How did you get into metal?

“It was in 1999, the heyday of nu metal. I absolutely fell in love with so many of those bands, especially System Of A Down, Korn, and Slipknot. And then rather than what my friends did, which was basically fall out of love with it, I investigated further and got myself down into the deep metal rabbit hole and discovered all of the subgenres, and I’ve never dropped it, really.”

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever found in terms of subgenre rabbit holes?

“I don’t necessarily love this, but it makes me laugh a lot - like, anything sort of goblin-based, or anything where the bands put themselves through hell playing for 50 people by wearing gigantic rubber costumes, I absolutely love.

I used to do a show on Radio X, and obviously that is not a metal station, but they would let me, every week, play a 30-second blast of something horrible that I’d found. The other day, I can’t remember the name of the band, but they style themselves as 'Shrek Metal' - so it’s all things on Shrek [it’s The Ogre Packet Slammers – Subgenres Ed]. And the song was called Stay Out Of My Swamp.

What I love about metal is it can be hugely silly and hugely ridiculous, or, then you’ll find another band who are the most serious, up their own arses. It’s such a broad genre."

You’ve had Corey Taylor on your food podcast, Off Menu. What was the best bit of having him on there?

“I think I managed to not sound like an absolute gabbling idiot. I was so nervous, because obviously I was superstarstruck. When I was 14, I queued up at Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street to meet Slipknot. When they came out, I was just walking around – my friend was holding the place in the queue – and I just threw myself at him, and I probably weighed about eight stone more than I do now, so I nearly wiped him out. He’s only a small lad.”

What was your last text with Corey?

"Oh, I don’t know. It was probably a while ago. Corey loves Taskmaster, so he’s got a few questions about Taskmaster now and again."

What is the most metal meal a person could have?

“A bloody steak, red wine – anything that just looks like you’re actually eating blood, I think. And then a side of thumb tacks. I’m sure there’s a huge amount of vegan metalheads who would massively disagree with me.”

Well apart from Corey, who’s your dream dinner party metal guest?

"Neil Fallon from Clutch. I’ve had the opportunity to meet him a couple of times, and I’ve turned it down, because I don’t want to be a simpering fanboy and he seems like one of the coolest men in the world. Matt Pike’s another one of my absolute metal heroes. I’d love him to come along to a dinner party, maybe. One of my great regrets is that we never got Ozzy on Off Menu. I would have loved to have got Ozzy on Off Menu. So if it’s a dead or alive dinner party, I’m gonna get Ozzy along."

Would you have the Ozzy hologram?

"I don’t think I would. I find the holograms as a whole quite creepy, and also I don’t want to have dinner with a hologram - I’d rather have a real person there!"

You mentioned Clutch there - you said you’d turned down the chance to meet them. Why?

"I just don’t want to embarrass myself. Years and years ago, I did the warm-up on the Golden God Awards, and Clutch were playing, and I got to introduce them onto the stage, and I got to stand near them - and that was enough for me, I think.

I got to introduce them and Mastodon, which was a huge night for me. But who knows. One day, maybe. One day I’ll be chill enough to meet all of these people."

You did a metal podcast called Lifers, which was very cool. What was the best piece of wisdom or advice you heard from the musicians?

"My favourite guest on that… Lzzy [Hale] and Dani [Filth] were over Zoom, because it was literally the start of the pandemic, where we hadn’t recorded the final episode, so we had to get a load of different people to talk about longevity in music, and more broadly entertainment. I think it’s an interesting thing to talk about. Especially when certainly in music, you can have these peaks of popularity that can then dip and can settle, and I wanted to speak to people about how you ride those highs and lows out and you just keep going.

I’m always very impressed by bands who just consistently release albums. Some of them might be massively popular, some are less popular, and how do you sustain that through a long career. But people like Lzzy and Dani are pretty popular all of the time, I would say. So I had really good chats with a few other bands who maybe had their peak in the 80s and now they play quite small rooms. It’s just about tuning into the passion that you had when you started doing something, and realising that’s the main reason you’re still doing it, and ignore any sort of success, particularly."

Which would you pick out as the proper lifers?

"We spoke to Brian [Tatler] from Diamond Head, and I went to his house and we hung out for the day. I found him quite an inspiring dude, to be honest. He’s just a total nerd for the music, and he’s never gonna stop doing it. They were big when they first started, and then they had these little peaks with Metallica covering them on Garage Inc and things like that. He’s like, ‘Yeah, all those things happened, but we’re still going, we just get on with what we do.’I found that, as someone who works in entertainment and wants to do it for a long time, quite an inspiring attitude."

What was it like visiting him at home? Did he get you a cup of tea and a biscuit?

"Yeah, absolutely. What I found was… metalheads all have massive dogs, gigantic, hairy dogs. I obviously knew this going in, but I think a lot of people who aren’t into metal don’t realise this, that the scarier the music, the nicer and more boring the person. We met so many people who were the most relaxed, sweet people, so it was fun."

Did Brian have a massive dog?

"Yeah, he’s got a massive dog. There’s a few massive dogs knocking around."

Apart from you, who do you think is the most metal comedian?

“Well, there’s Andrew O’Neill. Have you seen their show, History Of Heavy Metal? That is the definitive heavy metal comedy show. Joel Dommett likes a bit of metal, but only from 2001. He’s very specific in what he enjoys.”

What does he like?

“The last band I spoke to Joel about was Taproot. I’ve been recommending him some more modern stuff – I recommended some Silly Goose the other day. Anything that’s got that slightly throwback sound to it. I recommended a Callous Daoboys song called Two-Headed Trout. But I don’t know if he listens to it. I think he just goes back and listens to Limp Bizkit again, to be honest.

You can normally get [Off Menu co-host and current Celebrity Traitor James] Acaster into some metal if it’s really weird. Quite often he’ll send me some stuff I’ve not heard of, like weird noise metal, really discordant, quite upsetting to listen to. He likes stuff like that. I’ve been to see High On Fire with Rob Delaney before. He likes his riffs.”

You do The Traitors: Uncloaked TV show, which is the exit interviews for contestants. Which metaller would you put on The Celebrity Traitors?

“I mean, they’d all look good in the cloak, wouldn’t they? I don’t think they’d ever make a metal person a traitor, because it’d be too obvious. Maybe Dani Filth. I feel like Dani’s genuinely funny, like comic-level funny, and so sarcastic. Imagine Dani interacting with national treasures – I think that would be perfect.”

You once saw a man set his public hair on fire, while queuing to see Korn in 2000. Have you seen anything that topped that?

“I don’t know why we’re talking about Cradle Of Filth so much, but I went to see them at the Astoria, and that’s the only gig I’ve been to where there were protesters outside. Actual Christian street protesters telling us to not go in, and that it was Hell in there. And you just wanna go, ‘Come on in, guys! Everyone’s really nice! And it’s so silly, no one’s actually invoking Satan, there is an opera singer in there, there’s fake blood, it’s fun, it’s a laugh, come on!’”

Did you own the Jesus Is A Cunt t-shirt?

“No, I didn’t. Because I’m quite a scared little boy, and I didn’t want to get arrested for a t-shirt. I do have the Raised By Owls t-shirt. Have you seen their take on it? They’ve got one that says, ‘Jesus Probably Isn’t That Bad’.”

Have you seen the Mr Blobby one with the double-ended dildo?

"I’ve also got that T-shirt! I think they’re brilliant and I bought a couple of their T-shirts because I really want to support them. I think they’re doing something really interesting. They’re releasing great music, but also leaning into doing sketches that are genuinely good online. Everyone should try and support them as much as possible."

Talking of Hell, your new show is called Fresh Hell! What’s it about?

“At the moment, the two big tentpole routines concern me turning 40, and also toilet brushes. But that will change… I hope!”

What’s your idea of Hell?

"It’s certainly not being at a Cradle Of Filth gig. I think my idea of Hell is what purgatory is described as - just a completely empty room with nothing going on, where you just have to sit there with your own brain. No music, no phone, no book, no nothing. Just a totally empty room. Flames and the Devil - at least something’s going on. You can feel something."

Why should metallers go to it?

"Everyone should come to it, but if you’re a metalhead you know that we share a similar brain, you know we like the same sort of stuff, and we probably like the same sort of jokes. And even if you don’t find me funny, my pre-show playlist is exceptional."

Name one song in that playlist that is gonna get people going.

"I built it as I go along - I’m probably more dedicated at the moment to the playlist than I am to writing the show. Let me see what we’ve got… Oh wow, I really did add some mad stuff to it. I’ve got Turbo Lover by Judas Priest, I’ve got Mr Crowley, Ozzy Osburne... I’ve got Air Conditioning by Lightning Bolt, Mistress Of Death by Creeper, Electric Messiah by High On Fire... It’s big riffs, and it’s going to be an absolutely party. If you’re a metalhead, get there early for when the doors open, enjoy some of the songs, and then you can leave if you want!"

Tickets for Ed Gamble's stand-up tour Fresh Hell are on-sale now at his official website. The tour starts in Ipswich on January 30. Ed is currently hosting Celebrity Traitors: Uncloaked which airs on BB1 every Thursday and Friday right after Celebrity Traitors.

Declaring edgy post-punk funkers Talking Heads to be prog might seem like a bridge too far. But much of their work was truly progressive for those speed-addled times – not forgetting the input into their work by Brian Eno, Adrian Belew and Robert Fripp. In 2012 (long before the band members put their 80s differences behind them) Prog explored the question: how prog were Talking Heads?

“The most popular contemporary avant-garde group in America” is how Time Out described Talking Heads in 1980. In a way they were the Radiohead – named after a 1986 song by the band – of their day; their experimental sound and edgy, arty ideas attracting a huge audience.

Progressive? They certainly made astonishing progress, creatively advancing between albums, especially the three they recorded with producer-catalyst Brian Eno. In fact, so giant were the leaps they made that Simon Reynolds, in his 2005 book on the post-punk era Rip It Up And Start Again, was moved to compare them to The Fab Four.

“The trilogy of records Eno and Talking Heads made together recalls the runaway evolution of The Beatles across Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt Pepper’s,” he wrote of More Songs About Buildings And Food (1978), Fear Of Music (1979) and Remain In Light (1980). These were albums that variously featured, alongside the erstwhile Roxy Music chrome dome, Bowie/Zappa guitarist Adrian Belew, world music pioneer Jon Hassell and King Crimson majordomo Robert Fripp.

Talking Heads have had numerous appellations ascribed to them, from new wave and dance-rock to art disco and brainiac pop – but how about progressive funk? It seems to suit the cerebral nature of their highly rhythmic music.

“‘Progressive funk’?” muses Chris Frantz, co-writer of many of Talking Heads’ best-known tracks including Psycho Killer and Life During Wartime, and drummer from their inception in 1975 after his previous band with singer David Byrne, The Artistics – formed when the pair were at the Rhode Island School of Design – ran out of steam. “That’s not bad.”

“They used synthesizers and all kinds of new technology,” says Belew, who appeared on the Heads’ fourth album, and spent a year in their touring line-up. “But were they prog? When I think of the term ‘progressive’ I think of epic things like Yes and King Crimson. ‘Progressive’ to me means something ahead of its time, moving forward... so in that sense, sure.”

Frantz remembers prog’s golden age. He was at art school in 1971, where two records dominated student dorm stereos: Neil Young’s Heart Of Gold and Yes’ Roundabout. “You’d walk down the hallway and hear one and then walk a bit further and hear the other,” he laughs.

He acknowledges the prowess of the prog musicians. “I have a great deal of respect for those guys and their musical chops,” he says. He doesn’t believe, however, that Talking Heads were in the same league in terms of pyrotechnical ability.

“I would say the most musically accomplished member was Jerry Harrison. He was a great keyboardist and guitarist. David was an excellent rhythm guitarist and Tina a wonderful bassist. As for me, I’m a pretty good backbeat player, but if you asked me to do a drum solo I might just give you the stink eye.”

Whatever their shortcomings on their chosen instruments, there’s no doubt that the four players, when they got together in the studio with Eno, made for an awesome, inventive unit. Frantz has grown used to receiving accolades on behalf of this highly influential outfit, one that has become synonymous with dark, intense dance music that isn’t necessarily designed to be danced to. “People on Facebook tell me every day the music changed or saved their life,” he says. “I never tire of it.”

The first time most people heard Talking Heads was 1977, when the funk noir four – Byrne, Frantz, his girlfriend and later wife Weymouth plus former Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers member Harrison – emerged out of New York’s CBGB scene. To say that they stood out next to their peers – the burgeoning New York punk/new wave milieu that included the Ramones, Suicide, Television, Blondie, the Patti Smith Group and Richard Hell’s Voidoids – would be to do understatement a disservice.

Musically, as evidenced by their 1977 debut album - titled, with typical neatness, Talking Heads: 77 - theirs was a clipped, bright but weird pop that suggested a warped mix of African rhythms and bubblegum melodies with the spikiness of punk. Lyrically, too, this was virgin territory: songs that seemed to celebrate conformity and ran counter to rock’s usual credo of rebellion and degeneracy. Talking Heads looked and sounded clean-cut.

“We were inspired by Roxy Music,” admits Frantz of their formative sartorial period. “We didn’t have the funny outfits, though. When I see those pictures of Paul Thompson in that leopard skin suit, and Eno... Eno was really out there.”

Talking Heads were the diametric opposite of Roxy’s retro-futurist amalgam of styles. Frantz explains how the Heads came up with their defiantly simple preppy early look.

“I always say it was the clothes our moms gave us for Christmas,” he laughs. “When we arrived in New York, The New York Dolls were still going and there were a lot of people in bands wearing platform shoes and satin trousers. We thought: ‘We can’t dress like that, we’ll look and feel ridiculous.’ So we decided to go with button-down shirts or Lacoste polo shirts. That seemed to work really well for us.”

They might have looked like the most unprepossessing students, but there was an intensity to their frontman that lent the band a so-normal-they’re-disturbing air and made Psycho Killer, their most famous song, seem virtually autobiographical. Or, as David Byrne himself put it in an interview in 1992: “Looking at old videos of us, it’s like three normal kids backing up this maniac.”

Even in an era that threw up Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, Byrne was unusual, appearing to teeter on that fine line between genius and madness. Discussing it today, Weymouth says: “People would ask: ‘Is David Byrne a genius or a moron?’ I wanted to nip that ‘moron’ bit in the bud, so it was better to say ‘genius’. The truth is somewhere in between.”

Looking back, she says: “We had fun making those Talking Heads records – they were rarefied times.” She doesn’t accept the brainiac tag, asserting: “our music was emotionally profound.” She adds: “People say we were clever, and it’s funny – it’s also quite mistaken! Compared to Stephen Hawking we’re just midgets. Imagine if we had A Hawking Heads – that would be something.”

Yet she concedes that Talking Heads were big on ideas. “We’d been to art school – not that we were effete snobs – but we came from a place where ideas and conceptualisation were almost more important than craftsmanship.” The band’s experimental approach saw them make, she decides: “science fiction funk.

“Everything we did was texturally entirely different,” she asserts, “because we had this interesting mix of people: Chris came from the steel town of Pittsburgh and understood that raw black American sound. Then there were myself, David and Jerry who had been exposed to a lot of European classical music. So when you combine the African-American rhythms with that European melody you get Talking Heads.”

Their sci-fi funk process involved Eno’s use of “oblique strategies,” including the random chance cards he had brought to bear on the sessions that produced Bowie’s Berlin trilogy. “They were fun,” recalls Frantz. “One said: ‘When in doubt, be quiet.’”

The Fear Of Music sessions involved a different kind of oblique strategy: Eno and crew sat in a truck outside Weymouth and Frantz’s loft while cables ran upstairs to where the band performed the songs. Was that weird?

“No, it worked out just fine,” says Frantz, who enjoyed making a record that soon became synonymous with paranoid punk-funk: from its terse song titles (Mind, Air, Paper, Animals, Drugs) to its jittery rhythms, it brought to mind Anthony Perkins circa Psycho down at Studio 54. “We had a good time - a good time being paranoid.”

For the follow-up, arguably their finest foray into (out of this) world music, the band accommodated extra musicians such as keyboardist Bernie Worrell and Belew. Although Frantz talks up those Remain In Light sessions now, at the time there were rumours of dissent in the ranks as the other three found themselves increasingly treated like Byrne’s backing band.

Did Belew, an outsider, detect animosity? “Not in the studio, because Chris and Tina weren’t there when I played my parts,” he replies. It was on tour later that he was “privy to the in-fighting and questions as to who should be credited for what.”

“I just tried to remain neutral and have fun,” he says, “which it was, a lot of the time.”

Weymouth recalls “some temper tantrums” as relations broke down. “David had a lot of those when he got to be a star,” she reveals. “Fame overwhelmed him.” But then, as she admits: “It wasn’t a sane time in our lives.”

Is it true that Weymouth asked Belew to replace Byrne? “Yes,” says the guitarist. “Chris and Tina raised the question. But that would have been very destructive for the band. You couldn’t replace David, and I wouldn’t have wanted to. It came out of Tina’s anxiety.”

There wouldn’t be another Heads album until 1983’s Speaking In Tongues, and thereafter only two more: 1985’s Little Creatures and 1988’s Naked (that is, unless you count 1986’s pseudo-soundtrack True Stories as an official Talking Heads release). They all saw a scaling back in terms of ambition and experimentation, but they did make the band more popular than ever as songs such as Road To Nowhere and Burning Down The House made them early stars of MTV.

They also saw Byrne and the rest become increasingly estranged from each other as it became apparent that he intended to go solo. “Was there tension?” wonders Frantz. “Only because David had plans outside Talking Heads and he wasn’t keeping us abreast of what they were.”

One sensed mutual antipathy seeing the four together onstage to receive that Hall of Fame induction in 2002. Have they spoken since? “Barely,” says Frantz. “I would be happy to sit down and talk to David, but he’s not a social guy. His preferred method of communication is email.” It’s a shame, he says, because they started out as such great friends. “We did pretty much everything together, but as the band became more popular David grew more distant.”

Is it all Eno’s fault? “No,” he replies. “It’s just one of those things. We had a wonderful chemistry, but nothing lasts.”

Adds Weymouth: “We just have to be glad there was no loss of life – nobody was killed in the creation of a Talking Heads record.”

As keeper of The Alan Parsons Project archive, Eric Woolfson’s daughter Sally has a treasure trove of audio-visual gems still waiting to be shared with fans. She tells Prog about the challenges of keeping her late father’s creative endeavours out there.

Sally Woolfson was around three years old when her dad Eric Woolfson co-founded The Alan Parsons Project. The duo achieved more than 50 million sales from 10 albums between 1976 and 1987, delivering genius-level music mainly created by Woolfson and produced by Parsons.

Sally – whose voice is heard on the track Chinese Whispers from 1985’s Stereotomy – was once at odds with her dad’s lifestyle, but became his full-time assistant in 2002, and after that became his manager as they laid plans for his posthumous catalogue. He passed away in 2009 and, by that time, her view of the Woolfson legacy had changed.

“When I was younger, his work took him away from me,” she says. “He’d be in the studio ’til 3am then lying in ’til noon the next day, then he’d be on PR tours for weeks on end. His work was my rival, in a way, but when we worked together I was with him every single day, and it became my obsession too!”

It may be her job, but she speaks with brightness and passion of the role she regards as a privilege. She has her work cut out for her: since Woolfson was notably fame-averse, many people today don’t realise how much of APP’s output came from him. “Dad loved working with talented people and, of course, he was very talented too,” she says.

“It was about bringing the right people together for a project to get the best out of it. But he was terrified of fame. He’d seen negative aspects. It was his decision to name the band after Alan; Alan was more marketable, more sexy in a way. But Dad often said it was both the best and the worst decision he ever made. Towards the end of his life, especially working on solo projects, it was frustrating. I still find it frustrating!”

Since Eric’s death, Sally has devoted much of her time to cataloguing his extensive vault. He left not one but two houses full of memorabilia related to his output – and even 17 years on, she hasn’t finished going through it all.

“Dad was a real hoarder and he had a lot of space in those houses, and you know what it’s like: when you’ve got a lot of space, you fill it! When he died I went through everything, and it took me many years.” As a result she has 11 boxes of curated documents, one for each reissue so far, containing photos, clothes, notes, contracts and everything else one could imagine.

“That’s just the physical material – there’s audio material, too,” she notes. “We had 1,000 master tapes and we baked and digitised them all, so I have hundreds and hundreds of hours of audio. Every time we have a new album or box set or whatever it is, I go through the recordings and sort of audition everything, giving everything marks out of 10. It’s quite a process!”

Post-APP, Woolfson sometimes discovered incomplete pieces that he’d entirely forgotten about. Sally recalls: “Sometimes he’d write something and present to Alan, who’d sometimes go, ‘Oh, no, no’ – including Eye In The Sky, one of their biggest hits [it made No.3 in the US]; Alan had said, ‘I don’t like that one!’ but Dad pushed it through.

“We put together this album called The Alan Parsons Project That Never Was [2009], made up of songs Dad had picked out and had said, ‘This is really good; I should finish it.’ We found one called No Answers Only Questions [a bonus track on the 2007 reissue of Vulture Culture], which is a beautiful track, and the lyrics are so poignant.”

Woolfson’s vault includes a stack of songs with finished music but no lyrics, which Sally describes as “tantalising.” In the modern era an obvious question is: could they be completed? “I couldn’t write for those songs, but my sister writes lyrics,” she says cautiously. “I do ponder... it might be a terrible thing to say, but since he’s not here, could we use AI to put lyrics to some of his music? It’d be the closest thing: new lyrics generated from his own lyrics. It’s a continuous ponder!”

AI could go even further: Woolfson-sourced lyrics with vocals too. “It’s amazing, it’s terrifying, it’s confusing, it’s exciting, isn’t it?” she reflects. “But Dad was always about pioneering new technology. When a new format like CD came out, they used the Project to demonstrate its capabilities. We’ll see...”

The latest vault production is the official The Alan Parsons Project Book containing memorabilia from the band’s career and words by Prog scribe Joel McIver. There are more on the way (no details yet) and Sally remains committed to ensuring no one forgets Eric’s work.

One great example is her work in securing playback of Eye In The Sky instrumental track Sirius at the World Cup in the USA recently. “It’s always been used in America – the Chicago Bulls turned it into a real sports anthem. But to hear it on a worldwide scene... It’s a special thing for our whole family.

“My sister’s son just turned 16. She was pregnant with him when Dad died; Dad knew he was on the way but never met him. For the last year he’s been playing in the England under-15s football team. The timing! It’s magic!”

It all helps to keep Eric Woolfson’s art relevant. “He’s been gone over 16 years, but I hear his voice every day, one way or another,” Sally says. “And I do feel that he’s very much alive.” Does she find herself talking to him? “I did the other day, actually,” she replies after a pause. “I don’t normally, I can’t explain it.

“I’m driven to keep him and his music alive. I’m still discovering stuff. I haven’t covered every single album yet. It’s a treasure trove; it’s thrilling – especially the audio!”

As he was growing up in the port city of Jaffa in western Israel, Kobi Farhi’s family gave him mixed messages on how he should view the world. His uncle Kitz had PTSD after serving in the Six-Day War between Israel and the surrounding Arab countries, and he once told Farhi that Arabs “want to kill you and throw you into the sea”. Meanwhile, his father was a veteran of the Yom Kippur War who showed compassion to the men he’d been conditioned to hate, giving blankets to detained Egyptian soldiers. And his grandmother Lily was close friends with an Arab woman named Yousra, to the point that Farhi went to Yousra’s daughter’s wedding when he was five years old.

At the start of his new memoir, The Jewish Muezzin: Radical Sanity In An Orphaned Land, it seems that Farhi has adopted his uncle’s outlook. He recalls, in May 1992, aged 16, finding out that an 18-year-old Palestinian had murdered 15-year-old Israeli girl Helena Rapp: one in a long series of Palestinian terror attacks which intensified after the Six-Day War gave Israel control over the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In response to the killing, Farhi spray-painted “death to Arabs” on a shopping centre wall and searched for a person who looked Arabic, so he could attack them. He chased after one man on the street, but ultimately didn’t hurt anyone. Today he remembers the episode as something he’s “ashamed of”. Since then – through his progressive folk metal band Orphaned Land, which he co-founded in 1991 – he’s adhered to his dad and grandma’s examples, writing song after song advocating for peace in the Middle East.

“At the beginning of the book, when I was a teenager, I’m showing how easy it is to fall for indoctrination and brainwashing,” the talkative yet soft-spoken singer, now 51, says on a video call with Metal Hammer. “You’re made biased by the media and everything, because the newspapers are always red; you’re always seeing the bad news.

“I went to extremism. But, as time went by and I asked myself questions, I started to adopt my grandma and Yousra’s friendship as proof that coexistence is possible. If I take my 35-year career with Orphaned Land, I would say that, for the first two years, I was an extremist; the last 33, I have gone with my grandma and Yousra’s narrative.”

Orphaned Land’s commitment to unity has defined such tracks as 2013’s Brother, which lamented how skin-deep differences between the Abrahamic religions have been used to fuel generations of violence. And it hasn’t been just words. For decades, Farhi put a Palestinian keffiyeh, a traditional scarf, on his microphone stand.

The band have performed with multiple Palestinian artists; when they won the Global Metal Award at the 2014 Hammer Golden Gods, Farhi shared it with Abed Hathout of Palestinian tourmates Khalas. The Jewish Muezzin’s title reflects Farhi’s belief that music has the power to overcome cultural and religious divides, a muezzin being the person at a mosque who sings the Muslim call to prayer.

“The magic over the course of my life has always been music,” he says. “The sound of the muezzin calling to people from the mosque was there five times a day when I was a kid, and I loved the music. It was music that drew me for the first time to the Muslim culture.”

Before Farhi could fully dedicate himself to writing songs and using them to confront hate, he – like every other Jewish citizen of Israel once they turn 18 – was summoned to serve in the IDF. He loathed it (he had to cut his long hair short before reporting for duty), but for a year he was a model soldier. He worked as a mechanic, never seeing active combat. “I never wanted to be a fighter,” he explains.

When he requested to take the leave he’d earned so that Orphaned Land could make their 1994 debut album Sahara, he was denied. He went anyway, recording and doing a photoshoot where he wore a Palestinian keffiyeh, then refused to apologise upon his return. He was court-martialled and sentenced to 28 days in military prison. During the final two weeks, he had to guard Palestinian captives; he later recreated a melody that they sang and used it for the Sahara song Aldiar Al Mukadisa (‘Holy Land’).

“I always looked at them with a certain curiosity,” he says of his feelings while being in close proximity to Palestinians for the first time. “I wanted to understand what drove them to commit acts of violence against Jews and Israelis, who in many cases were not always soldiers. No hatred, no feeling of revenge; a lot of questions. Maybe that’s why, when I heard the melody, I didn’t resist. I said to myself, ‘They love music. They find comfort in music’, and I was enchanted by it.”

After Orphaned Land made two further albums, 1996’s El Norra Alila and 2004’s Mabool, they scored their breakthrough with 2010’s The Never Ending Way Of Orwarrior, co-produced by Steven Wilson. That May, the band supported their idols Metallica at the US giants’ show in Tel Aviv. Lead guitarist Kirk Hammett was such a fan that he asked Farhi if he could buy one of their CDs. The singer darted to the merch stand and rushed back with a copy of …Orwarrior.

Did Hammett ever pay up? “No,” Farhi replies matter-of-factly, “but he rewarded us by writing a review in Metal Hammer [where he said, ‘I really like what they are doing’]. One of your childhood heroes writing a review of your album, being acknowledged in that way… I can show it to my kids one day.”

However, as Orphaned Land’s fanbase grew, so too did pockets of resistance to their inclusive messaging. In band pictures promoting …Orwarrior, Farhi was dressed as Jesus, while figures around him in traditional Jewish garb assumed Muslim prayer positions, and vice versa. It was a call for togetherness which got misconstrued as blasphemy. “The three Abrahamic religions all come from the same source,” Farhi reasons, “and I always thought that the solution to the problems should be going back to the source of things.”

In other cases, people were punished for being fans. Farhi writes about the time an Egyptian man was sentenced to six months in prison because authorities found an Orphaned Land CD in his home. He also remembers Mysour, the young Muslim metalhead who inspired the Prog Award-winning music video for 2017 single Like Orpheus. Farhi hasn’t seen her since a picture of her with Nergal from Behemoth circulated online; he believes that someone must have banned her from going to shows.

However, it’s the last three years that have posed the greatest threat to Farhi’s goal of coexistence. On October 7, 2023, Palestinian terrorist organisation Hamas attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages (166 were freed, including eight who were rescued alive, and 85 have been confirmed killed). It was the deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust. Israel’s military response was swift and horrific: more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and Gaza. A UN commission of inquiry has accused Israel of committing genocide by deliberately targeting Palestinian children; Israel vehemently denies having genocidal intent.

The last 70 pages of The Jewish Muezzin are largely dedicated to Farhi’s nuanced thoughts on the conflict and the fierce global discourse surrounding it. He recalls, at 6:29am on October 7, hearing sirens wail and hurrying his children out of bed, into a nearby bomb shelter (he’s talking to Hammer from Greece, where the family have spent much of their time since the attacks).

As a confessed former extremist himself, he writes of Hamas: “Without agreeing or sympathising, God forbid, I have no trouble understanding how a Hamas monster is born. He is a man oppressed, controlled and stripped of purpose or independence.”

He’s a staunch opponent of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the slaughter of Palestinian civilians, and also outspoken against the rising tide of reactionary, antisemitic hate crimes around the world.

“[Netanyahu has] divided Israeli society to the extent that leftists are [considered] traitors,” Farhi says. “I think he built a hate machine towards leftists, myself included. I don’t love Israel less than right-wing people, I don’t love the Jews less. People in the government have said that we should wipe out Gaza. It’s very disturbing that these people represent me, because you see what’s happening around the world, even in the UK. Jews are being attacked in the UK and feel unsafe. You can see how people are going very fast to a collective blame. Itamar Ben-Gvir [Israeli minister of national security] says something, and the Jews of the UK are to blame.”

Alternative music has been far from immune to the divisions stemming from the conflict. In November 2024, Kneecap rapper Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh allegedly waved the flag of Lebanese political party and military group Hezbollah onstage (he was cleared of the charge of committing a terror offence earlier this year). Bob Vylan controversially chanted “death, death to the IDF” while performing at Glastonbury 2025 (an investigation by Avon and Somerset Police concluded that no action against the punk-rap duo would be taken). All the while, Disturbed frontman David Draiman has faced ongoing backlash for writing “Fuck Hamas!” on an IDF projectile during a June 2024 visit to Israel.

Farhi is critical of what he considers to be sloganeering from artists with no personal connection to Israel or Palestine. “In order to resolve the conflict, we need to be open and dive into the complexity of things,” he explains.

He’s disappointed in Draiman (a fellow Jew of Israeli ancestry), as well. He reveals in The Jewish Muezzin that the two first fell out over the artwork for Orphaned Land’s 2013 album All Is One, which Draiman alleged was an “imitation” of Disturbed’s 2002 cover for Believe (both pieces feature religious symbols merged together to promote coexistence); Farhi counters that “the combination of symbols, messages or ideas from all religions has been done so many times over the centuries”.

After Draiman wrote on the IDF artillery shell, Farhi says that the American singer “lost his voice”: “You can be in favour of Israel – that’s fair enough. You’re Israeli, but you could bring people together. You could address things [from] the right perspective. Every time he speaks now, that photo will come up again. He lost the ability to talk to everyone.”

Farhi writes that he feels like he’s caught in the middle of a bridge he himself built. Even some of those closest to him have fallen into steadfast nationalism after October 7. Amidst all the intense rhetoric, Israelis’ trauma following Hamas’ attacks, the widespread violence against Jews and the dreadful stories continuing to emerge from Palestine, does he still believe in Orphaned Land’s defining mission? Is peace truly possible?

“There’s a chance for peace in two ways,” Farhi replies, undeterred. “I think one is leadership: if a brave leader rises up, I think the people will follow. Everywhere has psychopaths, but I think the common people want to live in peace; I don’t think people wake up in the morning and want to kill someone.

“The second one, to maintain peace, we need to change the education system. They never taught us at school about human behaviour. You know what they taught us? Trigonometry. What about talking and listening to each other? Today, people don’t listen to the other side because it will be [seen] as weakness.”

Currently, the future of Orphaned Land is unclear. The band haven’t released an album since 2018’s Unsung Prophets And Dead Messiahs, nor have they performed internationally since 2024: a date on their European tour that year was threatened with a boycott but went ahead without incident. Even though Farhi considers Orphaned Land his “life’s project”, its future depends on the response to The Jewish Muezzin – and whether or not people will listen to what he has to say.

“We’re probably the only band in the metal scene that was born into this conflict, wrote six albums about it, went on tour and shared awards,” Farhi states. “I don’t think there is a similar activism to this, and I don’t want to throw it away. I just don’t understand where to go from here. I’m leaning back, releasing the book and wondering where this will take everything.”

The Jewish Muezzin: Radical Sanity In An Orphaned Land is out now via Lemon Soul.

Sleep Theory have fast risen as one of metal's hottest new names. Since releasing their debut EP in 2023 the band have amassed millions of streams worldwide, each tour seeing them play successively bigger venues. After making their UK live debut this year with a fully sold-out tour and appearance at Download Festival, the band are set to return in November for an arena run supporting Papa Roach. We asked frontman Cullen Moore to pick out the songs that have changed his life. Here's what he had to say.

“I could not tell you my first favourite song, and it’s because I have a love for all types of genres and I’ve never really pinpointed what a ‘favourite song’ of mine would be. Maybe it’s Will You Be There by Michael Jackson. I was a massive Free Willy fan as a kid, and Will You Be There plays at the end of the movie.

“The Land Before Time is another movie that means a lot to me. For a long time, I couldn’t even listen to [its theme tune] Diana Ross’s If We Hold On Together because of the innocence of being a child. [It’s a really emotional movie – Film Ed.] Music takes you back to certain times in life. I’d just watch the movies and enjoy it – the T-rex was freaking scary. But I think that’s good! It’s good for kids to experience that kind of childhood horror! Ha ha ha! But yeah, If We Hold On Together means a lot to me, and the message behind the song is important.

“A lot of people ask me, ‘What do you listen to? What rock bands?’ I’m like, ‘Dude, I’m not listening to rock when I’m vibing out’ – I listen to R’n’B. As I got into my teenage years or early teens, I started finding bands like Three Days Grace, Disturbed, Fallout Boy, Sum 41… things of that sort. I found a deep love for both, and I just didn’t want to choose between the two. So, I just kind of existed in this limbo of enjoying both simultaneously. New Edition’s Can You Stand The Rain is just a vibe, man. It’s a very good representation of R’n’B.

“Phil Collins’ Another Day In Paradise is a reminder that with every choice, with every decision that you make, there are consequences. There’s a reaction for every action. I think it would do a lot of good for people to have that at the forefront of their minds. Always think of how you would want to be treated as a person, and how you would do to others as you have others done to you.

“The Isley Brothers’ (At Your Best) You Are Love… how can I explain? I’ve had a lot of friends who are really challenging people. But although they’re challenging, whenever they’re being who they really are, they are fantastic individuals. At your best, you are love. When you’re not at your best, you’re kind of iffy, but when you’re at your best, you embody something pretty great.

“The Commodores’ Still resonates with my earlier years of dating. You always have a love for your first love. It’s a pretty song for anyone who’s gone through any kind of a break-up. You’ve gone through the wringer with this person, but although things are done and over, you still love them.

“The lyrics of Billy Ocean’s The Colour Of Love go, ‘If I had to paint a picture to show the world how true love can really be, I would use the brightest colours to create a vision of harmony.’ So it’s self-reflection, like if that’s the colours that I would use to paint the world and how I see life as it is, is that a direct comparison of how someone would paint my colours?

Dad and I, we would listen to it all the time. We listened to a lot of different songs. When he was in the military, I was homeschooled. So whenever he went to his drill every month or whatever, I would go with him – because I could go anywhere and do my schoolwork. So we would be driving down the road, going wherever it is we’re going, and we’d be jamming out, man.

“With Luther Vandross’s Dance With My Father, I try not to get too emotional. I love both my parents, and we’re super-close. But I think it’s a very good thing to stay in the present. Although my parents are not old and they are both very healthy, there will be a day when they are not. A lot of people don’t want to think about somebody they love passing, but I think it’s healthier that way, so you can appreciate the time that you have.

“My dad, he loves The Temptations, and after David Ruffin left the group, he put out his own stuff. So my dad would be listening to David Ruffin’s Statue Of A Fool. It’s again a reminder, a song about his life and reflecting on his mistakes. It’s a pretty sad song, but it’s a good reminder for people to listen to, knowing there will be a day that you will be filled with regret if you don’t handle yourself.

“It was an early Tuesday at 7:00am. I got in my car, and I was listening to Saosin’s self-titled album and Finding Home was the first song that came on. I’d already listened to it before, but at that moment, for whatever reason, it felt… I don’t know. You’re just driving, and you can tell that the sun’s going to come up in the next 15 minutes or so. I was listening to the song and just taking the drive home, and I felt pretty good. This was like 2013, 2014? I call Saosin my comfort album. I love that album, and it means so much to me.”

Sleep Theory's covers EP (E)motional (S)upport (C)are (P)ackage is out now via Epitaph. The band tour the UK with Papa Roach from November 1.

In 2017 Italian prog legends Premiata Forneria Marconi signed to InsideOut and released bilingual album Emotional Tattoos. That year Prog visited the band in their Milan studios to discuss how they continued challenging themselves after nearly 50 years, what it was like being mentored by Greg Lake – and that time they ate spaghetti with Jaco Pastorius and Joni Mitchell.

In the wilfully obtuse world of prog, artists are not often known for doing things the easy way. But while some challenge themselves in terms of instrumental technique, performance or lyrical concepts, Italian prog pioneers Premiata Forneria Marconi set themselves a slightly more unusual task while making their new studio album – or, albums – Emotional Tattoos.

“This time we decided to do two different records,” explains singer and drummer Franz Di Cioccio. “The same music, but one in Italian and one in English. It’s the better way to understand what we want to sing about.”

“We made them together at the same time,” says bassist Patrick Djivas. “First the Italian then the English. Sometimes the two were racing each other to be finished.”

However, the lyrics on one album don’t necessarily correspond to the other. “How can you say exactly the same things to Italians or to Americans or British people?” asks Djivas. “Especially as Italy has a way of thinking that’s so different to the rest of the world.”

To demonstrate, the pair sit Prog down in their Milan studio and play the English album. The atmospheric 7/8 piano figure of Morning Freedom (renamed Oniro for the Italian version) rings from the speakers. When we come to the chorus after which the English version is named, Di Cioccio explains: “We had the English phrase for the chorus first: ‘Moor-ning Freeee-dom’. If we’d translated that directly into Italian, it would be‘mat-i-no di li-ber-ta.’ It would be a completely different rhythm to the line and feel completely different, not reflecting the emotion it’s supposed to show.

“So in Italian it’s ‘sogni liberi’ – ‘make the dream free’. From there we build a different lyric. It’s a difficult exercise, but we like it that way.”

Fans of the band since their acclaimed 70s output will be aware that making records in Italian and English is not new for PFM. But back when they made career-defining albums such as Photos Of Ghosts, they could rely on the services of one of prog’s most celebrated lyricists to bring their visions to life in a foreign tongue.

“We had Mr Pete Sinfield writing lyrics for us,” says Djivas. “He was really heavy on us until we sang it really good in English. But this time Franz did a good job – I think it sounds pretty natural.”

They continue to get their message across; and in both languages the themes are similar: There’s A Fire In Me and It’s My Road offer up the power of music as a force to heal in the face of a fractious world; The Lesson takes a “no pain, no gain” philosophy to the challenges of life and love; and opening track We’re Not An Island sounds remarkably apposite to anyone wondering what’s to become of the UK post-Brexit and the US post-Trump, even though Djivas and Di Cioccio insist they had less specific social sentiments to impart.

Most striking of all, though, both lyrically and musically, is A Day We Share, which surveys a global landscape in search of common ground, despite observing scenes such as: ‘El Paso, Texas, almost in the middle of the night, watching the wall, waiting for the call to tear it all, another Berlin until we win…’

The six-minute journey starts with rhythmic punches of acoustic guitar and florid keyboard swoops and swirls, before stepping up the drama with a mesmerising battery of staccato rock riffs; then it unexpectedly sidestepping into a more groove-based, almost rap-like section of stream-of-consciousness observation. Then the curtains are thrown open onto a big, anthemic chorus and a joyfully upbeat Celtic-tinged denouement. Reports of PFM mellowing with age have, it seems, been exaggerated. “We wouldn’t want to play like we did back then,” says Djivas. “It would bore us to death. But we still like to challenge ourselves.”

Only the 71-year-old Di Cioccio remains from their founding line-up, which formed when a Milan‑based quartet of session musicians expanded to a five-piece in a bid to explore more adventurous musical avenues. Djivas would join their ranks a couple of years later on bass – but first, they had to establish themselves within a highly sceptical local industry.

“We were excited by the music we were hearing from abroad at that time,” says Di Cioccio. “King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Ekseption… we just got the feeling the wind was changing in our favour. So we changed our name and began to move to a more improvisational style. People couldn’t understand why we called ourselves Premiata Forneria Marconi – Award-Winning Bakery.

“When we played our first show under that name, the promoter wouldn’t even announce us! We were opening for Deep Purple, and support acts weren’t that common in Italy then. He thought if he announced a band that wasn’t Deep Purple, just a local band, everyone would throw things at us; and if he told them we were called Premiata Forneria Marconi they'd think, ‘What the hell is this?’ So he just refused to introduce us.”

He didn’t even tell the venue crew to turn the stage lights on – so as they stepped onto the stage in darkness, their only option, as the enduring cliché would have it, was to let their music do the talking. “Back then we used to play covers, like most bands do at first, so we began playing 21st Century Schizoid Man,” says Di Cioccio. “We used to play the part where they stop and start – the really complicated bit – just looking at the ground and not at our instruments. It would make people a bit shocked that we could play it without looking. At the end the promoter sees the reaction for us, gets up on stage and says, ‘This is Premiata Forneria Marconi. You will be hearing a lot more about them!’”

He wasn’t wrong: over the coming months, numerous like‑minded compatriots would emerge with similarly avant-garde sounds, many of whom just happened to have curiously elongated names, such as Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso and Biglietto per l’inferno. The Italian prog scene was snowballing, and its leading lights were about to get a major break.

“Greg Lake was given a tape of us when ELP played in Italy. After a month he calls our manager Franco Mamone and he says, ‘Hey, I can’t believe these guys played that song [Schizoid Man] like this!’ He says, ‘I want to see them playing it. I used to play with King Crimson and I know how hard it is.’”

A London showcase gig was set up; and, duly impressed, Lake signed PFM to his new label Manticore. Their mentor, keen to introduce them to the English and American markets, hooked the quintet up with erstwhile Crimson lyricist Pete Sinfield. But Sinfield and Lake had a suggestion to make first. “They said, ‘English speakers can’t pronounce Premiata Forneria Marconi’ – they would always put the wrong emphasis on the syllables – Prem-eee-tur Forn-eerie-yur Marconi or something – people knew Marconi because it’s a famous name but otherwise people struggled with it. So we said, ‘We’ll just call ourselves PFM.’”

With Sinfield they set about turning songs from their second album, Per un Amico, into an English language release. Photos Of Ghosts was also beefed up with a reworked instrumental from their debut, Storia di un Minuto. The finished article juxtaposed dazzling, urgent bursts of jazz rock with pastoral, classically tinged folk rock, warped psychedelia and ebullient synth-heavy prog. Helped by Celebration becoming an FM radio hit, Photos Of Ghosts made them the first Italian act to enter the Billboard Top 200 album chart.

By that time, Djivas had joined and the band were touring incessantly, thrilling crowds with improvisation-heavy shows of the kind that had made the Grateful Dead famous. And how better to capture that magic than with a live album? “ELP had hired a mobile studio in Central Park, but something happened and they couldn’t record that day,” says Di Cioccio. “Since they’d paid for it anyway, they said, ‘Do you want to record your show?’ We agreed – but we pretty much forgot about the recording, so we played normally, improvised pretty much the whole show, and that really made it so much better! Sometimes if you’re aware you’re being recorded live, you’re trying not to make mistakes, and it turns out a bit stiff.”

That recording formed part of Cook, a defining album for PFM, retitled and repackaged as Live In The USA for its European release. By that point, it felt like there had never been a better time to make music. The band had found a home from home just off LA’s Sunset Strip, on Alta Loma Road, as referenced in the extended jam Alta Loma Five ’Till Nine, which they created there.

They would also stay at the Sunset Marquis hotel. “All the musicians stayed there,” Djivas recalls. “There was a party every night.”

Di Cioccio adds: “I remember one night when Jaco Pastorius was recording Hejira with Joni Mitchell. They come in and he smells that we're cooking in our room. They asked, ‘Hey, is there a party here?’ We say, ‘No, we’re cooking spaghetti. Want some?’ So Joni and Jaco come in. We’re hanging out and Patrick’s playing bass with Jaco. It was a great time.”

Things would turn slightly sour in the US after their 1975 album Chocolate Kings, which featured former Acqua Fragile singer and fluent English speaker Bernardo Lanzetti. It featured a sleeve design that didn’t go down too well. “The cover was an American flag with chocolate inside, but the flag wrapper has been thrown away,” Djivas explains. “We really didn’t understand the weight of an Italian band in the US making fun of America.” A focus on foreign territories meant they didn’t put out an Italian version of the record, meaning their profile also slipped back home.

1977’s release Jet Lag would prove to be their last sung in English, as Lanzetti departed, and drummer Di Cioccio followed Phil Collins route to the lead singer’s mic, and they concentrated on rebuilding their fanbase at home. A pair of records backing Italian folk troubadour Fabrizio De André helped, and they consolidated their position as one of Italy’s best-loved rock acts.

It’s been over a decade since their last album of new compositions, and their task wasn’t helped when guitarist Franco Mussida called it a day in 2015, leaving the rump of Djivas and Di Cioccio in creative charge of the band. But every cloud… “The new guitar player, Marco Sfogli, is from Naples” says Djivas. “Neapolitans have a lot of heart – they’re very emotional people. So he’s a ridiculously good technical player who can do anything, but he also plays great melodies, and we love that.”

While Sfogli is barely half the age of his new bandmates, he’s of a generation who continue to carve out a strong reputation across Europe, helped by a thriving scene back home (covered, we might add, by the Italian equivalent of this magazine, Prog Italia). So do Djivas and Di Cioccio hear their influence among the latest crop of Italian bands? “I didn’t listen to anything in the last year,” says Di Cioccio, “and that’s deliberate, because I don’t want to be influenced. Writing songs, arrangements, writing lyrics in Italian, writing in English – it takes focus!”

“I’m the same,” says Djivas. “They cut off the lights in my house twice because I didn’t pay the bills. Not because I couldn’t, but because I was so focused on the album!”

That “no pain, no gain” philosophy has borne fruit, in the shape of an album (albums) that can stand proudly alongside the records with which they made their reputation all those years ago. “For us, the album is a positive journey,” Di Cioccio says. “We start the album with You’re Not An Island, and then the last lines are: ‘I’m feeling like a god!’”

And who can deny him such feelings? In terms of European prog at least, PFM deserve a bit of deification.

As a founder member of the Strawberry Hill Boys, Dave Cousins helped move the band through bluegrass and folk until they finally became international prog icons Strawbs, who could count Led Zeppelin among their fans. In 2019 – six years before his death at the age of 80 – Cousins told Prog about his journey from underground band to the household name that helped give Sandy Denny and Rick Wakeman their breaks.

Having notched up 19 studio albums since Strawbs’ 1969 self-titled debut, Dave Cousins has remained the one constant at the centre of the band, amid various shifts in musical directions and sometimes turbulent personnel changes. And the prolific songwriter and vocalist intends to stay busy. “While I still enjoy it, I’ll keep on doing it,” he says.

In 2019 Strawbs celebrated their golden jubilee at a gala event in Lakewood, New Jersey. Backed by a 30-piece orchestra and a choir of staff members from New York’s United Nations building, the gig covered their lengthy career from start to present day. Cousins recalls: “Tony Visconti, who’d worked with us on our very first records, agreed to come and conduct.

“It was unbelievable to have Tony there. We did our very first single, Oh, How She Changed, with Dave Lambert singing, backed by the orchestra. We also had the choir sing an amazing rendition of Lay Down and they accompanied us on We Have The Power from our 2017 album, The Ferryman’s Curse. That was extraordinary.”

The three-day celebration featured many musicians who’ve played live or recorded with the band. “Strawbs are a family. You can never overlook that. And we all get on very well together. Even though people left the band there was never really any hard feeling. Yes, there might have been aggravation at the time – but by and large, we’ve all stuck together and looked after one another.”

Whether it’s touring on his own or with The Acoustic Strawbs alongside longtime members bassist Chas Cronk and guitarist Lambert, 2020 looks like another busy year. When Prog caught up with Cousins at his home in Kent, he was still at the early stages of working on Strawbs’ 20th studio album.

“At the moment I’ve got ideas and a few scraps of paper with titles on them. I’m going down to my local pub, who’ve agreed to let me have the back room on an afternoon, where I can sit on my own and get on with the writing.”

You started out playing the folk circuit in the early 1960s.

Yes – though we were never a folk group as such. I was the fastest banjo player around, Tony Hooper was the lead singer and we had a double bass player. Before that we’d done a BBC audition which we passed, and I started ringing up BBC producers trying to get us work. One of them returned our call and told us we were recording the next week. The show was broadcast in 1963 and we shared billing on Saturday Club with Chris Barber’s Jazz Band and The Beatles.

At the time, I was the cloakroom attendant at Eel Pie Island Jazz Club in Twickenham; Arthur Chisnall, who ran the club, heard us on the radio and asked if we’d like to do the intervals for a group he had coming in. They were booked for the next six weeks and they were called The Rolling Stones. No idea what happened to them!

A bit later you were a producer on a pop show for Danish radio. How did that happen?

Tom Browne, who was later a Radio 1 DJ, did an interview with me about the Strawberry Hill Boys and he helped set up a tour of Denmark. I got booked for a Danish TV show. Also on there was The Who, promoting I Can’t Explain, and I got chatting to them afterwards. Pete Townshend gave me his phone number and told me to give him a ring sometime.

Anyway, Tom Browne had been asked by Danish radio to do a pop show from London called The London News. He said to me, ‘I know nothing about pop music – will you produce it?’ He and I interviewed all sorts of people: David Bowie, Sandy Shaw, Marc Bolan, Mary Hopkin, Keith Emerson.

We even interviewed Captain Beefheart on his first visit to England. We went up to his hotel off Oxford Street and he said, ‘I can’t do this interview without running water.’ So he went into the toilet, put the tap on, came back in and then we talked. Of course, when we came to edit, it sounded as if he was having a pee throughout the interview!

How did you meet Sandy Denny?

I’d gone to The Troubadour in Earl’s Court, and there’s Sandy down there wearing a long white dress and a straw hat playing a Gibson Hummingbird, singing the Gaelic song Fear a’ Bhàta. I introduced myself after she came offstage and asked if she wanted to join my group. ‘What’s the name?’ she asked. ‘Strawbs,’ I told her, and she said, ‘Yeah, okay.’ It was as simple as that!

“It was in 1967. She was 20 at the time and living at home with her mum and dad. She joined us and we were booked to play in Denmark. We really got to know Sandy on the ferry from Newcastle to Aarhus where we sat up all night, rehearsing and drinking every bottle of beer that was on the ship.

We got signed to Sonet Records, run by Karl-Emil Knudsen, and made a record in Copenhagen in an old cinema. We could only record during the day because people had to be let into see the film in the evening. So we’d go off and play in Tivoli Gardens with Sandy singing.

It was the only time we performed on stage with her, really. She came back to England and, after three months, I hadn’t been able to get anybody in England interested in releasing it. By then Sandy had joined Fairport Convention – which I didn’t mind. We were still the best of friends. She was an absolute icon.

And you were the first British act to sign to A&M Records, weren’t you?

Yes. That was through Knudsen, who distributed A&M in Denmark. He played them the recordings with Sandy; and although they were disappointed she wasn’t with us anymore, Jerry Moss – the M of A&M – phoned to tell me they were excited to have us and wanted a single. We were in the studio with Gus Dudgeon as producer, who shared his office with Tony Visconti.

A&M had sent $15,000, which at that time was a colossal amount of money, and it was all spent on that first record because Gus Dugeon wanted to prove himself with orchestras and Christ knows what. So when they said they wanted another album we asked for more money. They told us the cash they’d originally sent was to be spread across three albums!

So we went from London back to Denmark, but we took Tony Visconti with us because Gus had buried my voice on the first album. So Tony produced Dragonfly [1970].

How did you hook up with Rick Wakeman?

We’d been asked to do a session for the John Peel show and we wanted to do a piece called The Battle, but we didn’t have a keyboard player. Tony suggested he bring Rick along, and it was great – we got on famously. When it came to Dragonfly we had him play on The Vision Of The Lady Of The Lake.

I put his name on the sleeve notes, and when it came out sent him a copy. He said he was thrilled – that was the first time he’d had his name on the back of an album.

We met up and had a beer and I asked him to join the group. Our first gig with him was to be in Paris a fortnight later, but he said, ‘I can’t do that; I’m getting married.’ I asked him where he was going for the honeymoon. He said, ‘We’re not; we can’t afford one.’ So I said, ‘Well, I’ve got an idea…’ He came to Paris with us and had his honeymoon there!

After Dragonfly your music shifted towards a more electric sound. Was that deliberate?

We’d been using acoustic bass but it just wasn’t working for what we needed. At the time I had a folk club and then an arts lab in Hounslow and I’d booked Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera. It had guitarist Paul Brett, who’d guested with us on Dragonfly; and Richard Hudson and John Ford on drums and bass respectively. I thought they were great and invited them to join.

I still viewed us as a folk group, so the fact that Richard played percussion rather than a regular drum kit is what attracted me. It was only when we made From The Witchwood [1971] that we brought drums in for the first time, but they were very much mixed down because I didn’t want them to overwhelm the songs.

From The Witchwood has quite an eclectic mix of sounds and instruments, doesn’t it?

Yes, it does. On A Glimpse Of Heaven you’ve got multi-tracked voices to create a choir, Rick steaming in with a ferocious Hammond organ solo, and me playing bluegrass banjo behind him. Witchwood has me playing dulcimer and Rick playing clarinet – his second instrument at college. The Shepherd’s Song has that great Mellotron part as well as Rick’s great synth solo.

That was the first time we used a Mellotron. Also in the studio was a Moog synthesiser, the really big one. Rick sat with Tony and they got a sort of piccolo trumpet sound which Rick overdubbed. I’d been influenced on that song by Alone Again Or by Love. I adored that song and still do. So Rick dubbed that Moog on top of the strings.

You must have been really sorry to lose Rick to Yes.

Well, of course – but we’d been paying Rick £25 a week and Yes offered him £100, so it was understandable really. Funnily enough history repeated itself, because we had Oliver, Rick’s son, playing with us for a while, and he left us to join Yes as well!

1972’s Grave New World had a grander, more dramatic feel to it, and of course it had that fantastic triple fold-out sleeve which must have been very expensive to produce at the time.

The sleeve was immensely powerful. We’d become quite a significant band so A&M didn’t mind spending the money. We went from selling 5,000 copies of From The Witchwood to selling 98,000 in the UK with Grave New World.

A&M did the artwork and we had no involvement, other than me writing the sleeve notes and choosing the bits of text from the Egyptian Book Of The Dead and the Tibetan book of the dead [Bardo Thodol].

I had no idea what was going to go into the artwork until I saw the finished thing. I was staggered. The William Blake painting The Dance Of Albion [also known as Glad Day] is an immensely powerful picture as well. As for the middle picture, I’ve got that hanging on my wall at home.

You had an unexpected hit single in the UK with Part Of The Union, which got to No. 2 in 1973. Was that a blessing or a curse?

That song has been an albatross round our necks since it came out – in this country anyway. It was No. 1 in Germany because it’s an oom-pah song. In America nobody heard it. The first song we recorded for what became Bursting At The Seams was Lay Down and that was very much in my style.

At the same time, Hud and John had recorded a demo of Part Of The Union, and were going to put it out under the name of The Brothers. The publicity we got from the song at the time of the miners’ strikes and the three-day week and so on, was colossal.

But the problem was we didn’t come out and say whether we were left-wing or right-wing; we kind of sat on the fence. I think, unfortunately, that clouded the judgment of us for a few people. We recorded a version that was far more left-wing, but that wasn’t released. I have that on a cassette still.

The album title Bursting At The Seams was very apt. Things in the band had become quite acrimonious, hadn’t they?

Yeah. I was taken to one side by our manager, who said, ‘The band have decided to fire you. ‘We’re going to keep you on as a solo artist and they’re going to carry on as Strawbs.’ I said, ‘Over my dead body.’ There was a bloodbath in Hollywood, where we were at the time, and so John and Richard went their separate way and had some success as Hudson Ford.

Your next album, 1973’s Hero And Heroine, is regarded as a classic, featuring John Hawken from the original Renaissance on keyboards.

When John came in he’d never touched a Mellotron or a synthesiser. ‘What do I do with this?’ he said. But he was such a useful piano player with such a wonderful touch. I’d first heard him on that first Renaissance album [1969] when I was producing my Danish radio show. Hero And Heroine was when we became a proper progressive rock band. It was probably our biggest album worldwide, especially in America.

The most satisfying shows we did at the time were the double-header shows with King Crimson. Both bands liked one another’s company. There was a sympathy between Hero And Heroine – tracks like The River and Down By The Sea – and King Crimson, who were doing a lot of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic at the time.

Life on the road can take its toll in terms of relationships and personal health. How did you cope with it?

We weren’t into drugs. We loved a good old drink, you know? Yes, we occasionally smoked a few joints, but not coke or anything like that. It’s only when we met up with Led Zeppelin in Hollywood that I had coke with John Bonham, which was an extraordinary experience. He kept pushing my head down to the table, saying, ‘More, more, more!’

Our first gig in the States was a week-long residency at the Whiskey A Go Go. Zeppelin would go flying out to wherever they were playing that day, come back on their private jet to the Go Go and watch our last set. They did that two or three nights running. Our audience were astonished that Led Zeppelin were there watching us.

Your 1976 album, Deep Cuts, was given the deluxe reissue treatment last year. How you think it stands up?

It’s probably the best-sounding Strawbs album of the lot – but we were rushed into doing it. I didn’t have any songs. I’d just sold a cottage in Devon that I was about to move out of, so it had no furniture in it. I invited Chas Cronk to come down.

We went down the pub first and then went back, sat on the floor with two guitars, and in less than five days we’d written six or seven songs. It turned out to be more of a pop album due to the pressure of management saying we really needed a hit single.

Were you pleased by the reception for your 2017 album The Ferryman’s Curse?

Yes! It went into the prog rock album charts and I was thrilled. It wasn’t easy to make that album. I had a terrible hernia and it made singing a lot of the songs incredibly painful. I was also suffering from kidney problems; I was in and out of the hospital a lot of the time.

It was well-received by fans and critics so that was great. Some of the joy was taken from it, however, because our producer, Chris Tsangarides [Colosseum II, Brand X] sadly died a month later, which really broke my heart.

What’s the Strawbs album you would point to and say, ‘This is what you need to listen to?’

Grave New World. There’s one thing wrong with the studio version – we put it right in the live recording from our 50th anniversary show, which we’re going to release soon. We reprise Grave New World in a different key and suddenly the whole thing goes circular, comes to a resolution and makes sense.

Rolling Stone magazine listed Hero And Heroine as one of the 50 greatest prog rock albums of all time. Universal owns the masters of the biggest albums on A&M. When Steven Wilson started remixing all the classic albums by King Crimson, Yes and others, I wrote to Universal and asked them if they could get Steven to remix it to 5.1, but they weren’t keen on the idea.

Yet 50 years on our albums are still selling. We repaid our advance from A&M 20 years ago and we’ve been receiving royalties ever since. They’ve totally recouped. Now, for argument’s sake, say the royalty is 10 per cent and we’ve been paid over £100,000 – that means Universal has grossed a million pounds over the last 20 years. There aren’t many bands from that era still selling those kinds of quantities.

In 2016 Al Murray – best known for his comedy creation The Pub Landlord – told Prog about his eclectic attitude to music, which gave rise to his extensive and wide-ranging record collection.

When I went to boarding school in Bedford, everyone was into punk. I thought, “I want to be into something for myself – how can I carve out my own thing?” Someone had a copy of Genesis’ Seconds Out so I got into that. The sound of strings doesn’t frighten me: I don’t come at prog thinking it’s elitist music. I played in orchestras growing up and they were not elite; they were people scraping away to make a nice sound. So I don’t have an allergy to musicianship or classical music. I was always coming at rock music with that on board.

The first album I bought was And Then There Were Three. You’d go into Andy’s Records in Bedford with four quid in your pocket and think, “I like that band, but I can’t afford that double album, so what can I get?” It was all about cassette tapes for me – at school you couldn’t have a record player and you had to pack things away neatly, like being in the army. So you might not buy that expensive double, but you’d get what was in your price bracket.

Browsing in record shops was exactly how Nick Hornby describes it in High Fidelity: you don’t just look at the records you want, but the ones you already have; you’re touching base. I was looking at stuff I couldn’t afford and thinking, “One day I’ll buy that copy of Relayer.”

I learned about prog through making friends who were into it. When I got to uni (I studied History at Oxford) on my first weekend I met Simon Oakes from Suns Of The Tundra and he had a tape of Genesis at Knebworth – wow, that was like gold dust. At uni I had more money to spend and that’s when I really started listening to and playing music.

I’d studied percussion at school and I played in a jazz band there. On my year off I was in a covers band who I tortured into playing Solsbury Hill. I was like, “Right lads, this is in 7,” and they were like, “What the fuck are you on about?” “Basically we miss a bit of the end of this bar – don’t worry, I’ll play it right.” And then there’s that bit where we’ve all got to really count.

At uni I had a friend who was a massive Rush fan so occasionally you’d try and play some really difficult music. It was fun, but I always just tried to have a broader palette than fall back on the music I really love – I’m a big fan of lots of “normal” rock and pop too. Although I do remember a friend coming round with a Jane Siberry tape and me throwing it behind a cupboard because I wanted to listen to Larks’ Tongues In Aspic. I lied to him about it for ages. He still won’t know – he’s not a Prog reader!

From Larks’ Tongues to Red, that period of King Crimson is really amazing – you can’t take it as three records; it’s one hot stretch. Look at the YouTube footage. That music is angry for a reason. They’re all pushing to get space. When I moved into my first flat in London, Red was the soundtrack to nights in playing Risk. It’s my favourite Crimson album, and that’ll always stay with me.

I never got tribalism in music – if something’s good I’ll like it. But prog always felt like something I had to defend. Bowie walks along the faultline between rock and prog all the time. He inhabits the faultline – utilises it. Those Berlin albums are especially out there because Brian Eno’s an art rocker; and then you’ve got Robert Fripp. You’re not going to have Fripp on a record and it come out ordinary.

In the 90s I listened to a lot of Beatles. Revolver is the first prog record of all, and their best by a million miles. There’s a constant stylistic shift – each track is something one band alone would mine a career from. Tomorrow Never Knows is the invention modal, syncretic music that would become dance music – yes, the Beatles did that too.

Similarly, King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King isn’t the first prog album, it’s just the first that announces it is. The Who had been mining that seam for years and you can hear their effect on Genesis – who want to be The Who, but they’re too polite. They also want to be soul boys, but if you’ve got a classically-trained pianist in the band you’ll end up with Selling England By The Pound, which isn’t about having your heart broken but having your country broken – as worthwhile a lament as any love song.

My favourite Genesis record ia a toss-up between The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway – no one’s made anything that good for a very long time – and Duke, which is a very compelling record. I follow Genesis through the “pop” years too, because even singles like Mama are plain weird.

In the 80s and 90s prog lost its confidence – it had the shit kicked out of it and was told to go away. It went in on itself and doubled down on the gnarly bits rather than writing lovely melodies. Then people start not taking no for an answer and you got fantastic bands like Tool coming through.

Lateralus sounds completely timeless; it doesn’t sound like it’s been glued together, like a Metallica record – and I love Metallica, but their records do sound like they’ve been boiled in a bag a bit. You know Tool can play the record from start to finish. Danny Carey is such an amazing drummer; you wanna hear him, you don’t want to be deprived of that band.

The stuff I’ve got into in the last year has stemmed from Steven Wilson’s Hand.Cannot.Erase.. I was completely beguiled by that record. I always liked Porcupine Tree, but here he’s coming from pure melody, and you get this witheringly good band playing it. From there you listen to Marco Minnemann, who I’m a little afraid of because he’s a drummer. The Aristocrats stuff is hilarious; then there’s Nick Beggs’ stuff, and Craig Blundell, who’s a friend of mine – he does this prog dubstep grime project, Dr Octopus.

But my kids have influenced me on this last one: Elvis. They were really into him for a while and I don’t know where they found him. Suddenly they wanted The Sun Sessions on all the time. Elvis is prog rock: he invents rock and roll by taking two things and sticking them together. He’s even wearing capes by the end of it. In his Vegas period he invents orchestration in rock and roll in the way Jon Anderson describes how he puts his own music together.

Elvis would do that live: “I need a trombone here and the drummer to go nuts.” All the time Ronnie Tutt’s going for it with a huge drumkit. If you leave Elvis out of this you’re making a fundamental mistake. He came onstage to Also Sprach Zarathustra – how much more prog could you be?

If it weren't for Covid, Ricky Hoover would be cutting somebody’s hair instead of speaking to Hammer. When he left his previous band, Suffokate, he was done with music and was happy settling into his new barbering career. Then the world shut down, and his creative urges returned.

Now, he’s the frontman for hotly tipped new deathcore band Ov Sulfur. Originally conceived as a studio-only project, the online reaction led to Ricky and his bandmates taking it more seriously.

“I didn’t expect it to go anywhere,” he tells us, “I thought it would be a couple of dudes making music and having fun, maybe playing a few bar shows. Then I posted it on Instagram, and it went insane.”

Their debut album, The Burden Ov Faith, was a good start, but its follow-up, Endless, is the real game-changer. A mix of mosh anthems, big hooks, and black metal theatrics, it should entertain pit demons and singalong lovers alike. Each track has at least one memorable, ‘Wait what?!’ characteristic. There’s even – whisper it – a ballad. Ov Sulfur aren’t afraid to push the boundaries of their chosen genre, and Ricky wants to do more than growl.

“I’ve always enjoyed singing. It’s fun, man!” he laughs. “If you’re too tough for clean singing, then that’s cool, too. Each to their own, you do you.”

This willingness to challenge deathcore conventions has resulted in an entertaining and remarkably catchy album. Putting his scissors away has rejuvenated Ricky’s love of performing, and it’s given him a fresh perspective on his previous work.

“I never knew that my old band made such an impact,” he reflects. “I meet people who tell me how much they loved Suffokate. I only found out in the last couple of years how much we were loved, and it’s amazing.”

Endless is out now via Century Media. Ov Sulfur tour the UK from November 30.

SOUNDS LIKE: Blackened deathcore that isn’t afraid of clean singing
FOR FANS OF: Killswitch Engage, Dimmu Borgir, Shadow Of Intent

In 2018 Lifesigns mastermind John Young – whose career includes stints with Jon Anderson, John Wetton, the Strawbs, Steeleye Span and more – offered Prog a glimpse into his musical world.

Where’s home?

Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire. It’s the unconfirmed capital of prog! Loads of people live round here – I can see Nick Beggs’ house from mine...

Your first prog memory?

My dad buying me a copy of The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations in the mid-60s. That, and Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman playing great stuff on his Saturday Rock Show, like Edgar Winter’s Frankenstein.

First prog gig?

Queen at the Liverpool Empire in 1974. They were still doing stuff from Queen II like Ogre Battle, which I loved.

The first prog record you bought?

The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis. I went to their show at the Liverpool Empire on the Friday night [in 1975], bought the album on Saturday, and went to the show again on the Sunday, by which time I knew all the words.

Favourite piece of technology?

My MacBook Pro is permanently attached to me. It’s like taking your office with you wherever you go.

Any guilty pleasures in your music collection?

Eva Cassidy’s Songbird. Her version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow gets me every time. How did a record company not find her earlier? How could you miss a voice like that? It sums up the state of the business completely.

What would your Mastermind specialist subject be?

British civil aviation from 1945 to 1970.

Your biggest prog extravagance?

Maybe Cruise To The Edge. We’ve played it ourselves, but it’s a pure joy to go just to see the other bands.

Your favourite venue?

Trading Boundaries – it’s an exceptional and unique gig. There should be a franchise of them – they do such a great job. And I do wish The Marquee was still there in London.

Outside of prog, what else are you into?

Outside of aviation, country walks and riding my bike. It’s a bit boring really, isn’t it?!

Who is your prog hero?

Patrick Moraz. I loved his creativity, his sense of melody and soul. So much prog is mathematical, but he brought romance to it, and to Yes.

Are you a collector?

Of nerdy aviation stuff. It’s amazing what people sell on eBay these days: old manuals and things from Imperial Airways and BOAC. There’s a big market for it – there’s a lot of history tied in there.

What was the last album you bought?

Cardington by Lifesigns! We needed to check Amazon was working properly for us, so I bought one. Other than that, Life by Knower, a great pop/jazz/funk band from the US.

What was the last gig you went to?

Cruise To The Edge; we were playing, but the favourite things I saw were Adrian Belew and Focus. I’m gutted I missed Gong.

Have you ever been on a prog date?

Is there such a thing? My first girlfriend and I used to go to a club in Liverpool called Le Metro, and once the DJ played all four sides of Tales From Topographic Oceans. He must’ve wanted an easy night.

Who do you call in the prog community for a good night out?

Generally it’s the band. We’re all good friends, as well as being in the group together, which is the beauty of it. The lovely thing about prog is you make such good friends through it.

What’s the most important prog song for you?

Sound Chaser off Yes’ Relayer. I used to sing the opening line when I worked at the till at a bank. It didn’t go down well and I didn’t last very long.

Which prog muso would you love to work with?

Kate Bush. I’d happily watch her bake cakes! She’s genius personified, and I’d love her to hear what we do.

Which is the prog album that always gets you in a good mood?

Garden Shed by England. It’s pure English prog joy.

Who’s the best prog artist you’ve ever seen live?

Gentle Giant. Dave Bainbridge and I both saw them separately during their Playing The Fool tour in 1976. You can hear me screaming on the live record – they blew me away.

Recommend us a good proggy read.

Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End. It’s a beautiful way of looking at the world.

What’s your favourite prog album cover?

I do love the covers that Brett Wilde’s done for us, but I’ll say Frank Zappa’s Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch. It makes me laugh every time I see it. It’s so clever.

Alex Lifeson’s post-Rush band Envy Of None made a welcome return with their second album, Stygian Wavz in March 2025. It even included guitar solos, which Lifeson had omitted from their debut record. When he and ex Coney Hatch bassist Andy Curran discussed the release with Prog, it’s likely the 2026 Rush reunion was being planned – but wasn’t mentioned.

Alex Lifeson’s eyes are sparkling with pride, and they’re matched by a smile so warm it could melt the snow piled up outside his home studio in Toronto, from where he speaks. Hanging on the wall are just a small selection of the guitars with which he made his name, and in his hand is a steaming mug of coffee that befits this mid-morning hour.

Right now, he’s recalling the tipping point when Envy Of None – the electronica- industrial-influenced outfit featuring vocalist Maiah Wynne, ex Coney Hatch bassist Andy Curran and second multi-instrumentalist Alfio Annibalini – went from being a project to a band.

“The first time I listened to the whole of Stygian Wavz mastered, I thought, ‘Goddammit, we’re a band; a good band!’” Lifeson says. “The first album was a project to me, but with Stygian Wavz, there’s something about it. I guess it was the way we worked; we were more connected and I was happy with that.”

For Curran, the confirmed change in working status came through a moment of levity. “I secretly asked graphic artist Brian Walsby to draw us as Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds,” he says. “I showed them this poster that said, ‘Envy Of None Are Go!’ Alex said, ‘That should be the album cover!’ and that was when I knew we were a band.”

Should anybody still be in any doubt over their sincerity, Lifeson stresses that he’s experiencing the same level of excitement over the release of Stygian Wavz as he has at any point since Rush released their self-titled debut album back in 1974. “We’re so excited,” he says. “It’s been a year and a half of our lives working on this record from the spring of 2023.”

“And you still get that thrill hearing it on the radio,” adds Curran.

It’s difficult not to share their fervour; the record is infused with a sense of urgency, immediacy and accessibility that takes their music several strides forward with a confidence that oozes from its pores. As heralded by the singles that preceded its release – the filthy electro groove of Not Dead Yet and the textured pop-rock of Under The Stars – the album finds Envy Of None painting from a broader palette with bolder brush strokes.

Lifeson says there was never any doubt that a second record would happen. “We started maybe a half hour after we released the first album! We had bits and pieces floating around; more material started to flow in, and that was the seed point. It really was a concerted effort on all our parts.”

Following a steady exchange of ideas and working up bed tracks, they properly hit their stride in the summer of 2024. Such was the level of commitment that they jettisoned their original modus operandi of layering up the music via remote recording, and actually convened in a studio to work face-to-face. But they lasted just seven days before reverting.

“I think we were far more efficient working individually in our studios,” says Curran. “Maiah didn’t have three guys pumping opinions into her while she was recording. That’s what we enjoy about working individually – there’s no one piping in our ears. I got the impression she was much happier working on her own.”

Lifeson agrees. “I think there’s a vibe when you’re in the room together, but as Andy says, it’s difficult not to get distracted by the comments and activity. Everybody gets excited and has an idea of what to throw in the pot. I totally get that – with Rush we were all super-active in all our parts.

“But I find that when I’m working at home in this great little studio of mine, I’m not distracted and I dive into it. If I don’t like it, I can delete it and start over again. I get into a flow; it’s more efficient and I work quicker. I think we’re all skilled enough to work alone and submit our parts, while everybody gets it and everybody feels it. We keep building a pyramid by sending back files.”

Lifeson believes remote working frees Wynne to experiment with any number of vocal melodies and harmonies, which inspire the guitarist to come up with new ideas that in turn inspire her further. Think of it as musical tennis.

“Often I’d do a scratch guitar on something that Andy and Alf sent, and send that to Maiah,” says Lifeson. “She’d do a basic scratch vocal and that would come back to me. I’d get so much information from her vocal and, because she’s a fucking genius, I’d get inspired to go to other places with my guitar parts. This snowball effect is brilliant with all these ideas developing and barrelling forward.”

He goes on to praise the singer’s contribution, role and development within the band. “Maiah is the centre of Envy Of None; we surround her. Her vocal arrangements are the centre of what it is. It’s important not to step in it. I’m serving the song; that’s who I am and who I want to be. It’s different for me now and I embrace and absolutely adore that.

“Musically, she’s my muse. She thinks about music very similarly to the way I do. We’re really connected despite the 50-year-or-so age difference; we really do walk the same path. And when we trade back and forth, quite often the result is a dance that we do between the guitar parts and the vocal parts.

“From the personal end, I see a lot of growth in Maiah. We started working with her when she was 19 and we’ve had a really cool era with her as she’s grown as a vocalist and as a person.”

One cynical view of an established musicians’ side-projects is that it serves as an ego massage or a vehicle for music that was laughed out of the day-job studio. Although they’ve just released the career-spanning Rush 50, Lifeson is no longer bound by his former band – the only group he’d ever played in, bar a few guest slots. That offers him a whole new musical route to explore.

Crucially, Envy Of None make absolutely no reference to either Rush or Coney Hatch. This is music that’s made on its own terms to stand on its own legs. None of the band would have it any other way.

“I’m super-proud of my past and everything that Rush accomplished,” states Lifeson. “I think we wrote some great songs and we wrote some crazy songs and maybe a couple of duffers, but it’s what I did and I’ve sort of moved on. I’m so happy and excited with my life now as one of the folks in Envy Of None.”

Stygian Wavz features more guitar solos in comparison to its predecessor – and that’s partly because Lifeson’s initial trepidation in how to approach them turned into a pleasurable experience.

“I didn’t want it to be too Alex Lifeson-like,” he says. “Solos, for me, have never been this flashy thing; solos are an integral part of a song. I like to think that my solos connect very closely with what the song is about. It’s part of the main body of the song and it doesn’t stand out as this singular moment.”

So was he challenging himself? “Absolutely! I have to be more delicate at times; and I have to step back and acknowledge and celebrate the amazing vocalist in this band.”

Curren elaborates: “In the early stages of songwriting when we’re throwing around ideas I watch the song develop. The solos Alex has added usually come after Maiah’s scratch vocals, where it feels like it needs to go somewhere. The solo punctuates the song and it’s right there. I don’t ever get the impression that Alex has popped something in so that he could shred or show off. It’s always about the song and taking it to a level.”

He adds: “The courtesy that we show each other and the amount of rope we give each other is great. I’ve been in bands where there’s been a lot of turmoil and turf wars – there’s nothing bad in Envy Of None.”

Surely, with the band sparking off each other, and with two albums and an EP under their collective belt, Envy Of None must be itching to play live? “We would love to,” Lifeson replies. “It would really be a great show with the right lighting, adding more musicians for a live presentation. Playing these songs live with Maiah as the focus would be really fabulous.”

But caveats apply: “Everybody is busy; everybody’s got stuff and it’s difficult for me to plan something like that. I wouldn’t write the idea off – it’s a possibility if all things can align.”

But one thing that can be counted on is another album. Right? “Oh, I think we have a few ideas left over from the last one,” says Lifeson with a broad grin, his eyes sparkling once more.

"All for one, one for all? Fuck that. That's very limited. I'm out for myself and they know it!"

By December 1980, The Police were on top of the world. Released two months earlier, their third album, Zenyatta Mondatta, debuted at number one in the UK, with Don't Stand So Close To Me, their third UK number one single, becoming the biggest-selling single of the year. In America, they were set to headline New York's legendary Madison Square Garden, in Australia the album had also topped the nation charts. But if this kind of success sounds like the dream for any young band, it was accompanied by tensions which threatened to tear the band apart. Talking to Classic Rock in 2023, guitarist Andy Summers stated that by this point, he had decided that he was "working with two total arseholes."

The quote at the beginning of this article came from Sting, the band's vocalist/bassist speaking to English music writer Phil Sutcliffe for The Police: L'Historia Bandido, a band biography he was working upon with fellow writer Hugh Fielder. "As long as the group is useful for my career I'll stay," Sting added. "When it isn't I'll drop it like a stone... I do sometimes think, I want this to end."

"The artist in me is looking for death, it's looking for destruction."

Given Sting's mindset, it's no surprise to hear that the sessions for The Police's next album at AIR Studios in Montserrat the following summer were fraught and fractious. It was producer Hugh Padgham's idea that the three musicians should record in separate rooms at AIR - Sting in the control room, Summers in the main studio, and drummer Stewart Copeland in the facility's dining room - but the arrangement served as a neat visual metaphor for the divisions within the group. The mood probably wasn't helped by Andy Summers getting a phone call from his wife Kate during the sessions telling him that she wanted a divorce: it definitely wasn't helped by the fact that, by this point, Sting had discovered the 'joys' of cocaine.

Revisiting the time period for an article in MOJO magazine in the summer of 2008, Phil Sutcliffe quotes Stewart Copeland's ex-wife Sonja Kristina, vocalist with his former band Curved Air, as saying, "Sting was never really into drugs until being around coke. It had a bad effect on his personality. It made him less considerate, therefore more prima donna-ish and tiresome."

When this quote was shared with Sting, who freely admitted "I was terrible to work with, I was unsympathetic, aggressive, mean, selfish, egotistical", he didn't deny the observations.

"I'm sure," he admitted to Sutcliffe . "Cocaine is horrible. It makes you feel uncomfortable in your skin. I was lucky I couldn't get much of it into my system because it always blocked up my sinuses. I realised it was so stupid taking it that, some time after we recorded Ghost, I did it one last time, said some kind of ritual incantation and got rid of the rest. I never took it again."

Not that his ego deflated accordingly. When A&M, the band's label, suggested that the Andy Summers-penned Omegaman should be the album's first single, Sting flat-out vetoed the idea, insisting that it should not be a single at any point. Instead, the chosen singles, Invisible Sun, Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic and Spirits In The Material World, would all be Sting compositions.

Ultimately, it's hard to argue with the frontman's vision - Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic would top the charts in the UK, Ireland, Holland and Canada, peaking at number 3 on the Billboard chart in America - but his bloodymindedness only further exacerbated the discord within an already fractured unit. The album would be an important stepping stone towards The Police's undisputed masterpiece, 1983's Synchronicity, their fifth and final studio album, but the writing was on the wall for the group, and the end for The Police was very much in sight.

In 2013 Elbow leader Guy Garvey told Prog how long he’d been in love with Genesis’ music, and why former lead singer Peter Gabriel was his prog hero.

“My older sister Becky introduced me to Genesis. I don’t remember hearing them for the first time; they’ve always been there from my childhood onwards.

As a very, very small kid, they were my nursery rhymes, really, because of the magical quality and the storytelling nature of the lyrics.

The dark edge of it didn’t really shock me as a child. I didn’t consider the skewed look at middle England that Peter Gabriel was obsessed with. It was just stories to this beautiful music.

It’s still magical when I listen to it – Selling England By The Pound is probably my favourite album in its entirety.

So is my favourite Peter Gabriel solo album. It’s such a significant one for me. My parents divorced when I was 12 and my mum really found some solace in that difficult time through listening to that record.

I remember we’d drive to see my grandparents, which is about an hour’s drive through the hills to the north of Manchester. We became obsessed with the record – it was exactly the right length for the ride.

My life has taken me all over the place and I’ve met many of my heroes, but the first time I met Peter was when our band did our first album, the first version of Asleep In The Back. It was recorded at Real World; what Peter has done for music through his Real World label can’t be quantified.

I met him there and struck up a bit of a friendship with him, which has led to us covering his song Mercy Street. And he covered Elbow’s Mirrorball as part of the Scratch My Back series.

That was incredibly intense – hearing that incredible orchestration and hearing him really belting out my lyrics. That was an ambition I didn’t know I had.

I went to see him perform it live. Peter had hired one of the Thames ferries for a little boat party after the gig. He came off stage and, moments later, he was walking toward the boat in a big towel and dressing gown.

As soon as I introduced him to Becky [who funded Elbow’s debut album and offered moral support as the band struggled to survive], he knew exactly who she was.

He said: ‘So you’re the one responsible for all this!’ He put his arm around her and chatted to her, and it was the thrill of her life.”

It’s Sunday afternoon at Download festival, and punters are about to receive a royal blessing. Decessus frontwoman Ignacia Fernández strides onto the Dogtooth stage amid djent-tinged, melodeath riffing, before unleashing a voice vile enough to turn milk sour. Then she begins the ceremonial act of headbanging, disappearing behind a waterfall of flawlessly conditioned hair. Last year, Ignacia became an overnight viral sensation when she performed a Decessus track on a rather different stage.

Stepping out in a floor-length ball gown and a sash, with a full face of glam make-up, she growled for the judges of the Miss World Chile semifinal, backed by her bandmate, guitarist Carlos Palma. While the star was aware her guttural performance clashed with the demure trappings of pageantry, she felt it was the only way she could express herself authentically. It paid off, with Ignacia later taking the crown.

Onstage, it’s clear she’s in her element – she spins her mic with the whimsical precision of a baton twirler, and often strikes a menacing, model-esque pose. Considering Ignacia was worried her pageantry involvement would ostracise her from the metal community, it’s been a huge relief to find herself welcomed with open arms.

“I was nervous that the metal fans would hate me,” she admits after her set. “I didn’t want people to think I was being disrespectful to the metal scene.”

She needn’t have worried. Soon after her performance for Miss World Chile, Ignacia was inundated with praise. She even got recognition from some of her favourite artists: System Of A Down and Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler.

“When my dad saw that Geezer Butler had posted my performance, he sent a screenshot, like, ‘What the fuck?!’” Ignacia remembers with a laugh. “It was all so crazy and shocking… and it was amazing that it helped so many people find our band!”

Sitting backstage at Download, the 28-year-old does stand out. From the sequins she’s placed under both eyes for added sparkle, to her glossy brown hair, it’s a look you wouldn’t necessarily associate with a grimy Donington field. However, Ignacia has proved her chops – and knowing how to do your make-up doesn’t render you incapable of appreciating metal.

“Whenever we get hate, it’s usually towards me and towards my looks, as if the way I look means I’m not a true metalhead,” she sighs. “I’m like every other metal lover – I grew up listening to my dad’s Black Sabbath cassettes, and I used to get lost for hours watching Guns N’ Roses live videos on YouTube.”

After a three-year depressive episode, Ignacia formed Decessus as a way of reconnecting with what she loved.

“I had a break from singing for years because I started getting really bad depression,” she admits. “I stopped doing everything that I loved – like, I used to love drawing and rollerskating, but then I just stopped everything. But I snapped out of it because I knew I really wanted to do music… I knew it would make me happy.”

After learning how to scream from a friend on Facebook (“he just sent a short list, like, ‘Do this, do this, don’t do this…’ and I just worked from that”), Ignacia practised from the comfort of her bedroom.

“I originally thought only men could scream, but I saw a video of Arch Enemy performing when I was 15, and, seeing Angela Gossow, I knew I wanted to scream too,” she says.

Ignacia used to wear a more conventional metalhead uniform, complete with a septum piercing (“I still put the ring in sometimes when I’m performing!”) and dyed hair. However, modelling came along and pressed pause on her dreams of being in a band.

“I used to dye my hair, but one day a modelling agency told me that they’d only work with me if I went back to a natural look,” she explains. “I’d gone to a shoot with my sister, who also models, and I had green hair and half of my head shaved. Eventually I agreed, and I had to shave it all to one length.”

While Ignacia winces at the memory, jokingly putting a hand to her temple like a maiden in distress as she brands it “The worst day of my life!”, her love for modelling is evident. Although she struggled at first (partially down to attending auditions alone at 14 to look “more professional”, which led to people being “mean”), it’s a career she thrives in.

“I’ve been working my ass off since I was a teenager, and I love it,” she grins.

Ignacia didn’t have any specific goals in mind when she decided to pursue pageantry, other than shaking up her life and making it more interesting. But it’s allowed her to explore her love of beauty and modelling on a global stage, as well as giving her a platform for her music and activism.

“I was originally involved with Miss Universe, but Miss World suits me much more,” she explains.

To the layman, the competitions might seem the same, but Miss World has a more humanitarian edge. With a focus on ‘beauty with a purpose’, it aims to seek out someone capable of being a global ambassador who cares for their community.

“It’s not just about being the most beautiful girls – each candidate has to have a social project,” the singer explains.

In Ignacia’s case, she’s been an animal rights activist from the age of five.

“I’ve been rescuing animals all my life,” she smiles. “Where I used to live in Chile, people would come and abandon their animals on our street. You’d go outside, and the streets were full of stray dogs and cats… so I started to bring them home, clean their wounds, and heal them.”

Soon, the Fernández household became an unofficial refuge for abandoned animals – much to her mum’s chagrin.

“My mum doesn’t really like cats, but at one point we had a few cats as well as eight dogs,” Ignacia smiles.

Her activism has grown into a project called The Sound Of Compassion, which helps support rescue and adoption centres while raising awareness for animal rights. She’s also spoken in the National Congress of Chile, standing against the Chilean president’s plans to detrimentally change laws protecting animal and environmental rights.

“I will always raise my voice for those who cannot,” she says. “People who don’t want animals to have rights have no brain… it’s evil and heartless.”

Even in her music, Ignacia advocates for animal rights. Latest single Dark Flames condemns those who commit arson in Chile, starting wildfires that kill people and animals in catastrophic numbers – sadly a common occurrence.

“When I write, I’m exploring everything I want to scream about – which is usually mental health, or animal rights,” she explains.

Decessus are yet to release a debut album, but Ignacia is keen to sort that out very soon.

“My biggest wish is for peace… and to finally get an album out,” she laughs. “I want the world to be a better place, and to help that with my music. If I can grow more as Ignacia along the way, that would also be great.”

Decessus have signed to Frontiers/BlkIIBlk and their debut album is expected soon.

In 2018 musician and producer Moby – whose career extends across multiple genres from electronica and ambient to rock and punk – told Prog why Yes had mattered to him since his childhood, and particularly guitarist Steve Howe.

“I grew up in Connecticut and my mom was a hippie. We listened to a lot of college radio and AOR together. I first heard Yes when Roundabout was their big single. In 1978, aged 13, I went to my first ever concert – Yes in Madison Square Garden.

It was a school night and everything about it was so exciting; it made an indelible impression. I was thrilled to see Rick Wakeman, but I was most impressed with Steve Howe, a player so unique but always in service to the song.

From the age of 10 I’d played guitar and my teacher only liked complicated music. We had a schism because I liked a lot of punk rock and he hated that – but we agreed on Steve Howe, and I learned to play Roundabout note-perfect.

Later, I got really lucky: one of my friend’s fathers worked at CBS. He had access to the Yes catalogue for free, which he gave to me.

What I like about them is their approach to atmosphere and melody. Neil Young records are great, but they’re a document of a band in a room. Yes use the studio as an instrument to craft something bigger, to create a transcendent atmosphere. Aged 13, I could be in a suburban bedroom but transported somewhere else – and Roger Dean’s artwork certainly helped.

In the 80s and 90s they dropped off the cultural radar. Then Vincent Gallo used Heart Of The Sunrise in his [1998] film Buffalo ’66. I knew him, and talked to him about Yes – it made it okay for us closet fans to admit how much we loved them.

At their best, Yes created entire landscapes and worlds like no other. They’ve inspired me in that a lot of the music I’ve made has had the goal of achieving something similar.

Close To The Edge is my favourite album. I go back to it at least once a month. It has such flawless songs and recordings. Even if And You And I and Close To The Edge were the only tracks on the album, it would still be in my top 10.”

Across two bands and two eras, Chad Gray has endured the rise, fall and reinvention of modern metal – and lived to tell the story. As the feral, blood-splattered frontman for Mudvayne and Hellyeah!, the 54-year-old has spent more than three decades establishing himself as one of the most intense and uncompromising performers in heavy music.

Now back at the helm of a reunited Mudvayne, Chad looks back on a life spent screaming in key, blowing out knees and learning the brutal, beautiful realities of the music business. These are the lessons he’s picked up along the way.

BIG LEGENDS DON’T NEED TO HAVE BIG EGOS

“Vinnie Paul brought so much to the table [in Hellyeah], but he was a bandmember, dude. He wasn’t the big superstar celebrity drummer – who is arguably one of the top fucking five greatest fucking metal drummers out there – acting like, ‘I’m fucking Vinnie Paul. I was in Pantera. I’m bigger than you.’ He didn’t have that attitude at all. He was always just one of the guys, and he made us a band.”

HOPE FOR THE BEST, BUT PLAN FOR THE WORST

“If I were talking to the 2001 version of myself, right around [Mudvayne album] L.D. 50, when that was exploding, the one piece of business advice I would give myself would be to quit and go to college! Ha ha! Get the fuck out of here, quick! Run for the fucking hills! I could never imagine the fucking horseshit we would go through. I mean litigation. We spent $2,000,000 in litigation [with our former management company]. It was insane.”

DON’T EVER LET UP

“Back in 2000, we got a lot of interest and did a showcase with Clown from Slipknot, his drum tech, and their manager who worked for Epic Records. We walk out in full make-up, full everything, and there are literally four people sitting in front of us. We start playing, and halfway through the first song, the mic goes out. I just started screaming my head off without it. I look at the guy running sound, like, ‘Fix this shit!’ and we just kept playing. The guy’s hardwiring shit while trying not to get electrocuted, and we finally get the sound back on. We play five or six songs, and Clown walks straight up to me at the end and goes, ‘You got fucking issues!’ Ha ha! From then on, he was our boy.”

SOMETIMES ALL YOU CAN DO IS APOLOGISE AND MOVE ON

“Every band has a disaster set. For Mudvayne, especially when we first started touring, we were playing the entire L.D. 50 album because we didn’t have two or three hours of material to pick from. Now, some of those songs have tons of different parts. I remember we were going off the fucking rails in Norfolk, Virginia, at The NorVa. Then Matt [McDonough, drums] fucked something up, and the song just imploded. At one point I was singing one thing, Greg [Tribbett, guitars] was playing a different riff, and Ryan [Martinie, bass] was playing a different riff. It was an absolute disaster – a real head-scratching moment where everyone is playing something completely different. I just looked at the crowd and apologised. I said, ‘I don’t know what the fuck just happened there, but we got through it. So here’s this next one…!’”

GOOD MENTORSHIP FOCUSES ON THE DETAILS

“Mudvayne toured with Metallica on the Summer Sanitarium tour [in 2003]. One day, I’m walking down the hall, and James Hetfield walks out of his dressing room. I walked up and was like, ‘Hey James, what’s up? I’m Chad. I love your fucking vocal style, you have what I call yelling in key.’ And he’s like, ‘Exactly!’ Then he asks me, ‘Man, I use these little things called Vocalzones, have you ever heard of them?’ I said no, so he goes into his room, comes back out, and hands me a box of them. They’re like little liquorice pastilles that stick to the side of your teeth to keep you salivating. It was just so fucking cool. This is James fucking Hetfield, dude. The Alpha. He spearheaded a movement that changed the game in the early 80s, tracing all the way back to Sabbath, then to Metallica, to the nu metal movement, to the kids kicking today. Music is just this constant exchange of inspiration.”

METAL OFFERS THE FREEDOM TO EXPERIMENT

“People in metal have the freedom to experiment in ways that country or pop artists can’t. Your changes will actually be accepted by the fans. Metal wouldn’t sell shampoo! When you get into country and pop and shit, you have to stay in your lane. You have to sing what they think you should sing. In metal, you can do whatever the fuck you want. Some people do shit that’s so different it creates a whole new genre. That’s real freedom.”

BACKING TRACKS ARE KILLING LIVE MUSIC

“New music is really hard for me to deal with, because of the way it’s being done now with the backing tracks and the clicks. Mudvayne never played to a click. Vinnie Paul never played to a click. And I love that, because when you’re live, there’s an actual push and a pull that happens. Say you’re playing a mellow verse and a heavy chorus is coming – by the third or fourth measure of that verse, the tempo naturally starts to speed up right before the chorus hits. It slowly slides into what’s coming. That builds anticipation and excitement for the crowd because they know what’s coming, and then bam! that shit hits. When you’ve got a click, you can’t create momentum because you’ve got a bunch of backing tracks running along with you. I don’t expect a band that has a four-piece orchestral moment in a bridge to carry a viola player on the road, fine. But tripled and quadrupled guitars? Layers of backing vocals? Ain’t nothing wrong with a single vocal, man! If you sound exactly like the record because of the tracks, I mean, let’s keep it fucking real a little bit, what are we doing?”

MUDVAYNE LOVE THE UK

“UK fans always ask why Mudvayne hasn’t hit the UK since reuniting. It’s not personal! It’s just a matter of right time, right place. It costs a tremendous amount of money to go to Europe and the UK – trucking all your gear over there is incredibly expensive. Download Festival came at us with a guarantee, but to make a European tour work, you have to string all the festivals together back-to-back – Download, Wacken, Rock am Ring, Rock im Park… But because those festivals are a couple of weeks apart, you have to get side gigs in between to cover costs. Right now, there’s no venue availability, or the available venues are too small to make the math work. I’ll go over there and play for nothing, but it’s hard to go $100,000 in the hole. So it has nothing to do with our loyalty to Europe and the UK. I love playing Europe. I love playing the UK. I love playing Japan. I love playing Australia. I love playing anywhere you put me on a stage. And UK fans are phenomenal, it just has not been physically possible for us to get over there.”

THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE

“I am one of the most physical performers in metal, and every night my body tells me I should have quit! I’m killing myself out there. Over 25 or 30 years, I look in the mirror and think, ‘Why the fuck did you choose to wear make-up every day?!’ Ha! I blew my knee out on the last Mudvayne tour. I just threw three braces on it and did what I do. I can’t just stand at a mic stand and sing; that intensity gets my blood boiling. I want that connection to the crowd, and I connect by being physical. That intensity comes directly from the kids in front of me. We give them something, they give it right back, and it builds to this massive crescendo. When we walk offstage, everyone is exhausted. That’s the goal: I want to make you go home and sleep like a fucking baby.”

PLAYING MUSIC IS A PROFOUND ACT OF SERVICE

“When my final gig ends, the facepaint comes off, and the stage lights go down, I hope I’m remembered for being honest. I’ve given my life to people, sharing my stories so they know they aren’t alone. I had this idea a long time ago that I’d be able to exorcise my demons by writing songs about them, but I didn’t realise I’d have to play them every day. When I sing those songs onstage, I go right back to the exact headspace that inspired them. I wear my life on my sleeve. Part of my stage banter every night is telling the crowd: ‘Whatever you got going on in your life – relationships, jobs, money, mortgages – check it at the door. Come in here, open your hand and let go of everything, and embrace what we have because we are a family.’ Because that’s what it all boils down to – we’re all a family and family helps each other.”

Chad Gray plays Aftershock in October

You did a ‘Lemmy Forever’ dedication ceremony at Download, where some of his ashes were enshrined in a fruit machine. How did you meet Lemmy?

“Guns N’ Roses were playing our first gigs ever in London, like four or five nights at the Marquee. We had this flat on Kensington High Street and everything seemed to be going our way. Especially so when we got this invite to go hang out with Motörhead at their studio. We walk in and there’s a pool table – at least that’s how I remember it – and Lemmy looked at me first and goes, ‘You’re the bass player, aren’t you? I’m Lemmy. Nice to meet you.’ So very nice! We had no idea what to expect, whether they were going to fuck with us or whatever. Lemmy took us under his wing and we played Donington a year later. He came up just to hang out with us.”

It’s hard to imagine you guys being starstruck – even then.

“Oh, man. Ace Of Spades to me – and to everybody else my age – was one of those place-setter records that changed the scope of what you could do in rock’n’roll. It was truthful, badass and, look at me – I play bass! When Ace Of Spades came out I was playing drums, guitar, a bit of bass in different bands, but I started to lean more towards bass because of Lemmy.”

It seems everyone who met Lemmy has a wild story about him. What’s the story you’d tell people at parties?

“I mean, look, man, the party story I’d have with Lemmy… I wouldn’t remember! Ha ha ha!”

Away from drinking, what memory with Lemmy means most to you?

“I got to get up and play with Motörhead and that was incredible. Loaded [one of Duff’s former bands] did a tour with them up in Germany – they’re huge over there. I’d get up and play Overkill with them, every night. They made me an honorary Motörhead member – I’ve got a plaque. I’d like to think I’m the only one, but I bet there’s others.”

You’re the first we’ve heard of, at least.

“Well, there we go!”

Speaking of legends, last year you played the final Black Sabbath gig at Villa Park. GN’R had played the venue
the week before, so was it weird returning to do a quick set?

“That gig was just ultra-special. Those guys have been my family since the 80s, you know? There were roadies there I’ve known since the start. This one guy comes up, he’s like, ‘You won’t remember me, but I was on the crew for Mötley Crüe during Girls, Girls, Girls.’ Everybody was there, man. Trying to get side-stage to watch a band, it’d take you 45-minutes because you’d run into everybody on the way. The mood was killer. Everybody was in it for Ozzy and Sabbath. It was cool – more than cool, it was epic.”

You mentioned playing Donington earlier – what are your strongest memories of playing?

“Man, I have played so many times. That first time [in 1988] was so special. We were playing at 1pm but we’d blown up by that point, so in between us being booked and playing, everybody had heard about us. It felt incredible at the time, but the crowd started pushing forward and I remember it was the first time Axl had to do crowd control, getting everyone to take a step back. Unfortunately, a couple of guys didn’t make it and that was such a wake-up call. We took a step into the big leagues, but we had to be careful. Now it was like, ‘We need to take care of people.’”

Are there any up-and-coming bands who you think who could become legends?

“I really like James And The Cold Gun. They’re great songwriters and I’ve seen them play a bunch. They have got everything you need. But in this day and age, it’s just so hard to break through so I don’t know how you could.”

A lot of people keep Lemmy’s ashes in special places. Do you have some and, if so, where are they?

“Of course! I’ve got them in a little Lemmy hat thing. It’s on my mantelpiece at home. He lives with my family, he’s safe with us.”

In 2016 The Pineapple Thief were on the verge of breaking through with their 11th album, Your Wilderness, their first to feature Gavin Harrison. Of course, leader Bruce Soord couldn’t know what the future held, and so Prog found him in a reflective mood – a little bewildered but still hopeful.

Bruce Soord used to get terrible stage fright. The sort of crippling sense of dread and panic that partly explained why his band The Pineapple Thief only used to play a handful of gigs a year. It manifested itself as a nagging, foreboding tension deep in his stomach that only got worse as stage-time approached. It provoked the sort of existential crisis no performer wants to go through. “You think, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I touring? Why am I going on stage?’” he says today. “It’s horrible.”

All that changed a few years ago when TPT were booked to play a festival in Germany. It was one of the biggest shows they’d played to date. “I don’t know how our agent got it,” says Soord. “It was a mainstream festival. Before we went on, there was this ‘Whooah-oah-oah’-type band playing, and everyone was into it. And we were following them with our prog rock. I was at the side of the the stage going, [puts face in hands] ‘Oh god.’ And we went on and fucked it right up. It went down like a lead balloon. Someone even threw a bottle at me. That’s the only time that’s ever happened.”

When the band came off stage, they knew something had to be done. They were booked to play another festival a couple of weeks later, and Soord knew that if that happened again, then “that would be it, it’s going to be over”. He decided to take drastic action. He decided to tap into his inner rock star.

“The next gig I went onstage and just went ‘Come on!’ It was, like, ‘Fuck you, I’m Bruce Soord – like it or fuck off,’ rather than [apologetic voice] ‘I hope you like it.’” He smiles sheepishly. “It sounds really cheesy.” He’s right: it does sound cheesy. But it worked. He got over his stage fright.

Soord makes for an unlikely rock star. Sprawled on the bed of his hotel room, the day after The Pineapple Thief’s headline appearance at Barcelona’s Be Prog! My Friend festival, he looks more like a typical Englishman on holiday: stripy T-shirt, scrawny legs poking out the bottom of his shorts (although his tan is surprisingly healthy for someone who describes themselves as “a bit of a studio nerd”). In truth, he doesn’t carry himself like a rock star either. He’s unfailingly polite and thoughtful, and always seems on the verge of apologising for something, even when there’s nothing to apologise for.

But 18 hours earlier, a rock star is exactly what Bruce Soord looked like. Onstage at the Be Prog! My Friend festival, backed by a vast screen that pulsated with colour, Soord was magnetic. Restless and electrifying, wrangling his guitar like it had a thousand volts pumping through it at any given time, this was as far away from prog’s usual introspection as it gets. His face lights up at the memory.

“When we came off that stage, we were, like, ‘Why can’t we have this more often?’ We’ve paid our dues. We’ve toured the shit holes in a crappy bus, playing to 50 or 100 people. You’re just chipping away at the surface when you do that. But this felt like going to another level.”

It’s ironic that Soord has stepped up to the plate just as his band have made an album that delves into their prog past. Where 2014’s Magnolia was a brazen and unashamed rock record, the follow-up Your Wilderness – their 11th LP – is all moods and textures. It’s a 21st-century prog record for sure, but a prog record it undeniably is.

“I grew up listening to prog, but also to mainstream rock,” says Soord. “And for the last three Pineapple Thief records, we tried to cross over to rock. I think a lot of people who weren’t into prog rock really loved it – but a lot of people in the prog rock world have gone, ‘This isn’t prog!’”

So has he backpedalled with the new album? He laughs. “No. I felt like I’d written those rock songs – if I tried to do another Magnolia, it would have been the same songs but not as good. So I said to the guys, ‘I’m going to remember what used to excite me when I was a kid growing up in the 80s, which was prog rock.’ So I put myself into the mindset of having a prog rock attitude.”

Which is what? “Not giving a fuck what people think. Or that it’s okay to play notes on a guitar longer than you would in a rock song, before the money shot comes in. It’s our 11th record. I can do whatever the fuck I want.” As soon as he says it, he looks a little sheepish.

A few things have changed for Soord in recent years. He released his first solo album in 2015, inspired by his love of Beck (“Half of my brain wanted to take the songs in a direction that wasn’t The Pineapple Thief, so I decided to take half my brain and put it over there”), collaborated with Jonas Renske of Swedish doom-metallers Katatonia on The Wisdom Of Crowds (“He loves singer-songwriters, which you wouldn’t guess to look at him”), and began to remaster other band’s records, most notably the reissue of Opeth’s Deliverance. But the biggest change in Soord’s life was that he finally got chance to quit his day job in IT and take up music.

“It always felt productive,” he says. “You spend seven hours a day doing something you don’t want to be doing while your brain wants to make music. When you get home, you’ve got so much energy: ‘Come on, let’s write this song!’ Weirdly, going full time, that’s gone. I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to have so much spare time that I’ll be able to write 10 albums a year. It’ll be so easy.’ But it isn’t. Even with this album, it was hard to get started. You should be careful what you wish for.”

If he sounds downbeat, he’s not – 17 years into The Pineapple Thief, and Soord has carved out a niche for himself alongside the Steven Wilsons, Anathemas and Opeths of this world. But is he happy where he finds himself these days?

“The stock answer is that I’m really grateful that we’re where we are. Commercially, I wish more people knew about us. It’s not about the money, although the money would be nice. The thing that frustrates me is that so many people haven’t heard of us. I don’t know why that is. We’ve been around for 17 years, and seen people like Steven Wilson and Opeth break through.”

How have they managed that where The Pineapple Thief haven’t? “The difference is that they really busted their arses touring. I didn’t do that. I guess you get what you deserve. I stayed in my studio, stayed in my day job, writing records, and I wonder if you can break through if that’s what you do.”

You tell us. “I don’t know,” he says. “We’re on an upward curve, but we haven’t made the breakthrough. We’re burrowing our way to the surface.” Is it down to lack of ambition? Or lack of hunger? “I think that I was quite ambivalent when it came to taking that risk. I fell into that comfort zone. I said to my wife, ‘I just want to make music – I’ve got my day job, we’re doing 10 gigs a year.’

“And you’re never going to break through doing that. What we should have done is bet everything on this album, doing a loss-making support tour and just going for it. But you don’t know that at the time.”

At the Be Prog! My Friend festival, Soord looked like he was truly enjoying himself, and there was the whiff of the Matt Bellamy about him in his slightly skew-whiff guitar heroics. And while prog has never had much truck with rock star fripperies, it has had its characters, from Daevid Allen to Rick Wakeman to Peter Gabriel and his wardrobe of weirdness. The question is: does Bruce Soord fancy himself as a rock star?

“No,” he says, wincing slightly. “It’s very awkward for me. Mike from Opeth is very similar. He doesn’t court that. He doesn’t want to be put on a pedestal. Sometimes I feel like a rock star. But then I feel guilty about it.”

But isn’t being put on a pedestal part of the job of being a musician, prog or not? Gabriel, Jon Anderson, Fish – they all embraced that aspect of things. “[Unconvinced] Yeah. We used to get people coming up to us after gigs going, ‘Oh Bruce, your last album was amazing. And I’d be, ‘[bashfully] Oh, no!’ My keyboard player said, ‘People don’t want to hear that. They want you to be that man they’ve heard on the record.’

“That was when I realised, ‘Yeah, maybe there is part of me that needs to embrace that.’ I do enjoy seeing the impact what we do has on people. At the gig last night, I said to Jon [Sykes], the bass player: ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this. This is an extraordinary experience.’ Because it’s a positive impact.” He laughs. “Just not for my ego.”

He’s right: there’s no obligation for anyone to start behaving like Bono. But as Soord has grown more confident onstage and off, you can’t help wondering why more musicians aren’t stepping up to the plate or even stepping out of the insular confines of the prog scene. Even Wilson – one of the big success stories of the 21st century – is still largely preaching to the converted. He’s broken through, but he’s not broken out.

“It’s certainly very easy to stay in that comfort zone,” says Soord. “You know that if you pander to that crowd, you’ll sell records. But what do you do? When we did Magnolia, we had really high hopes that it would resonate with people in the wider world. Artistically, I think it worked, but there weren’t that many people who were prepared to go out and seek out new music.”

Does the fact that you haven’t broken beyond the boundaries of prog get you down? “Yes, in a way. When people ask me what my expectations are, I go: ‘I haven’t got any.’ And that probably sums it up.”

If he seems defeated, he shouldn’t be. The Pineapple Thief aren’t that far away from doing a Steven Wilson and taking their music to a wider audience. And if they don’t, well, Soord will lose sleep – but not that much.

“Yes, we’ve got our 11th album coming out and, let’s face it, we’re still in the prog underground,” he says. “But at the same time, I’m quite rare in that I’m still doing it. That’s why all this is worth it.”

Following on from Phil Collins’ memories of his early days and how Genesis became a streamlined musical organisation, he tells Prog about the era in which it seemed he couldn’t be escaped.

Were you surprised at the enormous global success of Face Value and the ensuing solo stardom?

Certainly. Don’t get me wrong, I took a lot of care over it. I don’t want to go cosmic on you and say, “I was just channelling something” – but it just came so easily. Because of my mental state probably. The house was empty [after his divorce]. That time wasn’t a barrel of laughs, but the more music I did, there was no stopping it.

If Leaving Me Is Easy is one of my favourites. I asked Eric Clapton to play on it. I’ve known him since before he knew I was a musician. I was just a friend of his wife Patti and would go over to theirs for drinks with them and his schoolmates. We used to drink ourselves to the point of stupidity back then!

Anyway, he came over and I pressed record. It ran through and he only played one note. One. I said, “What’s wrong?” He said, “I didn’t want to spoil it.”

Would you agree that Face Value shares musical DNA with John Martyn’s Grace And Danger album, which you played on, and Glorious Fool, which you produced?

Ah, I wish some of John’s albums had sold millions around the world too. Grace And Danger was lovely – we bonded strongly. He was in the middle of his divorce with Beverley and I was in the middle of mine. Yes, we both drank a lot, but he could drink anybody under the table. The album was full of really touching songs. Chris Blackwell thought it was too personal. I later helped John get another record deal and we did Glorious Fool, which is edgier than people realise.

Years later, I’d moved to Geneva and was very happy with my new lady. And John rang while I was just about to go into the dentist. He wanted me to produce another album, but I said, “I don’t think I can, John. I’ve got a new life here and I’m pretty busy setting up a house.”

He said, “I’ll come over!” I said, “Don’t come over!” ’Cos I was thinking of what my girlfriend might make of him; and, well, you couldn’t just dip into John. I loved him dearly but I couldn’t handle that then.

We worked out something where he sent me tapes and I’d put stuff on them, and it got him a new deal. Last time I ever saw him I presented him with an award at the Folk Awards. By this point he’d lost a leg and was in a wheelchair and looked like Orson Welles. But yeah, there’s a comparable intimacy, lyrically, on Face Value and Grace And Danger.

Do you understand why some elements of the public, or at least the press, got the hump with you when both yourself and Genesis were huge and ubiquitous?

I look back and realise I was never out of everyone’s eyeline, y’know? I was just omnipresent! But I can honestly say, on my children’s lives, it was simply enthusiasm. It wasn’t ambition; just one thing led to another. Same thing with Genesis – we thought playing the Marquee meant we’d made it. Then it was the Lyceum. Then the Rainbow. Then you think, “Hey, there’s a whole continent we haven’t played yet!” We’d keep gathering fans. But there was never really one moment where it changed: it changed gradually.

And as for me, I was being asked to do things by people whose records I’d bought – Robert Plant, Eric – and if you say no, I thought, they might not ask again. People choose to believe there was an ulterior motive or goal; but no, no, no, it wasn’t ego. I didn’t even want to be the Genesis singer! It happened by default. These things were just happening. There was no masterplan.

What’s your favourite Genesis album or period?

I enjoyed the last one, We Can’t Dance. But for me it’s more about memorable moments, pockets here and there throughout the whole thing. I used to love playing The Lamb live every night, singing along with Peter. I guess ...And Then There Were Three... wasn’t one of our best; it didn’t stay with me.

Your last tour and Genesis’ The Last Domino? gigs were emotional for audiences. How were they for you?

Well, I thought I’d done my solo farewells, but I guess... I missed it. And it was wonderful to see my son Nic playing drums behind me. Then Tony and Mike said, “Oh, he’s rather good, isn’t he?” So that was a no-brainer really. Nic was totally embraced by Genesis. And there was this 19-year-old coming into Genesis, just as I had at roughly the same age. Full circle. Hollywood couldn’t have written it better!

Any regrets?

I guess from a personal side I could say I’ve had regrets, and I should’ve done things differently. But then if I’d done that then I wouldn’t have the five great kids I’ve got today. So I can’t think like that. My glass is completely full. My kids all do what they want to do, and they’re good at it, and they’re happy. If I’d changed direction somewhere, all that might not have happened. It’s a win!

Will you be making any new music, do you think?

Um, I’m never gonna say no now. I’ve got my little studio still, and I’d like to get down there and just mess about and see what happens. There are some things I could finish. And other things which are finished. So, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility.

You’re looking well. The improvement in your health must encourage you.

Oh yeah, getting better. I went through some pretty dark times. Drink has come up a couple of times in this interview, but I was never “falling over” drunk. That wasn’t it. It was just drinking “normally,” as one would drink water. I’d wake up, have a glass of wine. Watch TV, read a book, have a glass of wine. And suddenly, some people’s insides can’t take it. Mine broke down.

My manager, Tony, called all the kids to Switzerland to have a meeting about me and my future. Because at one point it was kind of life support. Kidneys and liver were waving the white flag. I was close to dying and I hadn’t realised – I just thought I was sick. Well, really dark times. Spent a lot of time in hospital.

Then, pulling through that, I’ve had five operations on this knee. And drop foot. That’s why I have the crutches, just to make sure – I don’t want to fall over. But physically, now, I reckon I’m A-1, 100%. I’ve worked at it. Haven’t drunk for three years. I do physio three times a week, to bring me up to speed. All is good!

It’s been 10 years now since your autobiography Not Dead Yet. You should do a sequel.

Still Not Dead Yet, yeah! It’s all turned around completely. I’m closer to my children than I’ve ever been. We’ve seen together how fragile it can be. They’re proud of me for pulling through with flying colours, and everything – domestically, professionally – is all great. I’ve got no complaints. I’ve been very lucky. I never stop remembering that.

Diamond Head leader and Saxon guitarist Brian Tatler has been cited as an influence by many of the world’s heaviest bands, including Metallica and Megadeth. So it might be surprising to learn that the NWOBHM king’s own main influence were prog icons Gentle Giant – who formed in Portsmouth in 1970, six years before his own band got together 150 miles away in Stourbridge. were one of his own main influences. In 2012 Tatler told Prog about his passion for the experimental genre, also naming two more of his favourite proponents.

“There’s not another band in the history of music that sounded Gentle Giant. In those days a record company would let a band develop and not drop them if they didn’t have a hit.

The first album of theirs I bought was Octopus, but my favourite was always In A Glass House – there’s something about songs like The Runaway and Experience.

The fact they were so experimental and complex gave me the confidence to try anything in Diamond Head, and not be afraid to step outside of the rigid verse/bridge/chorus framework of rock and heavy metal.

The first time I saw It Bites was at a tiny gig in Wolverhampton in ’88 at a social club. They sounded incredible, the tightest band I’d ever seen, and I always liked the drummer, Bob Dalton.

He played simple, powerful drums behind the complex guitar and keyboard parts; he stopped it getting too muso. My favourite tune is Kiss Like Judas – that little guitar riff in it is amazing.

Frank Dunnery is ultra- talented – it’s such a shame he left that band. I remember seeing them do The Ice Melts Into Water, and it looked to me as if he’d lost the plot.

He’d sing the line then walk away from the mic ranting throwing his hands in the air. I don’t know if it was part of the show, but he looked a bit crazy.

“Muse are fucking incredible, I think. I’ve seen them twice since they got big, but missed an opportunity in 1999. They were supporting Three Colours Red at the Irish Centre in Digbeth.

I was on the guestlist, and to my shame I didn’t watch them. I kicked myself later when a friend played me Unintended and Falling Down off Showbiz.

I loved Origin Of Symmetry too. New Born is still my favourite Muse track. But Absolution was the perfect Muse album – every single track was awesome. Matt Bellamy’s an incredible musician; it’s unbelievable how he can sing, play guitar and piano and be such a good songwriter.

These bands are all to my taste. Maybe some of what went into Diamond Head went into them too; maybe we think in quite a similar way.”

From helping create jazz rock fusion to tackling everything from funk to Indian music to flamenco, John McLaughlin’s career has been defined by his willingness to take his guitar and his music into undiscovered territory. He looked back with Prog in 2017.

In the late 1960s, change was in the air. Jimi Hendrix had hinted at the possibilities of throwing jazz improvisation into rock music, James Brown amplified the R&B groove to create funk, and Miles Davis and Tony Williams were chomping at the bit to shake off the limits of acoustic jazz.

Originally from Yorkshire, John McLaughlin was a prodigiously gifted guitarist working on the London circuit when Williams brought him to New York to join his new band, Lifetime, for their genre-defying album Emergency!.

Davis, impressed by the young Brit’s speed, fluency and invention, recruited McLaughlin to play on In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew. These three albums tore up the jazz rule book and made something new – jazz rock. It was loud and the critics loathed it; but it was unstoppable.

“It was a great period, the end of the 60s going into the 70s,” says McLaughlin. “I just happened to be in the middle of it all. It was just luck really.”

In 1971 he founded Mahavishnu Orchestra to play their own fearless, ferocious brand of this new form. In the mid-70s, he switched direction to pursue Indian music with Shakti.

Currently leading John McLaughlin And The 4th Dimension, the guitar wizard remains a restless musical explorer, his lightning velocity on the guitar matched only by his boundless drive to expand and improve his craft. “I think music reminds us of our home where we all belong together,” he says. “It’s wonderful.”

What prompted you to record your recent gigs at Ronnie Scott’s in London?

We had two nights there and Ronnie’s has got the facility to record built right into the club, which is really very handy. I asked specifically to play Ronnie’s. It’s very nice to play in the Barbican or the Royal Festival Hall, beautiful halls. Maybe it’s age and nostalgia, but I thought how wonderful it would be to be back in Ronnie’s after how many years. I was in one of the house bands at Ronnie’s in 1966/’67, about 50 years ago, called the Mike Carr Trio: a very fine British Hammond organ player.

That was the whole theme in the 60s, the Hammond organ, and of course I have such a huge debt to Ronnie personally. Actually, a lot of musicians have a very big debt to him. You’re probably too young to remember the Wardour Street club before he moved to Frith Street in the early 60s. The first one was a very small club, but when he moved he kept the small one open for the young musicians so we had a place to play. It was very sweet.

Also, he was instrumental in getting me to America in ’68. He was just a super guy and a great player too, so it was personal for me. I asked to record, so maybe we’ll have a Live @ Ronnie Scott’s. How nice!

How is it different playing in a club versus a big hall?

I like the clubs; I grew up in the clubs. Even when I went to the US playing with Tony Williams and Larry Young, it was all clubs. No concerts at all really until a year later when Jack Bruce joined the band. Jack was already kind of a star in the four-piece Lifetime, but even Miles was playing mainly clubs in America in the 60s and 70s.

There’s an intimate atmosphere in clubs that’s really hard to reproduce in a concert hall. The sound of a hall can be really great, but that intimate communication between the audience and the band, I like that, I really do. They can see the dirt under your fingernails.

You mentioned organ trios were in fashion in the 60s – the original incarnation of Lifetime was an organ trio.

Absolutely. I didn’t even know Larry would be in the band until I got to New York, but I was thrilled. He was one of the new breed of Hammond players that stepped out of the genre of Jimmy Smith, this kind of funky R&B which I loved. But Larry brought this different chordal harmony that McCoy Tyner was doing with John Coltrane in the early 60s. He brought that to the Hammond organ and I thought that was marvellous. On the road, we were making $20 a night in those days. Not a lot, but it was a marvellous experience to play with Tony.

When you formed Mahavishnu Orchestra, did you consider the organ trio format?

I wanted a different sound. Don’t forget, I’d been playing for many years. We’re talking the early 60s, with people like Georgie Fame And The Blue Flames. I loved it but by the time I’d done two years with Tony and Lifetime with Larry Young, I was breaking out. Plus, I wanted a violin in my band and I always loved the Fender Rhodes.

It must have been the end of 1970 – it’s all Miles’ fault really. One night in a club we were talking and he said, “It’s time to form your own band.” That was a real shock for me because he was a very honest man, the most honest man I ever met. In any event, within a month I was putting it together. I got Billy Cobham; Billy and I were on A Tribute To Jack Johnson together and I loved the way Billy played.

Then Miroslav Vitouš called and he said, “John, we’re forming a band with Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul called Weather Report and we want you in on guitar.” Oh man! “Sorry Miroslav, but I’m under orders. I’ve got to put my own band together.” He said, “Listen, have you heard Jan Hammer? He’s a great piano player.”

He was playing with Sarah Vaughan at the time, and that’s as good a credential as you can get. So I called him and he was up for it – he wanted to break out. It was in the air. People wanted to break out of the mould, to create new forms and, in a sense, you’ve got to break some of the old ones and he was up for that. Of course, he was playing Fender Rhodes, so it was perfect for me.

How did the jazz rock sound develop?

In a way, you could say my discipline is a jazz discipline, but I like that distortion thing. It reminds me of Coltrane. You listen to some of the recordings of Coltrane, even on A Love Supreme, ’64/’65, sometimes he hits two or three notes on one note. You hear these harmonics coming out.

That’s what I loved about Jimi [Hendrix], he was finding a way to get a new sound and already by this time, we’re talking mid-60s, I was a little bored with the kind of jazz tone of the guitar – this pure, almost nylon string sound on an electric guitar.

I was cutting my teeth on Coltrane, whether A Love Supreme or Interstellar Space or Om – that music is just total passion and Miles of course always played with such a passion. Jimi really opened the door to electric guitar players in how to achieve this kind of getting more than one note out of one note.

It’s difficult to say, but Jimi had a very strong impact on me in terms of the tone of the guitar, and I think he affected an entire generation. In fact, more than one generation.

How much was your approach influenced by Lifetime?

When Lifetime started, Tony was already radical. I loved Tony because he was free, he was a real free spirit and he had new concepts of how to play drums. I loved that.

Within a couple of months I had to get a big amp and trade in my hollow body for a solid body – the hollow body guitar freaks out with high volume. Tony was always loud and strong because he loved rock’n’roll. There’s good rock’n’roll and bad rock’n’roll, like there’s good jazz and there’s bad jazz. There’s good and bad everywhere.

Is it true that Mahavishnu Orchestra were hated by critics?

We got really slagged off big time by a lot of the jazz players. The purists, they’ve always been around and they’ve always believed that they know what the real jazz is, but it happens every time. It happened with Shakti.

When I started playing with Zakir Hussain, the tabla player in Shakti, he got berated violently in the press for playing with people like me – it was making the music impure. I mean, it’s so silly. Paco De Lucia, when we started to play the flamenco, purists said, “It’s over now! The pure flamenco is dead.”

What can you say? These purists, they’re the bane of music. They think they know what music is and all they do is have certain fixations about what they like, and they want everybody to like what they like. They have problems accepting new concepts and innovation.

It happened with Coltrane, even from A Love Supreme. Within a year he started to make albums like Interstellar Space, bringing Pharaoh Sanders in there, just screaming saxophones like screaming guitars, but wonderful. Well, I like it, but the critics were saying, “What is he doing? He’s got such an ugly sound!” They don’t know how to deal with it.

When you start to break the mould of whatever they have a particular affection for, they get very nervous and anxious: “This is not the real thing, it’s wrong!” But it’s everywhere. Who worries about that? There’s no point. As Oscar Wilde said, “They love you, they hate you, as long as they don’t ignore you.”

When you played with Zakir Hussain in Shakti, was it like learning a new musical language?

It’s another culture, isn’t it? Musically, there is common ground between jazz and Indian music. I think they’re the only two cultural expressions that have common ground and that is rhythm and improvisation. Coming out of the whole psychedelic period in the mid to late 60s, many of us were looking to the East for answers to the great existential questions, and once you start looking East – India in particular has been addressing these questions for thousands of years – at some point you come across the music.

Zakir and I go back to ’69 when we both arrived in the US. We had a mutual friend who had a music store and I asked this guy, “Listen, if you get an Indian musician walk in and he wants to give a lesson, call me.” It happened to be Zakir, and the store owner called me. I said, “What does he play?” He said, “He plays tabla.” I said, “Well, I don’t study tabla, can he give me a vocal lesson?”

I went down right away – and I don’t sing well at all! Zakir really doesn’t sing much better than me, but he gave me a vocal lesson. We had a good laugh afterwards and we became friends.

By 1972 I’d studied North Indian. In ’72 I was studying South Indian, so I was getting the best of both worlds. By 1973 I’d met L Shankar, the first violin player in the Shakti band, and I took the percussion player of my teacher, my guru Ramanathan, and that was the first Shakti group.

I’d been studying theory for several years so I knew about the rhythmical structures, to some extent about the raga system of India, and I was relating it to my own Western harmonic knowledge. Western music is based all on different scales, because harmony is just a bunch of notes from a particular scale playing together. It’s a vertical view of harmony – of a scale rather, a chord.

I was playing acoustic guitar, and by the end of ’75 that was it for the Mahavishnu Orchestra. I told the guys, “Sorry, I’m going to have to let you all go because I just want to concentrate on the Shakti group.”

By the end of ’75 I’d gone to India and I found Vikku Vinayakram, the ghatam player. I continued learning, playing with the great masters like Zakir. He’s probably the greatest tabla player alive. I think the only guy who was better than him at that time was his dad, Alla Rakha.

How have those influences from India shaped your playing?

I’ve been going to India now for more years than I can remember. We’re not alone in the West in seeking inspiration elsewhere, in India or wherever for that matter. Because musicians – of which there are millions in India and they’re great players – they’re all seeking inspiration. They’ve been listening to and are influenced by Western music.

Floating Point, the album I made in India about 10 years ago, is an example of that. There’s a piece with two guitar players, one guitar, one is a zitar – it’s an electric sitar – with Niladri Kumar. The way he plays that electric sitar, you can hear the Western influence with the Indian influence. It’s not contrived.

I have no desire to be an Indian musician. I’ve done that. I’ve realised after years of working on Indian instruments that I’m a guitar player. I’m not gifted enough to play more than one instrument, but the influences and the knowledge that I’ve searched for and studied in Indian music are really because I love that music and I want to understand it more. In fact, the more I understand it, the more I understand the musicians themselves.

It’s like speaking a language. I live in a French-speaking population and there’s no way you can enter into the French mind without the language – it’s impossible. To understand the mind and the culture, you need the language, so I needed the language of Indian music in order to communicate in a coherent way with my Indian brother musicians.

Even though we’re thousands of kilometres apart, we’re growing up and discovering each other through music and through love, really, because if you don’t love it then it’s not going to work.

There was a period in the 80s when it became New World Music and people were sampling the shakuhachi flute from Japan with a 12-string guitar with a Peruvian flute – it was all sampling. They made records and actually became very successful, but it wasn’t playing. Nobody’s playing where you sweat and you can fall down and hit your nose on the ground, which is of course the only music that I want to play – real improvised music.

You’re revered by other guitarists. Are you ever tempted to start believing your own reputation?

Yes – but I don’t. That’s the problem: I’m acutely aware of my incapacities and my ignorance. In fact, I was just thinking this morning, I should make a CD called Deaf, Dumb And Blind because that’s how I feel sometimes. It’s very sweet what people say, and these accolades; but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s pleasing to the ego, but I’m also acutely aware that my ego is really a stupid fellow – so I don’t want to pay any attention to it.

I’m not trying to be humble here, because humility can be turned into inverted vanity; but what I say is what I truly feel. I know retrospectively I’ve had a great deal of success, but in a way that has stimulated me even more. My whole life has been dedicated to my instrument and to music. It hasn’t stopped.

I’m 75, I’m still learning every day, I still work every day because I know so little about everything. In my ignorance, since I’m aware of it, I have this insatiable desire to learn more.

Has Mahavishnu Orchestra cast a long shadow over your career?

I see it more as a bit of a shining light. For me, it’s a very positive thing that happened in my life. Even by that time, I was a very avid student of meditation and becoming increasingly aware of my own stupidity. The amazing outward success which happened more or less instantly with Mahavishnu, I couldn’t believe it. It was just kind of a phenomenon – and they come and go just like the tides, like the night and the day.

I had no illusions about losing popularity. In fact, I almost did it intentionally, because when I came out of Mahavishnu and said to my agent and my record company, “I’m going to do Shakti,” they said, “You’re out of your mind!” Literally, there was one guy from the record company – which was CBS at that time – who said, “Whatcha gonna do, sit down and play acoustic guitar with these Indians? What are you, crazy?” And I said, “Yes, but I assume the consequences.”

That’s really all it is. There were financial consequences – we didn’t sell many records – and that’s why they were pissed at me. Mahavishnu was a real money-spinner for the record companies.

In India, Shakti is something like a cult band, truly getting a wonderful reception. Mahavishnu, it is a light to me because it’s part of my musical history. I wouldn’t be playing how I am, I wouldn’t be who I am, without the Mahavishnu. So I’m very grateful for whatever that brought to me, musically, personally, spiritually –whatever you want to call it.

Dave Mustaine endured many tough times in the long months between being diagnosed with throat cancer in February 2019 and being declared cancer-free the following October. There was the emotional pain of breaking the news to his family and friends. There was the physical toll the radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatment he endured took on him. But one of the worst things of all was the mask.

Cancer patients who have to undergo radiation treatment on their head and neck, as the Megadeth frontman did, have to wear a thermoplastic radiation mask – a mesh-like construct that holds the patient’s head rigidly in place while it’s bombarded with pinpoint radiation that destroys the cancerous cells. Dave had been warned by his radiologist that fitting the mask would be uncomfortable, but he didn’t realise just how bad it would be.

“They said they were going to have to put this plastic mesh over my head because I could not move, not even one millimetre,” he recalls today. “I said, ‘OK’ and didn’t think anything of it. But what they do is take this plastic, heat it to a volcanic fucking magma temperature and slap it on my face. I thought I was going to have a baby! I went nuts!”

It took three different attempts in all to fit the mask, and only then with the aid of a little Valium to calm Dave’s nerves.

The mask appears on the cover of his new book, In My Darkest Hour, which charts his diagnosis, recovery and slow return to health. Where Dave’s 2010 autobiography, Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir, was a wild, all-guns-blazing ride through his mercurial life, In My Darkest Hour is more focused, reflective and ultimately moving. It captures the dread and doubt that he went through, and the emotional and physical toll it took on both him and his family. But it also shines a light on his resilience and, ultimately, the sense of relief and hope that came with his all-clear.

“I met a lot of people that had cancer, and a lot of them seemed really hopeless,” he says. “That was pretty much what prompted me to do it, because I wanted to share the hope that was there for me at the end.”

He found out he had cancer during a visit to an oral surgeon in early 2019. He had been suffering from an indefinable ache in his jaw – not quite toothache, but similar. In the book, he relates how the surgeon broke the news to him: “He stands over me, hands folded across his chest and takes a deep breath. ‘Well, looks like you’ve got the Big C.’”

Recalling that moment and the subsequent journey while he was writing the book wasn’t as painful as it could have been.

“Mostly, it was cathartic,” he says. “There were times, of course, after the chemo and the radiation, where I’d be so exhausted that I fell asleep. And they’d have students poking me in the neck with needles over and over trying to find my lymph glands, which made my wife lose her mind. But I knew every inch of the journey, so I knew how dark it got.”

In My Darkest Hour isn’t just Dave’s own recollections of the time. It also features input from people who were in his orbit during this period, from his wife, Pam, and children Justis and Electra, to the singer’s radiologist, Dr Anthony Cmelak (who contributed lyrics for the Megadeth song Dogs Of Chernobyl, from 2022’s The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!) and even his jiu jitsu teacher. These were the people that helped get him through the ordeal.

“I’ve always needed a lot of help in this world, and I’m not afraid to ask for it,” says Dave. “Family, faith, even my martial arts training – they all helped a lot.”

Dave made his diagnosis public in June 2019. There was never any intention to keep quiet about it.

“I’ve always been pretty open with people,” he says. “There are a lot of people who have prayed for me over the years. The reason I didn’t keep it quiet was to let the people who are my support system know, because I’m the dude who has needed prayer his whole life.”

After the news broke, he received messages of support from several famous friends and fellow musicians. Among them were Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne and, more surprisingly, James Hetfield, the man who had fired him from Metallica back in 1983.

“It wasn’t any more significant than the other people who gave their support to me,” he says of the notable names who reached out. “I’ve always looked at that stuff like one beggar giving another beggar a crust of bread. But I appreciate it, because I know how our time is measured out, and to take the time to stop and do something like that means a lot.”

One person who did offer some useful advice was Bruce Dickinson. The Iron Maiden frontman had gone through treatment for throat cancer a few years earlier. Bruce passed on his own experiences of what to expect, and also gave
Dave one simple but invaluable piece of advice: “Surround yourself with good people… make sure you’re spending time with people who are upbeat and positive.” Or, as the Megadeth man writes in the book: “Stay away from assholes.”

“Bruce had some fantastic stuff to say as a cancer survivor,” says Dave today. “There’s a big difference between someone saying ‘You’re in my thoughts and prayers’, versus somebody who goes into detail about his treatment and tells you about the outcome. I needed hope, and he gave me it.”

Unsurprisingly, the treatment itself was tough: first the radiation, then the chemotherapy.

“I absolutely hated getting up in the morning to go for treatment, but I knew I wouldn’t do it by myself,” he says. “So I hired a person to come into my room, whether I was asleep or not, get me up, make me get dressed, put me in the car, take me to my appointment, bring me home, and pour me back into bed.”

Dave had planned to start work on the follow-up to 2016’s Dystopia just before he received the news about his cancer. It’s a measure of his endurance – or maybe his stubbornness – that he elected to carry on working on new music throughout his treatment.

“There were all the stigmas that come along with it [the cancer diagnosis],” he says. “When I wanted to keep doing the record while I was going through treatment, I know there was doubt about how good it would have been:
‘How can a guy make a record when he’s going through cancer treatment?’

“I only had two days where I was too sick to work and couldn’t go to the studio,” he continues, his voice edged with defiance even now. “The studio was built in a house right next to where I live, so I’d go out my garage door, get into our little four-wheeler, drive through the field, pull up next door, walk through the door, and there was our studio.”

Finishing the new album would ultimately be held up even further by an altogether different illness in the form of the pandemic. The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead! – a title he insists had nothing to do with his own sickness – was eventually released on September 2, 2022, giving Megadeth their eighth US Top 10 album.

If he’d wanted to end the band there, it would have been the perfect valediction. Instead, they returned to the studio to make a follow-up, 2026’s self-titled Megadeth. And that’s when Dave announced that it would be his band’s last album, and that they were embarking on a farewell tour.

Today, he says his decision was down to a hand condition named Dupuytren’s contracture – aka ‘Viking Hand’ – that prevents him from playing guitar to the level he wants.

“It’s a tendon in the centre of my left hand that has nodules on it,” he explains. “That whole area itches, burns and hurts. Whenever I play, that extra activity just makes it worse. My goal is to play until I can’t.”

He’s considering surgery. “But even then, it’s a 50-50 chance whether it turns out good or bad. I don’t want to have someone cut my hand open and have it turn out worse forever. I know what I’ve got right now, so I’m going to put it to work and use it as much as I can. We have a beautiful tour lined up for the next couple of years, and there’s a lot of other Megadeth-oriented stuff we’re still going to do once playing is out of the picture.”

There are at least a couple of songs left over from sessions from the most recent album. One is called Bloodlust, the other Farewell My Love.

“I thought there was a third one called ‘When Robots Rule’,” he says, “But I might be mixing things up. That’s another byproduct of chemo and radiation called ‘chemo brain’, where you have a really hard time remembering things.”

There are definitely a bunch of older unfinished songs kicking around. Will he revisit them? Maybe, though they wouldn’t be his priority if he does get his playing hand fixed.

“If I could play old songs,” he says, “why wouldn’t I want to focus on new songs instead?”

There’s a funny moment in the new book where Dave relates that James Hetfield once jokingly said his former bandmate must have “a horseshoe stuffed up my ass”. How else could he have cheated death so many times other than pure luck?

“Well, maybe the horseshoe had fallen out, or maybe it had rusted over and poisoned my system,” writes Dave, thinking back to the moments after his initial diagnosis.

It’s incorrect to say the frontman cheated death once more – that does a disservice to the medical team that treated him and the people who supported him throughout that period. Still, surely it made him view mortality differently?Apparently not.

“I died once back in ’92 when we were going through some really terrible times [with drugs] and everybody was doing all kinds of hardcore stuff,” he says. “I still know death is final. I still have pain and grief for the friends I’ve lost. The only way that this could change me is just giving me experience in something that other people may not have faced and are terrified by.”

He empathises with anyone who is going through what he went through, though any advice he can offer comes with a quiet caveat.

“The thing I need to be careful with is that there’s not always a happy ending,” he says. “Some people wait too long, or some people don’t follow medical direction. The smartest thing I could say to anybody is: be honest with yourself. You have to know that you need help, and help comes in many forms. And then I would say: be nice to your family, because you’re going to notice when you need them.”

He laughs, and there’s a flash of the Mustaine of legend. “’Cos they’re going to have a hard time helping you if you’re a dick.”

In My Darkest Hour is published on September 24 via Constable

Born in 1978 in communist Hungary, Five Finger Death Punch architect and guitarist Zoltan Bathory was a furious kid who had no regard for the rules of his country and dreamed about escaping to the West. His discovery of metal only fanned the flames of rebellion, while his judo lessons gave him the mindset that any problem was something to be solved.

“You have to fight a guy twice your size, and at first that’s scary,” Zoltan explains. “But then you go, ‘Well, I think I can take him’, and suddenly the impossible starts to feel like, ‘I think I can do that.’ Every war can be won some way, I’m just going to figure out the way to win it.”

By the late 90s, he’d moved to New York and embarked on a career in design. In 2000, he relocated to LA, and although he played in bands in his spare time, he realised he wanted to be the leader of his own band, and Five Finger Death Punch were born. Their debut album, 2007’s The Way Of The First, catapulted them to the forefront of the scene, landing them tours with the likes of Korn and Disturbed.

Today, Five Finger Death Punch are a multi-platinum act celebrating their 20th anniversary, and are about to release their 10th album, Legacy. Whether driving monster trucks, playing gigs for veterans or creating the band’s visuals, Zoltan remains their fearless and irrepressible leader, his humble beginnings behind the Iron Curtain and struggle to the top never forgotten.

“When I look at my walls filled with platinum records, it’s not about the platinum records,” he says. “It’s about how much work it took to get them.”

You were born in Hungary in the 70s, under communist rule. What was it like growing up in that environment?

“I was a pretty angry kid. And the reason I was angry – even though I was seven or eight years old – is that at that age, it’s not like I could put on my backpack and head to America. You can’t do that. But the fact that I couldn’t, if I wanted to, just enraged me.

“We had access to Western society – we understood the culture, because things kind of seeped through. We had only one TV channel – it started at noon, finished at midnight, and there was no TV on Monday. As a kid I didn’t really feel oppressed, but we were oppressed – we couldn’t do certain things. I always thought, ‘Man, I can’t be a cog in this machine, I’ve got to break out of this.’”

How did you go about planning your escape route?

“I educated myself by going to extra schools. I was doing judo. I became a martial artist pretty quickly; I started at nine, and I competed. I attained that whole mindset that later became the foundation of my life. In extra school, anything I could study, I studied. I had this idea: I have to be faster, stronger, smarter than anyone around me if I want to break out of here.”

How did judo affect your mindset?

“Judo is the art of the samurai, tamed down, but with the same mentality. I know that if I get into a fight, I can do some damage – but that’s not what it’s about. The important part is the person you become. Obstacles are no longer obstacles; they’re challenges. That’s a massive distinction. The world is not happening to me – I am happening to the world. I was born into this world, and I’m going to impact it.”

How did you get introduced to metal?

“OK, so this is England’s fault. I was a little rebel at seven, eight, nine years old. I was already like, ‘When we grow up, we’re going to take down this system.’ My parents were scared shitless – ‘Kid, you’re going to get us arrested.’ And I was always like, ‘No, we’re not going to take this communist bullshit.’ So I started listening to British punk: Manufactured Romance, Cockney Rejects, The Exploited, GBH, UK Subs. That was my world. So imagine, I’m eight years old, a miniature punk in a country where you get your ass beat just for being a punk. I had a British-flag pin – I got my ass kicked by the cops, because that was Western society. It was crazy.

“Eventually, I heard of this band – Iron Maiden. Paul Di’Anno was the singer, and he’s kind of a punk guy. So the cassette was handed to me, like, ‘Check this out, bro, this is a punk band.’ At that age, I didn’t know what a guitar solo was – that was the first one. So I switched from punk to metal.”

What did you like about metal?

“In a way, it wasn’t just music – it was the voice of rebellion. All of us kids had long hair, and we got our asses beat for it. Any motherfucker who says, ‘Oh you guys are fake metal’ – fuck you. I got beat up by the cops for being a metalhead. I bled for this shit. We’d go to the park with these little gangs, cranking music – somebody had a mobile tape recorder, a boombox. When a cop showed up, we’d start running. All the metal shows were in burned-out, shitty places, usually broken up by the cops.”

We want to hear about some of those DIY shows, because they sound wild!

“Literally nobody had equipment. It was like, ‘Oh, this guy has a drum set, that’s pretty decent’, and then every band would play on that drum set. ‘Oh, this guy has an amplifier, that’s decent.’ Everybody would use that amplifier. If you don’t have resources, you have to be resourceful.

“I actually went to a special high school – the first in my country with a computer faculty. So, I wasn’t just getting a high school diploma, I was also getting a microelectronic engineering degree at the same time. So I could design and build amplifiers, distortion pedals, all that.”

What about instruments?

“I couldn’t afford a guitar – I was 12 or 13. A family makes a hundred dollars a month – that’s it. I saw a B.C. Rich in the hands of W.A.S.P. – Randy Piper’s guitar, with the skull on it. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, fucking hell, this is what I need!’ So I took a jigsaw to my parents’ coffee table and cut out a B.C. Rich Warlock shape from it. I got a second-hand guitar that had a decent neck, and I put together a guitar. It was an unplayable piece of shit, but it was metal. Fast-forward decades: I found Randy Piper’s actual guitar in the hands of a collector, and I bought it.”

Let’s talk about that first journey to the US – that’s a big leap. What was that like for you?

“I was 21 or 22 when I arrived in New York, but I didn’t speak English. Imagine: I show up in New York with a guitar, a bag of clothes, and a Hungarian-English dictionary. No safety net. I had to teach myself English. I stayed in a hotel that was $10 a night. There were cockroaches you could put a saddle on and ride. It was basically a crack house meets a hotel.

I had the only room with its own bathroom; everybody else shared. Questionable characters came in and out. But that’s what I could afford, and you know what? I was happy, because I was looking toward a life I could live in America without restriction, on my own terms. I was excited, regardless of the shitty circumstances.”

How did you learn English?

“Somebody had left a book there – The Shawshank Redemption. I started translating it with the Hungarian dictionary, without understanding grammar or anything. I kept reading it. I had a tiny black-and-white TV, about the size of my laptop, and it had closed captioning. I’d watch shows with the captions on, so I could hear how words were pronounced. Once I spoke English, I’d go to Barnes & Noble – I couldn’t afford books. I could afford a tea, so I’d come in and read, four or five hours a day, every day.”

Did you ever consider a career in something other than music?

“After high school, I ended up going to art school. I got a degree and built a design studio, at the same time as playing guitar. There was a moment when I was on tour – maybe 19, 20 – with a big Hungarian band that played arenas. We were the opening act. The reason we got the slot was that I was designing their stage, their album covers, all of it. We played a place that would be like spring break in America, called Lake Balaton [130km south west of Budapest].

We played there around August 30, the last day of summer before everyone goes back to school. We stayed, and I walked out of my hotel [the day after the shows], and the town that had hundreds of thousands of people partying yesterday was empty. Completely empty. And I thought, ‘I never want to see this again.’ I said: ‘If I’m a touring musician, I’ll never see the after-party again. I am the party. I’m the travelling circus. I’m bringing the fun. That’s the life I want to live.’”

How long were you a designer for?

“Until the band took off, design work supported everything. I was a consultant for the private space industry between 2004 and 2008 or ’09 – I was an interface designer, designing all kinds of crazy shit like space suits. Not the mechanical side, but the look and the vibe. I got to design a suit that went up to the space station. Once the band were big enough, I left the design world behind – but I still do album covers, plus the overall vibe, stage design, merchandise, all that.”

Five Finger Death Punch really took off fast. What’s the secret sauce that made you take off, when hundreds of other bands started in LA the same year and didn’t?

“It’s that whole judo mindset. Everything to me is tactical, everything is a chess game. I look at who’s doing what, and why, and how. And we knew we had a record that was something special. Ivan and I even had a moment when it was done – we were thrashing around in my house, kicking over couches, like, ‘Yeah, this is going to be something.’”

Through the years, there’s been some turbulence. Did you ever consider disbanding Five Finger Death Punch, or parting ways with Ivan? (He has stormed offstage on more than one occasion.)

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

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

Your new album’s called Legacy. What do you want your legacy to be?

“A legacy is something you cultivate and build – something that actually affected the world in a way that’s permanent. So that means, 50 years from now, somebody writes a history of heavy metal, and they can’t leave us out of the book. Only a nuclear bomb can erase our legacy at this point.

“And the other part of the legacy is that we built this with the fans. It always was, and is, the people’s band. I can give you stories about how many times people come up and go, ‘Man, you guys saved my life.’ And for us – because we have so many military guys, so many people with PTSD in the fanbase – it’s more real than it is for others.”

Have you had any particularly memorable fan encounters?

“We had a meet-and-greet, and a kid comes in and brings a red ballpoint pen, and he goes, ‘Listen, I’m going to give you guys this pen, because I wrote my suicide note with it.’ This kid obviously had problems – he was, like, 15 – and a friend sent him the music video that had just come out, Coming Down, which was about that very topic, and said, ‘Hey, man, I’m just reaching out, hope you’re doing good.’ So he told us, ‘I’m giving you this pen, because I wrote my suicide note with it, and because of your music, because of your video, I didn’t do it.’ And he gave us the pen. That’s the moment where it’s like, ‘OK, our existence is justified.’

“Now, years later, a man comes into our meet-and-greet and goes, ‘Hey guys, you remember me? I was the kid who gave you a pen that I’d written my suicide note with – the red pen.’ Ivan goes, ‘Holy shit! Hold on a second!’ Ivan runs off, comes back – because to this day, even right now, that pen is in his road case, he carries it everywhere he goes – and he brought it back to the guy. The guy almost had a heart attack – ‘Are you kidding me?’ So that’s one form of the legacy: that we meant something.”

Do you have any regrets, in your life or career?

“Maybe the stress of it. I always worked 150%. People imagine a rock band is stripper poles and disco balls and mountains of whatever drug is your choice. I like the business aspect, because it’s all strategy. But at the same time, it takes time. If I hadn’t stressed, maybe it would’ve worked out anyway. But then again, it’s a butterfly effect. Would I change anything? Absolutely not. I wouldn’t be me; I wouldn’t be here.”

What do you think that 21-year-old who landed in New York would think of the man you are today?

“I purposely try to take myself back there. It’s really important to find a way to ground yourself and not let magical things become the status quo. So if I could go back and give myself a flashback, it would be more like confirmation of my beliefs. It would be exciting – because I was going to go get it anyway, but it would’ve given me extra fuel: here’s a moment of the future, you’re actually doing it.”

Legacy is out now via Better Noise. Five Finger Death Punch tour the UK from January 16, 2027.

Adrian Belew has added his distinctive guitar to a diverse and stellar cast including Frank Zappa, King Crimson, David Bowie, Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Laurie Anderson, Herbie Hancock, Paul Simon, Porcupine Tree, Trent Reznor and even William Shatner. In 2011 – long before he hit the road with Crimson offshoot Beat – he told Prog that musicians’ survival lay in performing live.

In 1977 you joined Frank Zappa’s band. What, if push came to shove, are your favourite Zappa tracks?

Zoot Allures [from Zoot Allures, 1976]. The soaring feedback guitar lines over modal chord changes make this one of his most direct, even accessible musical pieces of Frank’s vast catalogue, and the effect is hauntingly beautiful.

With all the skills Frank had people sometimes overlook his voice. On Po-Jama People [One Size Fits All, 1975] I love the way he sings like a cartoon character might. I’ve sung it to each of my children growing up and they’ve all adored it.

One of the tracks Frank gave me to learn as an audition piece was Andy [One Size Fits All]. Another stunning piece of music which happens to be a song as well – and it certainly gave me pause to wonder what I was getting into!

Peaches en Regalia [Hot Rats, 1969] will always remain dear to me. It was often the first song of our performances together. Frank and I played the guitar parts in unison. What an honour that was.

You clearly love working in your power trio, featuring Julie Slick on bass, and Marco Minnemann on drums. What does it allow you to do that you can’t do in King Crimson?

First of all, it’s my vehicle more than Crimson. Obviously when when it’s you and Robert Fripp, you share ideas, and you can’t play all the time. Secondly, the trio gives me a different platform to work from. When you’re the only guitarist you have to fill in and really shine. I think it makes me a better player and gives me room to move around.

The trio have played all over the world. Any stand-out moments for you?

Chile was truly mind-blowing – all of South America was, but the first show in Chile was absolutely amazing. They turned away hundreds of people. The traffic was stopped and everything! I’d only played there once before with David Bowie in 1990; that’s a long time ago and I wasn’t expecting there to be much of an audience!

The coolest thing was that before we started playing they were pounding on the floor, a thousand people strong – incredible. We came out and we were like, “It can only go downhill now!”

You recently performed your 43-minute composition, e, on guitar with the Metropole Orchestra in the Netherlands. How did that come about?

I always dreamed of doing it, but I never thought I would because it’s a huge, very expensive undertaking, and I live in the US where they don’t fund these kinds of things! It took three years of writing on and off, and although it was definitely as a showcase for the power trio, in the back of my mind I kept thinking I’d like to have an orchestra play it.

I’d mentioned that in the press when the e album was released in 2009, and it just so happens that the guy who directs the Metropole Orchestra is a big fan. He called me out of the blue and said, ‘We’d love to do your orchestral piece!’

“They’re funded partly by the government and partly by the largest broadcasting company in the Netherlands. So, in February 2010, I played guitar by myself, in front of the orchestra; and that was like a dream come true.

Where did your interest in working with an orchestra come from?

I joined the school marching band playing the drums. They’d take us over to Cincinnati Music Hall four times a year to hear great symphony orchestras playing all this really great, heavy duty music.

Before I had a pop ear – and all the things that followed from that – I really liked orchestral music first; it was the thing that really awed me. If you’re 12 years old and you hear a 70-piece orchestra in a perfect acoustic hall, it’ll do that!

In a culture of increasing expectations that music should be free, are you optimistic about being able to survive?

The glass is definitely half-full for me. The story has not been fully written on what’s going to happen with intellectual property; I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. But the thing that I realised is that although they can steal pretty much everything else, they haven’t yet figured out a way of stealing the live experience. If they want to see you play live, they’ve got to come along and see you – and they still have to pay for that!

Your King Crimson ex-colleague Bill Bruford has retired from live work [he changed his mind and returned in 2023]. Do you think you’ll be following him soon?

No! No way. I don’t see myself stopping playing live right now because, as I said, it’s the one thing left, and I’d like to continue it. I don’t know what else I would do if I weren’t doing this.

Hanoi Rocks, the legendary Finnish glam punks largely responsible for Guns N' Roses, have announced a box set assembling their magnificent first five albums into a collection that'll look extremely sexy under any 2026 Christmas tree.

The Complete Collection 1981-1984 box set will include the band's first four independent releases – Bangkok Shocks, Saigon Shakes, Hanoi Rocks (1981), Oriental Beat and Self Destruction Blues (both 1982), Back To Mystery City (1983) and their major label debut Two Steps From the Move (1984), as well as Motorvatin!!!, a sixth disc containing live tracks recorded for the BBC and previously unheard demos. Full tracklist below.

Regretfully, the collection does not include the 1984 live album All Those Wasted Years, one of the finest live recordings ever made by humankind, but then nothing's perfect.

“The new Hanoi Rocks Box Set includes all the albums by the original band, including the Oriental Beat 40th Anniversary release The Re(al)mix, which came out in 2022," says frontman Michael Monroe. "There’s also a special extra bonus LP of rarities with even some previously unreleased tracks.

"The artwork has been put together nicely, and it has a vast amount of great, rare and some never-before-seen photos. If someone is not familiar with Hanoi Rocks, this is a fantastic opportunity to get to know the band’s unique material. I recommend this box set to everybody!”

Hanoi Rocks broke up in 1985 – the same year Guns N' Roses formed – and were a big influence on their American counterparts, both musically and wardrobe-wise. Monroe would later collaborate with the band on two songs: Use Your Illusion I track Bad Obsession, on which he played harmonica and saxophone, and GN’R’s cover of The Dead Boys' Ain’t It Fun, which appeared on 1993’s The Spaghetti Incident?.

Hanoi Rocks’ The Complete Collection 1981-1984 will be released via BMG on November 13. It'll be available as a six-disc vinyl set in various pleasant hues, and as a six-CD package. Happily, it's available to pre-order now.

Hanoi Rocks: The Complete Collection 1981-1984 tracklist

Bangkok Shocks, Saigon Shakes, Hanoi Rocks

1. Tragedy
2. Village Girl
3. Stop Cryin'
4. Don't Never Leave Me
5. Lost in the City
6. First Timer
7. Cheyenne
8. 11th Street Kidzz
9. Walking with My Angel
10. Pretender



Oriental Beat - The 2022 Re(al)mix
1. Motorvatin'
2. Don't Follow Me
3. Visitor
4. Teenangels Outsiders
5. Sweet Home Suburbia
6. M.C. Baby
7. No Law Or Order
8. Oriental Beat
9. Devil Woman
10. Lightnin' Bar Blues
11. Fallen Star


Self Destruction Blues

1. Love's an Injection
2. I Want You
3. Cafe Avenue
4. Nothing New
5.Kill City
6.Self Destruction Blues
7. Beer and a Cigarette
8. Whispers In the Dark
9. Taxi Driver
10. Desperados
11. Problem Child
12. Dead By Xmas

Back to Mystery City

1. Strange Boys Play Weird Openings
2.Malibu Beach Nightmare
3. Mental Beat
4. Tooting Bec Wreck
5. Until I Get You
6. Sailing Down the Tears
7. Lick Summer Love
8. Beating Gets Faster
9. Ice Cream Summer
10. Back to Mystery City

Two Steps From the Move
1. Up Around the Bend
2.High School
3. I Can't Get It
4. Underwater World
5. Don't You Ever Leave Me
6. Million Miles Away
7. Boulevard of Broken Dreams
8. Boiler (Me Boiler 'N' Me)
9. Futurama
10. Cutting Corners



Motorvatin’!!!

1. Two Steps From The Move
2. Underwater World (BBC Session)
3. Boulevard of Broken Dreams (BBC Session)
4. Oil and Gasoline
5. Shakes
6. Magic Carpet Ride
7. The Beating Gets Faster (I Know You) (Demo)
8. Sailing Down the Tears (Demo)
9. Rebels on the Run (Demo)
10. Malibu Beach (Calypso Version)

Following on from Phil Collins’ memories of his early days, he goes on to tell Prog about the progress Genesis made from a group of seeming misfits to a streamlined organisation capable of creating 23-minute masterpieces.

After you joined Genesis, the band went on to prove a productive, enduring blend of talents.

It was strange at first. I lived with Mike and his parents while we rehearsed in what was then a derelict farm. Just the four of us – before Steve Hackett – running through their ideas.

It’d be going fine, but suddenly someone would stand up, walk out, disappear for half an hour. I’d think, “What happened? Did I blink and miss something?” They were highly strung individuals, who could very easily get on each others’ nerves.

A lot’s been made of that in the past. But look, everybody is a totally different person now. Everyone’s mellowed out! We’re all a product of the way we’re brought up. They were raised to be officers and gentlemen; I was just living by the skin of my teeth. But that story’s become something of a cliché. That was just the early days.

You made extraordinary things together – not least Supper’s Ready.

We always pushed the limitations of a record. A 23-minute song was a cutting engineer’s nightmare! Our writing was... meandering. I was more of an arranger at that stage. I could see how things could be adapted or reprised. But we did like to stretch. Not with endless solos though – We never had that “let the guitarist go mad for ages” thing, ever.

Supper’s Ready was the first time we decided we could go that long. When we first heard it all edited together at Island Studios, later Trevor Horn’s place, we thought, “Oh, that’s great!” We were slightly surprised!

I always think we were better live, as we used to tense up in the studio when the light was on and the clock was going. When we got our own studio, of course, that changed.

Apocalypse In 9/8, at the end, is one of my favourite pieces of music that we did. Mike and Tony were playing in different time signatures, so sometimes I’d join in with one, sometimes the other – whichever I fancied! It all sounds very clever and arranged but it was a stroke of luck, really. Genesis were really good at that: playing together, improvising. It all started as free-flowing stuff, then we’d hone it.

The band itself streamlined as time went by, it’s fair to say.

Yeah, and I always used to get the blame for that, because it kind of coincided with me being the singer. People think the singer does everything! Not true. A band like Genesis is a writing commune, really. And as they’ve said, in the early days, before I even joined, they wanted to write hit singles.

We all grew up with The Kinks, Beatles, Stones: three-minute blasts. It’s just we weren’t very good at it! We were good at something else, so that’s what we did. Later, occasionally, we struck gold with something in that format, like I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) and Follow You Follow Me. But they were written first and chosen as singles second.

After Brian Eno contributed to The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, did you play on his record as a kind of trade-off?

That’s right, no money involved! But that sparked a lovely friendship. Eno and I got on pretty well, and he called me to play on not just Another Green World but Before And After Science and Music For Films – me, Percy Jones from Brand X, Robert Fripp, all kinds of interesting musicians.

Eno would come in with something he’d done the night before at home, just an abstract idea, and we’d use that and play with it. The fact that he brought things from home intrigued me. So when I started to do my music – basically trying to find something to do with my time because I was going through that post-divorce thing – I started working at home in my little studio.

And I was quite happy – in fact I became insistent – on using my home demos, copying them onto the multitrack. It didn’t matter if there was a bit of click or hiss. It’s more a case of, “Is it good?” I’d seen Eno do that. So the demos became the foundation of Face Value. And the same with subsequent albums.

By the time of Both Sides, which was ’93, my equipment had got more sophisticated and I did most of the album in my bedroom upstairs. Doing it when the mood strikes. It’s very freeing.

I’d sing rubbish until I sang something that felt right. Sometimes when the moon’s in the right place and all that stuff, you come up with something. In The Air Tonight was mainly improvisation. That’s what I sang when I opened my mouth that particular day. It’s like verbal jazz: when a saxophone player gets up and plays, he’s just playing what he plays. Often that was the case with my voice and words.

When The Damned guitarist Captain Sensible was at the vanguard of 70s punk, his penchant for the proggier side of things remained undisclosed. But in 2009 he owned up to ripping off the genre he’d professed to hate – although he confirmed that some of his negativity was genuine.

“The first record I ever bought was I’m A Moody Guy by Shane Fenton, who became Alvin Stardust. I was so young that I had to get my mum to buy it – I was five or something. I still love that record! I found it on the internet recently and I still knew every bit of it. I must have played it over and over again on the family Dansette or whatever it was.

I love records like that, where every note is pure genius. I’m a huge fan of music. When I was a kid you’d save your money up for ages before you went to the record shop, so you really had to be picky. I’d go in and I’d want Blodwyn Pig and Wishbone Ash and Traffic and Soft Machine – but which one do you choose? I had that exact decision to make. I bought the second Traffic album, the one with Forty Thousand Headmen on it. I used to walk around with my albums under my arm, posing!

I’m not obsessed with vinyl at all. I absolutely love my iPod; it’s changed everything. It’s so great to be able to take your entire record collection with you, all your favourites. You never know what mood you’re going to be in. When I go to the dentist, for me it’s always A Rainbow In Curved Air by Terry Riley. It’s perfect – it lasts as long as the treatment takes, so take that and a valium and you’re sorted… ou come out of the dentist’s with a smile on your face!

I like prog, but I don’t like 20-minute drum solos. I don’t mind a bit of widdly-diddly guitar, as long as it’s interesting. That’s why I never liked Clapton! You get someone like Peter Green and he’d play a lot fewer notes, but they’d be better ones. Like Chick Corea said: it’s not the notes you play that matter; it’s the ones you leave out!

So prog should be interesting – but who decides what’s interesting? Who are the prog police? I like the Groundhogs, but I can’t stand Yes. What’s the difference between them? One of them is really inspired and passionate and the other one is singing songs about fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Tony McPhee is my hero. He sang about real stuff that actually means something. Thank Christ For The Bomb is an incredible album. It’s an ironic title, of course; my girlfriend is Japanese, so I had to explain that one to her!

These fucking public school wankers in these prog bands in the mid-70s – these Royal College of Music educated posh tossers – were singing songs about absolutely nothing because they had nothing to protest about.

I want to hear people singing about real things with passion. When punk came along, it was part of the job to destroy Genesis and Yes. I wanted to see them fuck off and die.

But I do like the Canterbury scene. I like Hugh Hopper and I love the fuzz organ on the Caravan stuff. That’s where The Damned’s I Just Can’t Be Happy Today came from. Rat Scabies was a fan of Caravan and Gong as well, believe it or not.

There was an organ sitting in the studio and we decided to chuck it through my fuzz pedal to make it sound like David Sinclair from Caravan. We’ve been ripping off the prog lot for years!

I usually say that all the best records came out in 1970. It’s such a good year. Grand Funk Railroad’s Live Album is the best live album ever made. The bass player and the drummer create these grooves that whip the audience into a frenzy. That’s all the band were designed for.

The lyrics are complete twaddle, obviously, and there’s a drum solo on here – but it's a good one! I saw them in Hyde Park [in 1971] and they were supposedly the loudest band in the world. I didn't think they were that loud, to be honest.

Everybody should check out an album called First Water by Sharks. It’s Chris Spedding and Andy Fraser from Free, and two other blokes that no one’s heard of. What an amazing bass player Andy Fraser is! He does that Chick Corea thing – he knows all about which notes to leave out. He’d leave huge holes in the songs.

On All Right Now, he didn’t even play in the verse; he only comes in on the chorus, but then he plays the most incredible riff on the solo. You’re not listening to Paul Kossoff; you’re listening to Andy Fraser.

The Sharks album is so worth getting. I probably listen to it more than anything else. Andy Fraser’s solo album is great too. It’s him on lead bass. He only plays bass solos and he’s going through this rasping distortion and it’s absolutely brilliant.

I only like Pink Floyd up until Atom Heart Mother. Then it became bank clerk music. Syd Barrett was a genius; there are so many things that he did first. It’s not just about the beautiful songs. When he made The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn – and I say ‘he’ because the other guys were lucky to be part of it – you’d go into a studio like Abbey Road and they’d all be wearing white lab coats.

When all these remarkable albums were made, the studio people didn’t understand where the music was coming from or why the musicians would disappear into the toilet every five minutes!

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at those sessions. How did it go from 1966 and Silence Is Golden to Astronomy Domine and Lucifer Sam? That’s amazing. One minute it’s trite little pop songs – no disrespect to The Move because I do like them – then suddenly it’s genius. Syd changed so many things.

It’s a shame they’ll never have me on Desert Island Discs, will they? But it would be so difficult to choose six tracks. I’d probably pick some Ravel to confuse them, but also A Visit To Newport Hospital by Egg, Eccentric Man by the Groundhogs, Slightly All The Time by Soft Machine, Hallogallo by Neu! and wacky stuff like that. That’d shake up those Radio 4 bastards, wouldn’t it!”

From playing stadiums with Iron Maiden to popping up at Back To The Beginning, Halestorm have climbed to the kind of peaks most modern bands can only envy. But while Lzzy Hale’s talent is undeniable, the rest of the band are just as charismatic – a testament to the strong bonds and easy rapport they’ve maintained, even after decades of hard graft on the road.

Just weeks after the band’s stellar performances at Sonic Temple and Download festivals, Lzzy and guitarist Joe Hottinger embarked on an intimate acoustic tour amid a stifling heatwave. Hammer grilled the pair with your questions until the conversation dissolved into workplace bullying…

Too long, not gonna read? Watch the full interview below:

Apart from Back To The Beginning, what is your biggest achievement?
Mandy Handforth, Facebook

Joe: “The fact we still like each other.”

Lzzy: “We’re still together after what, 23 years? Nobody’s strangled anyone yet. It’s quite the feat.”

Joe: “And we still like to hang out too. That’s better than any other show – though the Grammy [for Love Bites (So Do I)] was pretty cool.”

Would you ever do a Halestorm ‘By Request’ setlist tour?
Alcojoelics, Instagram

Joe: “We’d have to do some prep. If I don’t play a song for, like, a month, it leaves my brain and I don’t know it. So it’d take some rehearsal. We’ve been taking requests on this acoustic tour, and I don’t remember most of them.”

Lzzy: “We could get one of those bingo ball machines with the songs on it!”

Which artist outside rock/metal would you like to collaborate with?
Malli Malpass, Facebook

Lzzy: “Pink would be cool – we could bring her to the dark side. One of the albums we love that is way, way outside our genre is Prizefighter by Mumford & Sons. It’d be cool to work with them.”

What’s the story behind [2010 single] Familiar Taste Of Poison?
Erik Von Trussdell, Facebook

Lzzy: “It’s interesting how songs can change over the years. I was 19 when I wrote that, so it meant something different to me then. It was kind of a love song, but an anti-Valentine’s Day love song. We do that a lot – apparently it’s our thing.

Some fans tell me they see it as talking to their addiction, some people it’s their ex or someone they cut out of their life… For me, what’s beautiful is that I get to sing that song to an audience every night and it becomes a love song between myself and them. You guys are the special sauce!”

Will we ever get a fourth Reanimate covers EP? Vxlloria, Instagram

Lzzy: “Maybe a full album. I don’t know. We have a long-running list of covers we’d like to try our hand at.”

Joe: “Now we have our own studio too.”

Is Like A Woman Can about Joe?! [Sample lyric: ‘Why can’t you love me, like a woman can?’]
James Lee, Facebook

Joe: “Yeah Lzz, is it?!”

Lzzy: “It is not about Joe! Not yet, anyway. But there’s still time. Like I said, songs mean something different every year, so you keep behaving yourself and you won’t get on my list.”

How is Arejay [Hale, drums] not bald after all his hair colours?
Leahslastbreath, Instagram

Lzzy: “I don’t know! There was one time where he went way overboard with bleach and he showed up at rehearsal with burns on his scalp, so we were worried for a while. But he still has his hair. He’s talking about growing it out.”

What song would you give to someone who’s never heard Halestorm before?
Metalcorequeens90, Instagram

Joe: “I don’t know! Would we go with our biggest song on the streams?”

Lzzy: “I don’t think so. I always tell people to go from our latest album backwards. Love Bites is a good one. That or Rain Your Blood…, or Fallen Star off our latest record.”

Why do you favour Shania Twain over Wendy O. Williams?
Gutierrez Estevez, Facebook

Lzzy: “Maybe it’s because I heard more Shania Twain than Wendy O. Williams.”

Joe: “Shania’s Man! I Feel Like A Woman is such a well-written song from top to bottom.”

Lzzy: “As a bi woman, that was a very confusing time for me [circa 1997]. I’m like, ‘Why do I think she’s hot?!’”

What advice would you give your younger self? Dramaries, Instagram

Joe: “I would just shut up and let it happen. ‘Keep doing what you’re doing, you little idiot!’”

Lzzy: “Less advice and more encouragement: ‘You’ve got this, kid. You’re doing the right thing – keep following your gut and have fun at all costs.’”

Who rips the worst farts?
Jason Owen, Facebook

Joe: “Definitely Arejay or Josh [Smith, bass] because they’re not here to defend themselves!”

Lzzy: “I’d say Josh because he’s vegetarian and/or pescatarian. Sometimes, if there’s too many lentil beans… It’s very distinct in the bus.”

Who was your first crush or obsession?
Angeline Burton, Facebook

Lzzy: “I have a weird one! My first crush was this little Amish boy. He did not notice me at all, and that would not have worked out at all. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, so there were a lot of Amish. My first celebrity crush was a contemporary Christian artist called Michael W. Smith – I thought he was dreamy. And/or Juliette Lewis. Like I said, confusing time!”

Joe: “I really liked Katie Holmes.”

You have to add Buzz, Conflicted, Painkiller or I Come First to regular rotation: which do you pick? Andy Hoffman, Email

Lzzy: “I’m gonna have to say Buzz – I really like that one.”

Joe: “I might change the arrangement a bit, though.”

Lzzy: “Too many choruses?”

Hammer: I Get Off, Love Bites or I Miss The Misery. One has to go: which one?

Lzzy: “Miss The Misery. I feel like we’ve played that too much over the years.”

Joe: “We’ve probably played I Get Off more.”

Lzzy: “OK, I’ll give you that… for now.”

When will Lzzy bring back the keytar? Marty_666666, Instagram

Lzzy: “I feel like it’s gonna be soon. The wonderful people at Sweetwater sent me a new one and I’ve been dabbling with these new sounds. It has all these new things. Keep your eyes peeled!”

What’s your favourite song to play live?
Rick Kearney, Facebook

Lzzy: “Oh god, it changes all the time! Right now, I think it’s Shiver for me.”

Joe: “I enjoy anything where I can just be soloing. Lately everything we play I’ve just been going off, so that’s cool.

How does that guitar player keep his locks so luscious?
Thejoestorm, Instagram

Joe: “Whoever asked that, it was so nice of them to notice.”

Lzzy: “Do you prime and tease?”

Joe: “I don’t shower and I drink beer.”

Lzzy: “That’s kind of true. You shower and just don’t shampoo your hair.”

Hammer: Skullet or toupee?

Joe: “I’d rock a skullet – I ain’t scared. I’d start saying, ‘Hell yeah, brother.’ I don’t know why, it just feels right.”

Lzzy: “With the skullet you’re owning your own head like, ‘This is me now.’ With a toupee, so much can go wrong. Maybe it flies off, maybe it’s not fixed on right. I’d go skullet all the way, then add a tattoo on it.”

When will Arejay bring back the upside-down drum kit?
OfficialLzzyHale, Instagram

Lzzy: “As his big sister, I’ve been trying to persuade him to do that for years. As we’re getting older too, it might be really good for his back. It’s basically an inversion table, but as a drumkit.”

Hammer: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve done while Arejay is soloing? Pee breaks? Cups of tea? Play poker?

Lzzy: “It depends how much time we have. It can be really stressful if you have to go pee and you have to time yourself. You have to listen for the big sticks or something, that can add a bit of pressure.”

Joe: “I like to sneak behind him and scare the living shit out of his drum tech. Watching him jump is hilarious!”

Will that bassist ever expand beyond four strings? Thejoestorm, Instagram

Joe: “I doubt it! It takes a highly intelligent person to play more than four strings.”

Lzzy: “To Josh’s credit, he plays bass, keyboards and operates the pedals. So he does more than anyone else!”

Joe: “That’s why we make fun of him.”

Everest is out now via Atlantic.

Slade's former frontman Noddy Holder is a national treasure. Would anyone in Britain even remember the annual celebrations marking the birth of son of God, Jesus Christ, were it not for the Walsall Warbler bellowing "It's Chriiiiistmaaaas!" at us from mid-November onwards? Unlikely.

Beyond that, Neville John Holder MBE is a beloved actor, an author, a former quiz show host, a TV critic, an inspiration for a character in Bob The Builder and an all-round showbiz legend. Yes, he might have inadvertently contributed to the success of god-awful heavy Californian metal band Quiet Riot, but that can't be held against him in a court of law.

Less well known is the fact that Holder is a keen fan of indie/alternative rock. This came to light when Slade's redoubtable vocalist/guitarist was recruited by the now-defunct British music magazine Select to review a selection of single releases in their March 1996 issue.

Artists who faced Holder's scrutiny included Oasis, who had just released a cover of Slade's Cum On Feel The Noize as a B-side to future national anthem Don't Look Back In Anger, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lush, Rocket From The Crypt, The Flaming Lips, Nick Cave with PJ Harvey and more.

It was, perhaps, no surprise to read that Mr Holder was a fan of Oasis, hailing their Slade cover as "great" - adding "The best bit is when they start doing a piss-take of our accents" - but who would have imagined that the Black Country legend was a fully-paid-up member of the Smashing Pumpkins fan club at the time? Invited by writer Clark Collis to assess the merits of 1979, the chilled third single from the band's 1995 masterpiece Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Noddy revealed, "I've got this album."

"They just can't be pigeonholed," he enthused. "They've got their own little style going. It's off the wall. It's certainly not a major radio record. But you can hear this in 20 listenings' time and you'll hear something new."

Nolder also professed to be a fan of the Pumpkins' fellow US alt. rock big-hitters Red Hot Chili Peppers, then promoting their under-rated One Hot Minute album, featuring moonlighting Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. Critical opinion was decidedly lukewarm for the LA funksters at the time, and Noddy couldn't summon up a huge deal of enthusiasm for the Aeroplane single, admitting "I'm not mad on this song... it wanders about a bit."

Rocket From The Crypt's urgent Born In '69 single too failed to fire the Nodster's imagination ("I think they'll probably need a bit more time to develop") but Nick Cave/PJ Harvey murder ballad Henry Lee was more warmly received, Holder likening the song to Leonard Cohen, and stating, "It'll be good seeing the video."

Elsewhere, Holder was enchanted by the weirdness of The Flaming Lips' This Here Giraffe - "Whatever they're on, I want some!" - but reserved his highest praise, and Single Of The Month award, to Lush, for their Ladykillers single, which he claimed he'd still be singing along to "in a fortnight".

"It's got handclaps in the middle bit," he noted. "You can't beat handclaps."

Wise words Mr H, wise words.

In 2010 Prog tracked down some of Peter Gabriel’s collaborators on his solo and soundtrack albums, with the intention of offering an inside view of working with the Progfather – as we’d dubbed him, much to his amusement. While we were at it, we also asked some of prog’s biggest names if they had any opinions on the former Genesis frontman’s career. They didn’t disappoint.

Bob Ezrin – Producer, Peter Gabriel 1 (Car)

If there’s anything that made me work with Peter Gabriel in the first place it was his natural sense of humility. Humility in the Christian sense of the word, in that he’s a humble guy. I was impressed that a person that brilliant can also hold himself on such a realistic level of esteem.

All I know is that Peter played me Here Comes The Flood in my living room on our first meeting. I was in the middle of producing albums for both Kiss and Alice Cooper, working on tight deadlines. In the midst of all that I went to bed singing Here Comes The Flood instead of my own records! There’s not many songs I’ve heard fresh from the writer’s mouth that are that great.

Robert Fripp – Guitarist / producer, Peter Gabriel 2 (Scratch)

Peter’s second album is a much subtler proposition that tells a lot on the production side. I think it is impossible to judge unless one has listened to it at least a dozen times. Peter was afraid of using me as a producer. He knew that my production would not be “commercial” and he was right. I was not guaranteeing any hit.

What I wanted was to record him faithfully. I could have produced two or three cuts only and let Bob Ezrin do the others. So it was with some reserves on Peter’s commercial interests that I was chosen to produce the album.

Steve Lillywhite – Producer, Peter Gabriel 3 (Melt)

I think a lot of people have quoted Peter’s third album as being a new departure in sound. I see Peter as a really important artist. He’s extremely talented, but he has to push himself. It doesn’t come easy, unlike Phil Collins. Things probably come easier to Phil than to anyone I’ve ever met. And things come more difficult to Peter than to anyone I’ve ever met. He will put off making a decision until the last possible moment, – but that’s only because he doesn’t con himself into thinking he knows what he’s doing.

David Lord – co-producer, Peter Gabriel 4 (Security)

I like the way he really perseveres and struggles through things that you might not think would work. I could be sure he wouldn’t get a song out of an idea; sure that he was going round in circles and not getting anywhere – but he always knew at the end of it he would.

He doesn’t like being proved wrong, though he’s not dogmatic. Most of the people I think are interesting musically would regard Peter as being influential, though I don’t know how much effect he has had on the mainstream hit parade stuff.

Alan Parker – director, Birdy

We got on so well; he’s such a sweet man. It was such a refreshing change from working with megalomaniacs like Roger Waters.

Peter’s record company were very difficult to begin with, and so I phoned them to ask if they’d mind if Peter took a little time to do Birdy. They said as long as it didn’t take more than a couple of months, because he was already a year late or something.

He had strong views and I would never be able to persuade him to do something he didn’t feel comfortable with – but we didn’t have any confrontation as such.

Tony Levin – bassist, So

On Big Time I asked the drummer, Jerry Marotta, to play on the bass strings while I did the fingering – not a new idea, but what is?! Then, live, I was attempting to play that part with a drumstick in my hand. One day at soundcheck, Peter looked at me and said: “why don’t you attach sticks to your fingers?”

What a great idea! I asked my tech, Andi Moore, to help devise a way to do it, and voila, Funk Fingers! Of course, the first sets broke the bass strings – some adjustments had to be made!.

Martin Scorsese – director, The Last Temptation Of Christ

I began listening to Peter’s music back in 1982-83 and I especially liked Rhythm Of The Heat with its drums, and then I Go Swimming where the lyrics start quite ordinarily before taking off to reach a spiritual level – especially in the live version.

I said I’d be interested in having him do the music for The Last Temptation Of Christ because, for me, the rhythms he uses reflect the primitive and his vocals reflect the sublime – it’s as if the spirit and the flesh are together right there.

Of course, he had to do it as a labour of love because there was hardly any money in it. Normally, he says, it takes two years to do 40 minutes of music, and this was two hours and 40 minutes, which he did in three months!

Daniel Lanois – producer, Us

It’s true that Peter likes detail, but he also likes performance a lot. Having watched him for a long time now, I know this is the aspect of recording that he enjoys the most: giving it hell and jamming it out with the band. His attention to detail generally goes into the area of sonic creativity. He likes to break new ground sonically and I encouraged him to spend time on that.

David Noyce – director, Long Walk Home and Rabbit Proof Fence

I think Peter’s major contribution to the film Rabbit Proof Fence was not only to underscore the drama that is the traditional function of a film composer – but he also gave the film a poetry. Peter was largely responsible for allowing the audience to really participate in the emotions that were at play in the story.

What he said to me at first was: “I want to do a score that comes out of the earth. I want to do a score that expresses the Aboriginal ’oneness’ with their land.” He said he wanted me to provide him with all the real sounds that would be used in the effects and atmosphere track of the film – birds, insects, winds, rain, water, all sorts of animal sounds.

He then sampled, programmed and synthesised these sounds, and made them part of his score.

Richard Chappell – engineer, Up

I think Peter invited Tchad Blake because he was producing himself and wanted to have a fresh pair of ears towards the end of the project to keep things under control. Tchad is very strong-willed – having someone like him around is a good discipline. We tried out a few songs with him, and Peter liked the results, so we kept going.

Tchad is a genius with what he can do sonically. Peter would be in here recording things with me for the same song that Tchad was mixing, and we’d walk towards the main building to add these things to the mix. Tchad would either agree or disagree, and they’d have to figure out between them what was going to be used.

Not only… but also:

Ian Anderson, Jethro Tull: “Peter Gabriel’s work has always been admirable and innovative, from the arty, theatrical beginnings of Genesis through to his latest, sans guitar and drums covers. He defies convention and searches out the deeper and more satisfying reaches of rock music without it ever losing all popular and commercial appeal. Clever chap, that Gabriel!”

Doug Pinnick, King’s X: “I’ve been a fan since Genesis – Sledgehammer is one of the funkiest jams there is. And the man has soul.”

Arthur Brown: “Peter’s modesty has not hidden the immensity of his achievements. His generosity and integrity matched his love for worldwide music. He carried out a vision. To do that you need strength and courage.”

Sonja Kristina: “Curved Air and Genesis shared the same bill in 1970. Peter was very shy and silent offstage, yet very extrovert and eccentric in his performance on stage. His first solo album was one of the few albums that really engaged me.”

Tom Morello, Rage Against The Machine: “He’s one of my all-time favourite artists. His song Biko is as moving and inspiring as any song I’ve ever heard. He is a true artist who brings a powerful poetic, musical and humanistic vision to life in his work.”

Taylor Hawkins, Foo Fighters: “He’s a unique character. He’s got the artistic integrity of Neil Young and the constant restiveness to push the envelope of David Bowie. I’d still love him to do some shows with the great Genesis line-up though!"

Carmine Appice: “I love Peter Gabriel’s genius – all his theatrical masks. His approach and voice are unique. He’s a great, innovative talent.”

Steven Wilson: “Peter is one of a small group of innovators that completely deconstructed the blueprint of popular music and reinvented it as something fresh. As a producer and a songwriter he’s been an inspiration to me.”

Mike Portnoy, Dream Theater: “I have a deep appreciation for his Genesis years, obviously. Foxtrot, Selling England and The Lamb are landmark prog albums. But unlike many prog icons who went solo, Peter Gabriel continued to push the envelope with each album. His solo albums are as close to studio perfection as you can get.”

Roye Albrighton, Nektar: “The guy is innovative. My all-time favourite tracks with him are Carpet Crawlers and Don’t Give Up – the latter is a truly moving piece.”

Trevor Rabin: “Peter Gabriel is a true artist. He never ’settles’ – he’s always pushing, from Foxtrot to Sledgehammer. I love him.”

When Eric Vanlerberghe isn’t screaming or growling as frontman of I Prevail, chances are he can be found backstage playing a round of Magic: The Gathering with a bunch of other band dudes.

“It’s fun and crazy to think some death metal fan is probably like, ‘Oh, I Prevail suck. They’re just weak shit!’” he laughs. “Well, I’m actually good friends with your favourite bands and we’re playing trading card games!”

Ahead of I Prevail’s Violent Nature tour hitting the UK this autumn, Eric tackles your toughest questions…

If you have one fully cooked lasagna, and then stack a second fully cooked lasagna on top of the first one, how many lasagnas do you have? The_Wurdalak, Instagram

“I have an answer that is a question: Do you count a lasagna by how many layers? Is it like, after nine layers or six layers, that’s it? If you don’t, then if you put another lasagna on top of a lasagna and bake it together, I’d say it’s one lasagna. But, if you just take this precooked lasagna and this other cooked lasagna, you stack it on top, it’s two separate lasagnas. A lasagna sandwich.”

What’s your favourite word to scream or growl? Mike O’Neill, Facebook

“There’s a line in Bad Things where I scream ‘fun!’ And anything with the ‘e’ sound is a fun sound to scream… it’s the most metal of the syllables.”

Hammer: When did you first try screaming or growling?

“After I found Metallica in eighth grade. I went from a private school to a public school and, as I was making friends, someone gave me a Ride The Lightning CD. After that, I was searching for heavier bands and came across Slipknot. When I realised it was just one guy doing the singing, screaming and shouting, I was like, ‘How do they do that?’ Whenever I was riding with my friends to school or driving myself, I’d have that 10-minute drive to try to figure it out.”

What’s the closest you’ve ever come to being arrested?
Andy May, email

“In Prague. I had a neck issue and had some medication. I usually have a backpack for tour and I left that bag sitting in my room with the medication for eight months or so. Right before I left for that tour, I dumped my bag and saw the pills, and I was like, ‘Oh, toss them. I don’t need them.’

We’re in the Prague airport… Dylan [Bowman, guitarist/vocalist] and I are boarding, and the dogs sniff and paw our bags, so the cops pull us aside. We almost missed our flight and ended up in a Prague prison, but they let us go. I guess it turned out the dogs smelled the pills on the bag that had been in there. We were like, ‘Oh shit, we’re going to prison in Europe. This is not good!’”

What’s your musical guilty pleasure? Thrashmemetal, Instagram

“I don’t think any of my musical pleasures are guilty; I’ll own up to them all! I mean, it used to be cool to hate Nickelback, but I never stopped listening to Nickelback. There’s some Japanese pop artists that I really like and some K-pop I’ve come across. I’ll play it in my truck, coming out of Whitechapel and going into something pop or country.”

Who’d be your dream collaboration, no limits?
Mae Samson, email

“I recently became acquainted with my new friend, Teddy Swims, and I think that would be an insane collaboration. I know he comes from the rock and not metal world, but man, he’s got such a unique and beautiful voice. I think that would be a really cool way to make an I Prevail song with some R’n’Bvibes to it… I know he can scream.”

When are you gonna collab with Lzzy Hale again? JeremyWilliams81574, Instagram

“I don’t know if we’ll do another original song together. It’s hard to catch lightning in a bottle twice, as they say. But it’d be cool next time if Halestorm come through Detroit and I’m home, or vice versa, or we’re on tour near them and Lzzy can come out. Maybe the stars will align and we can perform Can U See Me In The Dark? again.”

What’s the greatest challenge you’ve prevailed over?
James Vernon, email

“We’ve had quite a few over the last decade in the band. One that we’re still trying to navigate is the death of our manager, Dave Shapiro; that was very difficult. We released our first song on the new record, Violent Nature, the day after we found out that Dave passed.

Getting ready for the tours, the announcements and all the things that are involved in releasing a new record, we were just ghosts walking through that release because we didn’t have our best friend with us. He was huge in the rollout and the plans for world takeover. To go through everything, missing him, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to go through.”

Hammer: How did it impact the band?

“To come together through that loss and grief, and continue pushing forward and get back out on the road and tour… it really made our bond between the five of us stronger. The emotional walls came down, and we’re able to communicate more deeply and effectively with each other through this year-long grieving. Wherever he is, floating in the sky right now, whatever you believe in, he’s got his hands on things. He’s looking out for us.”

What are your favourite albums of all time (metal and non-metal)?
Niamh_Honor, Instagram

“I’d have to say Slipknot’s Iowa is up there. The Artist In The Ambulanceby Thrice is one of my favourite records of all time. Some of the riffs, the vocals and the writing, I think, set the stage for the new age, MySpace metalcore era. Nothing But Thieves’ Dead Club City has been one of my favourite records since it came out.And I’ll give a shoutout to Citizen’s Youth. I absolutely love that record; it’s timeless.”

Where would you take us if we came to visit Southfield, Michigan?
Smileybones, email

“I grew up in the St Clair Shores area, so I’d take you to Lake St Clair – but it’s not one of the Great Lakes, so I’d have to take you to one. I just opened a trading card shop, Black Vault Gaming, with some friends in St Clair Shore, so if you’re a nerd, I’d have to show you there. There’s a bunch of breweries and new restaurants too, and they’re all right off the water. It feels like a coastal town, but you’re in the Midwest.”

Hammer: What was the idea behind opening Black Vault Gaming?

“In lockdown, I’d invite friends over to hang out, listen to music and just have some connection. My buddy was like, ‘You want to learn how to play Magic: The Gathering?’ I was like, ‘Sure!’ I became obsessed with it: the whole aspect of building a deck, meeting new friends that played and having this new language to speak with them. Then, once we got to tour again, I started making friends with bands on the road, ‘Oh, you play Magic, too? Dude, I brought a deck. Do you want to play?’

Like Fit For A King; I became really good friends with those guys through playing Magic after shows. We started a group chat and added Josh [Moore] from We Came As Romans, and now we have 40 people in that chat, all from different bands. We’d go to MagicCon, and, through that, I made friends with these guys that owned a card shop in my hometown, and they were going to start a new store. I said, ‘That sounds awesome. I’d love to be involved.’”

Your birth name is Richard, but you go by Eric. Do you hate all Richards?
Richard Dudfield, email

“No, I don’t! I went to a small private school [as a kid] and my last name’s Vanlerberghe, so I was one of the last to get called on the first day of school. Every year it would be: ‘Richard Vanlerberghe?’ All the kids would laugh, make fun of me and call me ‘Dick’. I didn’t like it. I was like, ‘It’s actually Eric.’

The story I got growing up was, my mom’s got 15 brothers and sisters, and the brothers were into sports and Air Jordan. My dad’s name is Richard; he goes by Rick, so they started calling me ‘Little Rick’ and ‘Ricky’, and I think there’s a baby card somewhere that they signed ‘Air-Rick’. The other story I heard is, my mom was like, ‘I was looking at a baby book and it said Eric and Richard were synonymous.’ So they just started calling me Eric. Sometimes I forget my real name’s Richard!"

Violent Nature is out now via Fearless. I Prevail's UK tour starts on September 19.

Steven Wilson was in a storm of change when he prepared his first solo tour in 2011. Having recently put Porcupine Tree on the backburner, he’d moved out of London back to his home town. He’d also received a crash course in music production by remastering King Crimson’s catalogue. All that fed in to his second solo album Grace For Drowning, as he told Prog before the tour began.

Over the past three years Steven Wilson has been remastering King Crimson’s catalogue. His exposure to the band’s tapes – and the forensic insight into their music that provides – has had a profound effect on him. “I cannot emphasise how much I’ve learned doing the Crimson records,” he says.

“What I thought I understood about them I really didn’t. The albums aren’t very layered. There’s something about the tone of the instruments and the interaction of the players that gives this wonderfully warm full sound that still has a lot of space around it.”

When Wilson was learning his trade in the late 80s, more was more. If you wanted a guitar riff, you’d multi-track the guitar five times. “The thing is you lose a lot of the character of the instrument and performance,” he says. “When Robert Fripp’s playing on those early Crimson records, it’s one guitar single-tracked – but it sounds monolithic. I tried to bring that to this record; stripping things down, not multi-tracking for the sake of it.”

Big, heavy guitars are noticeably rare on Grace For Drowning. “The heaviest music is produced by things like choirs and woodwind, and how the chords are voiced,” he says. “One of the heaviest things is the main riff of Raider II, which begins with two baritone saxophones double-tracked. It’s pure 21st Century Schizoid Man.”

He fully intends to carry his lessons into his future recordings. “It’s almost like I’ve unlearned something. I made records by layering and layering, but I’ve come to appreciate the tone of the instruments; the music gets to breathe more and you get more the character.”

Wilson’s lyrics, and his trademark thin voice, are just a little heartbreaking on the album. No Part Of Me In You is about a relationship gone sour; Postcard’s character sings: ‘The fire in my eyes has gone out.’ Elvis Costello once remarked that he doesn’t write songs when he’s happy, because he’s too busy being happy. “I’m exactly the same,” WIlson says. “You’re exercising that part of your personality in the writing, in order that your more well-adjusted positive elements can prevail in your everyday life.

“One of the most beautiful things in the world when you’re sad is to listen to a song that lets you understand you’re not alone feeling that way – we’re all part of the same human consciousness.”

The album features some notable players, and a very special guest on Deform To Form A Star. “I met Steve Hackett last year. I’ve never been a big Genesis fan, but I’m a huge fan of his first solo albums: Spectral Mornings, Voyage Of The Acolyte, Please Don’t Touch, Defector. He said those records came from his love of – guess who – Crimson and Van der Graaf! I was already in the process of writing Grace For Drowning and those two bands are touchstones for me, so having Steve on the record made perfect sense.

We hooked up for dinner, and I asked why he doesn’t play Shadow Of The Hierophant live. He said he would if I guested on it. So I did, at Shepherds Bush Empire in November. That was scary!”

The Empire will soon host the sole UK date of his very first solo tour. It’ll be 12 months since Porcupine Tree sold out the Royal Albert Hall on the last night of their tour for The Incident, so the venue seems a little modest. “In this business brand name is everything,” Wilson says. “I’m not naïve enough to believe that everyone who buys a Porcupine Tree album will know the names of all the members of the band.

“A larger minority for us do, perhaps, but 80 per cent of people buy records because they heard a song on the radio they like, or they saw it in their local HMV. They have no idea who’s in the band. Just ask Roger Waters – he found out the hard way when he left Pink Floyd!”

He continues: “I don’t expect to reach everyone Porcupine Tree reaches. This is a tentative dip in the water. It’s such a huge financial risk for me; I have to employ a crew and a band, and I’m going out with a big multimedia show.

“I guess I’m overcompensating for the fact some people might think this is a side project. It’s isn’t – it’s as epic as anything I’ve done with any of my bands, and it took the longest time. I’m very proud of the album, and the fact that I’m taking it out on the road too. In so many ways this is my biggest endeavour.”

Robert Fripp was at the first playback of Grace For Drowning, at Air Studios. Did he pick up on his band’s influence on it? “No!” Wilson relishes the irony. “Everyone else I played it to picked up on the Crimson, Lizard element. The only person who didn’t was Robert Fripp! He told me that it sounded like me.

“I think I’ve got to the point in my career where it doesn’t matter what I do or how much I think I’m ripping something off; it’ll still ultimately sound like me. I hope that’s true.”

Toyah Willcox began her career as an actor in Quadrophenia and Quatermass, and as a post-punk in the 80s declared she wanted to be free. In the 21st century she teamed up with the late Bill Rieflin, Markus Reuter and her husband Robert Fripp, and was even In The Court Of The Crimson Queen. In 2020 – just as Toyah And Robert’s Sunday Lunch presented the pair in a new, light-hearted light – we asked the question: how prog is she?

Most people think they know Toyah Willcox. She’s rooted in popular perception as the rebel queen of 80s new wave, responsible for mega-hits like It’s A Mystery, I Want To Be Free and Thunder In The Mountains. But there’s a whole other, less-celebrated side to her – the edgy adventurer, surveying the worlds of improv, art rock and experimental music.

“I’ve always needed to walk away from the predictable,” she tells Prog. “I love doing the 80s festivals and the touring shows, and my audience turns up in their thousands, which I’m so grateful for. But there’s also a part of me that is very off-the-wall. And I need to feed that.”

In recent years, that creative nourishment has taken the form of The Humans, the trio that she co-founded in 2007 with multi-instrumentalists Chris Wong and Bill Rieflin (former drummer with King Crimson). The band’s studio endeavours – now collected in a handsome five-disc box set, Noise In Your Head – are centred around Toyah’s voice and two bass guitars, making for a fascinating aural experience. You’ll find ambient music, gnarly avant-rock, elastic funk and deconstructed pop. And yes, even prog.

Toyah is acutely aware of the connotations of the latter genre. She is, after all, married to Robert Fripp. And even though they’ve deliberately kept their artistic lives separate, her husband pops in and out of her story like a recurring King Crimson riff. The birth of The Humans is a prime example.

“I made a feature film in Estonia [Tied Up In Tallinn] during the country’s first year of independence,” she begins, “and I fell in love with the place. Then Robert and I became great friends with the Estonian ambassador for the UK, Dr Margus Laidre. In 2007, the president [Toomas Hendrik Ilves] asked if Robert would come and play on his birthday, to which he said, ‘No.’ I’ve heard Robert say ‘no’ to everybody – David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, you name it. He’s always got an excuse not to play.

“So I contacted Dr Margus and said, ‘Look, there’s a project really dear to my heart and I want it to be a spontaneous thing with three musicians.’ He was intrigued. I told him, ‘We’ll do this, for your president, on his birthday.’ I didn’t expect to hear anything back, but, within 24 hours the invitation was accepted.”

She immediately called Rieflin, who she’d bonded with through his involvement with Fripp. Wong, her musical director, was in too. Using Toyah’s demos as base material, the threesome flew out and played for the then Estonian president. “It was challenging,” she recalls, “but we really made it work.”

Their set formed the core of the band’s 2009 debut, We Are The Humans. “It’s a completely stripped-down, sonically naked album,” says Toyah. “My ears have always been very sensitive. I said to Bill, ‘I can’t have drums on this – they’re limiting my vocal ability. I just want that middle spectrum for me.’ So We Are The Humans was very much a work in progress. But, as a standalone piece, I think it’s magical.”

Later that summer she and Wong returned to Estonia, where they teamed up with German producer and touch guitarist Markus Reuter, plus local duo Robert Jürjendal (guitar) and Arvo Urb (drums). They christened themselves This Fragile Moment for a self-titled studio effort. “I think that album is one of the best in-the-moment pieces of writing I’ve ever done,” Toyah declares. “We all met in Tallinn, sat down in a circle, put headphones on and improvised for a week.”

Putting her solo career on hold (2008’s In The Court Of The Crimson Queen had been a neatly titled acknowledgement of her other half), Toyah threw herself into The Humans. The recording of 2011’s Sugar Rush, however, proved particularly difficult, both on a professional and personal level. “My father died the day after I’d gone over to Seattle to map Sugar Rush,” she explains. “So a lot of that album was grief-ridden and angry, because my father wasn’t treated well in his last days.”

The deeply atmospheric Snow At 10:23 marks the time of his death back home, while Fragment Pool and Small Town Psychopath concern Toyah’s relationship with her father and what happened to him. “I lost my mother around that time too and I also had a cancer scare,” she adds. “It was just the most ridiculous time. I had three years of intensive surgery – one of them kept me in a coma for 24 hours.”

From an artistic standpoint, the intensity of the sessions was heightened by Fripp’s presence in the studio. Rieflin had wanted to expand the sound of The Humans on Sugar Rush, adding more harmonic structure, with Fripp on board. Toyah acceded, but only out of respect for Rieflin, whose invaluable musical know-how had been sharpened by his involvement with the likes of Ministry, Revolting Cocks, Swans, Nine Inch Nails and REM.

“I told Bill it would be the death of The Humans,” she says. “And to a certain extent it was – certainly as a live act. I said to him, ‘The moment you put Robert on this project, we no longer exist.’ I had to let Bill see that.

“When I first met Robert I was three days away from suicide and he just took me out of the country and unravelled the knots and put me back on my feet. He’s a wonderful husband, but professionally it’s not done me any favours at all. We managed to do one more tour – and it was phenomenal – but that was it. At the same time, I think Sugar Rush is a work of genius on all our parts.”

The Humans went on to record a final studio album, 2014’s more vocal-led Strange Tales, but the sessions were hampered by Rieflin’s ongoing struggle with cancer. The results are nevertheless often spectacular, be it the post-grunge She’s Fast or the masterly art-funk of Get In Your Car and Bedhead. Rieflin pushes the band’s parameters by also taking on drums, keyboards and percussion, while violins and saxophones add further colour.

Noise In Your Head acts as a fitting tribute to Rieflin, who died in March this year. Toyah says he’d spent the last 12 months of his life taking care of loose ends, including the box set. “I’d deliberately stayed away from putting my name at the top of this project,” she explains. “Calling ourselves The Humans got rid of my past history in some ways. I have worked blisteringly hard to be where I am today and thought that if I put my name on this it wouldn’t help, because everyone would pick up on the fact that I’m married to Robert.

“But in the last year Bill told me, ‘Your name has to be on this. It’s got to be Toyah & The Humans.’ I think he realised that I had a greater audience, so it was all part of the journey.”

Toyah’s work with The Humans and This Fragile Moment isn’t some isolated left turn. She grew up listening to big-selling names with strong cult appeal – Roxy Music, Bolan, Bowie, Alice Cooper. As her love of theatrical art grew into an acting career (appearing in late-70s subculture classics like Jubilee and Quadrophenia), she began to absorb the audio-visual delights of Devo and The Tubes.

She spent her first £60 wage packet from the National Theatre on a bunch of vinyl: Velvet Underground, Pere Ubu and (No Pussyfooting). “So my first experience of Robert Fripp was through Brian Eno,” she says. “Later on I got King Crimson’s Discipline, which is an amazing album.”

Witnessing the Sex Pistols in her Birmingham hometown in October 1976 had been liberating for its vibe. But Toyah’s notions of live performance had started to take shape at a younger age. “I saw Black Sabbath when I was 11,” she remembers, “then I saw Hawkwind when I was 12. I spent the whole night running away from Stacia! I was just this child, surrounded by all these acid-heads and with a naked woman dancing on stage. She was wonderful though; quite something.”

Even at the peak of her fame in the early 80s, the playlist on Toyah’s tour bus reflected tastes that most post-punk artists wouldn’t admit to, from The Moody Blues’ Days Of Future Passed to the trippy Stones gem, Citadel. 1988’s Prostitute is a startling pre-echo of her Humans output. An abstract, confrontational album peppered with dialogue, samples and avant-pop grooves, it was an emphatic statement, issued after her commercial star had waned.

“I’d signed to CBS on their new Portrait label [for 1985’s Minx], but everybody wanted me to emulate Pat Benatar,” she explains. “Then as soon as I got married [she and Fripp wed in 1986] the phone would ring and the people who used to talk to me would ask for Robert instead. And they would discuss me with him! I suddenly became completely invisible, culturally, as a woman.

“I’d gone from having an award-winning, groundbreaking career – one of the top-selling artists and the most-awarded female in Europe – to suddenly having to have meetings with my husband in the room. And people saying to me, ‘Why don’t you go away and have babies?’ Prostitute was really a response to all that.”

She followed up in 1991 with the more prog-oriented Ophelia’s Shadow, backed by the musicians she’d previously fronted as Sunday All Over The World, including Fripp and future King Crimson man Trey Gunn. They released their sole album, Kneeling At The Shrine, that year.

Encouraged by pre-sales of The Humans box set (“It’s already been a hundred times more successful than any of those albums were originally”), Toyah thrives on challenging herself. “There’s always room for improvement in all of us; even Robert would agree with that,” she states. “So what drives me is the desire to remain creative, to expand, to explore. It’s definitely not commerce.

“I just don’t believe in this cultural thing where if you get older you lose power and relevance. You don’t. All your experiences are generating inside you, like a battery, wanting to come out. So you continue to resonate.”

Phil Collins may still be physically restricted, having been through the wringer in recent years, but at 75, clad in casual black, he exudes positivity. He’s approachable and friendly – every inch the “bloke next door” of his popular persona. “I’ve been blessed with this career, y’know?” he says. “Hard work, but that goes without saying. I wouldn’t have done anything else, or anything differently. The whole trip has just been a pleasure.”

Prog wonders if it was sometimes so hectic that he couldn’t take a breath. “Oh, I always appreciated it,” he replies. “Mainly because I was doing what I wanted to do. I didn’t know much about Genesis when I joined, apart from the fact that they were working. To me, just joining a band that was busy was hitting the jackpot. Playing every night!

“It was never a road to somewhere, or about building up a reputation – I’d probably have done it without getting paid, as long as I could live. So it all worked out incredibly well. I look back and my life’s been just a dream.”

Is it true you began playing on a toy drum at the age of five?

Oh yeah. It’s funny, you see that thing over there? [He points to a tiny plastic drum kit on a shelf.]That’s Lily’s daughter’s. My granddaughter. She’s one-and- a-half, and Lily said, “She’s going around at home hitting things, especially when we play your songs. So get her a drum kit for her birthday?” And that’s what was age-appropriate. So yeah, it’s running in the family – hitting things!

Now, my toy drum: I can picture it. I was three or four actually. I spoil my kids, but in those days you got one toy for Christmas. A soldier. A ball. Ha – yeah, an orange in a stocking. But I was given a drum – no idea why.

These friends of the family saw I liked the toy so much, they made a better one out of bits of wood and brass with a tambourine, cymbal and triangle on it. I’d play along to the telly – Sunday Night At The London Palladium, that kind of thing.

It was always music for me, really. I never went through the childhood phases of racing driver, fireman, pilot...

Weren’t you a keen footballer?

Yeah, but I think I was enthusiastic more than good. Growing up in Hounslow [in west London] I’d go and see Brentford: I’d even go and watch them training at the old ground, Griffin Park. QPR when I got older. But my idol was Jimmy Greaves.

And you got into acting...

When I was 13 years old there was no pop industry really, or it was just starting: The Beatles’ Please Please Me was the first album I bought. Then The Beatles caught fire. Lonnie Donegan was probably the first sign – skiffle and all that. I’d play along to his 78s.

My sister went out with him for a while. He came to our house one Sunday and watched me play. But I was too young to go on the road with him. I wouldn’t have been allowed in the chicken-and- scampi clubs!

Anyway, music wasn’t a “job” then. Mum was answering the phones at this drama school so she got me a place there. Yes, I got to play the Artful Dodger, but I just wanted to play drums.

Later I did enjoy acting – I liked making Buster and other things. Did I use my acting lessons when I became a frontman? Hmm, only maybe some things I did without thinking about it.

You and Genesis were from very different backgrounds, yet as soon as you sat behind the kit in the audition they knew you were the guy.

Apparently! So they’ve said. It was just Tony, Peter and Mike (By the way, I’m seeing Mike today – he’s coming by later). Mike’s always said that when Anthony Phillips, the unsung hero, left because he couldn’t take the stress, they thought that was the end of the band. But they carried on. They thought they could get a better drummer, I believe, than John Mayhew, who was on Trespass.

I didn’t know all this background dynamic; I had just seen their name a lot in the back of Melody Maker. I knew Tony Stratton- Smith, their manager, since I’d been about 16 and he was managing The Creation.

I went down to the Marquee bar one night to see if he could put in a word for me with Genesis. He said, “Oh, I’d love to, but I’m afraid they’re very fussy, these guys – you’ll have to audition.” So I went along and here we are today!

Yes, they were public school boys, and I was from the drama school where you could get away with murder. In their school they weren’t allowed to own a guitar. At mine, I’d bring my records in and we’d play Sgt. Pepper or Motown or The Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday. The teacher would say, “Are you sure you can hear me talk at the same time as this music is on?” We’d say, “Oh sure…!”

What the hell is Emperor’s 1994 track I Am The Black Wizards all about?

“I came up with this sort of parallel universe, this dark dimension that was very Tolkien-esque. I wanted to use it for a concept record for Emperor. One of the ideas was for it to have this massive tower with incredibly deep dungeons, housing, amongst other things… these strange wizards controlled by a hive mind. Everything is connected, and that’s where the title comes from.”

Presumably there was a big Tolkien influence on the Mortiis mask…

“Yes and no. I knew that I wanted to do something beyond corpsepaint. I’d grown up with Kiss and W.A.S.P. and Mötley Crüe – these big-image American bands – so that was something I’d always liked, but I was definitely into The Lord Of The Rings.

The early version of Mortiis was just me finding things I could mould into noses and ears and all of that, and then putting make-up on top of it. To get the long nails, I would cut out the bendy ends of soda pop bottles, then paint them and glue them to my fingers.”

How do you feel about this current crop of masked bands, like Ghost and Sleep Token, becoming some of the biggest names in metal?

“I don’t pay a lot of attention to it, but Tobias [Forge] has done really cool stuff with Ghost. I’ve only met him once but he seemed like a very nice person. He was quiet. I’m only aware of Sleep Token because people talk about them. I see a shitload of masked bands fly by on my algorithm. The weird thing is, I feel like I’m the only guy who wears a mask but still has a face.”

What are the masks like to travel with? How many airport security guards have you shocked over the years?

“They pull my stuff out a lot. I usually carry weird electronics, and they think it’s a bomb or something and scan it, like, three times. I’ve half-expected sometimes for them to go, ‘What’s inside this box?’ and then all of a sudden there’s a face staring back at them. Ha ha! It’s never happened, but, then again, these people, can you imagine all the weird shit they must see every day?”

You’ve travelled all over the world. Who’s the weirdest person you’ve ever met?

“I met a guy in the 90s who was completely tattooed, top to toe, and he had 12 kids in 12 [US] states. This was back when I was still drinking, and I drank with him all night. He was like a living piece of art and he was super-nice, but I was thinking, ‘How the hell do you even get to the point where you have 12 kids in 12 different states?!’”

Must’ve been a bit of a vagabond type.

“I guess! Maybe he just travelled around and… he must have been a very charming person.”

You were charmed enough to drink with him all night.

“Yeah, I didn’t have kids with him, though. Ha ha ha!”

You’ve been Mortiis for more than 30 years now. What keeps it fun?

“I’m a stubborn motherfucker, that’s for sure! I love trying new things musically. Even as I was completing [new album] Ghosts Of Europa a few months ago, I already had a whole bunch of other, different-sounding music on my hard drive. There’s, like, three more albums I’ve started: some similar, some vastly different. It’s the ability to explore new ideas and see where I can go with it.”

When you’re not Mortiis, you’re a healthcare worker. What do your colleagues think of the Mortiis music and presentation?

“When I started that gig, early on, some of them probably didn’t quite know what to make of me. I walked in there scruffy-looking, with long dreads. But I’m gonna believe my boss when she tells me that I’m a fairly well-liked employee. You try to have a good attitude and just be a fairly comfortable person to be around. That’s a big part of the job. If you’re an uncomfortable person to be around, you’ve failed the first test! Ha ha!”

What’s the most rewarding part of that job?

“Getting paid. Ha ha ha! But, in all seriousness, it’s nice to be nice, man.”

Ghosts Of Europa is out now via Prophecy.

Gryphon experienced a remarkably busy periods in 1974. The release of not just Midnight Mushrumps but also Red Queen To Gryphon Three found them reaching a bigger audience than before, aided by a North American tour with Yes. In 2024 founding members Brian Gulland, Graeme Taylor and Dave Oberlé recalled those early years, and explained why they were still going.

In the history of prog there’s never been a band quite like Gryphon; and in the history of Gryphon there’s never been a year like 1974. Over 12 months, the group released not one but two fantastically ambitious albums; they also embarked upon a spectacular North American tour as the opening act for Yes.

Formed two years previously, the band’s genesis went back even further. Co-founding guitarist Graeme Taylor was nine when he first heard The Beatles, and describes the feeling as “like a cannonball [that had] hit me.” His parents promised to buy him a guitar; and, on Christmas Eve, “I woke up in the middle of the night and went halfway through the instruction book by about five in the morning. From then on, I was just fanatical about this instrument.”

He met fellow co-founder Richard Harvey at Tiffin’s boys’ school in Surrey. Not only did they share a number of interests, but they were both also involved in ensembles inspired by medieval and Elizabethan music. A few years later, Harvey encountered Brian Gulland while both were studying at the Royal College Of Music, and soon the trio began playing together.

Gulland was also young when his journey into music began. At eight, he enrolled in the Canterbury Cathedral Choir, where he enjoyed “five years of the most fantastic musical training.” During the first term, he recalls, “We were allowed to sit up on the lockers and watch the orchestra rehearse. I became inveigled by the deep farting noises of the bassoon.”

However, during his second year at the Royal College he decided to leave – much to the shock of his teachers and peers. “They were absolutely horrified, because nobody leaves; you have to fight to get in there. ‘What do you think you’re going to do, then?’ ‘Well, sir, I’ve got these vague ideas about playing Hammond organ in a rock band.’”

It was Harvey who persuaded Gulland to invest in a different instrument. “He came rushing up to me and said: ‘Come on, you’ve got to buy a crumhorn.’ I said, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’” He soon found out.

The band’s original incarnation was completed by percussionist Dave Oberlé. “I’d been a rock drummer,” he explains, “and to suddenly be confronted with all these very strange instruments, it was a question of how I was going to adapt.”

Oberlé had been another early starter. At 12, his parents bought him a snare drum and he was soon playing in local rock bands. He formed a group of his own, Juggernaut, “playing quite heavy rock with proggy influences.” When Taylor, Gulland and Harvey recruited him, it was, he says, “a baptism of fire” – but it wasn’t long before he settled in.

The quartet were playing local folk clubs when Transatlantic Records talent scout Laurence Aston approached them. “It didn’t take very long for him to spot us,” says Taylor, “because we were unusual. We suddenly found ourselves with a recording contract in a makeshift studio, making our first album.”

Gryphon’s self-titled debut, released in June 1973, caused quite a stir with its fantastical blend of medieval and modern instrumentation. “Suddenly we became a household name,” recalls Taylor, “big pictures, centre-spreads; everyone knew who Gryphon was.”

Transatlantic’s press officer, Martin Lewis, was a key factor in their raised profile, too. “He was an absolute genius,” affirms Oberlé, “mad as a box of frogs, but a great marketing man.” It was through Lewis’s efforts that Gryphon became the first band to be played on all four BBC radio stations in the same week. Yet their biggest success was still to come.

During 1974 they released two further albums of startlingly inventive music – Midnight Mushrumps and Red Queen To Gryphon Three. By now, bass player Philip Nestor had joined. Both sets were recorded at the Chipping Norton Recording Studio in Oxfordshire, engineered by Dave Grinsted, the mastermind behind Caravan’s In The Land Of Grey And Pink. Musically, however, the two Gryphon records were put together on the fly.

“It was highly irresponsible in retrospect,” says Gulland. “These days you wouldn’t do it. But yes, we didn’t have any of that ‘getting it together in the country’ in a cottage for months. We went in and we cobbled together bits and pieces as we went.” This organic approach was made easier by the studio’s live-in accommodation and 24-hour access.

“We used to go up into Brian’s room,” recalls Taylor, “just sit there on the bed composing. We never really wrote it down, or if we did it was on the back of a fag packet. We’d work for half an hour and then go down to the studio to record it – we’d get Dave Grinsted up.”

“We were pretty adept at interpreting and performing each other’s material,” adds Gulland. “We thought, ‘Oh, this is a good challenge. I need to practise this for 30 seconds.’ Then we’d try and record it. There was some manuscript paper flying around as well as the backs of envelopes.”

The atmosphere of spontaneity was clearly inspiring and resulted in some beautiful and intricate material. The free-wheeling spirit even extended to the Midnight Mushrumps cover. “It was actually shot in Windsor Great Park in the middle of the night,” explains Oberlé, “which is why, if you look at the sleeve closely, you’ll see bright red noses because we were absolutely freezing.”

The flamboyant clothing they wore for the shot also came from a surprising source. “We’d stolen lots of costumes from the National Theatre wardrobe and carted them into the park,” says Taylor. “I remember making the crêpe-paper mushrooms with chicken wire and lots of old newspapers soaked in gum.”

Released in April, Mushrumps featured five original numbers, plus a cover of the traditional Ploughboy’s Dream. Fleshed out by Nestor’s pulsing bass, the band sounded even more polished and adventurous than on their debut. The title track – an intricate 19-minute suite – was partly adapted from music they’d composed at the request of renowned theatre director Peter Hall, to accompany a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

That led to another first for Gryphon: they became the first rock band to play a live gig at London’s historic Old Vic Theatre; they remain part of a select number of musical artists to have played there. “We had Ivor Cutler supporting us,” remembers Gulland, “Jon Anderson, Steve Howe and Chris Squire of Yes came along, too.”

Gulland had formed a friendship with Yes a few years previously. He recalls seeing them play at the Roundhouse in Dagenham: “My cousin said, ‘Brian, I think you’d really like this band.’ So we jumped into his Austin-Healey Sprite and whizzed up to this little club. They’d just brought out The Yes Album, and it blew my socks off. Soon there was a kind of mutual admiration society going on between the two bands.”

It was a connection which would soon prove fateful. But first, Gryphon returned to the studio to work on third record Red Queen To Gryphon Three. “We thought of that as our concept album,” Taylor remembers, “loosely hung on a game of chess. The approach to recording was much the same.”

Consisting of four extended tracks, each a multi-segmented masterpiece of astounding variety, Red Queen was destined to become a cult classic and remains one of their most popular albums, even now. Given the extraordinary standard of playing across a whirlwind of sonic twists and turns, it’s not hard to understand why.

At the recommendation of fellow Royal College alumnus Rick Wakeman, Gryphon scored a new manager, Brian Lane, and soon found themselves supporting Yes on their 1974 North American tour. “It was absolutely spectacular,” says Oberlé of the experience.

Gullard adds: “33 gigs in 38 days with a plane-hop in between each one.” The frantic schedule took some adjusting to, as the band were ushered between soundchecks, gigs, hotels and airports over and over again.

“You didn’t know where you were,” remembers Taylor – and it wasn’t only the pace that was challenging.

“I think the first place that we landed was Madison, Wisconsin,” Oberlé says, “and I distinctly remember walking into the gig, looking around and thinking, ‘My God, I’ve never seen anything quite like this!’ You suddenly thought, ‘We’re going to be playing here in front of thousands of people.’”

The Dane County Coliseum – now known as Veterans Memorial Coliseum – is part of a multi-venue complex used for sporting events and expos as well as concerts. Gulland recalls that the main arena where they played was a huge basketball arena, which “looked like a UFO from the outside. I think in terms of the size of the gigs, it was comparatively small. It was probably 10 or 11,000-seater, but it looked enormous to us.”

Despite the schedule, the band still found time to relax, absorbing and recording music from the multitude of radio stations across the country. Taylor and Gulland even brought themselves ghetto blasters in Miami. “I got seriously into the Grateful Dead,” says Taylor, “listening with speakers held up on either side of my head.”

Back in the UK, Gryphon continued their support tour with Yes and recorded another album, Raindance, the following year; but things weren’t quite the same. Taylor left shortly afterwards, and the band recorded one final album, 1977’s Treason, before disbanding in the shadow of punk.

“The whole thing just changed that fast,” says Oberlé. “We knew the writing was on the wall. Had Gryphon started a little earlier we might have survived. Yes and Genesis managed to get through it, but we hadn’t really gotten to that point.”

As Taylor neatly puts it: “It became fashionable to not be able to play your instrument very well. Unfortunately, we weren’t bad.”

There followed a lengthy hiatus until a surprise reunion in 2009, prompted by the discovery of a flourishing fan community. “A guy called Eduardo Mota started the website,” Oberlé explains. “We saw it had been hit by about 200,000 people. We thought, ‘Oh my God, there’s something going on.’ Otherwise, why would people bother?”

“We’d forgotten about ourselves by then,” adds Taylor. “We’d forgotten about Gryphon. It became evident that the rest of the world hadn’t.”

Fifteen years on, Gryphon are flying high with an updated line-up that includes Taylor’s daughter, Clare, on vocals and violin; reed player Andy Findon; and Rob Levy on bass. Although Harvey left to pursue other avenues, the new-look band are back on the road and are working on the studio follow-up to 2020’s Get Out Of My Father’s Car!

They’re clearly thriving, and Oberlé thinks he knows why: “There is still nothing quite like Gryphon – even now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thankfully, that was a long time ago.”

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

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

ANSWER THE CALL OF THE MACABRE

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

BE AWARE OF PEOPLE’S INTENTIONS

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

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

VISUAL SELF-EXPRESSION IS A POWERFUL TOOL

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

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

VEGAN STRAIGHT EDGE IS MORE THAN A LABEL

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

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

WE LOVE THE EMBRACE OF METAL

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

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

LET THE MOMENT TAKE YOU

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

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

KNOW WHAT TO TURN DOWN

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

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

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

GRIT YOUR TEETH THROUGH THE TRENDS

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

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

LET EVENTS PLAY IN YOUR FAVOUR

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

HITS AREN’T WRITTEN, THEY’RE MADE

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

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

APPROPRIATE FOOTWEAR IS IMPORTANT

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

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

PHYSICAL COMMUNITY IS THE REALEST THING

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

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

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

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

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