 1945, and raised by his mother after his biological father, a vicar, left the family when his son was just three months old. The young Lemmy passed through several groups in his late teens and early 20s, including The Rockin’ Vickers and Sam Gopal, but it was his four-year stint in psychedelic explorers Hawkwind in the early 70s that gave him his first real taste of success.

Dave Brock [Hawkwind singer/guitarist]: “Being in a band with him was never dull. We were young and Hawkwind was an eccentric band, so he fitted in with us really well.”

Phil Campbell [Motörhead guitarist 1984 onwards]: “I actually met him way back when he was in Hawkwind. I went to see them at the Cardiff Capitol Theatre and hung around in the big foyer hoping to meet them. Lemmy was the only one that came out. He signed my programme. I’ve still got that somewhere. If someone had told me that day I’d be in a world-famous band with that guy for over 30 years… it’s inspiring.”

Dave Brock: “Part of the growing divide [in Hawkwind] was that Lemmy took downers and speed, while the rest of us were into LSD. Things came to a head when he got pulled at the Canadian border in 1975. Lemmy had a tiny packet of speed on him. They mistook it for cocaine and he got thrown into jail.

So with everyone believing he might be in prison for a year or more, there was a big band meeting. He was voted out by two to four. It fell to me to break the bad news. He was really upset. He went back to England. Apparently he slept with several of the band’s girlfriends… who knows whether or not that’s true.”

Lemmy bounced back from his firing from Hawkwind by forming a new band in 1975. Originally named Bastard, they were wisely rechristened Motörhead after a song he’d written and recorded with his former. Thanks to albums such as 1979’s Overkill and Bomber, 1980’s Ace Of Spades and 1981’s No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith (a UK No.1), Lemmy, guitarist Fast Eddie Clarke and drummer Philthy Animal Taylor became one of the rare bands that metal fans, punks and bikers were all allowed to like.

Phil Campbell: “The first time I heard Motörhead was around the time of that first album [1977’s self-titled debut]. They sounded so different from anything anyone had ever heard.”

Kim McAuliffe [Girlschool]: “We supported them on the Overkill tour. They’d heard our first single, and liked it. And Lemmy being Lemmy, he probably thought, ‘An all-girl band, oi oi!’ We were quite scared to meet him. Of course, as soon as he walked in, we got on like a house on fire.”

Biff Byford [Saxon]: “I first met Lemmy in ’79 when Saxon supported Motörhead on the Bomber tour. They were in the front of the bus and we had the back. They were into quite heavy drugs, speed was their thing. All three of them were fucking nuts. But there were hidden depths with Lemmy, once you got to know him.”

Kim McAuliffe: “He was a gentleman around us. He did introduce us to Special Brew, though. We always say we blame Lemmy for all our bad habits.”

Biff Byford: “We had a couple of days off on the tour and we went to the house they had together in London. It was madness. They were throwing darts at pictures of their manager and shooting holes in the door with air rifles.”

Motörhead’s classic three-piece line-up became an equally classic four-piece line-up in 1984, when guitarists Phil Campbell and Würzel replaced the departed Fast Eddie Clarke. By 1992, Philthy Animal was out and Swedish drummer Mikkey Dee was in. When Würzel left in 1995, Motörhead were once more a trio, and would remain so for the next 20 years.

Phil Campbell: “Lemmy was so welcoming to me and Würz, and so funny. We all moved in together into a house in Kensal Rise, in London. Things got wild there, God knows what the neighbours thought. We were always getting high in the garden. I remember, quite late one night we were sat in the kitchen and we could hear this noise at about 3am. We turn the garden light on and there’s Lem, high on whatever, out in the garden trying to trim weeds in the dark with a pair of scissors.”

Mikkey Dee [Motörhead drummer 1992 onwards]: “The first time he asked me to join was in 1987, when I was drumming in King Diamond. I respectfully turned him down because I didn’t think I’d earned my stripes. When I joined the band in 1992, he took me aside and said, ‘Mikkey, good manners cost nothing. And if you walk into a room and there’s an asshole in there, make sure you’re the biggest asshole.’ I’ve lived by that my whole life.”

It was during the 80s that Lemmy was enshrined as one of rock’n’roll’s great outlaws whose life centred around alcohol, amphetamine sulphate, women and music.

Cameron Webb [Motörhead producer 2004-2015]: “I first heard Motörhead when I was 14 years old. My brother turned me onto listening to [1986’s] Orgasmatron and [1987’s] Rock ’n’ Roll: ‘You’ve gotta listen to these guys – their singer is the meanest-looking guy, and he gets chicks! He’s so fuckin’ cool!’ I couldn’t understand it! ‘That guy gets girls?!’”

Phil Campbell: “I never saw him get drunk. The speed meant he’d get through a bottle and half of Jack Daniel’s and not even be tipsy.”

Mikkey Dee: “I only saw him super-drunk once, in all those years. We were on a flight to Argentina and he had a couple of bottles of whiskey.”

Cameron Webb: “When we went to record in London one time, we all went out drinking. Lem goes, ‘I want to take you to my favourite bar.’ We drank there until 6am when the sun was coming up. We’re supposed to be working at noon. It’s like, ‘Hey, maybe we start at 3 tomorrow?’ We ended up starting at 6, we were all still so wrecked.”

Todd Singerman [Motörhead manager 1992 onwards]: “He never got hangovers. You don’t stop drinking, you can’t get a hangover, and he didn’t stop drinking. If I had to wake him up at his apartment, he still had whatever Jack and Coke he had from the night before next to him in a glass. He’d get up and put a couple of ice cubes in it and pick it right up and start right over again.”

But Lemmy the party animal was just one facet of his personality. He was a learned man, though his knowledge was self-taught.

Phil Campbell: “Lemmy was very astute at the English language. I’d try and catch him out, find a big word from somewhere and I’d ask what it means. He’d always be able to explain it.”

Todd Singerman: “That guy was cerebral. He could talk about everything. I used to trip out that he’d be reading three books at one time. I was like, ‘Who the fuck does that?’”

Phil Campbell: “He never wasted time, he’d be reading, or listening to music, or watching something.”

Todd Singerman: “Keep in mind that he’s on speed, too. He can’t keep it inactive. He couldn’t just lay there. He needed stimulation at all time. That’s why he loved gambling on those slot machines, ’cos it’s all fast and stimulating. For a speed freak, you can’t get better than that.”

For all the tales of Lemmy’s wildness, he was a musician first and everything else second. And no one else sounded like he did, sang like he did or wrote songs like he did.

Phil Campbell: “He was a rhythm guitarist who played it all on his bass. He never cared much for being a lead player, he liked to do these rock’n’roll bits and just tapped his feet to move with the groove. He wasn’t interested in how people wanted him to play – he did it his way.”

Mikkey Dee: “Sometimes we’d come out of this Motörhead frame, go in different directions, but whatever Lemmy did with the bass made it into Motörhead. We’d be there, ‘Ah, we can’t fucking use this one.’ He’d save it and turn it into a smash fucking Motörhead song.”

Phil Campbell: “We wrote for ourselves – not for fans, not for the record companies. I remember Lem saying, ‘Thank god Ace Of Spades was a good song. Imagine if our biggest hit was a turkey?’"

Todd Singerman: “I remember when I got involved around the time of [1992’s] March Or Die, the label wanted him to do a rap song. Lemmy told him they could all stick it up their ass. He literally told them to fuck off.”

Mikkey Dee: “On [1998’s] Snake Bite Love there was a song called Night Side and that’s one we fucking hated but put on the record anyway. Lem and I would laugh about that. We would do interviews about how we wrote what we wanted and threw out the shit we didn’t like. Lem would go, ‘Hang on Mikkey, we have done one shit song. Damn!’”

Lemmy may have been at home in the studio, but he was a road dog at heart. Motörhead played more than 3,000 gigs during their lifetime, never taking more than a few months off at a time.

Biff Byford: “Being out on the road with him and Motörhead was quite an experience. How he would stay up so late, drinking and doing whatever, and continue to perform at such a high level was something to behold.”

Phil Campbell: “If it was a long journey, we would be there on the back of the bus with Abba or the Bee Gees, trying to sing along with various degrees of success. I imagine that would’ve been hard to listen to, but we definitely had a go.”

Mikkey Dee: “US tours would be so long – we’d play for three or four months in a row. The worst thing would be that he smoked so fucking much. Lemmy would chain smoke in the back lounge and the whole bunk area would fill with smoke. He’d smoke so much you couldn’t see in front of your face.”

Phil Campbell: “Sometimes, in the middle of the night, you’d hear him start playing the harmonica. He’d just be there, in the back of the bus in the early hours of the morning, blowing away. It could be maddening, but we loved it a little bit, too.”

Mikkey Dee: “Any joke shop we passed in America, Lem could go in and spend a couple thousand dollars on a bunch of junk. Everything from stickers and keychains, funny hats and noses to the fart machines. He redecorated every bus we got on. They’d be covered in stickers and drawings. The bus drivers would think they’d gone to Hell.”

Like many intelligent, articulate people, Lemmy was a complex man. He could be friendly or frosty, kind or rude, depending on his mood and what substances he had taken. But he had a particularly low tolerance for fools.

Phil Campbell: “He was always very polite to people. He couldn’t stand rudeness. He was a gentleman 99% of the time, until something pissed him off and then he’d fight for his rights. You could only push him so far. He couldn’t stand to be surrounded by idiots.”

Todd Singerman: “Did I see him upset? He was upset on a daily basis. He was a fucking alcoholic speed freak! He was upset all day!”

Phil Campbell: “I remember going to [prestigious LA recording facility] A&M studios. Howard Benson was producing and me, Lem and Mikkey ended up arguing about something. Howard said, ‘I can settle this for you now, I’ve been recording the last 20 minutes.’ It turns out Lem was wrong. He was eating this cheeseburger, and he suddenly rammed it into the mixing desk, getting all this cheese and lettuce gummed up into this $2,000,000 desk. Poor Howard, he had to call out and say, ‘Can we get a repair man? Lemmy from Motörhead’s just trashed our desk with a cheeseburger.’”

Mikkey Dee: “Sometimes he was a little fuckin’ girl, if he was screaming at us about nothing. But we would scream right back! We had great arguments, in such a friendly way. Like a family should have. There was never any pissing or moaning – there was never trash talk behind anyone’s back.”

Todd Singerman: “He never took things home with him. You could have an argument with him - ‘Fuck you!’ ‘No, fuck you!’ – but he would never bear a grudge the next day. If you had a fight with Lemmy, the next day it would be wiped clean.”

Cameron Webb: “The first record I did with them was [2004’s] Inferno. It was a hard record – Lemmy and I fought a lot. By the end of it, I was exhausted. Late nights, early mornings… Yelling, fighting, drugs, alcohol… everything always went on. At the very end, Lemmy took me to his house and gave me a sword. I actually have it at my studio now. We got to his house and he said, ‘Cameron, I fucking love this record. I’m so proud of it, it’s one of my favourites. So I want to give you this gift and hire you for the next record.’ I thought he hated my guts!”

Lemmy may have liked people – or at least liked some people – but he had no time for the music industry. He had been burned over and over again at the hands of labels ever since the start of Motörhead’s career.

Phil Campbell: “Promoters lying to us made him angry. He took off a metal door once. He was wild about some promoter, I can’t remember what it was over, but he just took this big metal door off its hinges.”

Todd Singerman: “Lemmy didn’t trust anybody. Those were lessons he learned. Everybody had fucked him over eventually. He thought that other people should have no say over what he did: ‘This is my music, not yours, fuck you.’”

Phil Campbell: “He demanded our prices always be in the range of the working man, so everyone could hopefully afford to see us. I know we couldn’t put huge amounts on those tickets anyway – we’re not U2 or Madonna – but he was insistent about that.”

Mikkey Dee: “He took care of people. He was extremely concerned about taking care of our crew. We could argue about that. He would spend a fortune on getting the crew comfortable, five-star hotels and travelling well. It was super-kind, but our budget couldn’t always afford that. We’d argue and he’d say, ‘Mikkey, you only think about money.’ But it was like, ‘If we do this, we’ll be on our ass.’ His kindness could turn into stupidity at times!”

Todd Singerman: “Everyone else was in it for the money and the rest of it, they’re trying to get the most they can. Motörhead didn’t go that route. We never made a lot of money compared to others. It had to do with the fact he wouldn’t let the ticket price be too high. He said, ‘If a working man can’t afford to come to my show, then I’m doing something wrong.’ It wasn’t about money. It was never about money."

Lemmy may have given the impression of being immortal, but he wasn’t. He was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in the early 2000s - the first of a series of health issues that would continue to plague him over the next decade and a half. Not that he let that change him.

Todd Singerman: “What started all of this problem was the diabetes. That’s when we had to try to get him off booze. That was never going to happen. His compromise was vodka and orange juice. Orange juice is all sugar, but in his mind it was cleaner. Doctors used to tell me, ‘He needs more water, more hydration.’ So the fucker, in front of my face, put two more ice cubes in his drink.”

Cameron Webb: “When we started [2013’s] Aftershock, Lemmy told us he was going to need to get a pacemaker put in after he finished recording. He’d seen a doctor, but he wanted to do a record first. We did 10 songs’ worth of pre-production, but I felt like five of those were not good at all.

We decided to take a break – he’d get his pacemaker put in, and come back to do the remaining five songs with more ideas. So Lemmy goes away and sees his doctor, and the doctor is like, ‘Holy shit! If you’d waited another week, you’d have died. We need to put this in today.’ It was supposed to be a one-day process originally, but he ended up in hospital for, like, two weeks – he’d almost died.”

Todd Singerman: “I said, ‘Lemmy, you gotta start eating more vegetables.’ So he had sour cream and onion potato chips. In his mind, those were the vegetables.”

Dave Brock: “We did have that difficult conversation about slowing down. I sent him a text saying: ‘A live legend, a dead hero.’ Flying around the world and the stress of playing concerts isn’t good for your body, but I don’t think he paid it too much attention.”

In 2015, Motörhead marked 40 years since their formation with their 23rd studio album, Bad Magic. But it was a tough year. Some shows on the subsequent tour were cancelled due to Lemmy’s health issues, and the death of former bandmate Philthy Animal Taylor in November 2015 hit him harder than anyone realised.

Mikkey Dee: “Before that tour, I said to Lem, ‘Look, let’s just cancel or postpone it.’ Phil and I agreed, we couldn’t really do it, but he insisted. We decided we wouldn’t argue with him anymore, we’d help him do it.”

Phil Campbell: “He had good days and bad days, but whenever we said, ‘Lem, maybe we should take a break’, he refused. He wanted to just keep going.”

Biff Byford: “Saxon supported Motörhead on their last tour of North America, and he hated cancelling or aborting shows. It tore him up inside. When he was unable to finish a show, he would go back out and apologise from the stage. It was brave of him to explain why he couldn’t carry on.”

Todd Singerman: “Philthy’s death [on November 12, 2015] hit him very hard. He changed that day. When he started getting weaker and weaker, we thought it was because Philthy had died and he was bummed. We stopped beating him up, stopped trying to get him to do things. None of us knew what was really wrong with him.”

Phil Campbell: “Nobody realised Berlin [at the MaxSchmeling-Halle on December 11, 2015] was going to be the last show. It was the usual – ‘Good gig.’ We had a big hug after the gig – ‘Nice one, Lem. See you in a bit.’ But I didn’t see him after. I never got to say goodbye properly.”

Todd Singerman: “All of us thought we’d get home and patch him up a little and get him some rest. He had a party for his 70th birthday, and Lars Ulrich and lots of other people came down for it. He could barely recognise these guys. We took him to the doctor’s the next day, and that’s when they started finding all this stuff.”

All this stuff’ was actually cancer. Lemmy’s doctor gave him a prognosis of two to six months to live. A videogame was brought to his apartment from the Rainbow, his favourite Los Angeles hangout. On December 28, just a couple of days after receiving the news and four days after his 70th birthday, Lemmy fell asleep while playing the videogame. He never woke up again.

Todd Singerman: “How did he face death? Like a champ. When the doctor was at the house and told us [he had cancer], I cried right there. I couldn’t help it. And Lemmy was the one who fucking consoled me!”

Biff Byford: “I believe that he wanted to kick the bucket on the road, but he won’t have been too disappointed by the way things panned out. Playing a fucking videogame. He died as he lived. It was quick, at least.”

Todd Singerman: “Literally his whole goal was to drop at the last show of the last gig of the last tour. He missed it by two weeks. Same with Ozzy. They both died exactly 17 days after their last show.”

Lemmy’s memorial service was held on January 9, 2016, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles. Among those in attendance were members of Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Foo Fighters, Judas Priest and Anthrax, as well as Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne.

Todd Singerman: “I used to manage Marlon Brando, and Lemmy’s funeral was exactly the same as his. They all said, ‘If it wasn’t for Marlon, I wouldn’t be here.’ They said the same thing about Lemmy.”

Phil Campbell: “Something had burst in me and I was hospitalised. My doctor said I wasn’t allowed to fly to LA for the funeral. My friend Miko Brando – Marlon Brando’s son – owns a flower shop in Los Angeles. I asked them to do this flower display so it was a big mirror and a line of speed, made out of flowers. I was gutted I couldn’t be there, but I made sure to send him one last line of speed.”

Mikkey Dee: “When he turned 50, Metallica put on a party for him [at Sunset Strip club the Whisky A Go Go, where James Hetfield co performed Motörhead covers as The Lemmys while all dressed as the man himself]. He said to me then, ‘If I die tomorrow, I’ve had the perfect life.’ And he got another 20 years after that!”

Lemmy would have turned 80 on December 24, 2025. Physically, he’s not here anymore, but his imprint remains on music, culture and anyone who ever listened to a Motörhead album.

Mikkey Dee: “In interviews people would say, ‘It’s such a tragedy.’ I’d say, ‘It’s not a tragedy. It’s sad, but look at it this way: Lemmy lived 70 years on his premise, his way.’”

Phil Campbell: “What would he be doing if he was still here? Same thing he always did: we’d be playing in Motörhead. We never talked about the end, we always talked about the next album, the next tour, the next gig, the next song. We’d still be blasting away, like it or not.”

Cameron Webb: “He’d be writing music and telling stories. Or he’d be recording. That’s what he loved. If I asked him about taking a day off, he’d say, ‘I’m fucking bored! What am I gonna do, watch a fucking movie?’”

Mikkey Dee: “I consider Lemmy my father, my grandpa, my younger brother, my bigger brother… my younger sister sometimes! He was the whole scale.”

Biff Byford: “Lemmy Kilmister was a good man. He was the ultimate road warrior, the Mad Max of rock’n’roll. With Lemmy what you saw was what you got.”

Todd Singerman: “He lived sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Everybody fantasises about it, but he lived it, to the very fucking end.”

Phil Campbell: “There was nobody like him before, and won’t be ever again. People loved him.

Big Big Train have announced that they will publish a new book about telling the story of their upcoming studio album, Woodcut.

Woodcut – The Making And The Meaning will be published through Kingmaker Publishing on February 6, the same day the new album is released through InsideOut Music.

Written by author Andy Stuart, Woodcut – The Making And The Meaning documents the story of Woodcut and the story that inspired the album's concept, as well as looking at the centuries-long tale of woodcut art itself, making some fascinating connections between the ground-breaking artists of the late 19^th century and progressive musicians of the modern era.

“I was inspired by what Rick Beato has called the ‘sweat equity’ of being a music fan: traditional record stores, sleeve notes, gatefold art and the feeling that an album – and now a book – can still be an adventure, not just something you scroll past," Stuart explains. "Progressive rock, and Big Big Train music in particular, inspires something that I feel is sometimes lost in the era of streaming and music-on-demand. Woodcut is a very inspirational record. It’s not ‘just pixels’.”

Woodcut tells the story of a troubled illustrator; an ancient, possibly supernatural, piece of heartwood; an ingenious device – the Albion Press – evoking classic Big Big Train traditions – wrapped in a fable that blurs the line between inspiration, obsession and the sometimes dangerous cost of creative fulfilment The concept was inspired by a visit to Oslo’s Munchmuseet during the band’s 2023 European by Greg Spawton and Alberto Bravin.

Drawing on candid interviews, lyrical notes and personal reflections from every member of the band, Woodcut – The Making And The Meaning is more than 200 pages, and illustrated with over 80 images, including original handwritten lyric drafts and studio notes.

Pre-order Woodcut – The Making And The Meaning.

Prog has teamed up with Big Big Train and InsideOut Music to bring you an exclusive Light Without Heat Yellow vinyl copy of Woodcut that you won't be able to purchase anywhere else! You'll also get a lyric sheet for The Sharpest Blade, and a bespoke Big Big Train cover of issue 167 of Prog, also on sale February 6, in our limited edition bundle.

Get yours here before they sell out: https://store.loudersound.com/products/issue-167-big-big-train-magazine-exclusive-bundle

Finnish prog-doom merchants Swallow The Sun are to have their best-selling official biography translated into English and is now available to pre-order.

Written by Matt Reiki, Editor-in-Chief of Finland's popular rock monthly Soundi and published last year, Swallow The Sun will be published in the UK by Rocket 88 Books, who are also publishing the upcoming Alan Parsons Project book and are behind collector-quality books about Jethro Tull, ELP, 10cc, Syd Barrett and more.

"The band is old enough that they started to have stories like a book," says vocalist Mikko Kotamäki. "And this was quite a therapeutic session for us to talk through old stuff. It was no easy task for a Finnish man! We couldn’t avoid laughter, though – and tears."

Swallow The Sun has been translated by Salla Harjula and features interviews with everyone who has contributed to the creation of the band and their unique sound over the past quarter of a century, including the band's internal conflicts and difficulties with the music business.

This new hardback translation features 300+ pages, 100,000+ words and two photo sections, and includes new material which covers the two years since the publication of the original edition, and will be available in two editions, the standard Classic Edition, and the Signature Edition, whch will be signed by the band. Those pre-ordering will also get their names printed in the book.

Pre-order Swallow The Sun.

The recent Charisma & Virgin Recordings 1971-1986 box set captures Peter Hammill performing in Montreal in 1974. His scorching rendition of German Overalls – his psyche-shredding account of Van der Graaf Generator being on tour – ends with a ferocious buzz-saw howl that prompts an outbreak of fervent cheers and a larger wave of boos from the crowd.

That mixed reaction typifies Hammill’s position as an acquired taste: a progressive music scene outlier whose soul-wrenching material inspires either dazzled adulation or sceptical bafflement.

Joe Banks’ authoritative 500-page exploration of Hammill’s solo career – lavishly crammed with photos, posters and other ephemera – is the perfect accompaniment to that satisfyingly big box. Adopting a chronological trajectory, these highly accessible critiques are nicely pitched for both seasoned fans and curious newcomers.

Brimming with details and events surrounding the recordings, the author’s primary focus is on Hammill’s discography covering the 1970s to the 1980s, alongside VdGG’s albums from the same period. A comprehensive overview of the key releases from the post-Charisma period onward is also presented, ensuring Hammill’s story feels very much up to date.

Though not an authorised biography, Hammill himself cast a fact-checking eye over the text and, as the author describes in the acknowledgements, “answered the long stream of obscure questions I sent his way.” While the subject resists offering any pronouncements on the book, Banks’ interpretations of the recurring themes that stalk his work ring true and provide a nuanced assessment.

Extra weight comes from new interviews with musical and business colleagues. There’s also commentary from the woman who was Hammill’s romantic partner for much of the 70s. That relationship – or the aftershock of its dissolution – was chronicled on Over; and she reveals there was, of course, another side to that story.

Hammill is portrayed as a rounded human being, subject to all of the requisite foibles and contradictions. Crucially, Banks succeeds in nailing his driven personality of a self-starter motivated by a steely self-belief. Throughout, there is a tangible sense of the restless creative spark that has fuelled a diverse body of work, which, even accounting for its experimental diversions, remains boldly consistent.

Rock And Role: The Visionary Songs Of Peter Hammill And Van Der Graaf Generator is on sale now via Kingmaker Publishing.

Looking at the hirsute Gentle Giant in their prime, it’s a little hard to believe they were ever teen idols. But they reinvented themselves more than once, evolving from R’n’B combo The Road Runners into the floral-shirted pop sensations Simon Dupree & The Big Sound; and then, in 1970, to an altogether more progressive incarnation as Gentle Giant.

Erstwhile frontman and co-founder Derek Shulman has worn a fair few hats – both literal and metaphorical – as this entertaining autobiography relates. After the band split in 1980 he moved into promotions, then A&R, overseeing the signing of Bon Jovi and Dream Theater among many others.

The first two parts of the three-part narrative will be of greatest interest to Gentle Giant fans, as he tells of high times, riotous audiences and bold creative leaps forward; often in the face of doubters, to whom he seems unable to resist saying, “I told you so!”

As the band’s star rises, it brings the unhappy side effect of estranging him from older brother Phil, who tires of touring and leaves in 1973 for the family life. Their success comes despite their management’s slightly surreal associations with the Kray-associated “British mafia” – and on one scary-sounding occasion in prog-mad Italy, their Sicilian equivalent.

While he’s unapologetic about the groupie scene, he foreswears other excesses, an approach reinforced by witnessing the likes of Black Sabbath fall prey to them.

There’s no doubt that Gentle Giant saw themselves as a cut above their less musically adventurous contemporaries – with good reason in many ways – but Shulman is as full of warmth for those they befriended on their rise as he is of ire for those who crossed them.

Jethro Tull and Yes are complimented, as is Reg Dwight (the future Elton John), who briefly opened for them in their pre-Gentle Giant incarnation. Schulman is unimpressed by Syd Barrett after the Floyd man exposed a promising incognito psych single, recorded as The Moles, as having come from “shitty” Simon Dupree & The Big Sound.

Neither The Beach Boys or the Eagles come out of it too well either – despite their “masterpieces,” the former were “miserable,” “mean” and “sounded like beginners’ live; while the latter were “arrogant and obnoxious.”

Refreshingly undiplomatic? Yes. Gentle? Not so much.

Giant Steps – My Improbable Journey From Stage Lights To Executive Heights, co-written with Jon Weiderhorn, is on sale now via Jawbone.

Rocket 88 Books will publish an official 200-page hardback book telling the story of The Alan Parsons Project, in collaboration with Parsons and the daughter of his late bandmate Eric Woolfson.

The 50,000 word memoir, complete with over 150 illustrations, is being written by fan and Prog and Classic Rock contributor Joel McIver, based on archive material that even Sally Woolfson has never seen before. It’s set to arrive during 2026.

“I’ve been working for over 20 years promoting my father’s catalogue of work, as his manager for seven years before he died, then looking after his legacy for the last 16 years,” she tells Prog.

“There’s never been an official book about The Alan Parsons Project before, and the 50th anniversary in 2026 felt like the appropriate time for that to happen.”

She recalls that Woolfson, who died at 64 in 2009, “hoarded everything but never filed anything” – which meant it’s taken her years to work through his vault. “There are photos, lyric notes, documents, memorabilia as well as over 1,000 master tapes in the archives, including rare interviews.

“At the moment every box is out, given this book will cover the entire span of the APP catalogue. We’ve found material that’s never been seen before and I’m excited to share it in this wonderful book.”

The official book will be available in two editions, one of which will be signed with additional content. Rocket 88 – behind collector-quality books about Jethro Tull, ELP, 10cc, Syd Barrett and more – have launched a website where you can sign up for more information as the title’s production continues.

Those who sign up will be offered the option to choose which edition they want when pre-ordering begins, receive a discount price, have their name included in the book and receive their copy earlier than the general public, along with development updates. Full details will be provided in due course via those updates.

Woolfson adds: “It’s an important part of preserving the legacy, and particularly making sure that Dad’s role is properly understood and celebrated along with Alan’s. Together they were audio gold.

“There’s also a documentary in the pipeline – so 2026 is going to be quite a year for The Alan Parsons Project catalogue.”

Sign up for book updates at alanparsonsprojectbook.com.

A brand new biography detailing the career of Genesis founding member and keyboardist Tony Banks is to be published in February.

Tony Banks: Man Of Spells – The Magician Of Genesis has been written by Genesis biographer Mario Giammetti, and will be published through Kingmaker Publishing on February 19.

As well as a look at the musician's life and time in Genesis, the new biography also details Banks' solo career, drawing from Giametti's own interviews with Banks over the years and other key personalities in his circle.

“While there have been various books written by or about all the other major players in Genesis, there has until now never been one focused exclusively on Tony Banks," says Kingmaker Publishing's Greg Spawton. "We felt it was important to shine a brighter light on his life and career. Following the success of his two Genesis books, which we have previously published, Mario Giammetti was the compelling author to write this biography."

Tony Banks: Man Of Spells – The Magician Of Genesis is illustrated with more than 100 images, including many rare and previously unpublished photographs.

UK pre-orders.

US pre-orders.

Former Jethro Tull guitarist Martin Barre has announced dates for his book tour of the UK for November and December.

Last week Barre announced that he would publish his autobiography, A Trick Of The Memory: The Autobiography Of Jethro Tull’s Guitarist, through McNidder & Grace on November 6.

At the same time, it was announced that Barre would also be appearing at Louder Than Words literary festival in Manchester on November 16 and would be undertaking book signings in bookshops. These dates will feature a mixture of talk and music, followed by the book signings.

A Trick Of The Memory: The Autobiography Of Jethro Tull’s Guitarist traces Barre's musical journey from early days in Birmingham, playing flute and saxophone before discovering his true voice on guitar, through worldwide tours and classic albums with Jethro Tull and includes 16 pages of colour photographs.

You can see the full list of dates and times below.

Martin Barre's A Trick Of The Memory book tour dates

Nov 9: Glasgow Mitchell Library (Aye Write Festival) - 7.45pm
Nov 14: Hull Wrecking Ball - 8pm
Nov 16: Manchester Louder Than Words Festival - 2.15pm
Nov 17: Liverpool British Music Experience - 7.30pm
Nov 25: Sherbourne Winstone's Bookshop - 7pm
Dec 1: Leeds Waterstones - 7pm
Dec 10: London Rough Trade Denmark Street - 6.30pm
Dec 11: Pontefract Cat Club - 7.30pm

He’s been a knife-wielding killer and a flagwaving soldier, a cyborg bounty hunter and a Japanese samurai. He’s been mummified, lobotomised, disembowelled, set on fire, interred and dug up again (twice), and turned into a tree. He’s fought the Devil, murdered a Prime Minster and attempted to kill members of Iron Maiden onstage on numerous occasions. We’re not exaggerating when we say there’s nothing like Eddie.

From his humble beginnings as a papier-mâché mask stuck over the drum kit at early pub gigs to various towering live incarnations, via his appearance on virtually every Maiden album sleeve, single cover and t-shirt, Eddie – aka Eddie The ’Ed, aka Edward T Head, aka Edward The Great, aka (possibly) Benjamin Breeg – is absolutely integral to the history of not only Iron Maiden but metal in general. This is the story of Eddie, by the people who know him best.

Steve Harris (Iron Maiden leader and bassist): “We used to have a singer [Dennis Wilcock] who was really into Kiss and used to pull a sword through his mouth with blood capsules and all this business. When he left we thought, ‘It’s good for people to come and see that sort of thing’, but we didn’t want it to be within the band itself.”

Dave ‘Lights’ Beazley (lighting technician): “In the song Iron Maiden the lyric goes: ‘See the blood begin to flow’, so on the backdrop that we used for the pub gigs, with the help of a friend from art college, I rigged up a mask that was made from a mould of my own face, which coughed up blood in time to those lyrics.”

Steve Harris: “Dougie [former drummer Doug Sampson] used to get covered in fake blood every night. And he had blond hair so he could never get the bloody stain out!”

Dave Lights: “The Eddie that was used as the band became more famous was designed from artwork by Derek Riggs, but the original idea started with that first mask.”

Derek Riggs (original Eddie cover artist): “Eddie was supposed to be a punk. He had the mohawk part and Rod [Smallwood, Maiden manager] and Steve Harris had a little conversation, and came back and said, ‘Can you give it more hair sticking out the side?’, because their fanbase was a new layer of metal just coming through, and the punk thing wouldn’t go down very well with them.”

Steve Harris: “When Derek Riggs came along with that artwork, we were like, ‘Wow, that’s where we want to take Eddie The ’Ed!”

The illustrated Eddie’s first appearance was on Maiden’s debut single, 1980’s Running Free, but his face was shadowed as the band didn’t want to ruin the big reveal of their eponymous debut album.

Derek Riggs: “Eddie represented the idea that the youth of today were being wasted by society. He started out like that, anyway, and I made him more scary.”

Steve Harris: “We didn’t want to be on the front covers. We’re all pretty shy really, deep down. So Eddie fulfilled all of that.”

Derek Riggs: “I never knew the band very well. I had only met them a few times until The Number Of The Beast. That particular idea [the TNOTB cover] I stole from a comic book that I had read in the 70s.”

Bruce Dickinson (vocals): “Powerslave is one of my favourite album covers, possibly of all time, but certainly of Maiden. I just think it’s a classic, and it has inspired so many of our stage performances as well. It’s just like ancient Egypt itself: it’s eternal and eternally interesting!”

Derek Riggs: “[Somewhere In Time] took three months in all – I just had to stop, because I had had enough. It got into my head and I just couldn’t see anything else. I couldn’t think about anything else. It did my head in, because there are all these little details.”

Bruce Dickinson: “I had worked with Derek Riggs on the cover of [Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son], which had a touch of Salvador Dalí about it, with its slightly surreal procession of candles and a partially disembodied, skeletal Eddie. Next to Powerslave, it’s my favourite Derek Riggs cover art.”

As well as the album artwork, Eddie became a staple of the band’s live show, appearing in various formats ranging from painted backdrops to gigantic mechanical versions and lumbering walk-on roles.

Rod Smallwood (manager): “At first it was just me with an Eddie mask on. I’d just go bounding around the stage like a lunatic during the intro to get the audience worked up, and the place would go mad.”

Bruce Dickinson: “I remember when [The Number Of The Beast walk-on Eddie] was unveiled. They had a roller-shutter door, and it came up and there it was, standing there like in [1939 horror film] Son Of Frankenstein. We were, like, ‘Holy fuck! What the fuck is that?!’ That was the closest we’ve ever got to that feeling that fans get when that thing first walks onstage.”

Charlie Kail (stage set engineer, World Slavery tour): “There were some groundbreaking special effects, like the Eddie-on-a stick. It was a head, shoulders, arms and torso on a cherry picker – I think it’s still the biggest Eddie ever built.”

Steve Harris: “I’ve always liked the Somewhere In Time walk-on. That one had so much detail on it. The Trooper one is really good as well.”

Adrian Smith (guitar): “I had mixed feelings about Eddie over the years. I thought, ‘Is this overshadowing the band? It’s a big puppet, is it a bit questionable?’ We’ve had a few really dodgy Eddies over the years where I’ve thought, ‘Oh my god…’”

Iron Maiden and Derek Riggs parted company on less-than-amicable terms after 1990’s No Prayer For The Dying album. The baton was picked up by a series of artists, including Melvyn Grant, Hugh Syme, Timothy Bradstreet and Mark Wilkinson, each of whom put a different spin on Eddie.

Melvyn Grant (artist): “My approach to Fear Of The Dark was to see how sinister I could make Eddie. We’ve had all the physical violence with the blood and sharp things, now let’s instill something more psychological… I went off and produced a few pencil drawings, of which the Tree-Eddie was one. I had wanted to redesign the look of Eddie quite extensively, but [Maiden’s management company] Sanctuary said to keep it close to the original.”

Bruce Dickinson: “The [Dance Of Death] cover was also controversial. A partially finished work in progress, but Steve loved it and was not to be shifted. Personally, I still find it embarrassing… The artist was so mortified that he withdrew his name from the album credits. I didn’t blame him.”

Mark Wilkinson (artist): “I always say that the artists that came after Derek Riggs are caretakers of his brilliant creation. If you don’t respect that, then you are fooling yourself. However, there’s not much point in simply recreating the same thing over and over again… or attempting a pastiche in the same style as Derek, which would be disrespectful.”

More than 45 years after he made his first appearance above the drumkit, Eddie remains one of the most recognisable and iconic images in music.

Corey Taylor (Slipknot): “There wasn’t a dude that I hung out with that wasn’t trying to draw Eddie on their schoolbooks.”

Lars Ulrich (Metallica): “It wasn’t just the music… you had the best packaging, the coolest t-shirts, everything… it was a big inspiration for us in Metallica.”

Bruce Dickinson: “We have Eddie, so we don’t have to be the rock star. We don’t have to go and take some overdose and be found lying outside some Paris nightclub and go into rehab and have all these things and go and have, like, six porn-star girlfriends and all that shit, which is just, like, nothing to do with music. We’ve got Eddie. And Eddie is more radical and cool than any of them.”

Dicky Bell (production manager): “The kids fucking love Eddie more than they love the band. And you can see why: it’s cause he’s one of them. In their minds he’s like the Iron Maiden fan from Hell!”

Steve Harris: “Has Eddie ever done me a damage onstage? No. [The people inside the costume] usually avoid me. They normally go for the guitar players. Not that I’ve told them to, but they sidestep me.”

Bruce Dickinson: “Eddie is Iron Maiden’s mascot, monster, alter ego – call it what you will. Part supernatural, part primal, part aggressive adolescent, Eddie is a super anti-hero with no backstory. Eddie doesn’t give a fuck. He just is.”

Former Jethro Tull guitarist Martin Barre is to publish his autobiography, A Trick of The Memory: The Autobiography Of Jethro Tull’s Guitarist, through McNidder & Grace on November 6.

Barre needs little introduction to prog fans, having been the guitarist in Tull for over 40 years, from 1968 to 2012. In A Trick of The Memory: The Autobiography Of Jethro Tull’s Guitarist Barre offers candid reflections on life on the road, the highs and lows of the music industry, and the creativity behind some of rock’s most memorable moments.

The hardback book traces his musical journey from early days in Birmingham, playing flute and saxophone before discovering his true voice on guitar, through worldwide tours and classic albums with Jethro Tull and includes 16 pages of colour photographs.

"The story of Martin Barre's musical journey, from his early days in Birmingham to achieving global success with Jethro Tull and as a solo artist, is one we have long anticipated," says Pat Kent, founder of Facebook's Jethro Tull Group.

Barre will tour the UK with his An Acoustic Evening With Martin Barre And Friends show throughout December and take his A Brief History Of Tull show around Europe in April. You can see a full list of dates and ticket details below.

Barre will also be appearing at Louder Than Words literary festival in Manchester on November 16 and will also be undertaking book signings in bookshops, details of which are to be confirmed.

Martin Barre UK and EU tour dates

An Acoustic Evening With Martin Barre And Friends

Nov 6: Alnwick Playhouse
Nov 7: Lytham St. Annes Lowther Pavilion
Nov 8: Edinburgh Voodoo Rooms
Nov 10: Barnoldswick Arts Centre
Nov 11: Barnoldswick Arts Centre
Nov 12: Barnoldswick Arts Centre
Nov 18: Shrewsbury Theatre Seven
Nov 20: Exeter Phoenix
Nov 21: London Bush Hall
Nov 27: Stourbridge Town Hall
Nov 28: Shoreham By Sea Ropetackle Arts Centre
Nov 29: Southampton The 1865

A Brief History Of Tull

Apr 7: NOR Oslo Herr Neilsen
Apr 8: NOR Oslo Herr Neilsen
Apr 10: SWE Gothenberg Musikens Hus
Apr 11: DEN Copenhagen Hotel Cecil
Apr 14: GER Bonn Harmonie
Apr 15: GER Isernhagen Blues Garage
Apr 16: GER Dortmnd Das Piano
Apr 17: NED Sneek Het Bolwerk
Apr 18: NED Bergen op Zoom Gebouw-T
Apr 19: NED Helmond Cacaokade
Apr 20: BEL Veviers Spirit Of 66

Get tickets.

The restless creative spirit of Canadian prog metal quartet Voivod is the subject of a brand new biography, Always Moving: The Strange Multiverse Of Voïvod, which will be published through Radical Research on November 17.

The new biography has been written by US writer Jeff Wagner, who was the band's product manager at their label Century Media for 2018's The Wake album, and who also wrote the band's album release bios for the Voivod (2003) and Target Earth (2013) albums and the liner notes for their 40^th anniversary release, Morgoth Tales (2023).

"It’s a total honour to have written this book," says Wagner. "The band were entirely forthcoming and super-helpful with their time, as was their manager, James MacLean. I spoke to every living member – except one – for this book. I also spoke with folks like Monte Conner, Brian Slagel, Glen Robinson, Wayne Archibald, Harris Johns, Ian Christe, and members of Opeth, Cynic, Anekdoten, Virus, Deceased, Sindrome, Agalloch, Therion, Enslaved, The Accused and Gorguts – and a bunch of other folks! – to help get the most rounded, complete picture of the band’s influence and impact from people who have been close to them in a variety of capacities."

"And I held nothing back. There’s almost no stone left unturned, hence the size of the book. Even the two Appendices are total nerd-fests that I think fans will find amusing and interesting. I know I’m psyched with the book, as a fan, so I think a lot of other diehard Voïvodians will be too."

Always Moving: The Strange Multiverse Of Voïvod will be published as a 540-page book featuring a 12-page colour spread.

Pre-order Always Moving: The Strange Multiverse Of Voïvod.

Tubular Bells producer Tom Newman is to release his autobiography in September.

Fine Old Tales will be published by Dark Star Publishing on September 29 and the 232-page hardback book is described as a "brutally honest life story."

Newman made his name producing Mike Oldfield's 1973 debut album, Tubular Bells, having persuaded Richard Branson to open a recording studio and start Virgin Records. He subsequently produced a further seven of Oldfield's albums; Hergest Ridge (1974), Platinum (1979), Five Miles Out (1982), Islands (1987), Amarok (1990), Heaven's Open (1991) and Tubular Bells II (1992).

Newman's own musical career began with The Tomcats in 1966, before he joined psychedelic pioneers July alongside future Jade Warrior members Jon Feidl and Tony Duhig. He released his debut solo album, Fine Old Tom in 1975, and the well-received Faerie Symphony in 1977.

More recently, Newman appeared with a reformed July in 2009 and has been working alongside Robert Reed with his Sanctuary series of Mike Oldfield-inspired albums and with whom he worked on 2021's A Faerie Symphony II.

Pre-order Fine Old Tales.

In 2005, Audioslave released their second album, Out Of Exile, and spoke to Classic Rock about the rise of intelligent rock, making music with uncompromising integrity, and how the band pulled frontman Chris Cornell back from the precipice. "I was able to focus on something really positive," said Cornell. "Nothing else in my life was positive."

Chris Cornell is a picture of health as he enters the hotel room, his tall, lithe body wrapped snugly in jeans and white shirt.

He looks good for 40 – amazingly good, all things considered. Carrying an easy smile and a packet of cigarettes, he opens the sliding glass doors to let the smoke out and the sounds of LA’s Sunset Strip in. Life is good for Audioslave’s singer.

In an adjacent room his new wife and young baby are testimony to his newly found domestic harmony. The Cornells have flown over from their home in Paris, so that Chris can ride the media hoopla that surrounds the launch of Audioslave’s new album, Out Of Exile.

Joining him on the promo merry-go-round is guitarist Tom Morello, a fiercely intelligent and articulate Harvard graduate whose strong political convictions are evidenced by his black T-shirt baring the slogan ‘Arrest The President’.

It has been more than four years since Audioslave rose phoenix-like from the ashes of Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine. Both men are here to talk about a second album that some questioned would even get made.

Ever since Cornell teamed up with bassist Tim Commerford, drummer Brad Wilk and Morello, all ex-Rage members, scepticism has been part of the group, like a shadowy fifth member. But, like every other obstacle Audioslave have encountered, it has been overcome. Now, with Out Of Exile as proof of the group’s defiance and force, there are no longer doubts about their permanence.

For Audioslave there has never been any uncertainty. During their first discussions, Morello made his intentions clear to Cornell: “I said I’m not interested in doing a project, I want the next band I’m in to be the best band I’ve ever been in. So if you want to try something like that, then let’s jam together.”

That meeting was orchestrated by quasi-mystical producer Rick Rubin. “He was a big part of it,” Morello explains. “When Zack [de la Rocha] left Rage, Tim and Brad spent a lot of time over at Rick’s house talking about what we were going to do. Rick made the last Rage Against The Machine record, so he was in our lives a lot then. And one record we would listen to at top volume at Rick’s house was [Soundgarden’s] Badmotorfinger, and we’d go: ‘That guy’s good’.”

The approach came at an opportune time for Cornell. Since the 1999 release of his critically praised but commercially unsuccessful solo album Euphoria Morning, he had been caught in a downward spiral of drugs, depression and alcoholism. In Morello, Cornell recognised someone who didn’t judge, and who musically had been through the same highs and lows.

Cornell: “One of the main things is the experience factor, because that’s not always a given. We both had very similar experiences, and probably played similar roles in our respective bands. The other thing is that both of us had been through a lot of experiences in being in a band that were negative, that weren’t something we wanted to repeat: ‘I don’t want to have a miserable time either. I want to just do this if it’s fun, and if it’s not fun not do it’. All that stuff came out right away.”

Cornell’s stance was understandable given the pained and acrimonious dissolution of Soundgarden, the group he’d fronted for 12 years until their break-up in April 1997. For Morello, Commerford and Wilk, the demise of Rage Against The Machine had been equally turbulent, their eight-year career ending abruptly in October 2000 when de la Rocha announced he was leaving to pursue a solo career. These unhappy experiences were still fresh in the minds of the four members of Audioslave when they got together in 2001.

But whatever trepidation they may have felt was quickly dispelled by an unprecedented creative outpouring. As Wilk explains: “We went from writing three records in 12 years to writing three records’ worth of material within 24 days.”

“In the rehearsal there was no history or anchor from our previous bands,” Morello adds. “It felt like a new garage band, friends in a room: ‘How do you like this one?’. ‘How do you like this idea?’. It felt very innocent and easy to write the songs that way.”

The adjustment was different for Cornell, however. Not only was he joining three people who had a long history together, but he was also effectively replacing a very contrasting style of vocalist. “I knew if I went in and sang over something that could easily sound like a Rage Against The Machine song, it’s not going to sound anything like Rage Against The Machine,” he recalls.

The initial rehearsals proved so fruitful that the band settled into a pattern, which continued with the second album, of being able to write a new song every day. But although things were flourishing musically, the business side of things was threatening to sabotage Audioslave.

Shortly after their productive songwriting spurt, Cornell walked out. “What caved in on me was I had a lot of personal crisis stuff going on, and a lot of what we talked about in terms of this being fun and uncomplicated started to become un-fun and very much complicated by the two separate management camps, and they were disagreeing with each other and throwing the burden of sorting all of this stuff out on to the band.”

In the end, after failing to get the respective managers to resolve their issues, the band hit on a solution: they fired them. “It became staggeringly simple after that,” Cornell adds.

With new managers in place, Audioslave were able to get back to making music. With the help of Rick Rubin, they whittled the original batch of songs down to the 14 that made up their 2002 self-titled debut. The album married Cornell’s sunless, soul-searching lyrics and rasping wail to some apocalyptic riffing and spleen-tingling rhythms. The reaction was mixed; the Rolling Stone review concluded: ‘In their past lives, the members of this band were enraged. Now, fierce as they might sound, Audioslave just seem sorta engorged’.

It was hardly the first snipe at the band, who had found themselves in the cross-hairs of critics’ sights from the moment the rumours of Cornell collaborating with the ex-members of Rage were confirmed; ‘supergroup’ is a label they seem destined never to escape. It’s also not one that seems to worry them unduly.

“At this point I think it’s good,” Cornell states, “because if you can take something that absolutely only has negative connotations and present an example that’s not awful… Also, I like to point out bands like Led Zeppelin came from other bands that had success. Where ‘supergroup’ became a bad thing was in the 80s where you had Power Station and Asia and Damn Yankees, where it seemed like a convenient way to remarket the crap that these idiots already did. And with absolutely no dedication towards making great music or continuing on in a new way that’s as vital as something they did in the past. It’s just more of: ‘I miss the cameras and I miss the fans and the shows, let’s get together’.”

Both Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine were recognised for breaking new ground musically. And while Audioslave harness elements of their members’ former bands, few would cite their music as being radically innovative. It’s a point Morello is prepared to concede. “I’d say one of the reasons there may be some truth to that is because that ground was broken by those initial bands.

"The idea of making intelligent hard rock music is something that didn’t exist before Soundgarden so much; the idea of interracial hard rock bands breaking down the ethnic classifications between musics, stereotypes between musics, did not really exist before Rage Against The Machine.

"Those fertile fields that bands now sow their seed in were tilled by Rage Against The Machine and Soundgarden. We are a band now that makes music with the same kind of uncompromising integrity that we did in Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine. It does not stand in such stark contrast to the musical scene now, in part because of the work our previous bands did.”

Audioslave’s new album Out Of Exile contains the song Your Time Has Come that is a very personal reflection by Cornell on the many close friends of his who have died. In writing about the likes of Jeff Buckley, Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood and Alice In Chains’ Layne Staley, Cornell was all too aware that through his own dalliance with drugs he might easily have joined their number.

“I was in my early 20s when my first close friend died of a drug overdose, and I was devastated. He [Andrew Wood] was a creative force in music, and I felt like a kindred spirit had vanished. As time went on, that kept happening. And I think by the time it was Layne Staley [April 2002] I was Roger Waters. I’d constructed the enormous cement wall of ‘I’m not going to feel this. I don’t want to think about it. It might be me next. I don’t care. If it’s not me, great. If it’s me, I don’t care’.”

Perched as he was on the precipice, Cornell was able to pull back just in time, thanks to Audioslave, the other members of which he has openly said saved his life. “I think in the sense that at the time when we came together, and particularly the time that we reconvened and hired new management, and we were a band and I was able to focus on something really positive, nothing else in my life was positive.

"I was in a horrible relationship, I was struggling with alcohol and drugs in a way that I never imagined I would. I always felt like I was a really good person deep down, a person of integrity, the most together person in my circle of people.

"Then I became one of those people that is the least together. I was anchored by the other three guys in this band, who were very supportive in every way, in a friendship way which I needed and which I didn’t really necessarily have outside of that. It was hugely important.”

With a new lease of life, Cornell was determined to focus his energy on music, and in the process return the favour shown by the others through their faith in him. “Something that came out of that in me was that if I have a positive relationship with people I’m close to, I’m going to do my absolute best to repay that. When we go into a room to write a song, I want to contribute in a way that I feel good about personally, but I also want to contribute in a way where these guys leave the rehearsal room going: ‘God, I’m so stoked that we’re in a band with this guy’. And I think that had a huge impact on me.”

The collaborative input of each member is something they are all excited about and keen to stress. For Cornell, it’s clearly a refreshing change from past experiences. “Soundgarden started that way,” he says, “but by the time we were really making records, even from Louder Than Love, which was the first A&M record, we started splintering off and writing songs at home, and that began for me the lonely period of a lot of demoing in basements.”

Wilk, too, is aware of the improved writing process with Audioslave compared with Rage: “It’s definitely more collaborative, and it’s definitely more satisfying in that I feel that anybody can bring anything in, and if someone doesn’t like it everyone will at least still work on it and see the idea to its fruition and then decide if it works or not. A lot of times in Rage Against The Machine it was just ‘I don’t like rock’, or ‘I don’t like this riff’, and ‘Let’s not even try and make it better’. It was definitely more of a battle creatively. And that’s one of the reasons it just stopped working.”

Four years after their much-publicised and troubled birth, with a new album out and a tour under way, Audioslave believe they are only now hitting their stride. “Interestingly enough I feel like we’ve just arrived,” Wilk says. “We came from two bands that had a lot of history, so before anyone got the first record people had preconceived notions of what Audioslave was. But I feel for this record, people aren’t thinking about Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine, they’re thinking about the new Audioslave record, so it’s completely different.”

In describing the album, Wilk uses the food metaphors: “To me, the first record was the skin on the fruit. I feel like for this record, you get to bite into the fruit of Audioslave.”

Out Of Exile is a symbolic title for the new album. It suggests the creative and personal liberation Audioslave are now enjoying. With the group at an early stage of their evolution, where do they see the future taking them? “The sky’s the limit,” Morello says excitedly. From the elevated height of the Los Angeles hotel room, the sky appears very close.

This feature first appeared in Classic Rock issue 81, published in July 2005. Chris Cornell died in May 2017.

A brand new biography of one of prog's most intruguing characters, Van der Graaf Generator frontman Peter Hammill, is to be published in November.

ROCK and ROLE: The Visionary Songs of Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator by author and Prog writer Joe Banks, will be published by Kingmaker Publishing on November 21. The timely release date follows the release of the 20-disc The Charisma & Virgin Recordings 1971 - 1986 box set in September and Hammill's first liv e UK shows since 2018.

"Rock and Role... traces Hammill’s remarkable journey through the 1970s and beyond, providing an in-depth look at his music and lyrics, investigating the ideas behind his songs, and creating a portrait of Hammill as both artist and man," say the publishers. "Drawing on new interviews with key collaborators and contemporaries, and extensive research in media and fan archives, the book affirms Hammill’s unique position as a pioneer and iconoclast.

"At over 500 pages, and illustrated with hundreds of images, including many rare and previously unseen photographs, Rock and Role is both a highly readable biography and a serious critical appreciation of one of rock’s great unsung heroes."

As well as writing for Prog, Banks is the author of the acclaimed Hawkwind biography Days Of The Underground. Kingmaker have published books on Genesis and Big Big Train as well as autobiographies by Jakko Jakszyk and Mark Kelly.

All pre-orders received by October 31 will be signed by the author.

Pre-order ROCK and ROLE: The Visionary Songs of Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator.

In 2008, Marillion recorded their fifteenth studio album, the two-part Happiness Is The Road, and Classic Rock writer Jon Hotten accompanied a competition winner to the studio. Her prize? To play on the album. More foolishly, the band also allowed the journalist to play his part. This is the story of what happened.

It was the day the music died. Or rather, it was the day the music journalist died – just a little – on the inside.

It is May 2008. At Marillion’s studio, tucked away in the rural idyll of Buckinghamshire, where the band have been working on an album called Happiness Is The Road for eight months. They were supposed to have finished it in April, but it has taken on a life of its own and they have two more months to go. Their producer, Michael Hunter, has bowed to the inevitable, left home and moved in, taking up residence on a double bed a few feet from the chair he occupies for many hours of the day. Hunter wears the look of man who has not seen sunlight for a very long time.

“I try to walk to the village every morning,” he says plaintively. “‘If I get the chance.”

Today will not be that day, though, because today is not a normal day, for Mike Hunter or for anybody else here. Because today Marillion are going to do something unprecedented: they are going to allow a competition winner called Dawn to play on their record. On top of that, they are going to let a journalist play on it, too.

Marillion seem relaxed enough as they arrive for this day of days. In the tiny kitchen, Pete Trewavas puts the kettle on. Mark Kelly squeezes dressing onto his salad. Ian Mosley spills coffee down his white shirt, perhaps because he is in a darkened room and has forgotten to take off his sunglasses. Steve Rothery lugs several guitar-shaped cardboard boxes from his car into the studio.

Steve Hogarth is the last to appear, having done battle with the M4 after a night in London. He is frazzled from the traffic, and from having seen a policeman walking along Kensington High Street holding a machine gun. The incident has tripped memories of a Marillion tour of Brazil, during which the promoters employed an off-duty policeman as a security guard for the band. He was moonlighting from his day job chasing drug gangs in Rio De Janeiro. The guard was the last of his squad left alive.

Dawn, who has beaten thousands of competition entrants for this chance, is to go first. She’s playing finger cymbals on a track called Essence. It’s a nice touch: the finger cymbal is one of Marillion’s quirky signatures, a little chime heard on many of their albums. She is led through to the studio while the band watch through the glass of the control room. If she’s going to crack under the pressure, it will be now. But she doesn’t. She nails it after three or four goes, despite never having been in a recording studio before and having quite a complex count-in to deal with.

“We thought you could play the tambourine,” says Mark Kelly, turning to me. “Should be easy, shouldn’t it? You’ve been in enough recording studios.”

This is true, but all people seem to do in them is sit around on sofas, drinking and burping. This does nothing to equip you for the moment when you’re taken into a booth, given a pair of headphones and handed a musical instrument you have no experience of playing. Still, the tambourine, eh? How hard can it be? Anyone can play a tambourine.

Mike Hunter presses a button and the music begins. A line of grinning, gurning faces stare through the control room glass. Playing the tambourine is hard. It doesn’t sound hard. It doesn’t look hard. But it is hard. The problem is the bells that jingle as the tambourine is waved back and forth. If it’s waved too quickly, they don’t jingle. If it’s not waved quickly enough, they jingle too slowly.

The music in the headphones is so loud that the jingles of the tambourine sound as if they’re coming from deep underwater; tiny, muffled ‘tinks’ from the far distance. The music stops abruptly. Mark Kelly’s voice comes over the intercom.

“Are you right-handed, Jon?”

“Yes”

“Sorry, it sounds like you’re playing a left-handed one.”

There is extended laughter from behind the glass. Everyone seems to be enjoying the tambourine playing enormously, except for me. An unpleasant fear-sweat takes hold. The music begins again.

‘Effortless’ is not the adjective Marillion or Michael Hunter would apply to their working methods. There is a romantic notion that creativity should come easily, but it does not. It’s 90 per cent perspiration, digging around in the psychic dirt, mining for nuggets that come along only occasionally and that must be polished and burnished. There are no short-cuts. At work on their 15th album, Marillion know this. They begin each day with a 30-minute jam, the results of which are rigorously catalogued by Mike Hunter.

“Sometimes,” Kelly confides, “it’s just rubbish.”

“You have to kind of get that out the way,” says Pete Trewavas. “Then we play something and someone will go: ‘Remember that little bit we did on Tuesday?’, or whatever. ‘This will go with that’. Then Mike might dig it out and we’ll put it together.”

Sections of music are painstakingly constructed. Slowly they become songs.

The death rattle of the tambourine goes on. Steve Hogarth leaves the studio. Minutes later he bursts back in, holding a gun. At first it seems like a joke. But then he keeps waving it around. Maybe he got it in Rio. They’ll sell you anything there. He holds it up. It looks real.

“Put it next to his head,” suggests Classic Rock’s photographer, unhelpfully. “Do it execution style.”

He does. Very slowly, he says: “Just… put… the… tambourine… down… now… please.”

There is a pause. Then he laughs, and so does everyone else.

“Had you going, didn’t I?” he says.

“I thought you didn’t like guns,” I mutter. “This one’s good though,” he says. “Looks real.” “Yeah,” says Mark Kelly. “Be a nice headline for the mag, too: ‘Journalist shot after crap tambourine session ruins album’.”

Everyone laughs again.

“Okay, I think we’ve got enough now,” says Mike Hunter. “Would you like to hear that back?”

We do. Through the control room glass a line of heads shake and wobble with merriment. Mike places a consolatory hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “We’ve got this programme called Pro-Tools. You only have to actually come up with one good tambourine shake, and we can capture it and move it in time with the music. Honestly, it’ll sound alright. Promise.”

“That’s what he tells everyone,” says Ian Mosley.

One Saturday towards the end of August, a package drops through my door. Sender: a Mr I Mosley of Hertfordshire. Inside: Essence and The Hard Shoulder, the two discs that make up Happiness Is The Road. Track seven of disc one is called Woke Up, and it sounds horribly familiar. But hang on… It actually sounds quite good, too. There’s a waft of tambourine bells jingling merrily deep in the mix. It’s not particularly audible unless you strain yourself to listen, but there nonetheless – and even more remarkably, in time with all the other instruments.

“We were thinking of getting you a gold tambourine made,” says Kelly. ‘But then we heard what you did.” We have reassembled at the Racket Club to talk more fully about the record, which, despite the tambourine, has vindicated their decision to work so long and hard. The results are beautiful and mysterious, and with Essence in particular they seem to have distilled whatever is unique about them. It’s probably the best record they’ve made, ahead even of Afraid Of Sunlight and their last two, Marbles and Somewhere Else.

Ranged against them is an invincible tyranny of reputation. They are forever the band who made Kayleigh. Mention of their name to the general public usually elicits a response of: “Oh, are they still going?”. Just recently they were a part of an ‘80s Band’ giveaway in the Daily Mail. And yet here is this music, coming year after year in a wonderful flow that even they don’t fully understand.

They know already that their rewards for the new album will be low-key, but no less meaningful for it. They inspire fervent devotion in their fan-base.

“What we know is that our music connects with people,” says Hogarth. “I had someone telling me that we’d given him a path to live by; people saying that the music has helped them through a bereavement or a love affair and all of these things. I suppose it’s the upside of what I get for being the guy that’s not Fish – all that baggage that I carry around.”

Hogarth falls silent for a minute, considering his lot. Marillion are a band out of time, not the thing from the 80s that people think they are but instead a cult band of a new and different kind, made greater by their circumstances but constrained by them too.

“When we go off and play with other musicians, which we do sometimes, you find yourself thinking: ‘Oh, this is strange’, says Rothery. “Then we start to play together again, and we just know what each other is going to do. It sounds corny, but something magical happens.”

With the record finished, ahead for Marillion lie rehearsals for a big tour and, next year, two of their fan convention weekends, one in Canada and one in Holland. Both of them are already almost sold out.

“We need to start thinking about a set,” mumbles Mark Kelly. “There’s only about 120 songs for us to choose from.”

“Actually, do us a favour,” Steve Hogarth says to me. “Email me a list of the 20 songs you’d put on the set-list.”

“Well,” I tell him, “I can think of one straight away…”

This feature first appeared in Classic Rock 125, published in November 2008.

Autumn 1967. Lake Avenue, St. James. Suffolk County, New York State. In a house in the woods, a bunch of young men are living together in ramshackle bohemian splendour – 20-year-old students, graduates and wannabe musicians with a phobia for the 9-5, their days are spent in endless jamming and dope smoking. No one has money for utilities so the house is large, cold and damp. The windows are covered in blankets, the walls are painted black. In the living room, someone has painted a mural of Jim Morrison depicted as a strutting lion.

Residents include Donald Roeser, wizard guitarist and part-time student at Stony Brook University and Allen Lanier, a keyboard player and guitarist in the process of extricating himself from the draft. Patently ill-equipped to fight the war in Vietnam, Allen is working as an apprentice editor on industrial films. When he goes AWOL, Jeff Latham takes over.

On bass is Andrew Winters, a mordant, wisecracking New Yorker who should take credit for starting the band. Winters works as delivery boy at a drugstore in nearby Smithtown run by the father of one Samuel ‘Sandy’ Pearlman, an erudite scribbler for the ground-breaking Crawdaddy magazine who - legend has it - first uses the term ‘Heavy Metal’ in a review of The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Later on, Sandy will become the emerging group’s lyricist, mentor, conceptualist, producer and manager. His friend, another Stony Brook student and fellow Crawdaddy scribe Richard Meltzer, writes arcane verses that will be turned into songs.

The drummer drums is Albert Bouchard, a drop-out civil engineer and friend of Don’s from Clarkson College, Potsdam, NY. Albert is also an occasional contributor to Crawdaddy, writing about Buffalo Springfield. And completing this ramshackle ensemble is guitarist/bassist John Wiesenthal, who once had tuition from Pete Seeger and taught Jackson Browne some folk chords, and tall handsome tenor sax player and singer Jeff Richards.

In October 1967, Pearlman gets the boys their debut gig as Steve Noonan’s backing band at the Stony Brook University gymnasium, and since they need a name for this event, and Meltzer’s suggestion of Cow hasn’t been popular, Sandy christens them Soft White Underbelly: “after Winston Churchill’s description of Italy as the soft underbelly of the axis” he explains. Pearlman’s obsession with WW2 military history will crop up later when he writes the Blue Öyster Cult song ME 262.

Soft White Underbelly play a blues set in November at the Café au Go-Go supporting James Cotton, and do their own thing at a Christmas party in Stony Brook to try out some original material: Bouchard and Meltzer’s All-Night Gas Station, a lengthy psych jam, will mutate into A Fact About Sneakers - a song they record as Stalk-Forrest Group in 1970. Albert’s other contribution is You.

“That was a dream I had about being drafted, though I never was,” he says. “Sandy changed the words to an elaborate tale about Canadian Mounties. That became I’m On The Lamb, But I Ain’t No Sheep (which appears on the initially unreleased Stalk-Forrest Group album, and the debut BÖC album), and then as The Red and the Black (on Tyranny and Mutation).

"For the first half dozen shows, I sang and played drums using a boom microphone. Jeff Richards was a very good singer but he had terrible stage fright. It wasn’t ideal. We needed a singer. Before me they’d tried out David Roter and Jeff Kagel.”

Meltzer tried his hand too, but usually confined himself to shouting obscenities.

”Meltzer was always contrary”, says Donald. “He had no boundaries. He was like a shark: keep on moving or you drown. I liked him a lot but he had no discretion. Civil society wouldn’t function if everyone were like him. But he and Sandy did have folders full of possibly great lyrics, and we spent hours sorting them out.”

In early ’68 a longhaired stranger arrived at the house in the woods and found “what looked like elves, playing among the trees.” This was Les Braunstein, who entered the Underbelly after bumping into Pearlman’s girlfriend (later wife) Joan Shapiro while visiting friends on campus.

An aspiring songwriter and a graduate from nearby Hobart, where he’d shared anti-authoritarian conversations with fellow student Eric Bloom, Les had written a cutesy jug band track called I'm in Love With a Big Blue Frog that Peter, Paul and Mary covered as their obligatory kiddy song on Album 1700 (1967). It was more than faintly twee, yet this ditty gave Les a regular $75 a month royalty cheque, enabling him to buy a VW bus. He had other things to commend him: he’d seen The Doors play in 1967 and he’d hung out with Nico and Tim Hardin.

Smoking a joint with Joan on his bus, Braunstein played her a few songs. “She said: ‘you must meet the boys, Soft White Underbelly. My boyfriend is guiding them.’ When I turned up at St. James they were taking a break and smoking up so I joined in. We got more stoned on the bus and then I entered their rehearsal room, with all the equipment squeezed in. They played and it sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before: powerful, good and electric.

"I got very paranoid. I felt so trapped inside the music I had to run outside. Joan came to fetch me and said ‘oh, that happens to everybody.’ I went back and it was still the best thing ever – Donald, Albert, Allen and Andrew. They showed me some songs. Meltzer’s were whacked out; so odd I didn’t see how they could ever make sense, but Donald and Albert worked that out.”

Braunstein joined the “hangers-out”. Once integrated, he offered to participate and sang: “I’m in the band house, we’re all in the band house”. Sheer poetry. “Yeah, but it got more complicated. I tried out one of my college jug band songs, Rational Passional; slightly silly but it came out like the Jefferson Airplane.

The lyrics were pretty good. ‘I was at Selective Service [a US agency that maintains data on people potentially subject to military conscription] and the people made me nervous, so I asked the sergeant why they made me come. He said do just what you’re ordered, or we’ll have you drawn and quartered. You’re a lousy commie peace creep hippy bum…’”

Brausntein joined in earnest after jumping on stage at the Anderson Yiddish Theatre, Greenwich Village but doesn’t complete a set until February, a drugs bust benefit starring Country Joe & The Fish and The Fugs. Back from the army on a furlough, Lanier was horrified to find “the band house guy” upfront. “The constant, the communal context was altered,” he remembers. “I was always an outsider as a matter of style but we were great mates, also we weren’t. It was all about the band.”

Ever the open book, Les understands Al’s antipathy. “Allen Lanier did not come alone, he came with the Gothic South and the French poets. The boy was haunted. We didn’t talk much. He attacked the keyboards with an intensity that was missing in his everyday demeanour, where he was quiet, courteous and distant. We were completely non-confrontational as people.

"With the occasional exception of Andrew, nobody gave anyone else a hard time. Everyone expressed themselves about the music as it came together; that was understood as being constructive. But what was not expressed in words was never hidden in attitude. I could see it most clearly in Allen. He was frustrated at seeing the change in the band’s persona that I caused. ‘Why do we want a singer with vibrato?’ he asked.

"He had been playing and jamming with the band for months, had started to dream the big dreams, had been dragged away into the army and now comes back to find that this guy who had been singing a little in the band house was now the singer with the band. Plus life, which was obviously suffering and distress, was what to this guy? I was too happy for him. I liked Allen, but there was no place for me in his dream.”

Better gigs arrived. In April ’68 SWU supported BB King and Chuck Berry at the Generation Club, NYC, and also backed the rock and roll star.

Albert: “That was very cool. We arrived early. Chuck didn’t turn up ‘til 15 minutes before the doors opened. He plugged in and asked ‘who is the drummer?’ I was actually sitting at my drums! ‘OK. You know my songs. This is what happens: when I bring the head stock of my guitar down that means stop and the song ends, but keep the beat going in your head and be ready to come back in; when I lift up my left leg and bring it down to my right leg that means wrap it up ‘cos that’s the end of the song OK?’

“He told Andrew to play Memphis ‘but not like the record, like Johnny Rivers’ and Andy goes ‘wh-a-aat?’ That was the entire sound check. We played, then we backed him and he was incredibly loud but lucid and dynamic. What a great singer.”

In May SWU supported the Grateful Dead at Stony Brook. Albert thought “they (the Dead) were a little boring, went on and on and the vocals didn’t do anything. But Don liked Jerry Garcia and stole a bunch of ideas. They were a folky jug band and we still had an East Coast jazzy influence. Oh, but Phil Lesh came over and said ‘you’ll be great some day’. Dunno if that was a compliment.”

Finally, a break. Pearlman persuaded Elektra boss Jac Holzman to watch the Underbelly play in the Ballroom at the Hotel Diplomat, New York City, where Meltzer gave the record company boss a joint laced with horse tranquilliser. Evidently it worked because after they climaxed with All Night Gas Station Jac came flying out of the bleachers. “He jumped on stage threw his arms round me and hugged me and said ‘You’re in the family boy!’ It was a very special moment,” says Les.

Whether he liked SWU is a moot point, but Holzman viewed Les as an East Coast Jim Morrison. “Probably because at the end of the set I made up this story about going outside the Diplomat with a flower child space girl and then this dude arrives and she doesn’t like him so she pulls out these two long steel pins and I start screaming and she plunges them into her eyes.

In late ’68 SWU started recording at Elektra’s New York studio, then moved to the recently opened A&R Studio 2 in early 1969. Here they recorded enough material for an album. The songs included Mothra (Pearlman and Lanier), an early Cult-styled abstract Japanese horror monster piece, Queen’s Boulevard (Pearlman and Lanier), about the death of the classic American motorcycle, the Fleischmann’s area of New York and the joys of driving down said Boulevard, and Fantasy Morass (Meltzer and Lanier) about urinating in a public toilet with a lyric that goes “It’s not a yellow cloud, it’s not a smelly vent…”

Bark in the Sun (Meltzer and Bouchard) would become the Secret Treaties song, Cagey Cretins, when recycled with another SWU tune, Mystic Stump, something they never recorded. The original contains another fine Meltzer couplet: ‘You vomit slime, my armpits rhyme like artichoke hearts, not our own hearts.’

Pearlman and Albert wrote Buddha’s Knee, a trance song performed under the influence of LSD with a fast guitar passage that indicated how ridiculously good Donald had become on guitar.

There were also attempts at the following: St. Cecelia, Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy, Arthur Comics, Ragamuffin Dumpling (written by Meltzer about Les who used to make the band dumplings and also referred to himself as ‘the magic man’ of the song), Donovan’s Monkey and All Night Gas Station. These six were revisited and drastically altered by the Stalk-Forrest Group. Finally, there was a Braunstein folk song called Jay Jay that Albert says “was how Les wanted us to be. We thought ‘oh well, the Beatles always do some weird shit folk, so why not? We gave it our best shot, Allen especially.”

During the final recordings, with bemused producer Peter Siegel going slowly nuts, Les decided he didn’t like his vocals and erased them. According to Albert “He really did not want to sing Meltzer’s songs. He knew Meltzer didn’t like him and he didn’t like Richard’s tone because it wasn’t positive and was deliberately oblique. What it boiled down to was that Les wasn’t as serious about the music as the rest of us. He was gifted and talented but when he re-did his vocals it all got fucked up. He started by lying down on the floor twelve feet from the mic or he’d insist on singing when we weren’t there.”

The ultimatum was sotto voce. Either Les played ball, or he could do one.

Les also wanted to draft in arranger David Horowitz and add Love/Forever Changes style strings and horns. The rest of the Underbelly were aghast but Les sees it differently. “It’s true that I had played trumpet and French Horn in college, so on Buddha’s Knee I hit a fire hose against the mic to make a metallic clang, then I blew down the brass nozzle and found this great one-note waaaah and then I blacked out. Semi-conscious, I felt more involved in the Underbelly then I ever had done. I tried it first when we played with Blood, Sweat and Tears. I hadn’t taken acid at that point.”

By mid-69 Jac Holzman was getting cold feet about his $5000 investment (far from the often reported $100.000 advance), but still called the Underbelly in for a meeting with William S. Harvey, the Elektra sleeve designer. Neither man seemed particularly pleased with the recordings, which were quirky and still unfinished.

Though no official rejection was offered, bass player Andrew Winters was the most vocal dissident, since the others were non-confrontational. When Harvey, attempting to be avuncular, mentioned that ‘your album artwork doesn’t have to be like typical Elektra artwork’ Winters shot back “Well, that’s a good thing.”

In early summer, Les was “disengaged”. He played his last show with SWU when they supported The Band at Stony Brook, back in the gym, and it felt like déjà vu. Sandy Pearlman killed the SWU sessions off, terminating them at the neck because he didn’t think them releasable. “If we’d persevered, it would have been a disaster” he said. Les went off traveling with his girlfriend Kippy and the others soon enlisted their new van man and sound guy to take his place.

His name was Eric Bloom. A new chapter was about to begin.

Back before I’d ever spoken to him, I’d heard a few telling things about Alan Niven, the original manager of Guns N’ Roses.

He rarely gave interviews.

He (allegedly) gave the members of GN’R Uzis for Xmas.

He once invited Tom Zutaut, the A&R man who brought him GN’R, over for dinner one Friday, and laced his food with LSD. Tom didn’t make it home until Monday afternoon.

And when it was all over, and Axl Rose had Niven sacked, he moved to the desert – 25 miles north of Nowhere. (Literally, a town called Nowhere in Arizona.)

Niven, it seemed, was clearly as interesting and dangerous as peak-period GN’R – and had learned his culinary skills from a CIA cookbook.

Two of those stories are covered in Sound N’ Fury, a title that typographically leans into his GN’R past but is taken from MacBeth (“It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”) – a self-effacing mash up of high and low culture that is very Niven.

Niven didn’t give interviews back when he was in the thick of it and now he has stories to tell. Yes, he did treat Zutaut to a psychedelic lunch. “Roast chicken a la LSD” was a good way, he says, “to evaluate new friends by observing how well they tripped… The real soul could be exposed.”

And that trippy meal is part of the GN’R origin story: Zutaut passed the acid test, so Niven – who had already given Motley Crue and Berlin their first record deals – listened to Zoot when he pleaded with him to manage GN’R, a band of Hanoi Rocks-wannabes and junkies that no-one else would touch. And so it started. Welcome to the jungle.

Sound N’ Fury succeeds where most books about music fail: it doesn’t bother with where Niven was born, what school he went to, “and all that David Copperfield crap”. It moves from anecdote to anecdote, each chapter self-contained, in no apparent order, all killer, no filler.

Niven likens himself to an old jukebox, trotting out his anecdotal greatest hits, and the analogy is perfect: no-one wants to be stuck in the kitchen at a party with some old guy who starts his story with when he was born, after all.

It was something I noticed years ago when I was Editor of Classic Rock magazine and scored his first interview in years. He would do it, he said, but only by email. Most email interviews are dry, the answers abrupt: Niven’s were detailed, open, and very indiscrete.

Years later, he's still ruffling feathers. This book was originally scheduled to come out in July, but has been moved back to September, amid rumours that Axl's lawyers are trying to block publication. You can preorder it now on Amazon.

Niven tells it like it is/was – and writes like Mickey Spillane stubbing cigarettes out on the hard-boiled corpse of James Ellroy.

The stories in Sound N’ Fury are told with skill, wry detachment, wisdom – and humour drier than a Cohiba Behike.

Niven’s view of it all is almost Dickens-like: He takes you inside the chaos of Guns N’Roses and Great White (who he concurrently managed and wrote songs for), and into the boardroom. From the squalor of drug dens to lunch with David Geffen, to inside the courtroom for the Adler Vs GN’R battle, this is the music business from top to bottom – corrupt, crooked, and frequently funny and outrageous.

There’s the comical hunt to understand where Great White singer Jack Russell is hiding his drugs, or the time he had the LAPD arrest Axl Rose and bring him to the L.A. Coliseum, just so the singer would make the show on time. This is what it’s like to be the responsible grown-up in charge of a gang of reprobates.

In a chapter called The Missing Million, Izzy Stradlin, paranoid that someone has stolen a million dollars of GN’R money, goes AWOL with three-quarters of a million dollars in a cashier's cheque stuffed in his sock. Niven tracks him down to New Orleans where violence follows – and he realises the extent to which he’s losing his own mind.

Another chapter called The Calls In The Night, is about just that: The phone calls that disturb Niven’s sleep are to get people out of jail, or to visit people in hospital (“I’m just vomiting blood. Lots of it”), to listen to a panicked Slash after his friend Todd Crews dies in front of him from an overdose. Most biographies don't have this much drama in the whole book, let alone one chapter. Niven underplays it, which gives it more power.

There are snakes in the toilet, sharks in the board room, and coyotes ready to pick on your bones if you stay still long enough. “If you want it, you’re gonna bleed,” sang Axl and these pages are blood-soaked.

“No-one died on my watch,” says Niven, with pride. It’s a bloody miracle.

Sound N' Fury is scheduled to be published 18 September. Preorder it now on Amazon.

Gentle Giant frontman and record industry executive Derek Shulman will publish his autobiography, Giant Steps, through Jawbone on October 7.

Subtitled 'My Improbable Journey From Stage Lights To Executive Heights', and co-written by US music writer Jon Wiederhorn, Giant Steps tells Shulman's story in over 300 pages, featuring rare and previously unseen photos. It also boasts a foreword written by veteran music producer Tony Visconti, whoi produced the first two Gentle Giant albums.

Shulman chronicles his remarkable life and career surrounded by music and creativity in many forms, starting with him as a youngster confidently telling his schoolteacher he would grow up to become a star, through early forays in the 1960s pop and r&b group Simon Dupree & The Big Sound, then pushed rock music to the outer edges in the 1970s as frontman of progressive rock pioneers Gentle Giant.

Following the end of Gentle Giant, Shulman moved into the record business, taking on senior roles at labels like Polygram, ATCO, and Roadrunner Records. There, he signed and developed artists including Bon Jovi, Dream Theater, Slipknot, Pantera and Men Without Hats, while also helping to revitalise the careers of AC/DC, Bad Company and others.

"Derek Shulman was there before there was a there," Jon Bon Jovi recalls. "We grew together as a team. We learned as we lived. He was the one real A&R man that we could count on when we needed him."

Pre-order Giant Steps.

There aren't many stories from the metal world over the last decade that are quite as surprising or impressive as the rise of Malevolence. Since grabbing the attention of the UK underground with their superb 2013 debut album, Reign Of Suffering, they’ve crept slowly but surely into a position where they’re filling some of the most prestigious venues in the country and stealing the show at every festival stage they set foot on.

Not bad for a bunch of Sheffield hardcore kids with no gimmicks or obvious mainstream crossover appeal. Against all the odds, it’s not impossible to believe that Malevolence could be on the brink of becoming the next big shock success story in heavy music, à la Lorna Shore or Knocked Loose.

If that’s something that has entered this band’s consciousness, then they’re certainly not showing it on Where Only The Truth Is Spoken, the fourth and unquestionably most important album of their career thus far. Because, where many artists evolve, change and adapt to capitalise on gaining a larger profile, Malevolence are essentially still doing the same thing as they were over a decade ago. That might be a cause for disappointment with some artists, but this band have been so good at their particular brand of sludgy, moody, crushing hardcore that there’s no reason to desire anything else from them.

So effortless is their grasp on the sound that you get the impression that guitarists Josh Baines and Konan Hall were kicking out crushing Crowbar-meets-Hatebreed riffs while still in the womb. Case in point is album opener Blood From The Leech, which sets the stall out perfectly with a twisting, turning, cranium-chattering groove and frontman Alex Taylor’s gruff, bile-soaked growls.

Originality, growth... nah, not a bit of it, and why would you when you can chuck out the same wonderfully irresistible grooves and pit-starting aggro that only Malevolence can do? That said, there is a bit more to Malevolence than just assault and battery. The otherwise snarling Counterfeit also features their other great weapon for the first time on this record: the melodic vocals of Konan, giving the song a sober and aching feel before the bomb is detonated once again. It’s even more present on Salt The Wound, which sits somewhere between a Corrosion Of Conformity ballad and prime Lamb Of God. One-trick ponies they are not.

The comparison with their legendary recent tourmates is hammered home even more comprehensively when Randy Blythe turns up on the fist-swinging, Earth Crisis-esque In Spite. The production job by Lamb Of God, Trivium and Korn producer Josh Wilbur is immense, making Where Only The Truth Is Spoken the best-sounding album of Malevolence’s career so far.

So, for what will surely be one of the most anticipated metal records of 2025, it’s ultimately just business as usual for Malevolence. More people are destined to come onboard, their profile will certainly rise once again, and the only thing that looks like staying the same is the sky-high quality of their output.

Where Only The Truth Is Spoken is out this Friday , June 20, via Nuclear Blast

The winter of 1977 was fierce on the East Coast of the USA. A thick layer of snow engulfing the territory between Boston and New York, the freezing environment that was to be the killing ground for two of Britain and Ireland’s biggest rock bands: Queen and Thin Lizzy.

Queen were at the height of their creative powers, having captured the world with Bohemian Rhapsody and A Night At The Opera, now consolidating their position with Someone To Love and A Day At The Races.

Thin Lizzy, too, were no slouches. The Boys Are Back In Town and its parent album Jailbreak had finally given them chart status, and this was sitting well with an awesome live reputation. Don’t Believe A Word and Johnny The Fox emphasised their intention to stay around a while. Live And Dangerous, which would turn out to be rock’s definitive live album, was just round the corner.

It was sheer bad luck and circumstance (on Lizzy’s part) that led to them touring the US with Queen. An earlier tour had been cancelled when Phil Lynott contracted hepatitis just as they were nudging coast-to-coast fame, and when the time came to cross the Atlantic again, guitarist Brian Robertson, a young Scot with an unfortunate attitude, decided to pick a fight with the wrong man in the Speakeasy the night before they were due to fly out. The upshot: a broken bottle slashed the tendons on Robbo’s right hand. Tour off.

Forced to stay in the UK, they went to a party at Advision Studios, where Queen hosted a playback of A Day At The Races. Lizzy guitarist Scott Gorham and Phil Lynott ended up in deep conversation with Brian May and Roger Taylor. Queen were big fans of Thin Lizzy. During photo sessions with Mick Rock, they insisted that Vagabonds Of The Western World, Lizzy’s last album as a trio (Lynott, drummer Brian Downey and ex-guitarist Eric Bell), was played to help them relax. Now, at Advision, both bands talked enthusiastically about touring America together.

With Gary Moore returning to the Lizzy fold in place of Robertson, both bands found themselves in Boston, a city that was special to Queen and especially to Brian May. The band were big mates with Aerosmith, and it was in this city that they prepared themselves for US tours. Lizzy were the support band on the tour, playing an hour-long set compared to Queen’s one hour and 45 minutes.

As support, they were under the usual restraints: no thunderflashes, no wandering into restricted areas of the stage marked only for Queen use. One night Gary Moore broke out of Lizzyland and into Queendom, delivering a blistering solo in the process that brought the crowd to its feet. He was warned not to do that again. There was no animosity between the bands, though. Lizzy saw it as a bit of a learning curve.

“There were about a dozen bands that wanted to do this tour with us,” said Roger Taylor. “We thought that Lizzy suited our audience better than any of the others, and they’re probably better than any of those bands anyway. I mean, there’s no point in making it easy for yourself. We wanted a good all-round show. It’s a good tour for both bands anyway. Lizzy playing to tremendous audiences, 10-20,000 a night.

“I’m probably biased, but this is the best line-up around. As a rock’n’roll fan, I would come and see this show if it came to my town. Definitely!”

Scott Gorham was pleased with the match. “It’s a good one for us because we’re playing in a lot of places we’ve never played before and we’re playing in places where they haven’t even played our record, so that’s the challenge. Obviously there’s a bit of competition, but our aim is not to blow the ass off Queen. We got out to blow the asses off the audience and win them over because it’s Queen’s audience, though I’m sure we’ve sold a lot of tickets.”

I joined the Queen/Lizzy tour in New York and was taking in Madison Square Garden, Nassau Coliseum, Syracuse Civic Center and, finally, the Boston Garden. As an avid Lizzy and Queen fan, it was a dream tour. Never having seen Gary Moore during his earlier (brief) stint with Lizzy, I was keen to see how he would fit into the setup. He was a hired gun this time, taking over from the popular Robbo, and now having to play Robbo’s set pieces and solos. How would this sit with Moore?

I shouldn’t have worried. Moore’s input reflected his own effervescent style, adding a powerful injection of axe style. He was also an inspiration to Gorham, who seemed content to play second fiddle to Robertson but now came out of his shell.

“I thought it was going to be a real tough one,” Gorham considered. “It took Brian and me two years to get to where we were as dual lead guitarists, and when we decided that Brian was out, I was a little bit more freaked than anybody else. But after just 11 days rehearsal with Gary, it clicked. Brian was more into playing lead guitar, and after a while he lost some interest in the harmony things so we were starting to do less and less of it. But Gary likes it as much as I do, so that reintroduced the harmony guitar work into Thin Lizzy.

“Playing with Gary is the happiest I’ve been for a long, long time. It’s like breathing fresh air again. I guess it was kinda getting stale for a while. I know that on the last English tour, I was getting pretty depressed with a lot of those gigs. I would go back to the dressing room and I wouldn’t talk to anybody, and just go back to the hotel and lock myself in there.

“There was really a lot of heavy raving going on. People were losing control of themselves, and it wasn’t making for good music. It seemed sometimes that just a lifetime of noise was coming out, although we did have our nights when we came off and felt great. Brian was drinking pretty heavily, and I was going a bit crazy, too, and Phil, of course, still had hepatitis and he would get depressed.

“So this whole thing is just one big blast of fresh air, where everybody has perked themselves out of the staleness. We’ve got a new vibe in the band now. When we walk on stage, we have a great time again. It’s like a whole brand new thing, with 100 per cent more music coming out of it now.”

It was Thin Lizzy’s first tour of the American East Coast and you could smell the disappointment in the dressing-room after the first gig at Madison Square Garden when they felt that they didn’t do their music justice. They had, said Lynott, treated Madison Square Garden as just another gig. The disappointment was such that Lizzy wouldn’t go back on to do their encore; they didn’t feel they deserved it.

It was the same story at Syracuse, in New York State: Moore had difficulty with his guitar, damaged earlier in the day, and never settled down, while Scott Gorham was just a little too laid-back for comfort. Lizzy went down well at both places, but for this band, it’s the sub-standard gig that breeds the excellent one, and it was significant that on the nights following the Garden and Syracuse, Lizzy went on to play concerts full of controlled aggression and anger. They meant business and were taking no prisoners.

This was especially true of the gig at Nassau Coliseum, another one in front of 20,000 fans, and all staunch Queen followers. Lizzy were forced to work hard to win the support of the audience, a challenge they thrived on. They simply battered the crowd into submission, and fully earned their encore. The real clincher at the gig came with the drum solo of Brian Downey during the riffy Sha La La, and the crowd wasted no time in showing their appreciation for Downey’s energetic wrestling bout with his kit.

From then on in, it was Lizzy’s gig, ending with Baby Drives Me Crazy, which thankfully evoked the right ‘baby baby baby’ response from the audience, instead of the embarrassing silence of the previous night at Madison Square Garden, and encoring with Me And The Boys Were Wonderin’ How You And The Girls Were Gettin’ Home Tonight – still the best encore in the world and, with Moore adding his own touches, better than ever. The atmosphere in the dressing room was much more positive than the previous night, with Lynott triumphantly announcing: “We showed ‘em. We made an impression tonight all right. Follow that.”

Three nights later they were in Boston, a city they’ve never played before and which, apart from The Boys Are Back In Town, is unfamiliar with their music. This time, Lizzy took only five minutes, and, by the end of Massacre, the second number in the set, they sensed that it was their gig. Lynott, for one, was showing more aggression, and portrayed his tough man persona to the hilt. Playing in front of Queen audiences, there was no real danger that Lizzy would blow Queen off the stage. But they did make Queen work harder than they have ever had to. Queen had been getting a hard ride from the American rock critics this time around, the majority of whom had sided with underdogs Lizzy.

“The local press has been almost unanimously anti-us,” Brian May complained. “But it is very unpredictable, because usually the local guy who gets sent along from the local newspaper doesn’t really know what’s going on. Constructive criticism is healthy but I don’t like the fashionable easy slagging-off that tends to happen a lot, and a lot of these local journalists pick it up from the big guys and they want to be famous, too, so they go in and slag off the big band. I think it’s all on a very childish level.”

Nor are Queen worried that many critics attempt to play them off against Lizzy. They view that as “a false rivalry”. As Roger Taylor said, it was inevitable. May and Taylor, in particular, were close to Lizzy, and often went out drinking together after gigs. Taylor’s allegiance to Lizzy’s hectic lifestyle is obvious, as I witnessed when I went to his room at the plush Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

Taylor had built a Scalextric racing kit through two of the rooms and – suitably lifted by champagne and whatever else was available – he was having the time of his life. The man was a born rock’n’roller. Brian May was a much quieter person and enjoyed hanging out with Lizzy because he is into that type of hard-rocking band. He and Lynott got on very well together, and May was keen to play on Phil’s solo album.

Freddie Mercury and John Deacon, on the other hand, kept themselves detached. Deacon had his wife and child on the road, and that, coupled with his natural tranquility, made him almost inaccessible. Mercury, meanwhile, was playing the star card to the max. At airports he didn’t mingle with the rest of the band or with Lizzy.

Instead, Freddie would sit at another part of the lounge, accompanied by his friendly neighbourhood masseur and other friends. And, true to his adorable camp nature, he wouldn’t do interviews, as he explained to me at one after-show party. Eyeing me from the other side of the room, he sauntered over, gave my bum a gentle pat and whispered: “Harry, dahling, I’m so sorry about the interview. But I’m just not giving them anymore… no exceptions.” And with that, he disappeared into his fawning throng.

It’s always dodgy covering your favourite bands, especially if there’s a flavour of criticism. I found this out a couple of weeks after the article appeared in Melody Maker. I’d been to the Rainbow Theatre to see Elton John and spotted Queen’s May and Taylor in the audience. Up I went to say hello. Taylor was his usual affable self. Brian May, on the other hand, had seen my piece and wasn’t best pleased.

“Nobody blows us off in Boston,” came the opening salvo. “Boston is our town. Nobody blows us off and Thin Lizzy didn’t. You weren’t even there. You left with Lizzy before we came on.” Which I hadn’t, but what can you do? May apologised for the outburst later, but at least he was passionate in defence of his band. Queen went on to become bigger everywhere else in the world… except the States.

Thin Lizzy never really broke America. Gary Moore threw a tantrum in the middle of the next – you guessed it – American tour and left after one album, Black Rose. Phil Lynott learned one thing from the Queen tour. Having spotted how pampered Freddie Mercury was on the tour, he decided to have some of the same and got more and more spoiled with each subsequent Lizzy tour.

Germany, 1979. The Big Man is ruffled.

Here we are, 40 minutes into the set. This place should be in uproar. The seats should be reduced to matchwood. The audience is enthusiastic but, apart from a couple of extremists on the wings, remains fixed to the seats. Nevertheless, it’s claimed that they’re enjoying themselves. “The Hamburg audience,” the promoter assures us, “it is very hard to get them on their feet.” Hamburg’s shyness plainly irritates Phil Lynott. Earlier, in an uncharacteristic fit of temper, he threatened to cancel the gig altogether when the local fire chief declared that Lizzy could not use their flash bombs within the hallowed interiors of the Musichalle.

“Tell your boss,” Lynott muttered at a harrassed emissary, “that if we can’t use them then we’re not goin’ on.” Phil’s peculiar outburst wasn’t exactly taken seriously by the rest of the band. Gary Moore was busy outside cavorting with a friend, Brian Downey sipped champagne, and Scott Gorham dozed on the couch – the night he’d popped 10 times the doseage of sleeping tablets that he intended to take. Lynott, though, persisted with the charade, determined to knock the fear of God into the Germans.

His anger had been fuelled by the news that there would be no soundcheck. It would be a late start, 10.30 pm – two hours later than any other night – because in an adjoining hall there was a piano recital and it was feared that this loud rock music might interfere with the audience’s enjoyment. At this announcement, Lynott turned reddish-black with rage. “A piano recital?” He heard right. “No sound-check because of a piano recital! Fook that. We’re usin’ the flashes, no matter what the fookin’ fire chief says. Okay, Finbar.”

Finbar is in charge of the lights and effects. One of his lackeys had just dismantled the fireworks, having been informed that they would not be needed. “A fookin’ piano recital.” Phil strode around the dressing room. “Jesus. We’re a rock’n’roll band, not a fookin’ showband. These people have come to see the full Thin Lizzy show, an’ they’re gonna see it.”

Lizzy went on and used their flashes. Perhaps the hall officials headed for the nearest bomb shelter, because they didn’t interfere with the show. But, by then Lynott had other things on his mind. You could almost hear his brain click: “Jesus, what do we have to do to get these people on their feet? But, by Cowboy Song – “We’re gonna try an’ rock you with this one” – he was obviously overcome by the situation. For a second he stepped out of the spotlight and out of tune. “It’s okay, amigos,” he sang sweetly. “YOU CAN LET YOURSELVES GO!” 10 minutes later, the audience looked as if they were actually enjoying themselves. The relief was palpable.

Backstage, Lynott applied the old football adage. “Wait’ll we get them at home,” he said. Next stop, Saarbrucken, is a sneeze on the road from Frankfurt to Paris, the sort of place you want to beam out of instead of waiting for the next train. If you want to measure Lizzy’s low-key reputation in Germany, consider that I came across Phil Lynott in the car park, wondering when the audience was going to come, and from where.

Lynott and company cast a single glance at industrial Saarbrucken and decided that, instead of staying put that night, they’d move on to Frankfurt 200 kilometres away, after the gig. Throughout the Lizzy organisation, it was generally felt that Saarbrucken might not recover from a night of Philip Lynott. The gig itself was a solid if unspectacular Thin Lizzy performance, most notable for an impromptu version of Whiskey In The Jar.

Ever since that old standard reappeared at Hammersmith Odeon on the last UK tour, its performance has seemed to be an indication of Lizzy’s pleasure with their audience. Later, sound engineer Pete Eustace approached the band about sound problems they’d suffered in the venue. “You and acoustic halls don’t mix very well,” Pete offered. “I thought I was going to get knifed out there. People were yelling at me to turn it down.” Gorham disagreed. “At the front they were lovin’ the hell out of it.” “Yeah, but it’s cannon fodder to them.” Eustace counters, determined to impress his point upon the band. “At back the cotton wool was falling out of people’s ears.”

“That wasn’t cotton wool,” Gary Moore smartly comments. “That was their brains.” Asked why they played Whiskey In The Jar, after fighting it off for so long, Lynott simply counters that Gary Moore knows the song. But doesn’t it indicate that Lynott’s attitude has mellowed recently? No, claimed Lynott. In the wake of the success of Live And Dangerous, won’t Lizzy find it harder to enforce the continual progression upon which they’ve always insisted? After all, their set was still leaning towards Live And Dangerous – Phil made no apologies for that.

“I’m progressing the way I’ve always progressed,” he said. “When we started off, we’d sing everybody else’s numbers. Then, gradually, we introduced our own songs, dropping favourites as we went along, until half the set was original. And that’s what I’m doin’ now, only we’re not goin’ fast enough for certain people. But I’m bearing in mind that we have a very large following of loyal Lizzy supporters – and for us to have a radical change, which we don’t really want to do yet, would be stupid. We can’t totally ignore the fact that Live And Dangerous is our most successful album.

“The next tour we do will be another step away from Live And Dangerous. We’re gonna move away from that era with Brian [Robertson] and into another one with Gary… Dependin’ on how long we stay together. The pressure broke up the band before. It could easily break this one. I don’t think that we’re one of these bands that are gonna last for ever and ever. We could break up at any time… But don’t be writing our epitaphs yet because, as far as I’m concerned, we’re just starting now. Gary, for the first time, has given full commitment.

“I want to develop more as a songwriter and an artist of some sort. I want to get better and better at it, and I honestly believe that I am improving. But whether I actually move at the rate of speed that people want me to is another thing. Graham Parker hit it right on the head – Squeezing Out Sparks. That’s what it’s all about. What I can tell you is that the band is goin’ through a really creative period at the moment. Things are very positive for us.”

A standard criticism of Lizzy is that they lack the ambition to be a truly huge band. Phil refutes the implication outright. “The point is that we reach a climax with, say, Vagabonds Of The Western World. The pressure of success cracks Eric Bell up. He doesn’t want to fly to Paris to mime to Whiskey In The Jar. We do another three albums and we finally get success with Jailbreak. With the success of that album, we just end up talking about drink, fights and love-lives, and I get hepatitis. We overcome that and meantime we’re recording and building again and we have success with Live And Dangerous, which was to seal an era.

“To some casual observer looking in from outside, they can disregard the kids that have followed us all the way through and have made Live And Dangerous a successful album. I’m not talking just about a double platinum album. I’m talking about an album that was artistically very good. Then people say, ‘Now Thin Lizzy have done that, now give its something different.’

“Well, man, if we were to go out and play a totally original set, that’d be a con. I’m not sayin’ that we’re pandering to the kids by goin’ out and playin’ Live And Dangerous every night, but they have made it platinum and we have to play it to them. But, at the same time, we’re sayin’ that we’re gonna do new songs to show that we are a new band; that by hook or by crook, we’ll be droppin’ the old numbers and they’ll he dropped fast and furious. The end of our set will always just be playtime. The serious part is the early part of the set, the first three-quarters, where we’re playin’ for the music.”

I casually enquire of Lynott where Lizzy might go from here. It is, it seems, the question of the year. “A lotta people are worried about where we’re goin’ from here, and constantly they seem to be sayin’ ‘Give us a new direction.’ ‘Do this.’ ‘Do that.’ ‘This is not what we want from Thin Lizzy.’ And I say, ‘Fuck ‘em, every one of them.’ It’s a well-known fact that when a band gets big, they go for the band. The knives get drawn.

“The point is that we have always controlled our own career. And that’s what we’re doing now. Everybody’s talkin’ about Lizzy as a band that’s been around long time, whereas I think that it’s just the start ‘cos Gary’s in the band now. I don’t feel that I should defend Black Rose. From nobody. Black Rose is the start of a change. I can hear a definite change on Black Rose. Our last recorded album was Bad Reputation. There’s a hell of a difference between that and Black Rose.

“Y’know the way people tell you that when you have millions, there’ll be millions of people there to tell you how to spend it? That seems to be the same with success. There seems to be a million people tellin’ us how to use our success. How we should find this ‘new direction’ and how ‘Phil has lost the humour in his writin’.’ I never thought Massacre was that funny a song, you know? I thought it was pretty vicious myself.

“People are sayin’ that they want me to be their joker. Well, I’m no dancin’ ni***r for them. Obviously I’m over-reacting because the press has had a field day on me and my private life. I don’t like guttersnipes that take photographs with telescopic lenses. ‘The people have a right to know.’ Bollocks!”

Cookie is a leading figure in the Frankfurt rock community. Once responsible for booking major bands into the city, by 1979 his interest was confined to a couple of clubs. Cookie first met Lizzy when he booked the band, as a four piece with Gorham and Brian Robertson, into the Zoom Club a now-defunct heavy joint in Frankfurt.

Lizzy remembered the faith he showed in them, and renewed the acquaintance when they came back to Germany this time round. Cookie had a pool table in the front room of his city-centre home. At 6am, after a night spent in his club, we’re invited there for a game. Three hours later, Lynott and I have breakfast before going to bed, shattered. I remember him mumbling something like “It’s gonna be a wild three days,” as we say good morning.

The latest Thin Lizzy album, Black Rose, featured a track called Got To Give It Up. It extols the virtues of clean living, with Lynott suggesting that he (or the character in the song) intends to give up drugs and drink, among other excesses. At 9am on a Monday morning, after a night like that, the song doesn’t carry such a sincere ring.

“I’m being a bit cynical with Got To Give It Up,” Lynott admitted later in the day. “How many times do you say you’re gonna give something up and you don’t? It’s that perpetual thing where you can’t break the habit. I mean, I’m trying to be really honest in the song. Like on With Love, too. I wanted to achieve total honesty and also write a love song, and I say ‘This Casanova’s days are over, more or less.’ It’s the ‘more or less’ that’s the honest bit. It shows the human elements, the wanting.

“When I was writing those songs, those were the moods I was trying to capture. I did mean what I said. It’s honest contradictions. If my life was a simple black and white” – he chuckles at the irony – “if it was just straightforward, it would be easy to write songs. I wouldn’t wrestle with lyrics at all. I would just have to say, ‘I love you, the sky is blue.’

“But it’s not like that at all. It’s all so much more complicated. Got To Give It Up is to do with trying to give up bad habits – when you know that you don’t really stand a chance.” But the song really lays the addiction on the line. There’s so much desperation in its tone.

“Yeah, but it’s not just me. It’s relevant to a lot of people. I try to give these things up. I really do try, with all the sincerity I can, for brief periods, to give it up. “I don’t condone drugs, really, but I know why artists take drugs. They take them to experience, to go to the edge. Why do people climb mountains? To go to the edge. People always want to go to extremes. And if you go to the edge, you must be prepared to fall off. And lots of guys have.”

So it’s inevitable?

“Well, some people don’t need it at all – but seemingly all the artists that I rate have, one way or another, gone to the extremes. Some made it back and wrote about that experience, and others didn’t. To this day I’d love to hear what Hendrix would have done, or what Elvis would have done after their experiences.

“Now, lest you are mistaken,” he says, “I myself don’t take drugs.”

This feature was first published in Classic Rock issue 83 (Summer 2005)

A brand new Pink Floyd biography, Pink Floyd Shine On: The Definitive Oral History, by noted Floyd biographer Mark Blake, will be published through New Modern on October 9.

It's the first oral history of Pink Floyd as told by the band, friends and associates through new, exclusive and previously unpublished material, including letters from their late founder member Syd Barrett, written to his girlfriend in 1965/66, which reveal his intimate thoughts on the band, their very first recording session, his worries about leaving art college and much more.

Blake, who has also written for Prog and Classic Rock, and who published the respected and best-selling Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story Of Pink Floyd in 2007, since updated in 2013 and 2017.

The author also draws upon previously unpublished interviews with Pink Floyd’s past and present surviving members, David Gilmour, Roger Waters and Nick Mason, and their former bandmate, the late Richard Wright.

"I first saw Pink Floyd and their famous wall at Earls Court in 1980," says Blake. "It was an impressive piece of rock’n’roll theatre, made more impressive by the fact that I was fifteen years old. Over three decades later it’s been a pleasure and a privilege to tell the group’s story in their own words. My hope is that all readers – from the most committed super-fan to someone just discovering Pink Floyd’s music – enjoy a compelling and immediate experience of one of the most important bands in the world."

The release of Pink Floyd Shine On: The Definitive Oral History coincides with Pink Floyd’s 60th anniversary, the 50th anniversary of their multi-platinum-selling Wish You Were Here album, and the 20th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s reunion performance at the Live 8 charity concert.