Slipknot have announced a 2027 world tour that will see them headline the biggest venues of their entire thirty-year career. Taking place from July to September, the tour will fill stadiums in cities around the world including London, Toronto, Nashville, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Santiago and Bogotá.

Dubbed, the (sic)est Stadium Tour, support at the shows will come from the likes of Bring Me The Horizon, Lorna Shore, Acid Bath, Lamb Of God, Polyphia and Motionless In White. The first show of the tour is scheduled to take place on Saturday, July 3 at the biggest concert venue in the UK, London's Wembley Stadium, with a special fan event taking place in the area to mark the announcement of the show this afternoon.

Supporting Slipknot at Wembley Stadium will be Marilyn Manson, rising deathcore heavyweights Lorna Shore and metalcore veterans Hatebreed.

See the full list of Slipknot's 2027 tour dates and supports below. For all ticket details, head to the official Slipknot website.

The tour announcement follows the recent surprise-release of brand new Slipknot single Arsenal, the band's first new song in four years. Last month, the Iowan metal icons confirmed that longtime DJ Sid Wilson has left the band.

Manson's appearances on the Slipknot tour will mark some of his biggest shows since the wave of sexual assault and abuse allegations against him that emerged in 2020, with the singer having been embroiled in numerous lawsuits related to the allegations over recent years. He is currently scheduled to stand trial in November 2027 as part of a sexual assault and battery lawsuit involving his former assistant, Ashley Walters. Manson has categorically denied any wrongdoing in relation to all allegations.

Slipknot 2027 (sic)est stadium tour dates

Jul 03: London, Wembley Stadium, UK

Jul 16: Washington, DC Nationals Park ~%
Jul 18: Queens Citi Field, NY ~%
Jul 21: Montréal Parc Jean Drapeau, QC ~^@
Jul 23: Toronto Rogers Stadium, ON ~^
Jul 25: Chicago Soldier Field, IL ~$
Jul 28: Hershey Hersheypark Stadium, PA ~!
Jul 31: Boston Fenway Park, MA ~!
Aug 03: Nashville FirstBank Stadium, TN ~^
Aug 06 Houston Daikin Park, TX ~+
Aug 09 Commerce City Dick's Sporting Goods Park, CO ~=
Aug 13 Inglewood SoFi Stadium, CA ~=
Aug 15 San Francisco Golden Gate Park, CA ~&=
Aug 18 Phoenix Chase Field, AZ ~&

Sep 4 São Paulo The Town, Brazil*
Sep 8 Buenos Aires Estadio Huracán, Argentina #
Sep 12 Santiago Estadio Nacional, Chile #
Sep 14 Lima Estadio Nacional, Peru #*
Sep 16 Bogotá Vive Claro, Colombia #

# Marilyn Manson and Hatebreed supporting
~ Bring Me The Horizon supporting
% Acid Bath supporting
! Lorna Shore supporting
^ Kublai Khan TX supporting
@ Vended supporting
$ Lamb of God supporting
+ Polyphia supporting
= Loathe supporting
& Motionless in White supporting

Rock icon Rod Stewart has announced that he is retiring from touring for good, with his final shows due to take place next year. Taking in shows across the UK, Ireland and mainland Europe, Rod's farewell tour - dubbed The Final Encore - will kick off on April 23 in Dublin, before finishing up on July 24 in Hannover.

“My dear friends, The time has come to say farewell to life on the road," says the man himself in a statement accompanying the news. "After more than six decades, The Final Encore will most definitely be my last. I’ve been singing the music I love since I was 19 years old, and I’ve had the privilege of taking it around the world to all of you.

"It has given me a life beyond anything I could ever have imagined, and I hope I’ve given you some fond memories in return. So, may I take this opportunity to thank you for making this extraordinary life possible. I hope you’ll join me.

The announcement comes a few weeks after Rod was forced to cancel all remaining shows on his most recent tour after undergoing a routine coronary stent procedure. The Faces frontman had already cancelled some previous shows on the tour due to health issues.

See the full list of dates for Rod Stewart's Final Encore tour below. Support on UK and Ireland dates will come from Howard Jones. Tickets for the shows will go on sale first via a Fanclub presale on Tuesday, 29 September, followed by local presales and then, finally, a general sale on Friday October 2. Information on all tickets can be found at Rod Stewart's official website.

Rod Stewart Final Encore tour dates 2027

Apr 23: Dublin 3Arena, Ireland
Apr 27: Belfast SSE Arena, UK
Apr 29: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
May 04: Birmingham Utilita Arena, UK
May 06: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
May 11: London The O2, UK
May 28: Amsterdam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
May 29: Antwerp AFAS Dome, Belgium
Jun 01: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Jun 03: Düsseldorf PSD Bank Dome, Germany
Jun 06: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Jun 09: Helsinki Veikkaus Arena, Finland
Jun 11: Rättvik Dalhalla, Sweden
Jun 13: Trondheim Sverresboro, Norway
Jun 15: Bergen Plenen, Norway
Jun 18: Budapest Sportsarena, Hungary
Jun 20: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Jun 22 Pula Arena, Croatia
Jun 24: O2 Arena, Prague, Czech Republic
Jul 20: Kraków Tauron Arena, Poland
Jul 24: Hannover ZAG Arena, Germany

Slipknot are teasing a mystery announcement – and it looks like being revealed imminently .

Iconic London venue Wembley Stadium posted an image of the band’s logo together with the date .09.28.26 on its official Instagram page. The post also features the words:“If you’re 555…” – a lyrics from the band’s classic 2001 song The Heretic Anthem.

While there are no clues as to what the announcement is about, the date – September 28 – suggests it will be revealed tomorrow (Monday).

Earlier this week, cryptic Slipknot posters appeared across Euopre, North, Central and South America, possibly hinting at a new tour from the Iowa nu metal outfit.

Posters promoting the masked band have been spotted in at least 10 cities in the UK, US, Canada, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina and posted onto social media.

They feature the URL unlock.slipknot1.com, which leads to a website urging users to input their details, then displays the date 09.28 – the same date as the Wembley post.

While the signs point to a tour, there has been other activity in the Slipknot world in the last few weeks. The band recently returned with their polarising single Arsenal, while guitarist Jim Root says that they have been working with Faith No More and Slayer producer Matt Wallace.

Arsenal was the first song the band released following the departure of longtime DJ Sid Wilson earlier this month and percussionist Craig Jones in 2023, as well as the first song they’ve released since drummer Eloy Casagrande replaced Jay Weinberg in 2024.

“We’re at the beginning of a new journey now, and we’re approaching it with curiosity”: The Ocean’s Robin Staps can’t wait for Be Prog! My Friend. This is our official preview…

The German proggers and Soen top a bill alongside some of modern prog’s brightest stars. Taking place at Barcelona’s most unique venue, it’s set to be a celebration of all things of the genre we love

Modern prog is in rude health, and the 2026 edition of Barcelona’s sun-dappled knees-up, Be Prog! My Friend is, is here to prove it. In its organiser’s own words, its latest line-up is “diverse, daring and deeply emotional.” It also typifies what the festival is all about.

Prog royalty, from Steven Wilson, Jethro Tull and Steve Hackett have headlined the intimate and intruiging festival in the past. This year, the focus is on championing the next generation of acts taking the genre to bold new places.

Germany’s heavy and ambient proggers, The Ocean, and Sweden’s visceral, vintage-modern aces Soen top the bill. Below them is an eclectic array of contemporary acts that are proving, each in their own fascinating way, just how large a scope the genre has.

It takes place under the Wembley-goes-sci-fi-like arches of the quirky Poble Espanyol, an open-air architectural museum. It’s just a stone's throw from the Fountains of Montjuïc and, in late September, the weather is still pleasingly warm – an escape from autumn as it begins to blanket Blightly.

Everything about the festival is intimate and focused, and therein lays its charm. Be Prog! does is remain focused on quality over quantity; there’s little in the way of distractions as the organisers, Madness Live, put 10 bands it thinks are worthy of your attention centre stage. Some acts will be new to many punters, and they’ll get just as much love as those they came to see. That sense of community permeates across the unusual – but wholly fitting – venue.

The first night, on Friday 25^th September, coincides with the release of The Ocean’s epic new concept album, Solaris, and it’s set to give day one an extra special sheen.

“I see like a lot of classic prog elements in Solaris,” says founding guitarist Robin Staps. “It’s got some of the proggiest tracks we’ve ever done, but at the same time, there’s a heaviness that connects with earlier Ocean albums.”

The album is intense, but in prog’s truest form, it’s meant to get mental cogs turning.

“Every great record I have discovered was initially a bit difficult for me to get into,” he continues. “But there was some black magic that kept me going back to it; that’s how I see the Ocean.”

It’s a truly immersive concept record that captures the essence of both the book and the film, and features Tangerine Dream’s Thorsten Quaeschning on modular synthesisers. It finds the group synthesising vintage prog flavours with atmospheric turns and gut-punching crescendos. But they aren’t the only band to get excited about…

Friday 25th September

After Lapse

The Madrid outfit has enough cut and thrust to get the Be Prog! 2026 party started with a bang, but beneath their muscle is a classic-leaning sound that stylishly nods to Queensrÿche and Dream Theater. It’s a sound where their technical excellence has space to shine, but without ever getting in the way of solid, hooky songwriting.

Agent Fresco

The sparkling Icelandic math rockers are the only Be Prog! alumnus reappearing in 2026. More importantly, it comes during their summer of grand returns, after a seven-year hiatus. Their Arctangent set was a triumph of emotionally vulnerable, but musically watertight contemporary prog, and they’re sure to bring tears – both happy and sad – to the eyes of many. Their music is as complex as it is charming, and they’re not to be missed.

Einar Solberg

Few vocalists in the contemporary prog scene are as enigmatic and virtuosic as Leprous’ powerhouse. Revitalised as a solo act on the orchestra-powered Vox Occulta, while there are naturally echoes of Solberg’s main outfit here, the live experience is altogether different.

He blends a traditional live rock band with cello and keys – the latter from his Leprous bandmate, Harrison White – to recreate the album’s sweeping, cinematic songcraft, while reimagining cuts from his debut solo offering, 16. It’s a very different side to the beloved musician, and is no less barnstorming.

The Dear Hunter

After sadly pulling out late on last year, Prog would like to wager on the Dear Hunter as this year’s dark horse. Why? Well, nestling on the inventive indie side of the music spectrum, Casey Crescenzo’s band are one of those bands that are impossible to pigeonhole. They’ve written a raft of concept albums based on everything from colours to post-apocalyptic dystopias; their imagination is off the scale, and they’ve enough songwriting craft and leftfield thinking within their ranks to pull off their ambitious projects time and again.

They’re a highly narrative-driven band; prepare for tales of wickedness, trickery, and majesty told to tunes from sparkling clean guitars, strings, horns, and genre-bending aplenty. It’s going to be pure cinema.

The Ocean

“This will be an experimental show for us,” says guitarist Robin Staps, with the band only two shows into bedding in their new line-up. That includes two new vocalists, Lane Shi and Enrico Tiberi.

“It’s us stepping our feet into this new water, and we’re approaching it with curiosity,” he adds. “People almost expect from us that we do something different with every record now, and with this line-up, everything feels really new, and really great. It was important for the band to have new people, approaches, and inspirations; I need that as an artist. So we’re at the beginning of a new journey now.”

Expect songs from their stunning new concept record, while their new vocalist pairing – who both also play keyboards live – gives fan favourite tracks a new lease of life.

“It’s also record release day for us,” Staps adds with a cheeky smile, “So it’s kind of an unofficial record release party as well. It’s going to be fun!”

Saturday 26th September

Separis Project

Kicking off day two, the Bareclonanians stand out for their deft balance of minimalism and minimalism. This is a band that, with gentle acoustic passages and classical-styled refrains, can be whisper quiet. In the same song, Kristina Vega’s expansive vocals can send it soaring, while a barrage of ultra-complex heaviness acts as an indelible punctuation mark. Life is about balance, and Separis Project have theirs nailed.

Iotunn

The Danish/Faroese band has thrown the kitchen sink at their 2024 album, Kinship, and they’ve rightly been hailed for it. Lyrically, it follows a prehistoric tribesman’s life and afterlife, while exploring everything from nature to individuality and the interconnectedness of everything. Musically, it’s a brooding storm of space rock, melodeath and power metal, with their palette kept broad in the name of storytelling. They’re a fine pick.

Rendezvous Point

The second Leprous offshoot of the weekend, Rendezvous Point most notably features the impossibly talented drummer, Baard Kolstad. The shared musical DNA is clear, but the band also has a more Muse-tinted alt-rock edge, and some truly phenomenal vocals.

But don’t take our word for it - speaking to Prog in 2024, keyboardist Nicolay Tangen Svennæs described their sound as “melodic prog rock with some fast guitars and odd time signatures,” while explaining how they enjoy the freedom “to break the limits of the genre.” Expect plenty of plot twists.

Green Carnation

The Norwegian troupe are currently promoting the final part of a three-album trilogy exploring abusive childhoods and loved ones in crisis. Yet, as harrowing as it sounds, the way they balance their foreboding goth and doom metal influences with ethereal, folky turns makes the A Dark Poem saga special.

They make the marriage of their genres feel natural, and have found themselves at the forefront of modern prog by moving with the times without forgetting the majesty of the classics. Don’t be surprised to see them headlining in future editions. For now, bask in their harmonious darkness... likely in gorgeous, juxtaposing weather.

Soen

The Swedes have long since unshackled themselves from their supergroup tag to become a fine vintage-modern prog in their own unequivocal right. They’re equally as inspired by Judas Priest, Pink Floyd and Yes as they are Tool, djent, and maybe even a dash of Sleep Token on their fierce and finessed new album, Reliance.

Most importantly, they’re a towering presence on stage, and have a near-faultless back catalogue to pull from. Between Joel Ekelöf’s incredibly emotive voice and probing lyrics, tackling everything from personal grief to rallying against corrupt authorities, and former Opeth drummer Martín López’s uncompromising yet always accessible approach to rhythm, the band have something very unique. Under the cover of darkness, the Be Prog! stage is the perfect place for them to shine.

KEY INFO

The venue is now located in the far corner of Poble Espanyol, occupying a quant and well-signposted 1,000 capacity spot. The line-up features five bands per day, with one stage, meaning there are no clashes and running about between tents.

Doors open at 3pm each day, and the first band due to start at 4.00pm. The headline shows will conclude by midnight.

LINE-UP FRIDAY 25 SEPTEMBER (Doors at 3pm) After Lapse, Agent Fresco, Einar Solberg, The Dear Hunter, The Ocean

LINE-UP SATURDAY 26 SEPTEMBER (Doors at 3pm) Separis Project, Iotunn, Rendezvous Project, Green Carnatrion, Soen

LOCATION: The festival takes place at Poble Espanyol, Av Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, 13, 08038, Barcelona, Spain. It’s a 30 minute walk from the characterful Las Ramblas street and is easily accessible via public transport.

TRAVEL: Barcelona is 7.5 miles away. Public transport is recommended to reach the festival site. The closest metro station is Espanya, a 10 minute walk from the venue. The nearest bus stop is called Poble. There is also ample private parking.

DISABLED ACCESS: There’s a disabled viewing area at the event.

OTHER ATTRACTIONS: With the festival site opening at 3pm each day, there’s time to explore the city beforehand. Food and drinks can be purchased within the venue too, with a wide range catering for all diets.

ACCOMMODATION: Please note that Be Prog! is not a camping festival. Instead, try local hotels or Airbnb for a place to rest your music filled head.

ABOUT THE LOCATION: Built in 1929, Poble Espanyol is designed to look like a historic Spanish village, with replicas of buildings from different regions. Its village plays host to craft workshops, bars and restaurants. Please note: Museu Fran Daurel art gallery will be closed during the Be Prog! Festival.

DON’T FORGET TO PACK: Sun cream, sunglasses, water and ear protectors. There’s also be a merch stand for, so don’t forget to bring a few extra Euros to show your support to the bands performing.

Disclaimer: All details are correct at time of press. Visit the Be Prog! website for the latest info.

Be Prog! My Friend

In just four years, Spiritbox have gone from playing the 800-capacity O2 Academy in Islington to headlining the UK's biggest arena. Granted, Manchester's Co-Op Live isn't being used to its full capacity - curtains cover the upper decks and the room is maybe half-open, but the Canadians have managed to speedrun a progression that took Sleep Token six years - seven if we're talking full arena tours - Ghost nine years and Bring Me The Horizon a decade.

It's also their first real test as potential torchbearers for metal's future. With a supporting line-up of hot, rising acts, Spiritbox have at least avoided the pipeline of dragging out legacy bands to bolster bigger tours. You'd need to get in early if you hoped to see openers Dying Wish, but as the clock ticks towards 8pm Jinjer are greeted by a full floor.

Back in 2019, the Ukrainians seemingly couldn't play anywhere without being greeted by big SOLD OUT signs across the board, so their jump up to arena-sized stages has been a long time coming. But their biggest obstacle comes in translating their technical, acrobatic prog metal to bigger rooms. Perennial arrives with all the ferocity and violence of a Great White ram-raiding a seal, while Call Me A Symbol offers an apocalyptic death metal bluster. But there's also a distinct lack of big hooks, and impressive as Tatiana Shmayluk's range is - her voice rapidly switching between off-kilter melodies and throaty snarls - there's few moments for the crowd to roar along in rapturous release.

With limited production, Jinjer are still adjusting to the space they're playing. The rest of the band's all-black ensemble means they often seem to disappear into the background and while it sets a stark contrast against Tatiana's all-silver get-up that lends her the air of a rampaging crusader, it means they also feel lacking in presence. Still, the set picks up nicely in its second half, I Speak Astronomy earning an excitable pit, while Judgement & Punishment chucks up some careening force. But it's still breakthrough single Pisces that feels like the centrepiece of the set, its swinging dynamics bringing to mind the impressive sonic dexterity of Opeth.

From their incendiary Download Festival debut to the massive Alexandra Palace gig that tied a bow on their Eternal Blue era, it's been obvious Spiritbox are eyeing up the upper echelons of the metal world. The Tsunami Sea tour could well be the crucial stepping stone to getting them to the top. It's not a flawless transition, mind.

Silhouetted behind a giant curtain, there's a nice sense of drama to how Spiritbox arrive to the stage, Courtney's shimmying form projected as a colossal figure before the curtain drops and they kick out an impressively furious one-two of Fata Morgana and Black Rainbow. Intense as those tracks are, it feels like the band only fully arrive with Perfect Soul, the pay-off of having a big anthem helping to boost the energy in the room, Keep Sweet keeping that joyous spirit going and Soft Spine is introduced with an almighty roar of "You all deserve each other!", streamers blasted out over the crowd as the riff drops.

It's not quite Parkway Drive or Sabaton, but things like that, the shimmering light show and a bubble machine that sprays for Tsunami Sea add nice little touches to the set that show Spiritbox are thinking about how they want to enhance their live shows.

By their own admission, the biggest obstacle is working out their sequencing. These shows feel almost like a send-off for Tsunami Sea to clear the path for what comes next. While it's definitely great to hear so much of the album - eight of the record's eleven tracks - it feels like some obvious massive tunes from their debut - Hurt You, Secret Garden - could've served the big room well.

It becomes most obvious towards the end of the set. Introducing the next track, Courtney acknowledges that Holy Roller was the song that changed everything for Spiritbox. But rather than being the big finish, it and Circle With Me arrive as something of a premature climax - a powerful one-two, but also an all-too early peak with four more songs to go. We spot a few bodies making a tactical early exit - it is a school night, after all - and while there's seldom a good spot for a drum solo in the set, the fact it comes so late in the game just adds to the weird, post-orgasmic lull.

There's still a couple of highlights. Crystal Roses goes full trance to the point we're half-expecting Maxi Jazz (RIP) to drop a bar, and new single Mourning yields some Deftones-like crashing waves. But its obvious that Spiritbox need something bigger to really bring everything back home again.

In many ways though, that's a great problem to have: anecdotally, Metallica wrote The Black Album after realising the more complex arrangements of Justice For All didn't work in the massive rooms they were playing, and Ghost came up with Square Hammer to give them a big, orgiastic conclusion. If this is what Spiritbox can do without that big, all-conquering anthem, just imagine what they'll do next.

In another, better, universe, Moonspell would be absolutely massive. Granted, they've not done badly for themselves - five number one records and a Gold Certification in their home country of Portugal for 2006's Memorial - but as a band who've been namechecked by HIM as an influence and were part of the 90s goth metal boom, they certainly deserve better than the smattering of support slots that's consistuted their UK tours this decade thus far.

So, we've sacked the UK off and come to Portugal to see them on home turf. Ish. Playing up the road from their homebase of Lisbon in the mountainous region of Sintra, Moonspell are playing the first gig of its kind in the grounds of a stately home. There's a couple thousand fans milling around, only its all gone tits up.

Partway through opener Cross Your Heart, everything cuts out and everything is plunged into darkness. It takes a good 35 minutes before Moonspell return to the stage - we're later told one of the production hires for the gig had inadvertently plugged a light into an amp, causing a blowout - but thankfully the crowd is an eager (if somewhat captive) audience and grumbling is kept to a bare minimum. When they do return, Moonspell show what they're made of.

Portugal's biggest metal band, they take to the occasion with a sense of pomp and theatricality that is begging for TikTok take off. Hey, if it can happen for Crowbar, it can happen for anyone. Not that there's any novelty production: the papier-mâché bats have been left in the belfry and Moonspell are letting their songs do the talking, reaching an appropriately vampiric, otherworldly peak on the likes of Mephisto and Vampiria. Playing new album Far From God in its entirety, they chuck in the vast majority of 1996's Irreligious (only intro Peverse... Almost Religious and dancey interlude Subversion skipped) as an added bonus.

Early on, new songs Cross Your Heart and Far From God prove fine additions to the Moonspell catalogue, easily as hooky and slick as fan-favourites like Opium or Alma Mater (which thankfully gets an inclusion in the set, even with the focus on other records). Elsewhere, there's the stomping heft of For A Taste Of Eternity that hints towards their extreme metal past, and even a headlong plunge into 80s synthpop territory on For The Love Of Mortals and Raven Claws, the latter seeing vocalist Mariangela Demurtas hop on for the most satisfying new romantics revival this side of Paradise Lost's Smalltown Boy cover.

Set against the dramatic backdrop of Quinta da Ribafria and with a light show that would do Jeff Wayne proud, the show has a genuine sense of occasion. Moonspell might still be goth metal's best kept secret, but for one night in Portugal, they feel like the kings of lusty, dark allure.

Moonspell setlist @ Quinta da Ribafria, Sintra September 12 2026

1. Cross Your Heart
2. Far From God
3. Biblical
4. Opium
5. Awake!
6. For A Taste Of Eternity
7. The Great Wolf In The Sky
8. Your Promise Of Light
9. For The Love Of Mortals
10. Ruin & Mortals
11. A Poisoned Gift
12. Raven Claws
13. Mephisto
14. Herr Spiegelmann
15. Our Freedom To Fall
16. Reconquista
17. Vampiria
18. Alma Mater
19. Full Moon Madness

Fans have clamoured for Amy Lee, Courtney LaPlante and Poppy to tour together since last year's End Of You collab broke the internet, and it's finally happened - albeit a little split up, with Evanescence taking Spiritbox with them on some dates of their ongoing world tour, and Poppy jumping on for others.

It's Poppy joining the fun at the O2 in London tonight, alongside alt singer-songwriter K.Flay K.Flay has featured on a myriad of other artists’ songs, though it seems she’s never quite carved out a proper niche of her own; sited somewhere between indie, grunge and pop rock with fuzzed-out bass and laid back vocal delivery, it’s not an immediately obvious fit for an Evanescence crowd, but the room filling out and front rows nodding along indicates it’s at least going down reasonably well.

Poppy strides onstage confidently as her band opens with the arena-sized metalcore of Have You Had Enough. The equally mammoth The Cost of Giving Up follows, both polished bangers greeted by a horde of phones filming up front.

The famously reticent singer doesn’t initially speak much between songs, though it seems less like the robotic Poppy character of old, rather that the music is left to speak for her. Gone are the prerecorded, vocoder-laden interludes; instead she packs the set with as many songs from her recent two albums as she can, though an early Scary Mask is a glimpse into the more experimental artist she used to be as it flits from bubblegum pop ballad to searing metal to electronica.

It takes until VAN for the first pit to appear but, to Poppy's credit, she manages to incite a much larger one for finale New Way Out that finally sees her own stage energy levels returned by the crowd. By the end of her 50-minute set, she’s clearly having a blast.

Three decades into a career and over two since smash hit 2003 debut Fallen, Evanescence could well have spent the time since resting on their laurels and touring the hits. It’s to their credit that tonight’s setlist includes the entirety of new album Sanctuary woven through it.

Opening with its title track and Tell Me When You’ve Had Enough, it’s gratifying to see a crowd so up for new material despite Fallen’s long shadow. It barely needs saying but Amy Lee sounds phenomenal: a generational, immediately recognisable voice that’s propelled the band to legendary status.

Perhaps it’s an indication of this crowd’s average age now but they’re strangely immobile for the headline act, heads nodding and one small pit present, but little else. Despite this, everyone's enjoying themselves - plenty are bellowing choruses back. Naturally, the older material still gets the biggest reactions, with Going Under receiving deafening cheers, while the venomous Call Me When You’re Sober offers a sumptuous light show at odds with its restrained fury.

The band is joined by K.Flay for rebellious, feminist anthem Fight Like A Girl, while End Of You has lashings of pyro and a surprise guest spot not only from Poppy but Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante herself, the trio greeted by screams of adoration.

It’s easily the highlight of the set in terms of sheer spectacle and the huge audience pop, but Evanescence are on top form throughout tonight. The arena lights up with phone torches for the tender My Immortal, creating an air of melodramatic splendour, and while there's a noticeable number of people leaving during final song Wide Open Heart, it's still ultimately been a triumph of an evening, driven by some of rock’s most enduring, iconic songs.

Satyricon vocalist Sigurd “Satyr” Wongraven has looked back on the strange night his diabolical black metal band played at a Norwegian fashion show.

The Oslo duo performed their 2006 single K.I.N.G. on the catwalk at the 2011 edition of the Nordic World Ski Championships, playing the snarling metal track as models walked past in high-end dresses. Looking back during an interview with Metal Hammer, Wongraven, 50, calls the booking “bizarre” and admits he still has no clue who came up with the idea.

“The production was done by NRK, which is Norway’s equivalent to the BBC,” he explains. “And if you do anything with NRK, they will do it exactly the way that they want to. They’re not gonna sit down with a band and go, ‘How do you want it, guys?’”

The only theory Wongraven can come up with is that the organisers wanted to blend skiing, something “deeply rooted in our [Norwegian] sporting culture”, with black metal, “something else that is uniquely Norwegian”, and “show it to the world”. But, “I have no idea who came up with the idea to blend it with a fashion show!”

Elsewhere in the interview, Wongraven talks further about the creation of K.I.N.G., the lead single from his band’s 2006 album, Now, Diabolical. The heavy, groovy track – sometimes referred to as ‘black’n’roll’, a term Satyricon reject – saw the band remove keyboards and technical drum parts from their sound.

“Now, Diabolical was trusting more that a song could be more powerful if we strip it of unnecessary elements,” Wongraven recalls. “When you think of Iron Man by Black Sabbath or Let There Be Rock by AC/DC, you think of the signature riff, and when you have a riff that can carry a whole song on its shoulders, everything from this point onwards is about what complements that part.”

Upon release in April 2006, Now, Diabolical was the band’s biggest commercial hit, reaching number two on the Norwegian charts. It also charted in Finland, Sweden and the UK. K.I.N.G. became their biggest song: at time of publication, it has 19,800,000 Spotify streams, more than double their next-biggest track, 2002’s Black Crow On A Tombstone.

Satyricon’s last album, 2022’s Satyricon & Munch, marked a stark departure from their black metal sound. It was a single, hour-long, atmospheric song, designed to soundtrack the art exhibition of the same name that the band put on at Oslo’s Edvard Munch Museum. In 2024, Wongraven said that Satyricon’s next album will be “more conventional” but “very, very varied”.

The band will tour Europe from September to November. The first show will take place at the Floyd venue in Athens, Greece on September 18. On October 31, they’ll support Dimmu Borgir at Oslo Spektrum in their hometown, with Enslaved opening. They’re also booked to headline Damnation festival in Manchester on November 8.

Live footage of Slayer playing 1986 album Reign In Blood in full has made its way online.

The California thrash metal hellraisers kicked off a tour celebrating 40 years of their most lauded release with a show at Mystic Lake Amphitheater in Shakopee, Minnesota on September 4. They dusted off an assortment of hits before finishing with Reign… in its 28-minute entirety: the first time they’ve performed the whole thing since 2014.

Watch footage of the complete Reign… section of the show below.

The Reign In Blood 40th-anniversary tour resumed at Rocklahoma in Pryor, Oklahoma on September 6. It will pick back up with a stop at Palacio de los Deportes in Mexico City on October 21, then continue for more North and Latin American dates. See the full list of dates below.

Slayer’s third full-length album, Reign In Blood was produced by Rick Rubin (then known for his collaborations with such hip-hop stars as the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC) and released via Rubin’s label, Def Jam. It charted in the UK and US and won critical acclaim. In 2017, Rolling Stone put it at number six on their list of the 100 greatest metal albums of all time.

Reign… faced public backlash due to its album art and lyrical themes. Conservative commentators accused Slayer of having Nazi sympathies due to the opening song Angel Of Death, which was about Josef Mengele and his experimental surgeries at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The band have repeatedly denied that they support Nazism.

Guitarist Kerry King said of the controversy during a Loudwire interview in 2015: “My rebuttal to that has been since day one, if you put that on the History Channel and took Slayer out of it, it would be an educational, intriguing ride through World War II. You put Slayer in, and heavy metal, and it’s, ‘Oh, they meant that shit!’”

Slayer retired from touring in 2019 but reunited in 2024 and have since played standalone shows and short tours. Talking to Australia’s Metal Roos in 2024, King dismissed the possibility of a new Slayer album and more extensive touring.

“Mark my words: we’re never gonna make a record again, we’re never gonna tour again," he said. “Because that was the last thing. We said [in 2019], ‘This is our final tour.’ It took five years for us to come and say, ‘Hey, here’s a couple of shows, five-year anniversary.’”

Slayer’s final album, Repentless, came out in 2015. King took his ideas for a scrapped follow-up and used them to start a solo band. His first album under his own name, From Hell I Rise, came out in 2024. A second album is in the works.

Slayer Reign In Blood: 40th Anniversary tour dates:

• Oct 21: Mexico City Palacio de los Deportes, Mexico
• Oct 24: Fort Worth Sick New World, TX
• Nov 13: Inglewood Kia Forum, CA
• Nov 14: Inglewood Kia Forum, CA
• Dec 05: Bogota Vive Claro – Distrito Cultural, Colombia
• Dec 10: Santiago Estadio Santa Laura, Chile
• Dec 14: Buenos Aires Movistar Arena, Argentina
• Dec 17: São Paulo Nubank Parque, Brazil

Tickets to the 2027 70,000 Tons Of Metal cruise have gone on sale, with 30 of the 60 bands set to play the nautical festival confirmed.

Public sales commenced today (Monday, September 7) at 12 midday Eastern Time and 5pm UK time. Single and group cabins are available. Head to 70000tons.com for details.

The 15th edition of the annual, 3,000-capacity heavy metal cruise will set sail from Miami, Florida on Royal Caribbean’s ship Freedom Of The Seas on January 14. It’ll make its way to Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic before returning on January 18.

Bands confirmed so far include international melodic death metal favourites Arch Enemy, California thrash metal veterans Exodus, former Scorpions guitarist Uli Jon Roth and Portuguese goth metal outfit Moonspell. The full list is available below.

In addition, it’s been announced that Finnish metal band Wolfheart will premiere their upcoming, as-yet-unannounced studio album at a listening event.

“It is an absolute honour to step on the deck of the mighty 70,000 Tons Of Metal for the third time, on one of the most majestic metal events in this universe,” says bandleader Tuomas Saukkonen. “This time we are bringing something special with us: the world live premiere of our forthcoming album!”

Organisers say that, as well as performances, “the festival offers round-the-clock entertainment, from explosive performances on the biggest open-air stage structure to ever sail the open Seas, to artist-hosted activities and events, meet-and-greets with every band, and the opportunity for fans to mingle with their heavy metal heroes in a unique environment”.

Hammer boarded the 14th 70,000 Tons Of Metal earlier this year and saw sets by Anthrax, Paradise Lost, Soilwork, Amorphis and more across the four-day trip.

“70,000 Tons isn’t a rinkydink festival on a boat; it’s more like a floating city, the Freedom Of The Seas ship offering an almost insane amount of space for a few thousand metalheads,” journalist Rich Hobson wrote upon his return.

“70,000 Tons is more like a continental festival than your Downloads or even Aftershocks. What that means is, bands go late. This year’s event sees bands starting as early as 10am, and the last band going on-stage at 5am. Ooft.”

70,000 Tons Of Metal 2027 lineup:

• Abigail Williams
• Æther Realm
• Arch Enemy
• Avaland
• Battlelore
• Brainstorm
• Brymir
• Die Apokalyptischen Reiter
• Enforcer
• Equilibrium
• Evergrey
• Exmortus
• Exodus
• Famous Strangers
• Hammerfall
• Melechesh
• Moonspell
• Mors Principium Est
• Naglfar
• Obscura
• Origin
• Primal Fear
• Rhapsody
• Sinister
• Talia Hoit
• Thulcandra
• Uli Jon Roth
• Warbringer
• Wolfheart
• Ye Banished Privateers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Musical event of the year? Musical event of the 21st century so far wouldn’t be overstating it.” When Prog witnessed the attitude and energy of Kate Bush’s Before The Dawn show in 2014, we didn’t hold back the praise.

And why should we? They’d been building up unused since her one and only large-scale tour in 1979, waiting for the hardly-imagined moment that she’d bring her musical genius to another stage some day.

And she had – 35 years later, in the form of a 22-date residency at London’s Hammersmith Apollo from August 26 to October 1, containing 25 songs over two acts, and seen by over 80,000 fortunate people. “The spectacle embraces modern technology and stagecraft to raise Bush’s unique eclecticism – song, film, costume, lights, props, magic and high drama – to another dimension,” we said.

“More than a rock gig, it’s a sensual sound-and-vision extravaganza. It takes flight. Yet for all the razzle-dazzle, it proves intensely moving. At the centre of the whirlpool: that voice, richer than ever.”

We reflected: “It may be that Bush has brought mannerisms often reductively labelled as prog back to mainstream acceptance. Or it could just be that Britain’s most gifted female star can do anything she wants, such is the love and adoration displayed here. The young girl who once yelped ‘Wow’ is now a mature woman confirmed as the genius godmother of art rock – 35 years on, the moment is hers again.”

While the multimedia show was a triumph, no one should have been surprised. Bush gathered the best talent to multiply her own, including two former members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, an illusionist, a puppeteer and a video projection designer. This, along with seven musicians, 13 actors and countless crew, helped her deliver two stories, one based on The Ninth Wave from Hounds Of Love and the other on A Sky Of Honey from Aerial.

Those who didn’t see the show were treated to the release of a video for And Dream Of Sheep, part of The Ninth Wave. Bush is seen floating on an ocean, wearing a life jacket after her ship has sunk – and that attention to detail nearly delivered severe consequences after she spent three days in a water tank, singing live, to shoot the scenes as used in the show.

“This was to create a sense of realism, as the character in the song is lost at sea,” a press release explained. “She spent so long in the water during the first day of filming that she contracted mild hypothermia. She recovered after a day off and carried on filming.”

Once the run was over, Bush described it as “one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.” She added: “I was really delighted that the shows were received so positively and so warmly – but the really unexpected part of it all was audiences you could only ever dream of.

“They took my breath away. Every single night they were so behind us. You could feel their support from the minute we walked on stage. I just never imagined it would be possible to connect with an audience on such a powerful and intimate level; to feel such – well, quite frankly – love. It was like this at every single show.”

Bush most recently made chart history with the second-wave impact of 1985 single Running Up That Hill after its appearance in Stranger Things in 2022. Before that – and after the success of 1978 debut hit Wuthering Heights – she entered the record books again when Before The Dawn led to eight of her albums entering the top 40 at the same time, and her entire catalogue made the top 50.

Looking back her residency’s success, she admitted in 2016 that the endeavour had terrified her. “The idea of putting the show together was something that I found really interesting and really exciting,” she said. “But to actually step into it was something that I had to really work hard on.

“I was really nervous every night as a performer, but I had complete faith in everybody on the stage, everybody in the team, all the sound guys. The most difficult thing for me was to be continually in the now because I naturally tend to race ahead in my mind.

“Once we started running the show I had to be absolutely in that moment. I was so terrified that if my mind wandered off, when I came back I wouldn’t remember where I was. I had to really fix myself, so that I would remember where I was in the song.”

Naturally, speculation circulated that Bush might stage another show – but to date that hasn’t happened. She also said she wasn’t writing new songs at that time, although of course she’d have an impressive pile of creations stored away.

Asked if she’d put a full stop on creating music, she replied: “Oh no, I don’t think so. I think it’s just a rather big comma.”

Ozzfest has confirmed its return to Villa Park stadium in Aston, Birmingham next year.

The former travelling heavy metal festival, launched by Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne and his wife/manager Sharon in 1996, will have its first edition since 2018 take place at the venue where the Prince Of Darkness performed his retirement show on July 5 last year.

Ozzy died on July 22, just 17 days after the gig, following a heart attack at his home in Buckinghamshire. He was 76.

The official statement promises “more info on everything coming soon”. Sharon, 73, said in an exclusive interview with Metal Hammer last month that the event will be one or two days long, depending on fan interest. She added that she was speaking to potential performers and headliners, and would offer news soon.

She told Billboard in January that Ozzfest will return with a lineup that transcends its past niche of rock and metal, with a focus on young talent.

“It was something Ozzy was very passionate about: giving young talent a stage in front of a lot of people,” she said. “We really started metal festivals in this country. It was [replicated but] never done with the spirit of what ours was, because ours was a place for new talent. It was like summer camp for kids.”

Even though only a Birmingham event has been confirmed, Sharon has said that she wants to bring the festival back to the US, as well.

The Osbournes started Ozzfest after fellow travelling festival Lollapalooza refused to give Ozzy a spot on their lineup. The inaugural edition was a two-day tour with dates in Phoenix, Arizona and San Bernardino, California. Ozzy headlined with support from Slayer, Danzig, Biohazard, Sepultura and more.

As nu metal began to gather steam in the late 90s, Ozzfest became famous for putting up-and-coming artists on its bill. Such acts as Slipknot, Limp Bizkit and System Of A Down performed at the festival around the release of their debut albums.

Ozzfest expanded to have international offshoots in markets including the UK, Germany, Belgium and Japan before hosting its final incarnation – a single show in Inglewood, California – in 2018.

In 2023, Sharon explained why Ozzfest went away, saying on her family podcast The Osbournes that other managers got greedy.

“It was a very weird beast,” she said, “because all the bands were our mates, but the managers were greedy, and for some reason they thought that we were making billions on it and we weren’t. We made a profit. But it was not like – we couldn’t retire on it. And managers and agents wanted more and more and more, and it just wasn’t cost-effective anymore. We stopped because it just wasn’t cost-effective.”

However, the following year, she added that “of course” Ozzfest can return one day. “You can do it for a baby stage, but you still need the headliners,” she said. “It’s always great to have the baby stage, I mean, that’s what it’s all about – breaking new bands. That’s why we did it.”

Ozzy’s retirement show, Back To The Beginning, took place at a sold-out Villa Park and was live-streamed by more than five million people worldwide. Ozzy performed both with his solo band and his fellow Black Sabbath co-founders. The support lineup included Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Tool, Gojira, Anthrax and Mastodon. Proceeds from the event went to the charities Cure Parkinson’s, Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity and Acorns Children’s Hospice.

Sharon told Hammer last month that a Back To The Beginning concert film will hit cinema screens later this year.

Ding! The bell rings and all eyes snap back towards the bare-knuckle boxing ring in the centre of the arena. Alex Terrible, the Russian-born singer of Slaughter To Prevail, and Cameron Delano, an American bullrider built like a piece of farm equipment, rise to their feet, visibly exhausted, and step back to the centre of the ring. Both fighters are bloody, with faces swelling. Alex’s nose is broken, and he keeps wiping the blood from his face, yet, somehow, underneath all of it, he’s also grinning.

This is the climax of Blood4Blood, a meeting of metal and bare-knuckle fighting dreamed up by Alex and staged by heavyweight US promoter Danny Wimmer Presents at the 9,300-capacity Ocean Center in Daytona Beach, Florida. The idea is straightforward: a line-up of bands and a full Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship (BKFC) fight card, same night, same room, same crowd.

The bands, including Black Label Society, British metalcore heroes Malevolence, Crowbar and Slaughter To Prevail themselves, have been chosen by Alex and his bandmates. At the end of the night, Alex will climb into the ring for the event’s closing bout with Cameron Delano, a short, sharp shock of violence and viscera. That’s where we came in. For now, let’s go back to the start, when nobody in the building was bleeding yet.

6PM: The line at Ocean Center wraps a third of the way around the building. It’s mostly Slaughter To Prevail merch, but there’s a decent showing of Black Label Society gear, and a range of other metal bands are represented. Talking to a few people in the queue, two things become clear.

First, most of them are here for the bands. Second, most of them are also genuinely excited about seeing their first sanctioned bare-knuckle fight, including a few who say they wouldn’t have come for a fight card alone, and a few more who say the music is a bonus.

Hand-to-hand combat is a very old sport – one of the oldest. Two humans, no weapons, an audience. Alex has been a fight obsessive for years, training in combat sports. He’s already had one brutal professional fight in Russia, which left him with several serious fractures to his skull, air in his brain, and temporary blindness.

In spite of the pain, his love for fighting seems perfectly aligned with his pursuit to be the best version of himself.

“It gives you perspective,” he says. “You see things differently because it is serious. You could very easily die in there. Some people call me a poser or some shit like that. But you cannot fake it at all. It’s real as fuck.”

6.45: There are two focal points in the arena. One is a traditional stage at the far end. The other is the BKFC ring dead centre, with the crowd flowing around it. Local Florida band Chained Saint hit the stage in an arena that has no business being this full at 6.45pm on a Wednesday.

The music is classic thrash metal but the four people playing it are just kids, all less than 21 years old. Circle-pits are already going on both sides of the floor. The ring sits between them, fully lit, empty, waiting.

“Metal music isn’t all about being aggressive and high energy, but it is a big part of that style of music,” Alex says of his idea to bring these two worlds together. “It’s the same energy as in bare-knuckle fighting or in MMA in general. It’s so intense. It just fits very well.”

7.30pm: Pyro and strobes herald a condensed set of Slaughter To Prevail’s heaviest material. From the stage, Alex can look straight down into the ring he’s going to be fighting in shortly. In the photo pit, Cameron Delano is looking back at him with his arms folded, sporting a cowboy hat, completely still.

“From the moment I watched the band start playing, I knew the energy was gonna be crazy,” Cameron tells us later. “They brought the intensity the entire night.”

It’s a strange sight: a man calmly studying someone he’s about to spend three rounds trying to hurt, while that someone screams over breakdowns three feet above his head.

7.55pm: The first fight of the night lasts 66 seconds. Kratos, a Russian fighter making his BKFC debut with a moniker and ripped body both seemingly borrowed from the videogame God Of War, faces Brock ‘Alphadawg’ Walker. Kratos catches him clean inside the opening minute, and the referee waves it off. A few seconds later and it’s done. The Russian wins.

Most people in the room have never seen a sanctioned bare-knuckle fight up close. The sport was illegal in the US until 2018, when Wyoming legalised it after a 130-year ban. A growing number of states have followed. Florida is one of them, which is why what’s happening tonight, despite looking transgressive, is entirely above board, with ringside doctors, a referee, sanctioning bodies and a televised broadcast.

In contrast to other MMA styles, bare-knuckle boxing bouts are fast-paced. The fighters don’t wear padding to absorb blows. Knuckles cut skin in the opening exchanges. Blood is on the canvas within seconds. By the time you’ve registered what’s happening, somebody is on the floor. The fights are much shorter than traditional boxing bouts, so the intensity is cranked up to 11, and knockouts are common.

8.15: The early KO leaves time to fill, so the BKFC hosts come into the ring to throw t-shirts and work the crowd, eventually leading to an announcer crowdsurfing – reportedly a first for the organisation. Then Crowbar take the stage and slow everything down to molasses tempo. Alex is a fan.

“Every time we see a video of something cool on TikTok, it’s Crowbar playing in the background,” he says. “They are legends.”

8.50: The BKFC is often touted as a macho sport, but tonight’s card includes two veterans of the women’s division. Taylor ‘Killa Bee’ Starling is a dyed-in-the-wool metal fan, and her body is adorned with tattoos - a stark contrast to her opponent, Sydney Smith, who has none visible.

The lights cut, the spotlights come on, and the pair make their entrances to their own walkout tracks. Unlike the first fight, this one survives the opening round. Both women return to their corners, cut and visibly swelling. Round two ends at 1:32 when Taylor lands the shot that finishes it. She’ll spend the rest of tonight watching the bands.

9.10: Backstage, the contrast is striking. Aside from the rumble from out front, it’s as quiet as a quilting expo, though there’s a particular kind of nervous energy in the air that comes where people are about to do something they can’t undo.

Some fighters are getting their hands wrapped, others talk quietly with guests. Cameron Delano, Alex’s opponent, is here too, hanging out with his young daughter as though his televised fight won’t be talking place in less than two hours.

9.20: Malevolence are onstage, playing Trenches, and the pits are bigger than they have been all night. Zoltan Bathory and Chris Kael of Five Finger Death Punch – noted MMA heads – are watching from the floor. The crossover keeps writing itself.

9.45: Jake ‘Brutal’ Bostwick fights Roderick Stewart in front of a packed room that has fully accepted the format by this point. Bands stop, fights start, fights end, bands start again. Both fighters are tatted up and cast a menacing presence.

10.15: Black Label Society hit the stage. Zakk Wylde, in his plaid kilt, pounding out heavy riffs. By now, several of the night’s fighters are out on the arena floor in the crowd, bloodied and bruised, watching the bands. Taylor Starling’s newfound fans are getting photos taken with her battered, smiling face.

“It was a blast!” Zakk says after his set. “Fighting and heavy music go together like peanut butter and jelly.”

He’s not wrong. The metal community’s always embraced aggression – take a look at any moshpits. Bare-knuckle boxing is a natural extension of that. There’s mutual respect, too, before and after the bell, in a similar way metalheads knock someone down in the pit, and help them right back up.

10.50: The big fight. The one everyone’s here to see, or at least curious about. Alex Terrible vs Cameron Delano. The lights die and the crowd roars. The American walks on first – focused, narrow-eyed, the bullrider in him fully switched on. Then Alex, and the volume in the room peaks so hard you can’t make out his walkout track over the chanting.

“This is your main event of the evening!” comes the announcement, further riling the crowd up into a frenzy. The fighters meet in the centre of the ring. The bell goes. Ding! They start hitting each other. Within 90 seconds both men are bleeding from the face.

Round one is two solid minutes of trading: fists landing flush, knuckles opening cuts, the wet sound of impact audible over the crowd if you’re close enough. At the bell, the two men high-five through bloody teeth and walk to their corners. It’s a brutal opening round.

10.53: Round two. Alex lands a right hook clean on Cameron’s jaw and staggers him, but Cameron weathers it to the bell. Chants of “USA! USA!” and “AL-EX! AL-EX!” trade off in the rafters. There’s a Rocky IV-ish quality to it on paper – it was billed as The Russian Grizzly vs. The American Bull.

10.56: Twenty-nine seconds into the third round, Cameron counters with a clean right hand, and Alex goes down. He stands but his legs betray him and he wobbles to the ropes where the referee waves to signal the fight is over. Cameron takes the win by TKO.

Both men are wearing more of their own blood than seems possible. What most of the crowd doesn’t know is that Alex had been planning to play another short STP set after the fight, but the on-site doctor and the venue would not allow it. Presented with a man sporting a broken nose, several facial fractures and a suspected mild concussion, any competent medical expert would have firm opinions about the wisdom of headbanging in the immediate aftermath of all that.

The building, though, is in no rush to empty. Fighters are still mingling on the floor and fans are still photographing each other in front of the ring. Whatever Blood4Blood was supposed to be, it has clearly worked.

FOUR DAYS LATER: Alex Terrible is sitting backstage at Welcome To Rockville, where STP are due to headline the third stage this evening. The black eyes are something else. The voice is calm.

“To be honest, I’ve been asking myself that, and I still cannot find the answer yet,” he says, when asked why he fights. “It’s just something in my heart. We have this phrase: ‘Be a warrior means live forever’, and I believe I am a warrior, and my war is fighting fears and weakness. It makes me go to these places that I’m scared of going to and face my fears and try to build the best version of myself. Not only physically, but in all aspects of your life.”

He’ll fight again, he says. He might not perform on the same night next time, because he’s a competitor and he wants to win, and the split focus didn’t do him any favours. Other musicians have already been in touch about appearing on future cards. He says Pantera would be the dream get. Whether they came for the blood or the music, the fans in Daytona got both. For Alex, it was something simpler: a war he chose, fought and walked away from.

SLAUGHTER TO PREVAIL HEADLINE BLOODSTOCK ON AUGUST 8, PLUS GLASGOW SWG3 ON AUGUST 10 AND 02 ACADEMY BRISTOL ON AUGUST 12

Country rock legends Eagles have extended their record-breaking residency at Sphere in Las Vegas again. The news comes nine months after they announced that the "final" four shows of their current run of shows would take place in March 2026.

Since then, the residency has been extended three times, and now another four shows have been confirmed for early 2027.

The band, who played their first date at the venue in September 2024, will now complete a total of 72 shows over 36 weekends, with the final Sphere shows scheduled for January 22 and 23. Full dates below.

Eagles have now played to more than a million fans at the venue and own the record for the longest Sphere residency, comprehensively breaking the record held by Dead & Company, who played 48 shows between May 2024 and May last year.

According to the promoters, the shows will "offer fans the ultimate connection to the band’s legendary catalogue in an immersive experience that only Sphere can provide."

Ticket prices at the 20,000-capacity venue start at $175. The presale for the new seats begins on August 12 at 10am, with registration for early access to tickets now open on the Eagles website.

Also available are "Experience & Hotel" and "VIP Experience & Hotel" packages. The latter retails at $1451 and includes a choice of premium seat at Sphere, with guaranteed full view of the screen and priority access into the venue, a two-night stay at The Venetian Resort hotel, airport transfers, a VIP fan experience, commemorative Eagles keepsakes and a souvenir Eagles laminate and lanyard.

Sphere was opened in 2023 by U2, who played 40 shows at the revolutionary venue. Since then, Phish (13 shows across two residencies), Dead & Company, No Doubt (18 shows), country star Kenny Chesney (25), vocal group Backstreet Boys (35) and The Zac Brown Band (8) have completed residencies. Metallica have confirmed 24 shows between October and March.

Other bands rumoured to be in talks with Sphere include Guns N' Roses, Tool and Queen + Adam Lambert.

The next Eagles show at Sphere is on September 18.

Eagles @ Sphere, Las Vegas, 2026

Sep 18: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Sep 19: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Nov 13: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Nov 14: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Nov 27: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Nov 28: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Dec 04: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Dec 05: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Dec 10: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Dec 11: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Jan 15: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Jan 16: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Jan 22: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Jan 23: Las Vegas Sphere, NV

Get Eagles tickets.

Prog legends King Crimson will release 2014 (The Complete US Tour) as a double Blu-ray set on October 30.

It was the band's first tour for six years and one which introduced the now-famous three-drummer line-up, featuring Gavin Harrison and Pat Mastelotto, both members of previous Crimson line-ups, and Bill Reiflin, who had worked with Ministry and REM.

Robert Fripp's e-mail to his fellow bandmates ahead of the tour read, "dear brother crims, we have one year to prepare for action of the savage variety, and be in Go! mode for september 2014... but essentially, King Crimson is in motion.”

The two-disc set features the complete 19-date 2014 King Crimson USA tour as well as a never-before-seen pre-tour show at The Egg, Albany, NY for friends and family, in 24/48 and presented in 1920x1080 (HD).

The new concert recordings are presented in 24/96 Hi-Res Stereo taken from the Front of House live mix, sourced from the band's multi-track recordings and incorporating both the audience and hall sounds for each venue.

The two-disc set will be packaged in a miniature gatefold sleeve with 24-page booklet and new sleeve notes from King Crimson biographer and Prog writer Sid Smith.

Pre-order 2014 (The Complete US Tour).

King Crimson: 2014 (The Complete US Tour)

Blu-Ray I

SEPTEMBER 2014

8^th Sept - Albany, NY The Egg (Friends & Family show) video*

9^th Sept - Albany, NY The Egg

10^th Sept - Albany, NY The Egg

12^th Sept - Philadelphia, PA Verizon Hall

13^th Sept - Philadelphia, PA Verizon Hall

15^th Sept - Boston, MA Colonial Theatre

16^th Sept - Boston, MA Colonial Theatre

18^th Sept - New York, NY Best Buy

19^th Sept - New York, NY Best Buy

20^th Sept - New York, NY Best Buy

Blu-Ray II

SEPTEMBER2014

21^st Sept - New York, NY Best Buy

23^rd Sept - Madison, WI Barrymore Theatre

25^th Sept - Chicago, IL The Vic Theatre

26^th Sept - Chicago, IL The Vic Theatre

27^th Sept - Chicago, IL The Vic Theatre

30^th Sept - Los Angeles, CA Orpheum Theatre

OCTOBER 2014

1^st Oct - Los Angeles, CA Orpheum Theatre

3^rd Oct - San Francisco, CA The Warfield

4^th Oct - San Francisco, CA The Warfield

6^th Oct - Seattle, WA Moore Theater

The internet has been particularly generous to us this week, with a healthy number of rare and previously unseen live performances making their way online. From old TV shows to awards ceremony highlights to contemporary livestreams, here are 13 remarkable highlights, with a disclaimer: be quick, because at least a couple of these clips might not remain online for long.

1. The Beatles - Live At The Coliseum, Washington

In February 1964, at the height of Beatlemania, the Beatles played a sold-out show at the Coliseum in Washington, DC. The 12-song set was filmed by CBS and broadcast the following month, and has subsequently appeared on DVD. This latest (unofficial) clip of three songs upscales the video to 4K, colourises the footage and remixes the sound, and it shows the "lovable mop-tops" in complete control as carnage unfolds.

Famously, this is the night the band were pelted with jellybeans after professing a love for the popular sweet in an interview. "We were on a circular stage, so they hit us from all sides," said George Harrison. "Imagine waves of rock-hard little bullets raining down on you from the sky. It’s a bit dangerous, you know, ’cause if a jellybean, travelling about 50 miles an hour through the air, hits you in the eye, you’re finished. You’re blind, aren’t you?"

2. The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Live at the Royal Albert Hall

Jimi Hendrix's shows at London's iconic Royal Albert Hall in February 1969 were both captured by an American company, McCann Filming, and released as a concert movie later that year. This hour-long compilation uses the best available video and audio sources from the second of the shows (from February 24) and features some rare and previously unseen footage of Jimi backstage and after the show, an interview at Jimi's London flat, and two acoustic covers filmed at the same location.

3. Can - Halleluhwah (Live on Beat-Club)

Last week we made some noise about a known-but-previously unreleased version of Black Sabbath's N.I.B. filmed for the German TV show Beat-Club in 1970, and now here's something from the following year as Krautrock lynchpins Can perform an eight-minute version of the classic Halleluhwah. This performance is a full ten minutes shorter than the studio version on Can's Tago Mago album (thanks to standard television programming being unable to accommodate a 20-minute avant-garde jam), but Jaki Liebezeit’s relentless drumming and Damo Suzuki's stream-of-consciousness vocals are still a treat.

4. Family (ft. Roger Chapman) - Part Of the Load (Live on Beat-Club)

Another 1971 gem from the Beat-Club archive as Family mix three different kinds of rock (progressive, blues rock and jazz) into something truly adventurous, with Roger Chapman improvising on vocals and a stellar rhythm section in the shape of bassist John Wetton and drummer Poli Palmer, who, presumably via some kind of post-production video magic, also appears on vibes. Palmer was filling in on the stool for regular sticksman Rob Townsend, who'd been bitten by his dog.

5. Uriah Heep - Return To Fantasy (Live on The Midnight Special)

Since launching its archive on YouTube in early 2023, The Midnight Special has uploaded hundreds of clips and dozens of full shows, thus adding to the total sum of international enjoyment by a significant factor. This footage comes from the summer of 1975, when Uriah Heep were promoting their Return to Fantasy album, and features Mick Box & Co. (including our old friend John Wetton, who'd replaced Gary Thain earlier that year) playing the title track. This mix isn't the best (too much bass, not enough guitar), and singer David Byron may be what they call "worse for wear", but it's undeniably full-on.

6. Thin Lizzy - The Sun Goes Down (Sight And Sound In Concert)

Thin Lizzy's Sight And Sound In Concert was filmed at the Regal Theatre in Hitchin in early 1983 and featured the band's Thunder And Lightning lineup, with the late John Sykes fitting in beautifully alongside Scott Gorham on guitar. This footage of The Sun Goes Down finds Phil Lynott at his most melancholic, and has found its way to Thin Lizzy's official YouTube channel in the footsteps of two other songs from the same show, Cold Sweat and Jailbreak.

7. King Crimson - Sleepless (Live at Tokyo's Kani Hoken Hall)

Three Of A Perfect Pair might not be the best 80s-era King Crimson album, but the band were still absolutely monstrous live, as evidenced by this 1984 clip, which was filmed on the final night of a three-performance residency at the Kani Hoken Hall in Tokyo, and features some utterly heroic bass playing from the great Tony Levin.

This is the latest in a long line of songs released from the show (elsewhere you'll find Discipline, Frame By Frame, Sartori In Tangier, Elephant Talk, etc, etc), which was filmed for Nippon TV and later issued on LaserDisc as Three of a Perfect Pair – Live in Japan.

8. Pink Floyd - The Great Gig in the Sky (Live in Venice)

Such is the celestial splendour of Pink Floyd's Great Gig In The Sky, it's easy to forget that this performance – filmed in Venice in 1989 – only took place after three months of bickering with the local authorities, led to the resignation of the town's mayor, and took place on a barge. Backing vocalists Rachel Fury, Durga McBroom and Lorelei McBroom sing Clare Torry's original freeform part brilliantly, much to the presumed delight of the estimated 100 million people who watched Pink Floyd in Venice: A Concert for Europe when it was broadcast worldwide.

In the last few weeks, Floyd have also released Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Time, Learning To Fly, The Dogs Of War, On The Turning Away, Yet Another Movie, Sorrow and Round And Round from the Venice show.

9. David Bowie - Rebel Rebel (TFI Friday)

It's easy to forget the cultural dominance of Chris Evans's show TFI Friday, but for a while, back in the late 1990s, it was the UK show to appear on, with everyone from Bon Jovi to Slipknot, Tina Turner and Prince appearing live (and it was very live). The show's official YouTube channel was launched earlier this year (more than 300 clips have already been uploaded), and the latest batch includes a pair of David Bowie performances, China Girl and Rebel, Rebel, from a broadcast in October 1999. Eagle-eyed viewers will note the presence of Helmet's Page Hamilton on guitar.

10. Tom Waits and Neil Young - Get Behind the Mule

Back in 2011, Neil Young inducted Tom Waits into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. "I didn't bring my teleprompter or my notes, and I don't have any real thoughts," Young joked. 'I will say that this next man is indescribable and I'm here to describe him."

After doing so, the pair went on to perform Waits' Get Behind the Mule, from his 1999 album Mule Variations. Waits has only played one significant show in the years since, when he completed a 10-song setlist at a Bridge School Benefit show in 2013. Quite why the Rock Hall have waited until now to release this clip is anyone's guess, but we're not complaining.

11. Tedeschi Trucks Band - Live At Red Rocks

If there's a more sublime combination of band and venue than Tedeschi Trucks Band and Denver's Red Rocks Amphitheatre, then it surely must be in heaven. This twenty-minute teaser (you can skip five minutes of audience preamble) was filmed late last month and opens with a pair of rapturous Sly Stone covers in You Can Make It If You Try and Everyday People, plus their own Don't Let Me Slide and the beginnings of Crazy Cryin', before the footage fades. If you want to watch the whole thing, it's available via TTB's deal with streaming platform Nugs.

12. Smashing Pumpkins - Lollapalooza 2026

Filmed on the same night as Tedeschi Trucks' Red Rocks show, but across the country at Grant Park in Chicago, this clip features Smashing Pumpkins' entire Lollapalooza 2026 set, which includes a host of classics (1979, Bullet With Butterfly Wings, Disarm, Tonight Tonight, Cherub Rock and more) plus a trio of cameos from Yungblud, Olivia Rodrigo and Melissa Auf der Maur. It seems as if Billy Corgan (dressed here as Nosferatu, it would seem) is enjoying himself these days, and that comes across in a set that's sonically spectacular and ultimately triumphant.

There was a lot riding on Genesis’ first show with Phil Collins fronting the band in place of Peter Gabriel. In 2012, 36 years later, the people involved looked back with Prog on the first time Collins took the stage as lead vocalist.

After a stellar, record-breaking career, Phil Collins still vividly remembers his first show as lead singer for Genesis.

Canada – “because it was always strong for us” – had been chosen as the location: London, Ontario first, then Kitchener. A thousand thoughts were rushing through his head on March 26, 1976. “What do I wear? What do I do? I had big shoes to fill. I could sing, but could I talk? I had the goodwill of the audience, but not the security blanket of my drums. Once we’d got a couple of songs out of the way, though, I felt: I can do this.”

Genesis fans were onside: they wanted the band to survive original vocalist Peter Gabriel’s exit. Prematurely written off by the press as a backing band without a leader, they now had underdog appeal. “A Trick Of The Tail was a bright light,” says Collins, “and they preferred that we’d made things work within ourselves.”

Mike Rutherford recalls in the memoir Genesis: Chapter & Verse that in the first break between songs, “I saw Phil go up front with a piece of paper in his hand, shaking, so nervous. But it worked great. Phil had experience from his [acting school] youth of being on stage: he was comfortable there, and the audience wanted to like him. As some of our songs were slightly distant, atmospheric, dark, Phil’s more down-to-earth presence on stage counteracted the heavier parts of the set. He reduced the tension and allowed people to relax between the songs.”

The 1976 tour then swept across the States before arriving in England in June and continuing through Europe. It was an unqualified success, with the band honing a set list that accommodated their new, more accessible material alongside highlights of the earlier, Peter Gabriel era. Yet it nearly hadn’t happened – with Gabriel’s departure, the remaining members had wondered if they had any future as a unit. How would they replace their charismatic frontman? Could they come up with songs? Where would they find a new singer? And if they did, would he be given a fair crack of the whip?

Most of the answers were, as decades of commercial triumph were to prove, closer to home than they initially realised. Collins, simultaneously playing with experimental outfit Brand X, at first assumed Genesis would carry on as an instrumental quartet. That notion, he laughs, lasted “about a day”.

Tony Banks and Rutherford pointed out that they were and had always been songwriters, and needed a singer. Many luckless souls auditioned before the band realised the perfect solution was right under their noses. Steve Hackett, along with Yes vocalist Jon Anderson, went to Collins’ first wedding and urged Collins to consider the role.

Phil’s vocal contribution to the 1975 Hackett solo album Voyage Of The Acolyte had been much admired by the guitarist. Collins says he’s also “read somewhere” that his wife encouraged him to do it, “which is quite possible”. In the end, he says, he showed up at a rehearsal and said, “Well, I guess I’m going to have to do it. As long as I can find a drummer I like.” Because of course by ‘promoting’ Collins to vocals, Genesis were, to some extent, sacrificing another asset: the fact that they had one of the world’s best and most in-demand drummers.

Collins’ friend from Brand X, Bill Bruford, formerly of Yes and King Crimson, came in to bridge the gap for this tour. With his pedigree, he was, to the fans, “friendly fire”, reckons Collins. The new situation also lent Genesis the possibility of using two drummers at times.

“When they were playing together on The Cinema Show [from Selling England By The Pound],” Banks has said, “that became one of the strongest moments in the show.” Hackett’s memory of Bruford’s impact is even more specific: “Bill was a star in his own right. He helped our confidence on stage no end. I even shaved off my moustache. At last I was without facial hair!”

The most radical change, though, was upfront, centre stage, on the microphone. Banks says he knew Phil had a lovely voice, but wasn’t sure that he’d “want” to do it. At the time, he ponders, “He didn’t seem to have… the gravitas.” Yet as the auditions had revealed, he “sounded great” and was the right, if not the most obvious, choice.

Producer David Hentschel has said, “Phil really half-nominated himself… the timbre of his voice was not dissimilar to Peter’s… but there needed to be a push to convince the other guys.” Collins, though, denies that he was “ambitious”. “I’d got myself a nice little reputation as a drummer, and I was happy with that. This was the last thing on my mind. I had no affinity with the idea of walking out from behind the drums and becoming a band’s singer: the guy who wiggled his bum, who people looked at. Over the years there have been people claiming I nudged Peter out. That’s complete rubbish.”

Behind the scenes, the writing had been on the wall for the Gabriel-Genesis line-up for some time. Although Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford had grown up together at Charterhouse School and formed the band, their close friendship had become strained by the pressures and rigours of touring and recording.

Gabriel, frustrated by the democratic band format, was embarking on parenthood and, after quitting, took some time out to “grow vegetables” and recharge his batteries before getting his solo career motoring. During the recording of their 1974 double album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, he’d often be writing lyrics in one room while the others wrote music in another. “So,” muses Collins now, “you can look back and see where the trip wires were.”

Gabriel had informed the band of his decision before The Lamb… was finished and just before the subsequent exhaustive tour, on which the band played this lengthy concept album, as yet unreleased, in full, to often bewildered audiences blasted with innovative lighting and laser stabs.

He honoured his commitments, and Hackett recalled that, “more and more shows were put in because nobody wanted to say goodbye to him. Nobody’s departure from a band is without rancour, but it was as gentlemanly as it could be.” Banks hints that there was some begrudging of the press-led notion that Gabriel was the main man and the others just his backing band fleshing out his ideas.

Perhaps Gabriel at first had more faith in the others’ ability to succeed than they did. “It was difficult,” he said in Genesis: Chapter & Verse, “because they didn’t understand why I’d want to go when we were about to achieve something we’d worked so hard for. They perhaps felt I was sabotaging what was possibly their one big chance. I believe to this day that I had much more confidence in the band’s ability to transcend my departure than they did themselves.”

Collins remembers exactly where he was when Gabriel told him he was leaving. “I was in his hotel room in Manchester. I love Peter dearly, but I just assumed we’d carry on. Then as I’d been Peter’s stooge onstage, singing all the back-up vocals and more, the job of teaching the songs to the guys coming in to audition fell to me.”

Rutherford, Banks, Collins and Hackett were delighted with the new material they’d come up with for A Trick Of The Tail, the likes of Squonk, Dance On A Volcano, Ripples… and Entangled convincing them they’d been right to carry on. Squonk played a major part in deciding the course of the transition.

None of the singers auditioning had hit a home run, but one was in pole position. They got him in to record Squonk, but the key was too high and the results disappointing. Collins chuckles, with hindsight, that the band never took the courtesy of asking the singer what key suited him, adding that they never gave him that courtesy either in later years: “I had to make do,” he says.

So, having been pencilled in to perhaps sing one or two of the softer songs, Collins sang Squonk (inspired by the drum sound on Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir), confirming that he could handle tougher, heavier tracks too. The album was completed, everyone was getting along famously, and somehow, more by accident than design, Phil was the new Genesis singer. The tour that could have been an epitaph became a celebration, and the dawn of a new phase in the band’s remarkable career.

Of course, had A Trick Of The Tail tanked, the reinvention would have fallen flat. “But the album came out and it was a sudden turnaround,” says Rutherford. “We’d been dismissed: ‘Gabriel leaves, it’s all over’. Then it came out and people liked it and the reviews were very good.” Banks emphasises that the reception for The Lamb… had been, for all its subsequent acclaim, “very mixed. The fans weren’t ecstatic about it in the way they were about Foxtrot or Selling England…. So this gave Trick… a chance: people who found Peter a bit difficult perhaps preferred it being a little less dense.”

Released in February 1976, it went top three in the UK (and hung around, voted album of the year by the readers of Melody Maker), and went gold in the States. According to Banks, it doubled the band’s previous album sales, and helped to solve another issue: at the time of Gabriel’s leaving, Genesis were almost half a million dollars in debt.

Gabriel was happy for his former colleagues. “That assuaged any guilt I might have felt,” he’s said. “Clearly they were off and away after a wobbly period. When I’d been the centre of the band everyone assumed that like Pete Townshend in The Who I’d been the main writer of everything, whereas I’d been just one of the main writers. When the band had more success without me, I suddenly felt that people were re-evaluating the old work, thinking, ‘Oh, maybe Peter was just the guy who wore the masks’, and that did piss me off! When I did write seriously agaim, I tried to come up with songs that sounded as different from Genesis as possible.”

There were no masks for Collins, who didn’t try to compete with Gabriel’s on-stage theatricality, simply playing up his unpretentious guy-next-door persona. “Not a conscious decision,” he says now. “I just didn’t feel I could pull off the things Peter did. I said: ‘Okay, I’ll give it a go, but don’t expect me to wear all those costumes!’” So he “just stood there and sang”, afraid even to take the microphone off its stand at first. “Taking the microphone off its stand was what ‘singers’ did, I wasn’t ready for that yet.”

Yet as that night in Canada and many future nights (even during and after his phenomenal solo success) testified, he had a connection with Genesis’ music and fans that was invaluable. “He was quite a character, but to the audience he was one of us, and, therefore, one of them,” says Mike Rutherford now. “We knew after half an hour that night in Canada – this is going to work.”

Eyewitness report by Jim Fisk

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime event!” says the then-teenage snapper of the very first show with Phil as singer in London, Ontario.

“The London Arena [since demolished] could hold a few thousand at the most and is more used to roller-skates than rockers. Before the show, I wandered in with my Dark Side Of The Moon stickered briefcase (was I a roadie?) and watched the band set up. Everyone was ejected for the sound check. Come show time we dashed up to third-ish row on the hard concrete floor.

"When the lights dimmed, the place, small as it is, was packed. Phil perhaps a little tentative at first, but the crowd responds and so does Phil. Bill Bruford, in his Boston Bruins T-Shirt was Mr Perfection, as usual. I’d missed the Lamb… tour in Toronto for a physics exam (poor choice) and my buds were concerned Phil couldn’t cut it. He cut it good. Robbery, Assault And Battery and Phil is dressed the part. “A Flower?” he says as the huge green and yellow tulip explodes into view.

"I’m snapping pictures and I’d swear Phil and Mike are posing for me. Over 35 years later, and as I look at them now they still amaze me. Mike’s double-necking is masterful. But the Phil and Bill percussion duel was incredible. Speed, technical excellence, and musical too. Tony perched on the edge of the small stage, quiet, just doing his job and doing it well. Steve, all in white, soars to heights unreachable by mortal man. In the small hall, the sound seemed to wrap around us. Bass pedals grabbed my guts and shook them like there’s no tomorrow.

"Encore? Encore! Sure, I regret like hell not seeing Gabriel do Lamb… (although he did a bit in his first solo tour), but when the house lights came up I knew we’d witnessed a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

In 2023, accompanying our analysis of how Pink Floyd changed dramatically between their first two shows at Earls Court in 1973 and their five-night return in 1981, Prog presented a rundown of 10 key live performances from the band’s early days to their final reunion.

1. 14 Hour Technicolor Dream – Alexandra Palace, London, April 1967

At which the first tranche of Floyd fans felt they’d sold out, moving from the confines of All Saints Hall in Powis Gardens and the UFO in Tottenham Court Road to be part of the multi-artist happening in Muswell Hill. Captured on film by Peter Whitehead as part of Tonite, Let’s All Make Love In London, Floyd appeared at the end of the show,as the Sunday sun rose across the capital – and with it, their role as underground house band of choice was secure.

2. Games For May – Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, May 1967

Probably the group’s most famous early concert, Games For May was immortalised in song by Syd Barrett on the Floyd’s first Top 10 single, See Emily Play. Described as a “space age relaxation for the climax of spring – electronic composition, colour and image projection, girls, and the Pink Floyd,” frankly, what was there not to like?

Playing more or less what was to become The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, and premiering Emily, someone dressed as an admiral gave out daffodils to the audience while a bubble machine stained the seats, allegedly resulting in a lifelong ban at the venue for the group.

3. More Furious Madness From The Massed Gadgets Of Auximenes – Royal Festival Hall, London, April 1969

Realising that trying to replace the tragic whimsy of Syd Barrett was a road to nowhere, Floyd favoured the high concept with a generous dollop of their brand of space rock. The show the group premiered at this RFH event was The Man And The Journey, following Everyman as he goes through the day, incorporating released and unreleased material. Thumbs up for ambition, thumbs down for abundance of melody.

4. Roman Amphitheatre, Pompeii, Italy, October 1971

Arguably Pink Floyd’s most famous live performance was captured without a single paying member of the public amid the lava-saturated relics of Pompeii. Filmed by Adrian Maben for his oft-released and well-loved movie Pink Floyd: Live At Pompeii (reissued in 2025) the tracking shot behind the band’s amplifiers, bearing the legend ‘Pink Floyd. London.’ is one of the greatest moments in pop, ever.

5. Winter Tour ’74 – Trentham Gardens, Stoke on Trent, November 1974

After the desultory performances at the Empire Pool the nights before, Pink Floyd found their mojo and played a show strong enough that the bootleg of the three non-Dark Side songs of that tour allegedly sold 150,000 copies, in one shop outselling Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. What the recordings do underline is that by playing an hour of unheard material, Floyd demanded a great deal from their audience.

6. In The Flesh – Stade du Parc Olympique, Montreal, Canada, July 1977

Included solely for its notoriety, the most infamous Pink Floyd show of all time saw Waters beckoning a rowdy fan toward him, then spitting at him. It resulted in Roger Waters hating himself and his audience, setting his creative course for a considerable time going forward. How had it come to this?

7. The Wall – Earls Court, London, August 1980

The excitement of The Wall shows is difficult to put into writing. The shock of this band, associated with hippies and the profound, playing confrontational, difficult, theatrical rock was palpable. Once the taste was acquired, to see it in this enormous venue with its inflatable mothers, schoolteachers and wives, crashing planes, pop-up rooms, explosions and a lot of cardboard is still somewhat mind-bending.

8. A Concert For Europe – Venice, Italy, July 1989

A free concert that was intended to be played off the island of Giudecca in the Venetian Lagoon; instead, because of logistics, it actually ended up being staged on large rafts in the middle of the San Marco Basin, directly opposite the Doge’s Palace and smack-dab in the middle of Venice.

A great deal of local, national and eco politics surrounded the show, but it also acted as a metaphor for the very opulence of the 80s – not to mention the apogee of slick, David Gilmour-led commercial Floyd. The show was eventually watched globally by 100 million people.

9. Pulse – Earls Court, London, October 1994

By the time of The Division Bell, and what was to become the live album Pulse, Gilmour, Rick Wright and Nick Mason had learned how to be Pink Floyd without Waters or, indeed, Barrett. No one now had to ask “Which one was Pink?” as Pink was the unity, the spectacle, the togetherness of the band, playing The Dark Side Of The Moon in full for the first time since 1975, but importantly, having, in The Division Bell, an album that could stand upright in its shadow.

10. Live 8 – Hyde Park, London, July 2005

They never thought it would happen, Gilmour and the boy from Great Bookham, out on that crepuscular common, that night many haven’t forgotten… Pink Floyd’s temporary reunion, engineered by Bob Geldof for Live 8, overshadowed the rest of the global concert. Although the awkwardness onstage can be analysed to the nth degree afterwards, in its moment, it felt like the best thing ever.

"I love you, man," Serj Tankian beams, hugging Daron Malakian tightly to a sea of cheers from over 60,000 delirious, onlooking System Of A Down fans. The last time this writer saw the Armenian-American metal heavyweights share a stage - at Download festival 2017 - they looked like they all wanted to be anywhere else, shoulders slumped, static poses and practically ignoring each other. It was a depressing visual for one of millennial metal's most creative and idiosyncratic bands.

Today, the vibes couldn't be more different: singer Serj can barely stop smiling; guitarist Daron's stage banter is playfully eccentric rather than grumpily off-kilter; bassist Shavo Odadjian looks like he's having the time of his life. Even powerhouse drummer John Dolmayan's trademark intensity is broken by the occasional grin. One 40-something fan sat near us remarks in disbelief as he takes in the spectacle: "Are System Of A Down back?!"

System are indeed back - back in the UK for the first time in almost a decade, a long ol' absence by any standards in music. There are kids here who wouldn't have been born when they last played, enjoying their first rock show, hoisted up on the shoulders of parents in matching Toxicity t-shirts. There are teens milling around sporting Serj's iconic 90s tribal face paint (why didn't we ever think of that?!) and, of course, a large portion of elder millennials ready to relive their nu metal heydays. Oh, and lots of people in banana costumes. That definitely wasn't a thing nine years ago.

Long before System hit the stage, cult sludge heroes Acid Bath get us started in style. Their grimy psychedelic heft fits a stadium stage surprisingly well, even if the echoey thud of Shane Wesley's bass bouncing off the empty seats at the back creates a head-spinning racket that's even more of a trip than the far-out visuals splattered across the screens around them.

Queens Of The Stone Age are masters of their craft at this point, Josh Homme's casual saunter out on stage suggesting he's well versed to owning crowds this size. They get a big response from a rapidly growing audience, though a muddy mix sees some of their swaggering riffs lost in the ether. Still, they earn the first pits and crowdsurfers of the day, so it's very much job done.

The response that greets Daron Malakian's arrival on stage around 40 minutes later is deafening, but surpassed almost immediately by the singalongs that accompany Soldier Side; fans are already on shoulders and venue-wide circle pits are already beginning to open up before a proper riff has even dropped.

Then, the rest of System appear, launch into the dizzy opening crush of B.Y.O.B. and Tottenham's home ground explodes into joyous, chaotic abandon. What follows is a relentless dishing out of anthemic alt metal ragers - thirty of them, in fact, unleashed at such a pace there's barely time to remark "How good was that?!" after each song before they've already kicked into the next one.

"These three guys are the best fucking musicians in the world!" Serj remarks warmly at one point, noting that his bandmates "saved my ass" after a slight miscue. Tottenham definitely didn't notice; the entire floor is a bubbling sea of movement from the first notes of B.Y.O.B. to the final bouncing riff of Sugar, the stands full of people off their seats dancing, jumping and singing their bums off.

Every song is greeted like a classic but there are undoubtedly highlights. Chop Suey! getting dropped two thirds of the way in sparks bedlam; Radio/Video's folky breakdown prompts all manners of shapes thrown; Daron's now-trademark "I wanna see you spinnin' around! Round, round, round and round!" command elicits at least 10 massive circle pits across the floor during an electric Toxicity.

That would all be enough to make this a hell of a gig, but the fact that the band themselves seem genuinely, wholeheartedly pleased to be here is what really puts it over the top. Whatever healing these four lads have done over the past few years has made all the difference: even if we're resigned to never getting that new album, metal is just a better place for having a happy, healthy System Of A Down in it. Tonight was an absolute treat and one of the best rock stadium shows in recent memory.

System Of A Down Tottenham Stadium night one setlist

Soldier Side - Intro

B.Y.O.B.

Suite-Pee

Chic 'N' Stu

Prison Song

Aerials

I-E-A-I-A-I-O

Innervision

Darts

Genocidal Humanoidz

Needles

Deer Dance

Radio/Video

Dreaming

Hypnotize

ATWA

Bounce

Suggestions

Psycho

Chop Suey!

Lonely Day

Lost in Hollywood

Streamline

Spiders

Forest

DAM

War?

Roulette

Toxicity

Sugar

Rock legend Alice Cooper has announced another run of dates on his ongoing Alice's Attic tour. Just two days after the European leg of the tour ended in Italy, the indefatigable 78-year-old has announced a new run of shows in the US.

The new dates – which are in addition to Cooper's upcoming European tour with Hollywood Vampires, his UK book tour, and another four Welcome To My Nightmare dates in Las Vegas with magician and illusionist Criss Angel – kick off at the Louder Than Life festival in Louisville, KY, on September 17, and conclude on November 21 at the Grand Theatre at Grand Sierra Resort + Casino in Reno, NV.

The new dates will presumably give American fans another chance to witness new guitarist Anna Cara in action. The 22-year-old Brit joined Cooper's band in April to cover for Nita Strauss, who gave birth in May and has not yet announced her return to the band.

Full dates below.

Hollywood Vampires: European Tour 2026

Aug 12: London O2 Arena, UK *
Aug 14: Cardiff Castle, UK $
Aug 15: Scarborough Open Air Theatre, UK $
Aug 17: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Aug 18: Manchester AO Arena, UK *
Aug 19: Birmingham Utilita Arena Birmingham, UK *
Aug 21: Colchester Castle Park, UK $
Aug 22: Halifax The Piece Hall, UK $
Aug 25: Nürnberg PSD Bank Nürnberg Arena, Germany
Aug 26: Paris Adidas Arena, France
Aug 28: Cologne Lanxess Arena, Germany
Aug 30: Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
Sep 01: Novegro-Tregarezzo Parco della Musica di Milano, Italy
Sep 02: Este Castello Carrarese, Italy
Sep 03: Arena Zagreb, Croatia
Sep 05: St. Pölten VAZ, Austria
Sep 06: Praha Sportovní hala Fortuna, Czechia

* with The Jesus and Mary Chain
$ with The Damned

Find Hollywood Vampires tickets.

Alice Cooper: Alice's Attic tour 2026

Sep 17: Louisville Louder Than Life, KY
Sep 19: West Springfield The Big E Fair, MS
Sep 20: Ottawa CityFolk Festival, ON
Sep 22: Niagara Falls OLG Stage at Fallsview Casino, ON

Oct 27: Clearwater Ruth Eckerd Hall, FL
Oct 30: Richmond Altria Theater, VA
Oct 31: Atlantic City Tropicana Casino & Resort, NJ
Nov 01: Bethlehem Wind Creek Bethlehem, PA
Nov 04: Hershey Theatre, PA
Nov 06: Windsor Caesars Windsor – The Colosseum, ON
Nov 07: Kalamazoo Wings Event Center, MI
Nov 08: Waukegan Genesee Theatre, IL
Nov 10: St. Louis Stifel Theatre, MO
Nov 11: Park City Hartman Arena, KS
Nov 14: Indio Fantasy Springs Casino, CA
Nov 15: Prescott Valley Findlay Toyota Center, AZ
Nov 17: San Diego Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre, CA
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Alice Cooper: Devil On My Shoulder UK book tour 2026

Oct 11: Cardiff New Theatre
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Oct 19: Glasgow Pavilion Theatre
Oct 20: Wolverhampton Civic Hall

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Alice Cooper and Criss Angel: Welcome To My Nightmare residency

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It wasn't meant to be Freddie Mercury's final performance, and it certainly wasn't billed as such, but Queen's 1986 show at Knebworth has gone down in history as just that. The last time Freddie Mercury took to the stage with his band.

There's a shortage of video documenting what took place, but that's far from unusual, even considering the historical nature of the show. Two months earlier Marillion had headlined the vast Garden Party, 35 miles north of Knebworth at the Milton Keynes bowl, and no professional footage of the show exists. "There was a disagreement over who was going to pay for it," then-frontman Fish told this writer, "and at the end of the day nobody bothered filming it. It's ridiculous."

These days, of course, it'd be different. There'd be multiple cameras, a drone or two, pro-shot and fan-shot highlights would be on YouTube within hours, and the whole shebang would be released as a deluxe edition Blu-ray before the arrival of Autumn.

That's not to say that there weren't film crews at Knebworth. Anglia TV were there and filmed a segment for local news broadcast. Some documentary footage was shot by Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, the Austrian duo responsible for Queen's One Vision video. And the entire set was relayed live to the huge screens that book-ended the stage.

Various pieces of footage have surfaced over the years. Anglia shared some film shot at the show to accompany a story about Brian May receiving an honorary degree from the University of Hertfordshire in 2002, but the footage has become a subject of some controversy – even conspiracy – among Queen fans.

"It is one of the biggest blunders in our history," May once said. "The cameras were rolling, and visuals of the entire concert were relayed to the Eidophor screens simultaneously with the show. All it needed was for someone in our team to put a tape machine on the end of either the screen mix or the cameras themselves. No-one did. So it all went into the ether.

"There is a little bit of documentary footage in existence, also shot at the time separately, by Rudi and Hannes, I think, which includes some beautiful audience footage - which has been used in the odd documentary. But that's it. It would have been a great DVD to have, wouldn't it. Queen's Last Concert! Well, sadly, it will never happen."

So we're left with scraps, until we're told otherwise. But there's still magic in those morsels, as proved by the short segment of video that shows a giddy Freddie Mercury performing vocal exercises in a backstage dressing room immediately prior to the band's stage walk. He's even joined by Roger Taylor for a quick run through the "deeeeey-o" call-and-response Mercury had made world famous at Queen's Live Aid show the previous summer.

It's a wonderful clip. Mercury looks as if he doesn't have a care in the world. Yet he'd already told his bandmates that he was nearing the end of the road, "I'm not going to be doing this forever," he's reported to have said. "This is probably the last time."

Sadly, he was right.

Some 45,000 fans have made the journey to London’s N4 in the blistering heat to witness this stage of Biffy Clyro's Futique tour: their own mini-festival of sorts and the pinnacle of their career thus far.

The Scottish trio have endured some emotionally trying times in the last 12 months, some big (get well soon, James Johnston), some a bit smaller (Scotland's woeful World Cup campaign in the USA). But they've each shown their mettle throughout it all and tonight is a testament to their unwavering resilience.

Following robust sets by San Diego's Wavves and the returning West Yorkshire four-piece Marmozets, Don Broco hit the stage dressed in black on this stiflingly hot summer afternoon. They're immediately in irrepressible form, with a set which leans heavily on their latest album Nightmare Tripping. Over the course of their slot, the Bedford quartet up the party atmosphere with an outrageous fusion of pop hooks and obnoxious nu metal riffs.

Frontman Rob Damiani – looking majestic with a Kevin Keegan Hamburg-era perm – effortlessly commands the crowd throughout their 10-song set. It's Bruce Willis, taken from their 2021 album Amazing Things, which ups the ante with its 'Yippee ki yay motherfucker' hook. The audience reply with a melange of limbs and pints, and look like a BBC montage of Box Park celebrations when Harry Kane scored that goal against the Democratic Republic of the Congo earlier in the week.

"We're taking a hydration break," he tells the crowd in between mouthfuls of water to pantomime boos from the crowd. "It's thirsty work."

Nothing But Thieves bring a different atmosphere to their late afternoon slot. Where Don Broco are a raging house party with a bag of Madri beer and European energy drinks, this Southend five-piece offer something a little more refined. Maybe some nice wine and olives. Their 14-song set opens with Amsterdam and it's immediately apparent that Conor Mason remains a powerhouse vocalist, recalling the late Jeff Buckley as his voice soars over the band's driving, atmospheric alt-rock.

And on to tonight's hosts Biffy Clyro. It's been quite the journey for the Scottish trio, who began their story as dissonant alt-rock alchemists and became gold-plated arena headliners over the course of 30 years or so.

This evening marks their biggest headline show on their own footing. They've headlined Reading and Leeds, Download, Sonisphere, and Bellahouston Park in Glasgow. In the run-up to this 45,000-capacity show in London's N4, frontman Simon Neil promised surprises and a setlist which will delight long-time fans of the band.

Across the capital, Metallica are gearing up to play as their tape of Ennio Morricone's The Ecstasy of Gold rolls at London Stadium seven miles away. Biffy have a similar trick up their sleeve, with the use of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings as their walk-on music; the poignant soundtrack from Oliver Stone's 1986 anti-war film gives the show a true sense of occasion and gravitas.

The setlist kicks off with the glorious riff from The Captain from 2009's Only Revolutions, backed by the first of many fireworks which sparkle in the dusk sky.

Simon, wearing a patchwork jean kilt from what we assume is the McLevi's clan, leads his formidable band with an almost permanent grin: drummer Ben Johnston, bassist Naomi MacLeod (admirably standing in for James), guitarist Mike Vennart, keyboard player Richard 'Gambler' Ingram, and string section Annemarie McGahon and Ailbhe Catherine.

"Here's something old school," says Neil, before picking out the opening bars of Justboy, a song from their 2002 debut Blackened Sky. The song which has been largely shelved in recent years to make way for their newer material draws massive cheers from the diehard fans, as does Booooom, Blast & Ruin, which hasn't been performed for almost a decade.

There are more surprises in store. There's the haunting a cappella of There's No Such Man as Crasp and the genre-twisting There's No Such Thing as a Jaggy Snake.

After Mountains and a ton of confetti, there's the heartbreaking plea of Machines. Neil is joined on vocals by impact sub Henry Creel, otherwise known as One or Mr. Whatsit or Stranger Things villain Vecna (or to give him his actual name, Jamie Campbell Bower).

“We’re never going to forget tonight," says Neil with palpable pride, before the band close on the triple treat of Wolves of Winter, Bubbles and Many of Horror.

It's life-affirming stuff, alright, and an evening which will live long in the memory. Mon the Biff!

Biffy Clyro setlist – Finsbury Park, London: July 3, 2026

The Captain
That Golden Rule
Who's Got a Match?
Justboy
Biblical
God & Satan
A Little Love
Booooom, Blast & Ruin
Instant History
Living Is a Problem Because Everything Dies
Hunting Season
Space
Cop Syrup
Different People
A Hunger in Your Haunt
Goodbye
There's No Such Man as Crasp
There's No Such Thing as a Jaggy Snake
Black Chandelier
Mountains
Machines
Wolves of Winter
Bubbles
Many of Horror

The two shows Pink Floyd played at London’s Earls Court in May 1973 marked a quantum leap for the group out of the ballrooms and theatre circuit into the arenas, stadiums and fields, where their concerts would remain for the rest of their career. Thanks to the worldwide allure of their eighth album, The Dark Side Of The Moon, their controls seemed to be set; any intimacy and direct connection with the audience – never something highest on Floyd’s priority list – was over. Prog explores those shows and their impact on the group in the following years.

In 1980, Pink Floyd took to the stage at Earls Court, the cavernous 18,000-seater exhibition centre in west London. Booked for six nights in early August, the group performed a show that systematically parodied the very notion of an arena concert, introduced by an over-the-top MC, before sending four musicians onstage wearing Pink Floyd life masks; a surrogate band, proving that audiences at that distance could actually be watching anything. If that wasn’t enough to emphasise the dislocation, a physical wall was built between artist and audience made of 450 cardboard bricks.

The Wall became Floyd conceptualist Roger Waters’ most complex idea, a reaction to the general isolation in his role as conflicted multi-millionaire socialist, but specifically at the dislocation he felt as his group played live to ever bigger, increasingly soulless arenas. Always a band received with earnest silence from their fans, since the global success of 1973’s The Dark Side Of The Moon, rowdy elements of the crowd, especially in North America, asphyxiated the already slender rapport Waters felt with his audience.

But how did it come to this? How did a band, so experimental, stately and well-mannered get to this point? It all begins in exactly the same place, Earls Court, seven years earlier in May 1973.

There was much talk in early 1973 of Earls Court opening its doors to live concerts, yet there were few acts that could fill a hall of such size and scale. Built between 1935 and 1937, the storied venue was constructed on a triangle of land between train lines that had been used for entertainment grounds since the late 1880s. Its spectacular Art Deco/Moderne style was designed by American architect Charles Howard Crane, famous for his ‘movie palaces’ of North America, most specifically in Detroit.

The venue opened on September 1, 1937 – 40,000 square feet of space, complete with an indoor pool – with a chocolate and confectionery exhibition. From then on, it became the go-to venue for large-scale events such as the Royal Tournament, the Ideal Home Show, the 1948 Olympics and the Boat Show, where the indoor pool would be filled with almost eight million litres of water. But not live performances by rock bands. Yet.

For large concerts, London was served by Olympia, just up the road from Earls Court, with its 10,000 capacity. Jimi Hendrix and Floyd themselves had played there as part of Christmas On Earth Continued and, later, in one of his few ill-fated solo gigs, so did Syd Barrett. There was also the Empire Pool Wembley – again a 10,000-seater – which had opened its doors to concerts since 1960 with the NME Poll Winner shows.

After The Beatles had played to 57,000 at Shea Stadium in 1965, plus Woodstock in 1969 and the Isle Of Wight Festivals of ’69 and ’70, rock promotion became big business. And ‘big’ was the operative word – the bigger the better. The idea of festivals was now established, so if they could draw tens of thousands, surely the right band could fill a mere 18,000 seats in an arena. To facilitate this, a new breed of UK concert promoter was coming through, such as John and Tony Smith, Harvey Goldsmith, Maurice Jones and Mel Bush.

The idea to put on live shows at Earls Court came from showbiz impresario Robert Paterson and boxing promoter Jarvis Astaire (the man later responsible for bringing WWF to these shores). “Patterson came from the classical scene, very old-school,” former London agent and Thin Lizzy co-manager Chris O’Donnell recalls. “I used to see Jarvis around town a lot. I don’t think there was a pie that he didn’t have a finger in. He once claimed he was offered the management of the Fabs but turned them down because his wife didn’t like them. Pure fantasy!” But, of course, an element of fantasy is what is needed to pull off feats on such a large scale.

Firstly, Mel Bush was contacted about which acts of his he thought he could promote there. He had not one, but two of such magnitude: David Bowie and Slade. At opposite ends of the glam phenomenon, both had ardent fanbases that could guarantee sales. If the teenyboppers could potentially fill it, so could Pink Floyd’s fans, especially as The Dark Side Of The Moon looked as if it would be their biggest release yet. Negotiated by the team at housing and homeless charity Shelter, Floyd agreed to play a benefit concert. As ticket sales (priced at £2, £1.75 and £1) far exceeded capacity, a second date was added.

And so, on May 18 and 19, 1973, the group played two nights there, among only three shows they played in the UK in that particular year. They already had a taste of larger shows as they had played Wembley’s Empire Pool the previous October, and understood that the sound was so important to these halls. Their US tour in March saw them playing venues between six- and 12,000-seaters.

Although Slade had been booked first, at the end of their UK tour on July 1, David Bowie was announced first and opened Earls Court to rock audiences on May 12. Whereas his Hammersmith Odeon concert in July that year is revered by the world and its gnome, Bowie’s Earls Court show is frequently swept under the carpet. By all accounts, it was a shambles. The stage was too low, the PA inadequate and the show had to be stopped for 15 minutes to quell the excitable stage-charging crowd.

“There was a good deal of apprehension about the group playing at this enormous exhibition hall,” Pink Floyd biographer Rick Sanders wrote in 1976. “Some weeks previously, David Bowie had done a concert there, the first time the venue served as a rock palace, and both fans and critics had been unanimous in their verdict. The show was a disaster, with terrible sound and nobody able to see what was happening on the distant stage. Earls Court was definitely not for rock, everyone thought.”

Pink Floyd would be leaving nothing to chance. Their live shows had been building in scale for a couple of years, especially with the addition of lighting and effects technician Arthur Max, who would introduce cherry pickers cascading rose petals, or burning gongs to enhance the band’s desire to focus on ‘son et lumière’ rather than the group themselves (as Floyd academic David Pattie notes, “The band, with the occasional exception of Roger Waters, were static to the point of self-effacement”).

Even though it had been played live for over a year, the press were calling the Earls Court show the “première” of The Dark Side Of The Moon, which had been released that March. It was certainly the first time that UK audiences had seen the group augmented with Dick Parry on saxophone and female backing vocalists – on this occasion, Vicki Brown and Liza Strike. Thunderbirds (and later James Bond) special effects technician Derek Meddings coordinated a crashing Spitfire to shoot over the audience’s head, and Max worked on the lighting effects, as well as introducing the inflatables that would become so central to Floyd’s performances. A huge mirror ball rose behind Nick Mason’s drums and opened out – not unlike the jewel-encrusted satellites shown in Diamonds Are Forever, the then-recent Bond film – and sent laser light beaming across the auditorium.

Most importantly, given the criticism of Bowie’s shows, the sound team led by Chris Adamson employed the latest quadraphonic technology to exploit the auditorium’s vastness. “What I always found amazing was the sound in the room, how that took the music around,” Gilmour’s first wife, Ginger, who was there that night, recalls. “You didn’t just have it coming at you. You were enveloped into it. Rick’s keyboards were amazing. It was really special.”

Bootleg recordings of the concerts demonstrate how accomplished the group had become. From the hits’n’bits of the first half, opening with Obscured By Clouds and When You’re In, they sound enlivened by their US tour and happy to be scaling up that size of venue, filling the empty space with layers of well-mixed sound. Waters introduces Careful With That Axe, Eugene as another “extremely oldie.” A leisurely Echoes closes the first set. Then The Dark Side Of The Moon is presented straight, with little improvisation. A storming encore of One Of These Days sends the crowd home in rapture.

The second night’s performance is a lot roomier, with jams stretching out. If it had been able to stay this way during subsequent tours, maybe The Wall would never have happened. “It wasn’t, ‘Here’s a bit of a Spitfire,’” Ginger Gilmour continues. “It was bringing the multi-dimensional aspect of the music and the visuals more into one. It was theatre. It wasn’t a gimmick. It intensified the reality of the music, the experience and the oneness. It made the audience feel like a kid: ‘Wow!’ I remember the unity and the beauty of it, a beautiful concept. I loved it.”

The band were broadly happy with the way the show had gone. “All the elements came together, as we presented the piece in its most developed version,” Nick Mason wrote in Inside Out. “The music had been rehearsed enough to be tight, but was new enough to be fresh. The lighting, thanks to Arthur, was dramatic. There were additional effects including a 15-foot spotlit plane shot down a wire over the heads of the audience to crash onstage in a ball of fire in sync with the explosion in On The Run.”

Rick Sanders continued: “Their material might have been familiar but they put on the show of their lives for 18,000-strong audiences whose appreciation bordered on religious fervour. Floyd’s amplification amply filled the cavernous hall with quadraphonic magic, aided by visual effects of dramatic power. Roger Waters’ gong exploded in flame during Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, an inflatable man loomed behind Nick Mason during Careful With That Axe, Eugene, his luminous green eyes glowing through dry ice clouds.” It was, as Melody Maker said, “A perfect moonshot, faultless in every department.”

Waters spoke to ZigZag magazine the week after the gig and still seemed in awe at the scale of what his band could achieve: “When we were setting up, I thought that it did look a bit like a circus with all these wires going into the audience. And the plane we used at Earls Court was very like those circus space rockets that people whip round and round in. It was silver and red and about six feet long, like a bloody great aluminium paper dart, flashing lights and smoke. Amazing.”

A bar had been set. The shows changed the band – thoughts of how subsequent records would scale up for performance became as much a consideration as what the sleeve would look like, what the music would sound like and what the concept would be. Never the most prolific of touring bands compared to their peers, their new-found success enabled further scarcity. Before now, Pink Floyd’s appearances had incorporated the experimental, moving forward with light and sound, cooking breakfast and sawing wood, yet these all seemed am-dram, even the original liquid lights, compared with what they had arrived at.

The very fact that Pink Floyd weren’t going to be coming to your town meant getting your money’s worth when you did see them. While each performance was to become a treasured memento for European fans, their reception in North America after they had hit the bigger stages was to lead to something altogether darker. In May 1973, 10 days before the Earls Court shows, Capitol US did what the group wouldn’t allow in the UK – release an edited version of Money as a single. The sarcastic blues-boogie taken out of context made Pink Floyd sound like everything they were not: a good-time bar band. Although its success didn’t greatly affect their remaining North American and European dates of the year, as time passed, it became an issue.

“Roger started getting really upset later, after Money became a success. We became more famous and the gigs got larger; intimacy was lost,” Ginger Gilmour says. “In earlier gigs, people listened. They allowed themselves to be taken by the music and they didn’t have to be on drugs to do it.”

Aside from commitments to a short French tour in June 1974, Pink Floyd reappeared onstage at Usher Hall in Edinburgh on November 4 that year, playing a 20-date UK winter tour that mixed multiple nights in smaller capacity venues with four consecutive nights at Wembley Arena. There was tremendous excitement for the group’s first UK tour in over two years. Demand was high. For example, the Cardiff concert at the town’s Sophia Gardens Pavilion received 9,000 applications for 2,000 tickets.

The weight of expectation of the live return weighed heavily on Pink Floyd. When this tour was announced, it was back to ’72 in terms of premièring new material in the first half of the show, before returning to familiar territory. And frankly, hearing Shine On You Crazy Diamond, and early versions of Dogs (Gotta Be Crazy) and Sheep (Raving And Drooling) cold was quite a big ask. And by now, although The Dark Side Of The Moon was becoming a tad hackneyed for Floyd, people had paid their money to hear their softly spoken magic spells.

For these 1974 shows, one of Pink Floyd’s most recognisable stylistic devices was added: the circular screen on which films could be projected – known colloquially within the group as ‘Mr Screen.’ Films were made for each number including director Ian Emes’ animated clocks for Time, and shots of Dark Side... being pressed up for Money. Pictures taken of the band by Jill Furmanovsky backstage show them positively at ease with each other.

“They were an organism,” Ginger Gilmour says. “Each one had a character, a quality that made it work: Roger was the outspoken visible person, Nick was the glue, David was more of the heart and the floating, Rick was even more introverted, but brought in a certain quality.”

The volume of the cheers at the first thud of The Dark Side Of The Moon’s heartbeat after the interval drowned out anything that was played in the first half, yet UK fans were respectful and knew how to behave. Tour manager Mick Kluczynski, who was also part of the group’s sound team, the ‘Quad Squad,’ said in 1976: “Pink Floyd fans come to a concert, sit down, shut up and listen, and go home quietly. The group have a very good reputation among hall managers.”

This was becoming less of the case in North America, where on the short two-part tour they undertook in April and June, at the gig at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, fights broke out in the 50,000-strong crowd. They detracted, as The Pittsburgh Press was to write afterwards, “from the mood so vital to appreciating Pink Floyd’s music.” Not even the brand-new Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park-designed inflatable pyramid could calm the nerves.

A despairing Waters was later to say: “I cast myself back into how fucking dreadful I felt on the last American tour, with all those thousands and thousands and thousands of drunken kids smashing each other to pieces. I felt dreadful because it had nothing to do with us. I didn’t think there was any contact between us and them.”

The tour ended with an enormous outdoor show at Knebworth Park on July 5, 1975, the only major outdoor concert they had performed in the UK since the Hyde Park show in July 1970. “Knebworth looked, initially, like a repeat of one of those glorious festivals that marked the zenith of progressive rock development in the late 60s,” Robin Denselow wrote in The Guardian. “The vast audience was sprawled across the English countryside, banners waving like a medieval battlefield, while the homely droning of Mr John Peel announced an impressive cast of musicians who used to be leaders of the so-called underground, and still retain their cult appeal. The underground has long disappeared, rock has become big business and respectable, and audiences are now more passive, demanding slickness and professionalism rather than experiment.”

When they did take the stage at Knebworth, the first hour was material completely unfamiliar to most of the audience – unless they had been to previous shows on the tour or bought a bootleg. To think a group would conclude their tour ahead of an album that had yet to be released today seems unthinkable. To go that long before ‘the hits’ would test the patience, and as seemed commonplace at this point, the show received mixed reviews. However, there was much to look at.

Sadly, technical delays hampered matters, as the band had to take to the stage as two Spitfires, flown in from East Midlands airport, buzzed the crowd. The electricity supply to the stage was variable, the band were tired, and the sound beset with issues. Rick Wright’s keyboards were out of tune, and, losing foldback to the stage, Waters sang out of tune. However, with pyramids and lights and explosions there was still enough warm thrill of confusion for the 100,000-strong crowd to enjoy.

The band spent the first half of 1977 on the final ‘proper’ tour they undertook with Roger Waters. This would be the one where their superstardom really hit home, with sales of Wish You Were Here – which arrived three months after Knebworth – proving a worthy successor to The Dark Side Of The Moon. Yet the band were determined to keep their anonymity – there would be no showboating or foot-on-the-monitor shenanigans.

As David Pattie notes, Pink Floyd “did not take advantage of the technologies they helped pioneer to declare themselves, unambiguously, to be stars. Instead, they allowed themselves to disappear behind the images they created; in fact... the stage technologies they employed came to stand in for the band in performance.” They were, in the stadiums at least, a surrogate band – people came to look at the lights.

To coincide with the release of Animals in January 1977, the group undertook a European tour, arriving in Britain in March for five nights at Wembley’s Empire Pool and four at Stafford’s Bingley Hall. Although keeping Dick Parry on sax, there would be no backing vocalists, thus removing any sweetening of the sound – instead, second guitarist Snowy White helped Gilmour recreate his multi-tracking from the Animals album. By now the spectacle was complete – beyond the usual explosions and projections one expected from the Floyd as a matter of course, there was now one of the most-loved aspects in Floydology: the inflatable pig. As seen on the cover of Animals, it would majestically hover above the audience’s heads.

Dave Bandana, writer and performer with prog outfit The Bardic Depths, was in the audience at the Empire Pool shows in March 1977. “Having seen Genesis perform The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway two years earlier at the same venue, I was expecting something similar, but without the costumes.” For Bandana, it was not to be. “My abiding memory is one of disappointment and I would tell people it was the most boring concert I ever attended. Maybe I expected too much.

“The music, of course, was wonderful but there was no interaction with the audience. It all felt very sterile, played exactly like the records. There was, of course, one theatrical moment: the pig on a wire. But I remember little else. Today I might appreciate it more, especially as I never saw them live again. But at least I saw them and witnessed a bit of musical history.”

As the European Animals tour became In The Flesh in the US from May to July 1977, all the dark forebodings of previous excursions coalesced. A pall seemed to hang over the band, and all the shows seemed to be downbeat. The staging had complex hydraulic lights rather than their usual ‘square rig’ illumination; these had umbrellas attached that could also protect the band from the elements. In addition to Mr Screen, the mirror ball, the pyramid and the pig, Fisher-Park designed a huge inflatable nuclear family to hover out over the audience in Dogs.

“The Floyd were mere puppets, it seemed, on the stage and in the distance,” Ginger Gilmour wrote in Behind The Wall. “I admired this, for it gave an opportunity to listen instead of adulating upon our stars. Taken on a journey, because that was the Floyd they loved. Admittedly, I wished that there was less tragedy, less angst. It was as if Beauty had become a whisper. The music was just about audible amongst the props and the click track. It was not to David’s liking, nor Rick’s, as the click track took over.”

Ginger added, “Sometimes I’d come out telling them it had been a really great gig and they’d go, ‘It was terrible.’ They’d have their headphones on, the click track and all that stuff. Sometimes they were almost doing covers to them. But it still transcended, at least for me.”

The final show of the In The Flesh tour was at the recently built Olympic Stadium in Montreal on July 6, 1977. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of Floyd lore knows where it all reached breaking point, with Waters reacting to the rowdy crowd with phlegm. It’s fascinating to think that in 1977, with all the ‘I hate Pink Floyd’ sentiment from punk, Floyd themselves would be the ones to gob on their audience rather than be spat at. David Gilmour had had enough as well, retreating to the mixing desk for the final encore.

“I’ll never forget the moment when David appeared at the mixer,” Ginger Gilmour says. “Poor Snowy White. He didn’t know that traditionally, at the last gig of every tour, they always did this breakdown. Little by little, all the equipment leaves and there’s poor Snowy, suddenly David’s gone and everything’s been taken away.”

The irony of the final thing that this line-up of Pink Floyd would play in a stadium was a listless blues jam, not unlike something that they would have played at UFO when starting out just over a decade previously. But, here in the brutalist Olympic Stadium, both UFO’s liquid lights and the band’s spirit had gone.

The effects of the In The Flesh leg of the Animals tour were deep and long lasting. “The last show we did under those really bad circumstances was in Montreal at Olympic Stadium to 90,000 people and my sense of it was that it was a bad joke,” Waters later recalled of that night. “It really had nothing to do with a group of people playing music and another group of people listening to them. It was a weird kind of religious rite and it made me very uneasy – I didn’t want to be involved in it.”

Ginger Gilmour, from her vantage point at the mixing desk, could see it slightly differently: “The energy was terrible. But at the same time, the unity of people – apart from the ones in the front row that were drunk, out of it on marijuana and making a lot of hoo-ha – they wanted intimacy. They wanted people to listen, because if you don’t listen, you don’t hear it. You need to become one. The majority of fans were sitting, listening, wanting to get lost in music and not partying.”

Relationships within the band had been slowly, almost impenetrably deteriorating since The Dark Side Of The Moon. Never a band of brothers as such, as success meant they had to spend less time together, it was almost as if strangers were reconvening every time they gigged or recorded. “There was terrible conflict,” Ginger Gilmour recalls. “Roger and Carolyne, his new wife, would always be in a separate limo, separate hotel... always separate. She was building up his belief so that he could break out of the chains that he felt we had.

“We were in LA and they were working on finishing the album. They were talking about royalties, and we all met up at a Japanese restaurant. The day apparently had been really tough because Roger didn’t want Comfortably Numb on the album. David doesn’t show anger very often, but on that night, in the Japanese restaurant, if he knew karate, he would have broken the table with how hard he hit it. He said, ‘That fucking has to be on the album.’

“Well, for me, having gone through that summer where there was so much angst in the demos, and watching it evolve into something that we could watch, it represents the archetypal journey of us with chaos. When Comfortably Numb comes, it’s the release, it’s a hope. He’s up there, the light totally shifts and you’re absolved of all the angst. If that wasn’t there, it would be a terrible album.”

The Olympic Stadium would be Pink Floyd’s final show playing old material. When they returned to the live arena in February 1980 it would offer something completely different: a show based entirely around their new album, which contained two versions of a track called In The Flesh – one with a question mark and one without. Its opening line was: ‘So you thought you might like to go to the show...’

Designed specifically in three parts – an album, a live show and a film – The Wall channelled everything, good and bad, of what had been learned in the seven-year trajectory since Pink Floyd took to the stage at Earls Court in May 1973. It took all of Waters’ angst, and all the cutting-edge skills of the light, sound and construction team to create a show so grandly preposterous that it could only be staged in its original incarnation 31 times.

The band played it at Earls Court twice: for the six-night stint in 1980, and then a further five nights, for potential use in Alan Parker’s forthcoming film of the album, in June 1981. The show on June 17 that year would be the last time the four core Pink Floyd members would play together until their brief reunion in 2005.

Tales of The Wall, and what the size and scale of the concerts meant for the entire live concert industry, are legion. Sounds reported that “they dwarfed the biggest indoor rock venue in the country with a dazzling array of effects and a 360-degree sound system that was the finest I have ever heard anywhere, let alone the cavernous wastes of Earls Court.”

Earls Court always had a special place in Pink Floyd’s mythology. Nick Mason wrote in Inside Out that it was “one of our favourite venues, a place with plenty of character, right in the heart of London.” It was where the Roger Waters-less Floyd ended their live career with their run of shows in October 1994 to complete The Division Bell tour, and Waters played there again in 2007.

Tragically, the exhibition centre was demolished in 2017 and is now an empty space awaiting long-promised development. It was a venue that was far from perfect, but the group had an affinity with it – being less soulless than Wembley. The shows Pink Floyd played there between 1973 and 1981 bookended the most fascinating, not necessarily for all the right reasons, period in Pink Floyd’s career.

When it comes to alternative music, Canada may as well be the Phantom Zone: so many artists who fill arenas and enjoy legend status in the Great White North find themselves playing to far fewer people whenever they step beyond the border. Billy Talent and Alexisonfire aren’t as big here as they are at home, where pretty much everything they do charts in the top 10, but they’re each still pioneers of millennial post-hardcore with cult international followings. London demonstrates its dedication tonight, as thousands of fans come out during a 35-degree heatwave to see them play their respective 2006 albums in full.

“Tonight is all about gratitude,” says BILLY TALENT vocalist Benjamin Kowalewicz. The opening co-headliners swagger their way through second effort II with genuine glee, and during such standouts as Devil In A Midnight Mass, Red Flag and Fallen Leaves, Wembley Arena reaches the same level of joy, singing along en masse. The highlight of the set, though, is the video production the four-piece have brought with them. Throughout, vocal hooks from Kowalewicz and guitar lines from Ian D’Sa are paired with footage of the band laying down the exact same part in clubs 20 years ago. The videos run in perfect sync with the performance, making for a pleasing full-circle moment.

But, the second the Mississaugans leave the stage, it’s obvious who the crowd’s really here for. A wave of tatted, skate-apparel-sporting punks instantly surges forward in anticipation of ALEXISONFIRE, so enthusiastic that they’re happy to be rammed together in this scorching weather. The St Catharines aggressors stride out under ironic archive footage of the 1977 New York snowstorm, which inspired the imagery of their lauded breakthrough album Crisis.

Drunks, Lovers, Sinners And Saints starts with a declaration of their DIY ethos – “This is from our hearts! Sincerity over simple chords!” – which London recites like a pledge of allegiance. What follows is both rawer and more dynamic than the first show of the night, screamer George Pettit leading the band through passages of rampant hardcore before co-singers/guitarists Dallas Green and Wade MacNeil steal the grand, melodic highs. This Could Be Anywhere In The World, Boiled Frogs and the title track are all time-tested favourites that get a pit swirling in between moments of sweet reprieve.

It’s testament to Crisis’ excellence that, unlike so many front-loaded album-in-full sets we’ve seen, the deep cuts keep the energy high. Keep It On Wax hasn’t been played live since 2012, yet the audience fills in the gaps during MacNeil’s cries of “I! I guess! The only thing cheap to you is your friends!” Many a phone is held high for the following To A Friend, as Green flexes the vocal muscles that have made his indie solo project, City And Colour, a chart-topping juggernaut in its own right.

2006 b-side Thrones is played for the first time ever during the encore, cementing this evening as a truly special occasion. As Alexis then default to early hits Pulmonary Archery and Happiness By The Kilowatt, the set ends with the kind of rich, textured but savage material which made them once-in-a-generation. The self-described ‘only band ever’ have once again proved why no one else matters.

Billy Talent setlist: Wembley Arena, London – June 24, 2026

1. Devil In A Midnight Mass
2. Red Flag
3. This Suffering
4. Worker Bees
5. Pins And Needles
6. Fallen Leaves
7. Where Is The Line?
8. Covered In Cowardice
9. Surrender
10. The Navy Song
11. Perfect World
12. Sympathy
13. Burn The Evidence
14. Rusted From The Rain
15. Devil On My Shoulder
16. Reckless Paradise
17. Viking Death March

Alexisonfire setlist: Wembley Arena, London – June 24, 2026

1. Drunks, Lovers, Sinners And Saints
2. This Could Be Anywhere In The World
3. Mailbox Arson
4. Boiled Frogs
5. We Are The Sound
6. You Burn First
7. We Are The End
8. Crisis
9. Keep It On Wax
10. To A Friend
11. Rough Hands
12. Thrones (live debut)
13. Pulmonary Archery
14. Happiness By The Kilowatt

California rockers Rival Sons have announced their first run of US dates since 2024's Two-Headed Beast schedule. The Domestic Bliss tour kicks off at the Knitting Factory in Boise, ID, on October 30, and finishes on November 29 at the Clyde Theatre in Fort Wayne, IN.

"A lot of irons in the Rival Sons fire right now, but we wanted to break off a quick one domestically, get out there and run it hot for a minute," says frontman Jay Buchanan. "24 US dates in the fall, the Domestic Bliss Tour let's go!”

"We are elated to get back out touring across the U.S., it's been a while," adds guitarist Scott Holiday. "We weren't able to tour the US properly on the last two records, so it's going to be great to get back to some of those territories we missed. We're going to mix it up and try to play songs from across the catalogue - this is going to be fun for us!"

Support will come from Canadian blues rock duo The Blue Stones and Colorado rock'n'rollers The Velveteers, and tickets go on sale this Friday, June 26, at 10am local time. Full dates below.

Meanwhile, the band have also revealed that they're currently working on their ninth studio album, the follow-up to 2023's Darkfighter and Lightbringer sets.

"It's been great to get back to writing and recording with my brothers in Rival Sons," says drummer Michael Davis. "It's early days, and we're doing this one a bit differently, but I'm so excited about how it's turning out!"

The new album is expected to be released in 2027.

Rival Sons: Domestic Bliss US tour 2026

Oct 30: Boise Knitting Factory, ID
Oct 31: Seattle The Showbox, WA
Nov 01: Portland Roseland Theater, OR
Nov 02: Spokane Knitting Factory, WA
Nov 04: Sacramento Ace Of Spades, CA
Nov 05: Reno Grand Theatre At Sierra Resort And Casino, NV
Nov 06: Las Vegas Brooklyn Bowl, NV
Nov 07: Albuquerque Shine Theater, NM
Nov 09: Austin Emo’s, TX
Nov 10: Tulsa Cain’s Ballroom, OK
Nov 12: Moline The Rust Belt, IL
Nov 13: Green Bay Epic Event Center, WI
Nov 14: Milwaukee The Rave, WI
Nov 16: Silver Spring Fillmore Silver Spring, MD
Nov 17: Cincinnati Bogart’s, OH
Nov 18: Cleveland House Of Blues, OH *
Nov 20: New Haven College Street Music Hall, CT
Nov 21: Huntington The Paramount, NY
Nov 22: Worcester The Palladium, MA *
Nov 24: Buffalo Town Ballroom, NY
Nov 25: Montclair The Wellt, NJ
Nov 27: Memphis Minglewood Hall, TN
Nov 28: Indianapolis The Vogue, IN
Nov 29: Fort Wayne Clyde Theatre, IN

*support from The Blue Stones only

Find Rival Sons tickets.

British djent pioneers Tesseract entered the record books in 2015 when they became the first band to perform on top of a structure made completely out of ice. The gig was part of Jagermeister’s Ice Cold series of gigs and took place at Snow Village in Kittila, Lapland. The temporary village was built every year from 20,000,000kg of snow and 350,000kg of crystal-clear natural ice, covering an area of 20,000 square metres and consisting of a hotel, restaurant, cocktail bar, chapel and cinema. Stephen Hill was there to bear witness.

“One of the main challenges is keeping the instruments at the same temperature,” bassist Amos Williams tells us. “If the strings become colder during the set then tuning will become a massive issue.” Which is something that would be more than likely in the minus 20ºC temperature the band had to perform in. In fact during their soundcheck many band members complained of a loss of feeling in their hands after only one song.

To combat this for the duration of their 75-minute set each band member is given a special heat sack, a small marble-sized bag that is as hot as a freshly microwaved baked potato, to hold between songs and return some feeling to their frozen riff digits.

There was more than just the conditions for the band to contend with as well, it was also left to each member to trudge through the snow to various bars and restaurants in the surrounding area to drum up an audience for the show.

“If you book us they will come… hopefully,” laughs vocalist Dan Tompkins before as he prepares to mount a table and address a bar full of Finnish locals. “I genuinely don’t know if there will be anyone there.” He says after his speech.

The band need not have worried – at around 8pm around 100 locals, many of whom are coerced by the promise of free Jager and others in attendance from sheer curiosity, arrive by foot, ski and snowmobile.

Tesseract wander gingerly onstage (or to the top of his drum riser nearly thirty foot above the stage if you’re drummer Jay Postones) and impress everyone with their set of shimmering, melodic, tech-metal. It’s a stunning setting which feels as historic as the record breaking show is and, save for a quick slip on the icy stage by Tompkins half way through, goes off without a hitch.

There is obvious and audible relief in the Tesseract camp after the show. “It was good but I could hear some of the tunings going out as we were playing.” Guitarist Acle Kahney tells us. What thoughts were going on in your head while you were up there? “It was just surreal,” he says. “It was definitely hard to concentrate. You just don’t think you’ll ever be doing something like this when you start a band.”

“It’s an honour,” adds Tompkins. “There are, not just so many bands, but so many people on Earth. I just kept thinking in my head, ‘seven billion people on this planet. Five of us.’ We are the only five people that have done this. You know, this is why I came back to the band. For moments like this – it feels very special. We did Sonisphere and that was incredible, but this is something else.”

Sounds as if you didn’t even notice the cold?

“Oh no,” he laughs. “As worthwhile as it was you couldn’t ignore that cold.”

Today Dream Theater are known for the intensity of their well-planned, polished and focused shows. But in 2014 band biographer and Prog writer Rich Wilson unearthed some examples of the band’s early live performance issues – demonstrating the challenges and hard lessons that need to be learned, and the personnel changes that may need to be made, before a truly mindblowing performance can be delivered.

Horror shorts

Prior to Dream Theater releasing debut album When Dream And Day Unite, they were known as Majesty, and spent much of their time rehearsing in the basement of a hair salon. Below is a recording of one of those sessions, capturing Mike Portnoy wearing some alarming shorts, and then-singer Charlie Dominici jumping in and out of shot with pixie boots on his feet. Predictably, the ever-silent John Myung doesn’t say a word during the meet-the-band session.

A curious sense of humour

The dynamics of the band were pretty interesting at this time, as can be seen on this video, which consists of a short Q&A followed by a live performance of The Ytse Jam from Dream And Day. Then-keyboardist Kevin Moore was a central force, and possessed a dry sense of humour, here suggesting that the track was named after a “traffic situation in India…”

Like Billy Joel singing for Queensrÿche

Dominici would leave Dream Theater shortly after the album’s release, after the band had decided that he wasn’t quite the perfect fit – especially when playing live. As Portnoy explained, “It was like having Billy Joel try to sing with Queensrÿche or Iron Maiden. It just didn’t work.” That might sound harsh, but this rare footage certainly demonstrates what he means… Dad dancing?

And the guitarist played on (mostly)

Mind you, there were other mishaps to affect the band during those early live dates. Here, John Petrucci somehow manages to plummet from the stage into the crowd at the beginning of his solo. Ever the true pro, he quickly hops back on the stage without needing the help of the roadies who were sprinting to his aid. Indeed, a break in the solo and a touch of feedback aside, he covered up the incident pretty well.

Reunion blues

Dream Theater’s early line-line up reunited (with the exception of Moore) to perform When Dream And Day Unite in 2004. With Jordan Rudess never having met Charlie Dominici before that night, he later admitted that when talking to the singer, he had no idea who he was. “I thought he was one of our drivers or something!”

With Dominici having stayed away from music for 15 years, he certainly no longer had the look of a rock star – as that night’s performance of Metropolis shows.

Until Tuesday night, Rush hadn't played their iconic 2112 suite in full for a long, long time. Nearly three decades had passed since the 20-minute, seven-part epic ended the first set of the final show of the Test for Echo tour, at the Corel Centre in Ottawa, ON, in July 1997.

Since then, the band have performed truncated versions of the suite, including on the opening night of the Fifty Something tour at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles. But on the second night, they played the whole thing, to the very palpable delight of the 18,000 ticketholders.

Much has changed since 1997, not least the technology at the disposal of concert goers. YouTube didn't launch until 2005. Apple's first iPhone didn't arrive until two years after that. And now, it appears, everyone is filming the shows they attend and uploading the results to the Internet. Search for Rush videos shot at the Corel Centre in 1997, and you won't get far. Try the Kia Forum this week, and there are hundreds of results.

Whatever your views on the pros and cons of this amateur filmmaking, it does throw up some interesting results, like the widely-circulated "Anika-cam" footage, in which the entire set-long film zeroed in on Rush's brilliant new drummer. And another YouTuber has stitched together footage from various sources to compile a multi-cam edit of this week's performance of 2112.

"Little edit I made of the first full performance of 2112 by Rush since before I was born," says the YouTuber, who goes by the name of Hummel Creations. "Did a little editing on the audio to boost bass and hopefully give a little more clarity to Geddy's vocals. Huge thanks to all the people who recorded these angles!"

Rush's next show at the Forum is this evening (June 11 PCT). Full dates below.

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2026

Jun 11: Los Angeles Kia Forum, CA
Jun 13: Los Angeles Kia Forum, CA
Jun 18: Mexico City Palacio de los Deportes, Mexico
Jun 20: Mexico City Palacio de los Deportes, Mexico
Jun 24: Fort Worth Dickies Arena TX
Jun 26: Fort Worth Dickies Arena, TX
Jun 28: Fort Worth Dickies Arena, TX
Jun 30: Fort Worth Dickies Arena, TX
Jul 16: Chicago United Center, IL
Jul 18: Chicago United Center, IL
Jul 20: Chicago United Center, IL
Jul 22: Chicago United Center, IL
Jul 28: New York Madison Square Garden, NY
Jul 30: New York Madison Square Garden, NY
Aug 01: New York Madison Square Garden, NY
Aug 03: New York Madison Square Garden, NY
Aug 07: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 09: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 11: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 13: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 21: Philadelphia Xfinity Mobile Arena, PA
Aug 23: Philadelphia Xfinity Mobile Arena, PA
Aug 26: Detroit Little Caesars Arena, MI
Aug 28: Detroit Little Caesars Arena, MI
Sep 02: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 04: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 12: Boston TD Garden, MA
Sep 14: Boston TD Garden, MA
Sep 17: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 19: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 23: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Sep 25: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Oct 05: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 07: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 10: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 12: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 15: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 17: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 25: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 27: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 30: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 01: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 05: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 07: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 09: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 11: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 20: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 22: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 25: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Nov 27: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Dec 01: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 03: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 10: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 12: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 15: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC
Dec 17: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2027

Jan 15: Buenos Aires Movistar Arena, Argentina
Jan 22: Curitiba Arena da Baixada, Brazil
Jan 24: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 26: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 30: Rio de Janeiro Estádio Olímpico Nilton Santos. Brazil
Feb 01: Belo Horizonte Estádio Mineirão, Brazil
Feb 04: Brasília Arena BRB Mané Garrincha, Brazil

Feb 19: Paris La Défense Arena, France
Feb 21: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Feb 23: Amstersam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Feb 25: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Feb 28: Cologne Lanxess Arena, Germany
Mar 02: Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
Mar 04: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
Mar 08: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 10: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 12: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 14: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 16: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 18: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 21: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 27: Kraków Arena Kraków, Poland
Mar 30: Milan Unipol Dome, Italy
Apr 01: Basel St. Jakobshalle Basel, Switzerland
Apr 04: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Apr 06: Oslo Unity Arena, Norway
Apr 08: Stockholm Avicii Arena, Sweden
Apr 10: Helsinki Veikkaus Arena, Finland

Find Rush tickets.

On November 9, 1995, Type O Negative’s Bloody Kisses became the first album released by Roadrunner Records to achieve gold certification in the US. Released two years earlier, the album’s fusion of doom metal, goth and hardcore had turned the band into stars of the 90s metal scene, and their six-foot-eight frontman, Peter Steele, was cemented as a talismanic icon. But their fortunes wouldn’t last. “We always had a very negative tint on everything,” shrugs guitarist Kenny Hickey. “We never patted ourselves on the back and there weren’t words of encouragement. Every time we came off tour it felt like, ‘Well, that’s it – better get a job.’”

Although they’d always maintained an air of pervasive pessimism – proudly adopting the nickname ‘The Drab Four’ – Type O’s fifth album, World Coming Down, was especially bleak. Its lyrical narratives of drug addiction and familial loss were taken directly from Peter Steele’s experiences at the end of the 90s. “Much of my recent time’s been taken up by funerals,” Peter revealed to Hammer at the time. In another interview, he quipped that “everyone else’s family is growing – mine’s shrinking”, responding to the interviewer’s polite congratulations that Kenny had recently welcomed his first child.

Although flippant, Peter’s comments hinted at deeper trauma he was trying to overcome. As he turned to drugs for relief, the issues compounded. “World Coming Down might have been our bleakest record, but Life Is Killing Me was our bleakest period,” says drummer Johnny Kelly, who joined the band after the release of Bloody Kisses and remained behind the kit until their eventual split in 2010. “Between girls, drugs and an entourage he’d bring everywhere, Pete was out of his mind more than at any other point.”

But in typical Type O Negative fashion, the band responded to adversity with pitch-black humour. As they began writing their sixth album – originally titled ‘The Dream Is Dead’, eventually released as Life Is Killing Me – they decided to reinject a sense of playfulness that had been absent from World Coming Down. “Peter specifically wanted us to have a lot more humour for Life Is Killing Me”, Johnny recalls. Not all ‘jokes’ were appreciated, however. Peter Steele had long courted controversy with his lyrics, the likes of Jesus Hitler and Der Untermensch seeing Type O dogged with rumours of Nazism in their early days. In response, the band wrote tongue-in-cheek Bloody Kisses track We Hate Everyone and explained the accusations away as a misunderstanding about their humour. But Life Is Killing Me song I Like Goils once again skirted too close to the edge. Anecdotally penned as a jokey response to the increased attention Peter had received from men after posing nude in a 1995 issue of Playgirl, the song’s lyrics veered into direct homophobia that has come under increased scrutiny in the years since its release.

“Peter liked to poke the bear like that,” Johnny says evenly, admitting that while he can’t speak for exactly what his bandmate was thinking, he didn’t think he was homophobic. “You always had to take Peter’s lyrics as something tongue-in-cheek. He was never trying to make a statement, other than to start shit!”

This combative nature came out in other ways too. Peter would argue with his bandmates during rehearsals and recording sessions, long drives out to their space in New York’s Rockaway Beach sometimes ending with the band piling back into the van and driving home without playing a note. “We’d part ways and at, like, one in the morning, the phone would go and there’s Pete, calling Johnny like, ‘I want to fight you in the street, right now’,” coming to us with these 14-minute opuses!” Kenny recalls. “He came up with I Don’t Wanna Be Me, this really cool punk rock anthem.”

The lead single and opening track proper on Life Is Killing Me – after doomy instrumental opener Thir13teen – I Don’t Wanna Be Me still crept past five minutes. Nonetheless, the song recaptured the band’s hardcore roots, albeit with a gothic, new wave twist as Peter playfully turned his self-loathing into a bouncy singalong. It set the tone for a record that, by Kenny and Johnny’s reckoning, was “all over the place”, but to fans captured their genre-blurring buffet of styles. “There were some songs to me that validated where it sits in the catalogue,” Johnny concedes. “Anesthesia alone makes it all worth it for me. Nettie is really cool, I Don’t Wanna Be Me is really out there and different from what we were doing, so that was cool. The band needed that variety and humour.”

I Don’t Wanna Be Me was ultimately the only single to be released from Life Is Killing Me. In spite of that, the band were able to shoot a video for the track, actor and comedian Dan Fogler donning a variety of costumes in front of a red theatrical curtain, pretending to be everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson to Britney Spears, Eminem and Peter Steele himself. “Dan was such a funny guy, we had a lot of fun with that shoot,” Johnny recalls fondly.

Released on June 17, 2003, Life Is Killing Me proved Type O Negative still had commercial appeal, even if the venues they were playing had shrunk. Breaking into the Top 40 of the US Billboard 200 at No.39, the album matched the chart position they had achieved on World Coming Down four years earlier. But while the goth aesthetic was making a big comeback in the US – propelled by the likes of Him and Evanescence – Type O weren’t able to scale the heights they had enjoyed the previous decade, even as they went on tour with Lacuna Coil and Cradle Of Filth. “We made some lifelong friends with those people,” Johnny says. “There were always laughs – even in the worst situations we could find something funny. Somebody else’s misfortune or misery was a good set-up for a punchline.”

Type O Negative would only release one more record – 2007’s Dead Again
– as on April 14, 2010, Peter Steele passed away from heart failure. Without their towering frontman, the band decided to call it quits. But for all the doom and strife they experienced over the years, both Johnny and Kenny look back with a sense of fondness and rue for what might have been. “My gut feeling was that the band never hit their potential,” Johnny admits. “So far as Peter’s songwriting abilities and whatever, there was always a sense that there was something more in there.”

“Because he always interfered!” Kenny exclaims. “It’s hard to maintain something on that wavelength that the band ran on. To be positive and hit your potential, you’d actually have to have some hope!” “Peter had optimism... right before he died,” Johnny says, deadpan. “He was optimistic and really excited about making a record sober, realising he hadn’t applied himself as he should have in later years. Our best record probably would’ve been the next one.”

“He was always a late bloomer, in everything,” Kenny agrees. “Our worst enemy was our bleak outlook. It’s hard to move forward and have energy if you don’t have some kind of positivity. If you look at The Beatles, Lennon was the dark one and McCartney was the light one. We were a band of Lennons. But... I wish I had him back and we still had that going.”

I Don’t Wanna Be Me remains one of their most enduring anthems, a testament that even when everything was falling apart, Type O Negative were a singular creative force. In the years since Peter’s death, numerous bands have acknowledged Type O’s influence, from the likes of Code Orange and Oceans Of Slumber, to Trivium and Pallbearer. Nobody has been more surprised by this than the former members themselves.

“At the time, a song like I Don’t Wanna Be Me really didn’t have the impact or staying power that it has now,” Johnny admits. “It’s only really a lot later when you start getting bands cover it that it seems to have built up and revitalised it.” “It was a sleeper hit, like one of those songs that takes a few years to really get popular – Dream On, Bohemian Rhapsody, that type of thing,” Kenny nods. “Type O were a sleeper hit all round, then!” Johnny adds with a chuckle.

Three thousand, nine hundred and sixty-four days after Rush departed the stage at The Forum in Inglewood, CA., at the end of their R40 tour, the band have finally returned to the same venue, beginning their mammoth Fifty Something schedule.

Much has changed. Alex Lifeson has released two albums as a member of Envy Of None. Geddy Lee has become an author, publishing Geddy Lee's Big Beautiful Book of Bass and My Effin' Life. Neil Peart, of course, is gone, but he'll forever remain a looming presence. And there are two new members of the touring party, drummer Anika Nilles and keyboardist Loren Gold.

Now they've played their first show in 11 years, opening – after a lengthy 'Where's Rush?' intro video – with the A Farewell To Kings classic Xanadu, a song that's never opened a Rush set before (video below).

More followed: La Villa Stangiato. The Spirit Of Radio. Limelight. Freewill. Red Barchetta. Three sections of 2112. Peart's traditional tour-de-force, YYZ, performed without a drum solo. Time Stand Still, featuring special guest Aimee Mann, who sang on the 1987 original. Tom Sawyer, the crowd roaring its approval for Nilles' drum fills. An unexpected By-Tor & The Snow Dog. The traditional finale, Working Man. And, of course, tributes to the great Neil Peart.

The most eagerly-awaited tour of the year is finally underway. Full setlist and tour dates below.

Rush setlist: Kia Forum, Los Angeles: July 7, 2026

Set 1
Xanadu
Limelight
Far Cry
Subdivisions
Freewill
Bravado
Caravan
La Villa Strangiato
Vital Signs
The Spirit of Radio

Set 2
2112 Part I: Overture
2112 Part II: The Temples of Syrinx
2112 Part VII: Grand Finale
Distant Early Warning
Red Barchetta
Dreamline
Natural Science
Time Stand Still
Red Sector A
YYZ
The Garden
Tom Sawyer

Encore
By-Tor & The Snow Dog
Working Man

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2026

Jun 09: Los Angeles Kia Forum, CA
Jun 11: Los Angeles Kia Forum, CA
Jun 13: Los Angeles Kia Forum, CA
Jun 18: Mexico City Palacio de los Deportes, Mexico
Jun 20: Mexico City Palacio de los Deportes, Mexico
Jun 24: Fort Worth Dickies Arena TX
Jun 26: Fort Worth Dickies Arena, TX
Jun 28: Fort Worth Dickies Arena, TX
Jun 30: Fort Worth Dickies Arena, TX
Jul 16: Chicago United Center, IL
Jul 18: Chicago United Center, IL
Jul 20: Chicago United Center, IL
Jul 22: Chicago United Center, IL
Jul 28: New York Madison Square Garden, NY
Jul 30: New York Madison Square Garden, NY
Aug 01: New York Madison Square Garden, NY
Aug 03: New York Madison Square Garden, NY
Aug 07: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 09: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 11: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 13: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 21: Philadelphia Xfinity Mobile Arena, PA
Aug 23: Philadelphia Xfinity Mobile Arena, PA
Aug 26: Detroit Little Caesars Arena, MI
Aug 28: Detroit Little Caesars Arena, MI
Sep 02: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 04: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 12: Boston TD Garden, MA
Sep 14: Boston TD Garden, MA
Sep 17: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 19: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 23: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Sep 25: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Oct 05: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 07: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 10: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 12: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 15: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 17: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 25: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 27: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 30: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 01: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 05: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 07: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 09: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 11: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 20: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 22: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 25: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Nov 27: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Dec 01: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 03: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 10: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 12: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 15: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC
Dec 17: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2027

Jan 15: Buenos Aires Movistar Arena, Argentina
Jan 22: Curitiba Arena da Baixada, Brazil
Jan 24: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 26: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 30: Rio de Janeiro Estádio Olímpico Nilton Santos. Brazil
Feb 01: Belo Horizonte Estádio Mineirão, Brazil
Feb 04: Brasília Arena BRB Mané Garrincha, Brazil

Feb 19: Paris La Défense Arena, France
Feb 21: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Feb 23: Amstersam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Feb 25: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Feb 28: Cologne Lanxess Arena, Germany
Mar 02: Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
Mar 04: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
Mar 08: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 10: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 12: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 14: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 16: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 18: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 21: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 27: Kraków Arena Kraków, Poland
Mar 30: Milan Unipol Dome, Italy
Apr 01: Basel St. Jakobshalle Basel, Switzerland
Apr 04: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Apr 06: Oslo Unity Arena, Norway
Apr 08: Stockholm Avicii Arena, Sweden
Apr 10: Helsinki Veikkaus Arena, Finland

Find Rush tickets.

Van der Graaf Generator's Peter Hammill and Emerson, Lake and Palmer drummer Carl Palmer and Van der Graaf Generator's will return to the Royal Albert Hall in July when they take part in the very first Prog Rock Prom, Prog Rock: A Fanfare for the Common Man, on July 18.

The BBC announced back in April that they've finally gotten around to recognising progressive rock - only 15 years after Prog Magazine first approached them with the idea - and the Prog Rock Prom is the highlight of the second day of events.

Palmer and Hammill will be joined by Elbow frontman Guy Garvey, Jane Weaver and Gruff Rhys from Welsh psych exponents Super Furry Animals, who will also be in attendance, with BBC Radio 6 Music’s Stuart Maconie. Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson told Prog he too had been approached to take part but could not due to a prior engagement.

Conducted by Robert Ames, the prom will feature symphonic tributes to ELP, Genesis, Jethro Tull, Mike Oldfield, Renaissance and more, performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra.

Seated tickets for this Prom are sold out, however 1,000 £8 Promming tickets will be available on the day.

Porcupine Tree offshoot Voyage 35, the band spearheaded by former bassist Colin Edwin and live guitarist John Wesley, have shared a video for their new re-working of Even Less, originally from 1999's Lightbulb Sun album.

The pair formed the band to perform Porcupine Tree material rarely heard in the live arena these days and will be touring Europe and the UK in September. Earlier this year, they announced that they had been joined by Edwin's O.R.k. bandmate, keyboard player Lorenzo Esposito Fornasari, better known as 'Lef', and drummer Alessandro Vagnoni, who himself has performed with O.R.k., deputising on occasion for Pat Mastelloto.

“This is no idle thought, this is a chance to re-explore and re-immerse ourselves fully in a set of material that many people have expressed a desire to hear and see live again," says Edwin. "With a view to both honouring and elevating the original spirit, with a fresh new energy, a few new flavours and some serious talent alongside us.”

"I realised deep inside that I really missed playing that music, so an opportunity to go out with Colin and an amazing set of musicians to perform music I deeply cared about was not something I was going to miss," adds Wesley. "Bringing that music to fans that care about it as I do will be a mutual pleasure.”

You can see the full list of live dates below.

Voyage 35 EU and UK tour dates

Sep 4: ITA Revislate 2Days Prog + 1 Festival
Sep 8: GER Aschaffenburg Colos-Saal
Sep 10: NED Utrect Tivoli Vredenburg
Sep 11: NED Uden De Pul
Sep 12: NED Zoetermeer De Boerderij
Sep 15: UK O2 Bristol Academy
Sep 16: UK London Shepherd's Bush Empire
Sep 17: UK Manchester O2 Ritz
Sep 18: UK Newcastle The Grove
Sep 19: UK Glasgow Classic Grand

Get tickets.

Rising metallers Castle Rat have announced their biggest headline tour to date. The much-vaunted, broadsword-brandishing New Yorkers, led by Queen Rat Riley Pinkerton, will commence their Summon The Beasts tour at the Baltimore Soundstage in Baltimore, MD, on September 23.

"Join 𝕮𝖆𝖘𝖙𝖑𝖊 𝕽𝖆𝖙 as they 𝕾𝖚𝖒𝖒𝖔𝖓 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕭𝖊𝖆𝖘𝖙𝖘 in 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕽𝖊𝖆𝖑𝖒 nearest you," say the band, making liberal use of their preferred medieval font. "Together, we expand and defend 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕽𝖊𝖆𝖑𝖒!"

Tickets for the shows, which are in addition to a previously announced run of European shows, go on sale this Friday at 10am local. Support will come from Portland gothic rockers Unto Others and dungeon synth merchants Wraith Knight. Full dates below.

It's been a busy period for the band, who completed the Amonklok Conquest tour last month in the company of Amon Amarth and Dethklok, and filmed an acclaimed live performance for KEXP in April.

This week, Castle Rat will appear on SiriusXM's Liquid Metal show alongside host Jose “Metal Ambassador” Mangin, where they'll play some of their favourite tunes.

Castle Rat : Summon The Beast tour 2026

Jul 29: Bergen Beyond The Gates, Norway
Jul 31: Copenhagen Pumpehuset København V, Denmark
Aug 01: Wacken Open Air, Germany
Aug 04: Warszawa Klub Hydrozagadka, Poland
Aug 06: Jaroměř Brutal Assault, Czech Republic
Aug 08: Kortrijk Alcatraz, Belgium
Aug 09: Walton-on-trent Bloodstock Open Air, UK
Aug 10: Southampton The 1865, UK
Aug 12: Wittelshofen Summer Breeze Open Air, Germany
Aug 14: Seelbach Bei Hamm Hoflärm, Germany
Aug 15: Eindhoven Dynamo Metal Fest, Netherlands
Aug 16: Carhaix-plouguer Motocultor Festival, France

Sep 23: Baltimore Soundtage, MD
Sep 25: Charlotte Neighborhood Theatre, NC
Sep 26: Atlanta The Masquerade, GA
Sep 28: Dallas The Studio at The Bomb Factory, TX
Sep 30: Mesa The Nile Theater, AZ
Oct 01: Los Angeles The Belasco, CA
Oct 03: The UC Theatre Berkeley, CA
Oct 06: Portland Roseland Theater, OR
Oct 07: Seattle The Showbox Market, WA
Oct 09: Spokane Knitting Factory, WA
Oct 10: Boise Shrine Social Club, ID
Oct 11: Salt Lake City The Grand, UT
Oct 12: Denver The Ogden Theatre, CO
Oct 14: Minneapolis Varsity Theater, MN
Oct 15: Chicago Concord Music Hall, IL
Oct 16: Detroit The Majestic Theatre, MI
Oct 17: Toronto The Opera House, ON
Oct 19: Montréal Théâtre Beanfield, QC
Oct 20: Worcester The Palladium, MA
Oct 21: New York Webster Hall, NY

Find Castle Rat tickets.

Guitarist Steve Vai explains hooking up with ex-King Crimson pair guitarist Adrian Belew and bassist Tony Levin plus drummer Danny Carey of Tool in BEAT to revisit a trio of Crimson albums from the 80s: Discipline, Beat and Three Of A Perfect Pair.

Tell us about your own induction to the church of King Crimson.

My childhood friend John Sergio turned me on to progressive rock by playing me that incredible first King Crimson record, but then I went through a period of dryness with Crimson until Discipline, Beat and Three Of A Perfect Pair. Those three records were like jewels. I had never heard guitars interlocking that way until Robert [Fripp] and Adrian [Belew] did it, and equally unique was their use of guitar synthesisers. They created tapestries of audio colour. The arrangements were so complex, but there were beautiful melodies on top. So when Adrian called, I knew we could do some pretty whacked-out stuff together.

That was your first thought. What was your second regarding being part of BEAT?

I needed to know whether Robert gave the project his blessing, and Adrian said right away that he did. I've been involved in projects where there's drama and nefariousness, and I didn't want that again. Robert even suggested the name.

My third thought was: “Can I even play this stuff?” Y'know, a sixty-five-year-old Steve Vai taking on Robert Fripp at thirty-five and at the top of his game? I went back to the music and decided to accept the challenge. [Laughing] I worked with Zappa, and then Dave Roth after Edward [Van Halen]. I'm addicted to challenges.

And how difficult has it proved?

I went into this project knowing I had to be a dutiful soldier, because the Crimson fan base is so loyal. And protective. And snobby [laughs]. I know that because I'm snobby too. It helped so much that Trey Gunn [former Crimson guitarist] sent me a forensic transcription book of those three records. That was a godsend.

How closely are you following Fripp's parts?

On about ten per cent of the material I changed the [finger] position to suit my style, but I'm playing the same notes. There were two pieces that presented problems. One was Three Of A Perfect Pair – you had to play it the way Fripp played it. I couldn't cheat, I had to learn it Robert's way. The only riff I had to change was in Frame By Frame. That one was just not within my wheelhouse.

The BEAT concept is proving popular, with an extra date added in Wolverhampton due to public demand. Has the possibility of making new music been discussed?

It's there in the back of our mind, because this band is so great. I mean, Tony and Danny are about as good as it gets. I know that we could make a pretty stellar record, but the question remains: What is BEAT? The audience comes because they love the music of King Crimson. Would Crimson's audience be moved by a new song from Steve Vai?

Also, there are logistics to consider. Right now, I've been on tour with Satch [Joe Satriani, as The SatchVai Band] and BEAT since May of 2022. I'm not due to end until September of 2027. As a creative person, I must return to being master and commander of my own ship.

What do you have lined up?

The next thing I want to do is a solo acoustic guitar and vocal record. It's already sitting on the shelf. Four full-length orchestral records are also done. It's not what everyone wants to hear from me, but there will be some, and that's enough.

BEAT's European tour kicks off in Wolverhampton on June 7 and ends in Bari, Italy, on July 3. For dates and ticket links, visit the BEAT website.

Pallas singer and solo artist in his own right, Alan Reed, has announced that his upcoming show at Glasgow's G2 venue in Reed's hometown with his band Daughter's Of Expediency on September 4, will be his very last live performance.

Reed and his band have a short run of dates on their The Last Dance tour throughout the UK in September.

"It’s time to put away childish things, and there’s nothing more childish than a guy in his sixties pretending he’s in his twenties," says Reed. "Besides, I have Parkinson’s now and I don’t know beyond the next six months how I’m going to be. I’d rather go out on a high. Planning gigs is no way to do it. If you know anything about Parkinson’s it’s that stress should be avoided at all costs. And planning gigs is very stressful.

"Which is why I will no longer be doing the 5th of September in Veruna. It became very stressful and expensive as a one-off. So blame the costs associated with the war in the Middle East as well as those associated with Brexit!!"

Reed announced his Parkinson's diagnosis in March 2025, but has been performing live sporadically as well as completing work on a new Pallas album. You can read a review of Reed's recent performance at Winter's End Festival in the brand new issue of Prog Magazine.

Following Reed's final live dates, Reed will join former colleagues on September 18 as he walks along the canals from Bowling in the West, to Leith in the East. Last year he walked the West Highland Way and raised over £7K.

You can see the full list of Reed's live dates below.

Alan Reed And The Daughter's Of Expediency The Last Dance tour dates

Sep 1: Southampton The 1865
Sep 2: London 229
Sep 3: Sheffield West Street Live
Sep 4: Glashow G2

Smashing Pumpkins have announced The Rats In A Cage Tour, a run of dates celebrating the 30th anniversary of the band's much-loved 1995 album Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness.

According to the band, the setlist will feature two distinct sets – one focused on the album and a second celebrating "nearly four decades of hits and dark treasures."

The 27-date schedule begins at the Schottenstein Center in Columbus, Ohio, on September 30, and wraps up at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles on November 12. Tickets go on sale this Thursday (May 21) at 10am local time.

The new dates are in addition to a short European trek announced last week, which is billed as "A night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness featuring Billy Corgan" and takes in shows in London, Antwerp, Paris and Madrid. This show premiered last year at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and featured Corgan performing alongside the Opera's Orchestra and Chorus.

The 28-track Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was one of the most ambitious and commercially successful rock albums of the '90s, selling 10 million copies in the US alone. It featured hit singles Bullet With Butterfly Wings, 1979, Zero, Tonight, Tonight and Thirty-Three.

Smashing Pumpkins: The Rats In A Cage Tour

Sep 30: Columbus Schottenstein Center, OH
Oct 02: Boston TD Garden, MA
Oct 03: Baltimore CFG Bank Arena, MD
Oct 04: Brooklyn Barclays Center, NY
Oct 06: Pittsburgh PPG Paints Arena, PA
Oct 07: Hamilton TD Coliseum, ON
Oct 09: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Oct 11: Madison Kohl Center, WI
Oct 13: St. Paul Grand Casino Arena, MN
Oct 14: Chicago United Center, IL
Oct 16: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Oct 17: Jacksonville VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena, FL
Oct 18: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Oct 20: Indianapolis Gainbridge Fieldhouse, IN
Oct 22: Nashville The Truth, TN
Oct 24: Oklahoma City Paycom Center, OK
Oct 25: Austin Moody Center, TX
Oct 27: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 29: Salt Lake City Delta Center, UT
Oct 30: Las Vegas MGM Grand Garden Arena, NV
Nov 01: Portland Moda Center, OR
Nov 03: Calgary Scotiabank Saddledome, AB
Nov 05: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC
Nov 06: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Nov 08: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Nov 11: Phoenix Mortgage Matchup Center, AZ
Nov 12: Los Angeles Kia Forum, CA

Find Smashing Pumpkins tickets.

A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness Featuring Billy Corgan

Sep 01: London Royal Festival Hall, UK
Sep 02: London Royal Festival Hall, UK
Sep 06: Antwerp Queen Elisabeth Hall, Belgium (2 shows)
Sep 08: Paris Salle Pleye, France
Sep 09: Paris Salle Pleye, France
Sep 11: Madrid Palacio Vistalegre, Spain

Find Billy Corgan tickets.

It’s impossible to overstate the significance of My Chemical Romance on alternative music in the 21^st Century. Ghost’s clergy, Bring Me The Horizon's ascension to arenas, even Sleep Token’s global takeover are ripples in the pond to the explosion of emo in the mid-2000s. All of which is to say, MCR headlining Sonic Temple is a Big Deal.

Performing The Black Parade in its entirety, My Chemical Romance put on the kind of massive spectacle that underscores the fact they’re the most important rock band since Nirvana or Oasis, their cultural footprint obvious in the sheer number of classic, Myspace-era emo getups spotted around the Historic Crew Stadium (although bright-coloured fringes remain in short supply).

A big, communist-coded propaganda video plays as soldiers wheel out a decrepit dictator dummy to signal the start of the set. The show plays out like a funeral for 20^th Century culture, the band somehow managing to blend Broadway, Hollywood and stadium-sized pop production, each song greeted with religious fervour.

From the Queen pomp of Welcome To The Black Parade to the T-Rex aping shuffle of Teenagers, My Chem expand the boundaries of emo to almost ludicrous levels. Each song seems to come with ever-grander production – cellos, opera singers, and even the stage bursting into flames, complete with a blazing man sprinting across. It all leads to the bloody execution of Gerard Way as he’s stabbed to death by a monochrome clown, who promptly blows himself up.

The final cherry on the cake is a punky encore. Kicking off with I’m Not Okay, MCR drop the theatrics and go for broke with sweaty, frantic energy. Even without the adornments of their previous set, they’re utterly magnetic to behold and the atmosphere in the stadium is electric as Na Na Na and Vampire Money fly by. Finally, Helena sends the crowd screaming into the night. It might be fuelled by nostalgia tonight, but this set shows MCR still have the magic to do something truly massive in future.

My Chemical Romance Sonic Temple 2026 setlist

The End.

Dead!

This Is How I Disappear

The Sharpest Lives

Welcome to the Black Parade

I Don't Love You

House of Wolves

Cancer

Mama

Sleep

Teenagers

Disenchanted

Famous Last Words

The End. (2025 reprise)

I'm Not Okay (I Promise)

Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)

Vampire Money

Helena

Former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore has finally confirmed that one of rock'n'roll's longest-standing, possibly apocryphal tales is, in fact, true.

The story goes something like this: During an early Deep Purple show at the Jam Factory in San Antonio, Texas, Blackmore was taken ill, and his place was taken for a single show by Christopher Cross, the soft rocker who rose to fame years later when his eponymous, multiple-Grammy-winning debut album sold five million copies in the US.

In the 2018 book about what's come to be known as Yacht Rock, The Yacht Rock Book: The Oral History of the Soft, Smooth Sounds of the 70s and 80s, Cross relates the story, placing it in 1968 at Purple's debut US show.

"I had a promoter friend who I did a lot of kind of gopher work for and stuff like that," says Cross. "And I had a local band, and Joe [Miller] was promoting that show, at a place called the Jam Factory. It was their very first show in the United States ever, and someone advised them to get flu shots.

"So they did, and Ritchie Blackmore got very sick. And so the decision was made that they didn’t really want to cancel the show if they could help it. And Joe Miller – who was kind of managing me at the time – said, ‘Y’know, there’s this guitarist in town who’s a big fan of Ritchie and he could probably step in.

"The singer [Ian Gillan] was in favour of it, I remember, but Joe pretty much ran the band and was the one who made the decision that it was better to play than not play. So I came down, and I had a Flying V and long hair, and I’m this big Ritchie fan.

"So we played the songs that I knew and then we jammed some blues. And they told the crowd Ritchie wouldn’t be there. It was a great moment for me. And then, when they left town, I went to the airport and got to meet Ritchie, and he thanked me for covering for him. He was cool."

In the intervening years, doubt has been expressed over whether the incident ever occurred, with late Purple keyboard player Jon Lord reportedly denying that it had. "This is something that Jon Lord wanted to forget, and I wanted to remember," Cross told Songfacts. But now Blackmore has confirmed the story in a new interview with Ultimate Classic Rock.

The incident actually occurred on Deep Purple's In Rock tour in 1970, when the band were scheduled to perform two shows at the Jam Factory on August 28, one at 7pm and the second at 11pm. Blackmore played the first show, but then fell ill.

"I remember being very miserable, and I was walking down the corridor with Jon Lord to go to the show, and then I felt very dizzy," Blackmore says. "I grabbed hold of Jon, and he kept me walking. Then I fell down, and they took me to the hospital. They didn't know what it was. I think it was just pure misery. And they kept giving me shots in the hospital.

"I just stayed in the hotel being miserable and [Deep Purple] went on and did the show with, I think, his name is Christopher Cross or something."

Blackmore recovered quickly and resumed his rightful place onstage the following night at the Civic Auditorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Cross, however, would have to wait a little longer before his moment in the spotlight.

Bickering AOR kings Journey have added another lengthy run of shows to their current Final Frontier tour. The stretch of 40 new dates begins on September 12 at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, CA., and wraps up at the Chase Center in San Francisco, CA., on November 28.

The new schedule is in addition to a run of 28 previously announced shows that kick off on Thursday this week at the Benchmark International Arena in Tampa, FL.

Artist presale tickets go on sale tomorrow (Wednesday, May 13) at 12pm local time using the code FRONTIER, while the general sale begins at 10am on Friday.

As has become the norm with Journey, the period between the band's last show in April and this week's resumption of activities has been marked by confusion, with frontman Arnel Pineda posting a cryptic message to fans after Journey's show at Stagecoach Festival in California was cancelled due to dangerously high winds, leaving fans uncertain about his position in the band and his future plans.

Pineda reportedly tried to leave the band twice ahead of the tour, but guitarist and band lynchpin Neal Schon has denied knowledge of Pineda's concerns.

Full dates below.

Journey: Final Frontier tour 2026

May 15: Benchmark International Arena, Tampa, FL
May 16: VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena, Jacksonville, FL
May 18: Colonial Life Arena, Columbia, SC
May 20: Spectrum Center, Charlotte, NC
May 21: First Horizon Coliseum, Greensboro, NC
May 23: Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall, Atlantic City, NJ
May 27: Bryce Jordan Center, State College, PA
May 28: John Paul Jones Arena, Charlottesville, VA
May 30: Food City Center, Knoxville, TN
May 31: Enmarket Arena, Savannah, GA
Jun 03: Hampton Coliseum, Hampton, VA
Jun 04: Berglund Center Coliseum, Roanoke, VA
Jun 06: DCU Center, Worcester, MA
Jun 07: SNHU Arena, Manchester, NH
Jun 10: KeyBank Center, Buffalo, NY
Jun 11: PPL Center, Allentown, PA
Jun 13: Heritage Bank Center, Cincinnati, OH
Jun 14: Van Andel Arena, Grand Rapids, MI
Jun 17: Ford Center, Evansville, IN
Jun 18: Allen County War Memorial Coliseum, Fort Wayne, IN
Jun 20: State Farm Center, Champaign, IL
Jun 21: Resch Center, Green Bay, WI
Jun 24: Vibrant Arena at the MARK, Moline, IL
Jun 25: Great Southern Bank Arena, Springfield, MO
Jun 27: Cadence Bank Arena, Tupelo, MS
Jun 28: Cajundome, Lafayette, LA
Jul 01: Hilliard Center, Corpus Christi, TX
Jul 02: Sames Auto Arena, Laredo, TX

Sep 12: Los Angeles Crypto.com Arena, CA
Sep 14: San Diego Pechanga Arena, CA
Sep 15: Phoenix Mortgage Matchup Center, AZ
Sep 17: Stockton Adventist Health Arena, CA
Sep 19: Portland Veterans Memorial Coliseum, OR
Sep 21: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Sep 24: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Sep 26: Calgary Scotiabank Saddledome, AB
Sep 27: Saskatoon SaskTel Centre, SK
Sep 29: Winnipeg Canada Life Centre, MB
Oct 02: Grand Forks Alerus Center, ND
Oct 04: St. Paul Grand Casino Arena, MN
Oct 05: Chicago United Center, IL
Oct 08: Tulsa BOK Center, OK
Oct 10: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Oct 12: Biloxi Mississippi Coast Coliseum, MS
Oct 13: Birmingham Legacy Arena at the BJCC, AL
Oct 16: Sunrise Amerant Bank Arena, FL
Oct 17: Orlando Kia Center, FL
Oct 19: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Oct 21: Nashville Bridgestone Arena, TN
Oct 22: Louisville KFC Yum! Center, KY
Oct 24: Baltimore CFG Bank Arena, MD
Oct 25: Newark Prudential Center, NJ
Oct 28: Philadelphia Xfinity Mobile Arena, PA
Oct 29: Providence Amica Mutual Pavilion, RI
Nov 02: Detroit Little Caesars Arena, MI
Nov 04: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Nov 06: Wilkes-Barre Mohegan Arena at Casey Plaza, PA
Nov 07: Uniondale Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, NY
Nov 10: Boston TD Garden, MA
Nov 12: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Nov 14: Greenville Bon Secours Wellness Arena, SC
Nov 16: St. Louis Enterprise Center, MO
Nov 18: Houston Toyota Center, TX
Nov 20: Dallas American Airlines Center, TX
Nov 22: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Nov 24: Anaheim Honda Center, CA
Nov 27: Las Vegas MGM Grand Garden Arena, NV
Nov 28: San Francisco Chase Center, CA

Find Journey tickets.

Nicknamed The God Of Hellfire after his 1968 UK chart-topping hit single Fire, and equally legendary for his ‘helmet of flame’ stage prop, Arthur Brown has challenged audiences with flamboyant art-rock and a piercing voice for six decades. Now he’s on the way back with a new album.

A new Crazy World Of Arthur Brown album is on the way. You have described it as a “fantastic, experimental piece of work”.

Having decided it should revolve around where I was born [Whitby in Yorkshire], we returned to the north of England. I made the album with my wife Claire. Basically, it’s a quest to discover who we are. The music is represented by the elements. We lit fires inside and outside of the house and recorded the crackling sounds. We also recorded a river that flows nearby. Some of those sounds are played backwards.

The album was also inspired by [18th/19th-century poet] William Blake, who was in constant conversation with all of those forces. The prophet Ezekiel and the Four Riders Of The Apocalypse are all part of it as well.

It sounds fascinating.

This album is my love letter to life. I’m at an age where I am doing a lot of self-contemplation.

Does the album have a title yet?

It does, but for now I’m keeping it under my hat.

When will it be released?

It’s fully recorded but won’t be released until later this year, probably in the summertime.

Have you performed any of the songs from the new album live yet?

So far we have played three tracks. The show begins with one of the new songs, which is the title track of the album. The characters of the Four Riders Of The Apocalypse are played on stage by the band.

Why are you still performing and recording at eighty-three years old?

[Arthur and Claire, who is also in the room, both laugh loudly.] I like to live life adventurously. It’s a lovely way to be alive. I still have the thrill of going on stage. I can’t imagine that ever going away.

Claire: Let me say this on Arthur’s behalf. He lights up whenever he goes on stage. It’s his home. We have realised that these are the final stages of his life, so we are going all-out. The new show is full of costume changes, props and visual content. Everything is set for him to go out and use his gift – which is his voice. And he’s still got that.

When you appeared at the Royal Albert Hall with Hawkwind back in 2023, it was amazing that you could still do all of the high falsetto parts.

[Without warning] Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! [Then up another level] AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

That you are able to do that is quite preposterous.

Yes. It’s probably against the laws of nature.

When the album comes out, will you be playing it from start to finish?

We will include four new songs, but later in the year that’s precisely what we will be doing.

Claire: It will be a very different show for Arthur, very cinematic. Very delicately put together. It’s something that nobody should want to miss.

In this late part of your life, are you happy?

Extremely happy. I may last another ten years or even twenty. By then the scientists may have reached a point where none of us die.

The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown play live throughout 2026. For dates and tickets, visit the God Of Hellfire website..

It’s Monday night in the Voodoo Room at the House of Blues San Diego – a small stage with nowhere to hide and just enough oxygen for a band to either ignite or quietly suffocate. Retro-rocking upstarts Stanley Simmons have chosen this moment to make their live gig debut. Barely a year old, with no album in the wild yet – their forthcoming debut, Dancing While The World Is Ending, is still months out – and they are already under a level of scrutiny most bands spend years avoiding.

And yet Evan Stanley and Nick Simmons don’t arrive with anonymity as cover; they arrive carrying the surnames of Kiss icons Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, and everything that comes with that. This is not a soft launch. It’s a test, and from the first few minutes, it’s clear they intend to pass it.

Childhood friends, Stanley and Simmons bonded over a shared love of 70s folk and Americana, a sensibility that runs counter to the stadium-scale bombast baked into their lineage. A casually posted Instagram cover of The Sound of Silence drew early attention, but tonight it’s clear they are not here to trade on novelty.

The opening run of Dancing While The World Is Ending, Running Just A Little Too Long and Starve The Beast lands with force, the backing band locked into a high-voltage groove with an emphasis on execution: Evan rips through leads with the assurance of someone who has done the hours; Nick shifts from falsetto to a full-bodied, soulful howl, their harmonies locking in with a precision that feels instinctive rather than studied.

The question of lineage hangs over Stanley Simmons, as it must, but it quickly becomes beside the point. On Cellophane, they move with a confidence that has nothing to do with inheritance – loose, assured, and stridently committed to the groove. This is not a band hiding behind legacy; it is one already doing enough to stand without it.

For a band playing their first show, they brim with confidence, chatting easily with the audience and announcing songs with unguarded sincerity. The set runs just under an hour, the catalogue still forming, and there is little of the hesitancy that usually defines a debut; tempos shift but momentum never stalls and they deftly navigate a tuning issue with humour.

More telling is how seamlessly they move across styles without slipping into pastiche. Cold lands as a punchy, mid-tempo piece with pop instincts and a blues undercurrent, while Don’t Leave Me Here Like That – still unreleased – leans into a Tom Petty-style Americana without sounding borrowed.

When Simmons asks, “Y’all ready to get country?” ahead of Love Real Slow, the pivot lands closer to Jason Isbell than anything Nashville-polished, driven by melody rather than cliché. Across it all, the harmonies hold firm – rich, precise, instinctive – giving the set a cohesion that suggests this is not genre-hopping for effect, but a band working within a shared musical language.

Not every song lands with equal weight, but the intent is clear and the ceiling is higher than most bands at this stage. They finish as they start: direct, forceful, with no interest in soft exits. Dystopia lands late and hard, all ragged energy and forward drive, the sort of song that would close most sets. Here, it’s a feint.

“We’re not doing the fake encore thing… we literally don’t have any more songs,” Nick cracks before they pile into Real Life, which hits with equal force, harmonies locked and the band pushing just hard enough without losing shape.

Strip away the context and the questions about lineage, and what remains is a band with a clear sense of purpose and a firm grip on their own strengths. The songs are not all fully formed yet, but the foundations are there: strong harmonic identity, confident playing, and an instinct for when to hold back and when to unleash the big rock action. More than anything, though, this is fun – high-energy, unforced, and clearly connecting, if the audience is any gauge.

This doesn’t feel like a band finding its feet – it feels like one already in motion.

Stanley Simmons' debut album, Dancing While The World Is Ending, is released on August 28.

US metal heavyweights Five Finger Death Punch have announced a landmark European and UK tour, taking place early next year and filling some of the biggest venues the band have ever headlined on this continent.

Joining the Las Vegas-based five-piece will be none other than fellow American metal riff kings Lamb Of God and Scottish metal favourites Bleed From Within. The tour will begin in the UK via Manchester at the AO Arena on January 16, before running through Glasgow, Dublin, Birmingham and London, where it'll hit the O2 Arena, marking Five Finger Death Punch's biggest ever UK headline show.

The tour with then cross over to mainland Europe, with stop-offs in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Lodz, Prague, Munich, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Zurich, Vienna, Berlin, Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm and, finally, Helsinki, where the tour will wrap up on February 22.

“We built this band like a battleship, twenty years of everything life could throw at us, and we’re not just still here, we’re still growing," says FFDP guitarist Zoltan Bathory. "New fans discovering us every day, the fanbase bigger now than it’s ever been. This World Tour is the celebration that milestone deserves. First leg is America in 2026, then Europe in 2027, and we’re not stopping there! South America, Australia, Asia are all in the talks. This is going to be a big two or three years for Five Finger Death Punch, and we’re just getting started.”

See the full run of dates below. For info on all ticket onsale dates, head to the official Five Finger Death Punch website.

Last year, Five Finger Death Punch issued two compilation albums featuring re-records of their greatest hits. The two-part 'Best Of' collection was released in part to celebrate their twentieth anniversary, but also in response to the band’s original master recordings being sold off by their former label - something FFDP themselves claim they had no say in.

“We would have loved to have a shot at reclaiming our masters, or at least to be involved in the transaction but we found out after the fact," said Zoltan Bathory. "Surprised, but not surprised. These kinds of behind closed doors deals have become far too common in the music industry. Labels buy, sell or trade artists' work without their knowledge or consent, reducing them to soulless commodities.

"But life is a chess game so when this happened to Taylor Swift, she responded by re-recording her catalog. After that respectably bold move, her fans switched to streaming the new version out of protest and loyalty. We have one of the most hardcore and loyal fan bases on the planet so I know our fans will do the same.”

Five Finger Death Punch's last studio album, Afterlife, was released in 2022.

Five Finger Death Punch UK and Europe tour dates 2027 with Lamb of God and Bleed From Within

Jan 16 Manchester AO Arena
Jan 17 Glasgow OVO Hydro Arena
Jan 19 Dublin 3Arena
Jan 22 Birmingham BP Pulse Arena
Jan 23 London O2 Arena
Jan 26 Düsseldorf PSD Arena
Jan 27 Hamburg Barclays Arena
Jan 29 Lodz Atlas Arena
Jan 31 Prague O2 Arena*^
Feb 2 Munich Olympiahalle
Feb 4 Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle
Feb 7 Amsterdam AFAS Arena
Feb 8 Brussels Vorst National
Feb 10 Paris Accor Arena
Feb 12 Zurich Hallenstadion
Feb 14 Vienna Stadthalle
Feb 16 Berlin Uber Arena
Feb 17 Copenhagen Royal Arena*
Feb 19 Oslo Unity Arena
Feb 20 Stockholm Avicii Arena
Feb 22 Helsinki Veikkaus Arena

* No Lamb Of God
^Lamb Of God replaced by Dymytry

It should have been so easy. Towards the end of 1997, Metallica were steamrolling towards the release of their seventh studio album, Reload, and the metal titans wanted to do something big to celebrate. They decided that putting on a free concert would do the trick: a seemingly simple prospect that any metal fan would pole-vault over their dying grandmother to attend.

However, the road to that ostensibly breezy gig was strewn with fracas and issues. Angry locals, political grumbles and even a lawsuit against a stadium surrounded the notorious Metallica car park gig of November 11, 29 years ago.

The first roadblock Metallica hit along the way was the fact that, arguably, the idea they’d had was too good. In mid-to-late ’97, the band began hunting for potential spots to host their no-expenses-paid extravaganza, yet they were turned away by each one. Bigwigs at venues, airbases and everywhere else across America all shivered at the notion of putting on the show, fearing so many people would turn up that it would devolve into bedlam.

Undeterred, Metallica took their campaign to the people. They opened a phone line and email inbox to let fans vote on where the gig should go, and the eventual victor was Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. According to band co-manager Cliff Burnstein, the monolithic Black Album had sold 250,000 copies in that city alone, so the expectation was for there to be a monstrous turnout: magnificent for the musicians, but terrifying for uninterested locals who just wanted to sleep that night.

A mere seven days in advance, the show – later dubbed the “Million Decibel March”, a parody of Philadelphia’s “Million Woman March” protest the prior month – was announced as taking place in the car park of the CoreStates Center stadium. MTV reported that said car park could potentially hold upwards of 100,000 people. Uproar swiftly followed.

One city councilman, James Kenney, complained (according to Ultimate Classic Rock): “You’re going to have problems with crowds in a residential area. You’ll have noise and traffic congestion. If the heavy metal rock group wants to hold a concert here, why not hold it inside [nearby arena] the CoreStates Spectrum?

“And, if you’re putting all these Beavis and Butt-Heads in the parking lot, where are you going to park the cars?”

The outrage from politicians and Philly natives led the CoreStates Center to rescind their invitation for Metallica to play on their premises. The band responded measuredly: by suing a 21,000-seat stadium. They quickly won the case, according to The Los Angeles Times, as U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III ruled that the CoreStates Center had entered a verbal contract with Metallica.

“God bless America’s judicial system!” singer/guitarist James Hetfield said in a statement (again according to UCR). “It proves that even Metallica can get a fair hearing if you have a reasonable argument. Let’s rock!”

However, there were still debacles on the day. The event, despite being free, was still a ticketed one to prevent overcrowding. This clearly wasn’t communicated to everybody, though, as thousands of fans rocked up to the CoreStates Center anyway. Security was so overwhelmed that they just started letting everybody in.

Nonetheless, Metallica did indeed rock the car park, playing a 14-song set featuring returning favourites and live debuts. The Four Horsemen was bashed out on electric guitars for the first time since 1993, then Reload’s The Memory Remains, now a mainstay at shows, was heard for the very first time. A series of covers – including Diamond Head’s Helpless and Am I Evil?, Queen’s Stone Cold Crazy and Killing Joke’s The Wait – reared their heads: a subliminal tease of the Garage, Inc. compilation that would come out 12 months later.

The gig was a rip-roaring success for the band, with 50,000 fans making it to the spectacle, according to lead guitarist Kirk Hammett. The performance was eventually released as a bootleg video, aptly entitled Banned In Philly. This June, it’ll finally get its official release as part of an enormous multi-media Reload reissue.

Metallica are still testing the boundaries of live music decades later. At time of publication, they’re midway through the M72 world tour, where they play two full-length concerts across two nights at almost every stop they make. That said – given the community furor, political mud-slinging and legal battles that surrounded Banned In Philly – we’d be stunned if they ever attempted anything like this again.

Metallica Banned In Philly setlist: Corestates Center, Philadelphia – November 11, 1997

Helpless (Diamond Head cover)
The Four Horsemen
Of Wolf And Man
The Thing That Should Not Be
Fuel
The Memory Remains
King Nothing
Bleeding Me
No Remorse
Am I Evil? (Diamond Head cover)
Stone Cold Crazy (Queen cover)

Encore:
The Wait (Killing Joke cover)
Master Of Puppets

Encore 2:
Damage, Inc.

It's 2002, and partying's very own Andrew W.K. is on the promotional trail for his debut album I Get Wet, released the previous November. The latest stop on the campaign finds him in Auckland, New Zealand, where he appears on Space, a late-night music and entertainment TV show.

It does not go according to plan.

As the cameras roll, nervous-looking co-host Jaquie Brown can be seen crawling towards W.K., who has positioned himself beneath a grand piano.

"I've been working on a few things in here," explains the musician, before leafing through a copy of the New Zealand Herald. He then tears the newspaper into shreds, his arms a whirling frenzy, and the serious business of interviewing is resumed.

"Are you all nuts and bolts and man and gruff and GRARRRRRGH?", asks the clearly fascinated Brown.

"Nut. Bolt. Flour. Cheese, Fudge Brownie. Egg," responds W.K. "And a whole lot of love."

The interview proceeds in this vein for some time.

"Fruit. Yoghurt. Blackberry yoghurt," W.K. adds, before contorting his leg into a position where his foot is painfully wedged into the frame of the piano.

Finally extricating himself from his hideout, W.K. sits at the piano and hammers at the keys for over a minute, his fingers a frantic blur, before finally launching into a version of his breakthrough single Party Hard.

It doesn't last. Before we know it W.K. is improvising again, cartwheeling his fist into the piano keys as Brown and fellow co-host Hugh Sundae look on with a mixture of bewilderment and concern. He ends the performance by repeatedly whipping both arms around his body, lurching around the studio as the cameramen back away, before joining the hosts on the sofa and revealing that he may have just broken his thumb.

"What's going through your mind when you're doing that?", Brown asks.

"In case I don't live tomorrow, and tonight's my last night on Earth, I wanted to know that I gave all I had to give," responds W.K. "For no other reason than for the sake of doing it. It's that simple."

In 2021 Brown gave her side of the story to NZ website The Spinoff, saying, "He’s out of control. He’s like a performance piece on speed, swinging, hitting himself, jumping up in the air and breathing really heavily, making these animal noises. I’d never seen anything like it."

"The rehearsal was completely normal," she explains. "When we went to go live, it was, ‘Three, two, one’… down he goes. All I remember thinking is, ‘Fuck, oh my god, this is completely different to what I thought was going to happen.'

"I got down on my hands and knees and approached him. I tried my best to interview him but he wasn’t open to being interviewed. He was on an Andrew W.K. performance path… he didn’t play by the rules."

"I absolutely loved it. I love live TV. When you’re creating a show like Space, you want it to be exciting and interesting. Andrew W.K. is like the fairy dust. He’s what you want.

“He was weird, but he was amazing. He was one of a kind.”

Watch the full video below.

Yes have rescheduled their previously postponed Fragile tour and will now be playing live around the country in May 2027.

The band had originally scheduled a nine-date tour celebrating their classic 1971 album this May, in what would have been Yes's first UK live dates for two years, but announced at the beginning of this month that they had been forced to postpone the dates as guitarist Steve Howe required urgent surgery and needed time to recover.

The prog legends have now announced a new run of dates for next year with Howe stating, “We’re all now looking forward to the UK dates in 2027 and will be presenting all of Fragile, in its entirety and much more. See you all then.

“After The Yes Album, everything seemed to align. With Eddie Offord co-producing, and each of us contributing solo pieces, Fragile became a bold statement of creativity. It was Bill Bruford’s idea to include individual showcases—it was a bit oddball, but it captured the spirit of the time.”

Tickets already purchased remain valid for the new dates. Tickets (subject to booking fees) go on general sale on Thursday, April 30 at 10am. Yes were unable to reschedule the Bournemouth show and so ticketholders for that gig will be refunded. The York Barbican show on Saturday, May 15 is a newly added show. You can see the full list of dates below.

The band also recently announced that they will release their twenty-fourth studio album, Aurora, through InsideOut Music on June 12.

The new album, which features new artwork from the band's long-standing cover artist Roger Dean and his daughter Freya, features eight tracks (with two bonus tracks), including the thirteen-minute-plus Counterpoint.

"Making this record was joyful, a chance to play, explore and give everything to the music," adds Howe. "It's always been about collaboration, somebody can write a song, but until everybody puts their contribution in it isn't really a Yes song. We’re not trying to echo the past; we’re carrying the spirit of Yes forward and turning it into something new”.

Pre-order Aurora.

Yes rescheduled Fragile UK tour dates

May 2: Sheffield City Hall
May 3: Manchester Bridgewater Hall
May 6: Birmingham Symphony Hall
May 7: Bristol Beacon
May 10: London Palladium
May 11: London Palladium
May 13: Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
May 15: York Barbican
May 16: Liverpool Philharmonic Hall

Carl Palmer has announced that he is bringing his immersive An Evening With Emerson, Lake & Palmer show to England for three dates in February 2027.

The celebrated live event, which Palmer has been touring around the US for the last two years, sees the drummer and his ELP Legacy band, guitarist Paul Bielatowicz and bass player Simon Fitzpatrick and with the late Keith Emerson and Greg Lake appearing on big screens.

The two-hour concert features at least nine classic performances from the band’s legendary 1992 Royal Albert Hall show (the first time the band had toured together for 14 years), with all three members appearing together on stage and screen, in perfect sync with the live band.

Palmer will play The Glasshouse in Gateshead (Sun 7 Feb 2027), Liverpool Philharmonic Hall (Mon 8 Feb 2027) and London Palladium (Tues 9 Feb 2027).

Tickets for the shows go on pre-sale at 10am on Wednesday, April 29, and on general sale at 10am on Friday, May 1.

All tickets will be available here.

The music of Genesis, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake and Palmer is set to reverberate around the hallowed walls of London's Royal Albert Hall once more as the BBC has finally included progressive rock in its ever-expanding season of the 131st Proms (and the 99th since the BBC has been involved).

Prog joins a celebration of Miles Davis's centenary, reflections on Benjamin Britten, a tribute to Disney composer Alan Menken, an "immersive take" on Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians while South Africa's Ladysmith Black Mambazo will lead a celebration of Paul Simon's Gracelands album on its 40th anniversary, alongside tributes to the music of James Bond and to Motown soul legend Marvin Gaye as well as a concert by Turkish psych-folk band Altın Gün as part of the 2026 BBC Prom season.

The Prog Prom will take place on July 18 and will be curated by Stuart Maconie, presenter of the excellent prog-friendly Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone on BBC 6 Music, who also curated the successful Northern Soul Prom in 2023, and will feature new orchestral arrangements of hits by Genesis, Emerson Lake & Palmer and Jethro Tull, among others.

"Prog is simply great music released from the arid strictures of cool and from the sneers of gatekeepers," says Maconie, who goes on to state in an essay for this year's Proms programme that some of the genre's "excesses and follies can seem silly" to a modern eye, while insisting the genre shouldn't be written off.

Every concert will be broadcast on Radio 3 and BBC Sounds, with 24 Proms programmes on BBC television and iPlayer. More than 300,000 tickets are available across the season, with almost a quarter of those available for just £8.

In the mid-90s, the dominance of the alternative rock boom that had kicked off in Seattle at the start of the decade really started to turn sour. Kurt Cobain’s passing in 1994 was the biggest headline maker, but arguably no band had more issues in that era than Alice in Chains; cancelled tours, drug dependency, endless press rumours and inner-band tension all leading to their split.

It’s something of a miracle, then, that in 1996, after years of being begged by MTV, they managed to get back together to perform an Unplugged session that has gone on to achieve legendary status and provide the swansong and final act of the band's classic line up.

As 1996 arrived, it was over two years since Alice in Chains' last live performances on an Australian tour in late 1993. Since then, they had turned down a slot at the huge Woodstock 94 festival and the chance to open for Metallica on their Shit Hits the Sheds US run in the same year, chiefly due to vocalist Layne Stayley’s uncontrollable heroin addiction.

It was a rock-bottom moment; Stayley, having only just returned from rehab, arrived at rehearsal the day before the Metallica tour was due to start, completely strung out. This in turn led drummer Sean Kinney to throw his sticks down and proclaim that he would never play with the frontman again.

"If we had kept going,” Kinney admitted to Rolling Stone in an infamous 1995 profile on the band, "there was a good chance we would have self-destructed on the road, and we definitely didn't want that to happen in public."

Alice in Chains split there and then. The aftermath left certain members angry, but Stayley dumfounded. He admitted he didn’t know what to do, so spent his time getting drunk and lazing on his couch watching TV. His reclusiveness inspired the tabloid rumour mill to whirl out of control; at various times the press pronounced he was dead, had developed gangrene and even contracted HIV.

"I found out through the Internet that I have AIDS," Staley told Rolling Stone. "I learned I was dead."

The members of Alice in Chains eventually found things to do; bassist Mike Inez played on Slash’s solo album It’s Five O’ Clock Somewhere, Stayley formed the grunge supergroup Mad Season alongside Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready and Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin, releasing the fantastic Above album in 1995, and guitarist Jerry Cantrell mapped out a solo career.

Time away from each other gave the band perspective. Stayley later admitted he felt that by starting these new projects, the members were “betraying” each other. So, after six months apart and with the promise of total creative freedom and an unlimited budget from their label, Alice in Chains reconvened and began working on a new album.

1995’s Alice in Chains was released on October 31 1995, entering the US Billboard Chart at number 1 and selling over two million copies in their homeland. It was good news but presented a problem: most artists with a number one album in their pocket would go out and promote it, but the members of Alice in Chains, particularly Stayley, were still in no fit state to operate as functioning, touring band.

Throughout this period, MTV producer Alex Colletti had been trying desperately to convince the band to perform one of his channels' Unplugged sessions.

“They have the songs, they have the depth, they have the emotion where, when you strip it down, you really find something there,” he said in the 2015 biography Alice in Chains: The Untold Story. “Layne’s voice and those songs were going to shine through.”

AIC had turned the offer down on multiple occasions, mainly due to Cantrell’s concerns that transposing their songs acoustically in front of an audience wouldn’t work. But now, with no other way to promote their new album, they finally agreed to take part.

The Majestic Theater in Brooklyn was booked for April 10 1996, with rehearsals in Seattle prior to the show, but old habits die hard. Kinney bemoaned that there was “Barely any rehearsing at all, guys not showing up - the same shit” in the 2009 book Grunge is Dead, and rumours continued to surround Stayley’s habits.

On the day of the show, 400 fans were ushered into the Majestic Theater, with thousands left frustrated outside, to see Alice in Chains' first live performance in two and a half years.

The venue had been given a grimy makeover to suit the bands aesthetic, with paint splatters peeling from the walls, gunshot holes fired into the backdrop and the stage decorated by candles purchased in Seattle by Stayley himself. The vibe was completed with minimalist lighting in pink and purple, matching the frontman’s recently dyed hair.

No one really knew if it was going to work, and, with Stayley ill from heroin withdrawals having to give himself a shot to perk up prior to performing and Cantrell getting food poisoning from a rogue hotdog and vomiting all afternoon, leading to an insurance bucket being placed next to him onstage, the smart money would have been on a rusty, unprepared Alice in Chains Unplugged being a car crash.

Miraculously, they found pure magic, a thirteen-song set that is equal parts stirring, inspiring, beautiful and deeply sad. Cantrell’s reworkings of classic material like Would, Rooster, Down in a Hole and No Excuses sound even darker in their quieter, more sombre forms, whilst Kinney, Inez and live guitarist Scott Olsen do fantastic jobs of bringing colour and nuance to songs the band feared would sound naked when not cranked up to 11.

The reason this performance remains so special, though, is Stayley. Despite his shocking appearance - gaunt, frail, pale, almost motionless as he sits on a stool with his eyes closed - he is effortlessly able to unleash a voice with such power it hits like a gorilla dropping a concrete breeze-block onto your stomach.

The one occasion that he does eyeball the camera, delivering the line 'Oh god please, won’t you help me make it through' on Rooster, is truly, heartbreaking and chilling to witness. You’ll struggle to find another performance so gripping in live music history.

Alice in Chains Unplugged was released as an album and concert film on July 30 1996. By that point, the band had played their final shows with Layne Stayley, appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman and four gigs opening for the reformed Kiss. The day after their last performance, in Kansas on July 3, Stayley overdosed and was taken to hospital, leading to a hiatus that that incarnation of the band would never come back from.

It meant that although the Unplugged show was not his last performance, it was undoubtedly the final defining moment of the Layne Stayley era of Alice in Chains. Within six years he would pass away, leaving this as his swansong.

Deep Purple have announced a North American tour, and they're bringing Kansas and Jefferson Starship along for the ride. The run of dates kicks off on August 4 at the Red Hat Amphitheater in Raleigh, NC, and ends at the Nugget Event Center in Sparks, NV, on September 12.

Presale Tickets and VIP packages go on sale on Tuesday, March 31 at 10am local time, using the access code DPBAND. The general sale begins on Thursday, April 2 at the same time.

The new dates are in addition to Deep Purple's previously announced schedule, which includes shows in Asia and an extensive tour of Europe and the UK, including a return to London's historic Royal Albert Hall on November 25. Full dates below.

Deep Purple 2026 tour dates

Apr 11: Tokyo Nippon Budokan, Japan
Apr 13: Osaka Grand Cube, Japan
Apr 15: Nagoya Mizuokadani Steel Machinery Public Hall, Japan
Apr 18: Jakarta Indonesia Arena GBK Senayan, Indonesia
Apr 22: Almaty Arena, Kazakhstan

Jun 11: Espoo Metro Arena, Finland
Jun 12: Tampere Nokia Arena, Finland
Jun 14: Kristiansand Dirty Old Town Live, Norway
Jun 18: Clisson Hellfest, France
Jun 20: Meppen Emsland Open Air, Germany
Jun 24: Mönchengladbach SparkassenPark, Germany
Jun 27: Coburg Open Air, Germany
Jun 28: Ulm Klosterhof Wiblingen, Germany
Jul 04: Gredos Músicos en la Naturaleza, Spain
Jul 05: Pamplona Navarra Arena, Spain
Jul 09: Málaga Starlite, Spain
Jul 10: Cádiz Tío Pepe, Spain
Jul 16: Pisa Summer Knights, Italy
Jul 17: Este Music Festival, Italy
Jul 19: München Tollwood Festival, Germany

Aug 04: Raleigh Red Hat Amphitheater, NC
Aug 08: Clearwater The BayCare Sound, FL
Aug 09: Hollywood Hard Rock Casino, FL
Aug 12: Wantagh Jones Beach Theater, NY
Aug 13: Mansfield Xfinity Center, MA
Aug 15: Halifax Scotiabank Centre, NS
Aug 17: Laval Place Bell, QC
Aug 18: Toronto RBC Amphitheatre, ON
Aug 19: Ottawa Canadian Tire Center, ON
Aug 21: Detroit Pine Knob, MI
Aug 22: Salamanca Seneca Allegany Casino, NY
Aug 24: Indianapolis Everwise Amphitheatre, IN
Aug 25: Highland Park Ravinia, IL
Aug 27: Prior Lake Mystic Lake Casino, MN
Aug 29: Winnipeg Canada Life Centre, MB
Aug 31: Calgary Scotiabank Saddledome, AB
Sep 02: Abbotsford Abbotsford Centre, BC
Sep 04: Lincoln Thunder Valley, CA
Sep 05: Mountain View Shoreline Amphitheatre, CA
Sep 06: Highland Yaamava Theatre, CA
Sep 08: Chula Vista North Island Credit Union Amp, CA
Sep 10: Las Vegas Planet Hollywood, NV
Sep 11: Long Beach Long Beach Amphitheater, CA
Sep 12: Sparks Nugget Event Center, NV

Sep 29: Sofia 8888 Arena, Bulgaria
Oct 01: Cluj BT Arena, Romania
Oct 02: Budapest Laszlo Papp Arena, Hungary
Oct 04: Bratislava Tipos Arena, Slovakia
Oct 05: Vienna Stadthalle, Austria
Oct 07: Prague O2 Arena, Czechia
Oct 08: Lodz Atlas Arena, Poland
Oct 10: Belgrade Stark Arena, Serbia
Oct 11: Skopje Boris Trajkovski Arena, Macedonia
Oct 13: Athens Telekom Centre Arena, Greece
Oct 16: Zurich Hallenstadion, Switzerland
Oct 17: Milan Unipol Forum, Italy
Oct 19: Barcelona Sant Jordi Club, Spain
Oct 22: Paris Adidas Arena, France
Oct 23: Antwerp Lotto Arena, Belgium
Oct 25: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Oct 26: Stockholm Avicii Arena, Sweden
Oct 28: Oslo Spektrum Arena, Norway
Oct 29: Gothenburg Scandinavium, Sweden
Oct 31: Leipzig QI Arena, Germany
Nov 01: Hamburg Sporthalle, Germany
Nov 03: Dortmund Westfalenhalle, Germany
Nov 04: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Nov 06: Frankfurt Festhalle, Germany
Nov 07: Nuremberg Arena, Germany
Nov 09: Amsterdam Ziggodome, Netherlands
Nov 10: Strasbourg Zenith, France
Nov 12: Bordeaux Arkéa Arena, France
Nov 13: Nantes Zenith, France
Nov 15: Lyon LDLC Arena, France
Nov 18: Newcastle Utilita Arena, UK
Nov 19: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Nov 21: Birmingham BP Pulse Arena, UK
Nov 22: Manchester AO Arena, UK
Nov 24: London Eventim Apollo, UK
Nov 25: London Royal Albert Hall, UK

Get Deep Purple tickets.