Oli Sykes has his head in his hands. A couple of weeks ago, the Bring Me The Horizon frontman uploaded a video to Instagram. It showed him re-recording the death growls of Pray For Plagues, the opening track from the band’s 2006 debut album, Count Your Blessings.

The accompanying caption read: ‘Took me a minute to work out how to do some of this shit again.’ The pile-on in the comments was immediate.

“Instantly, it’s like, ‘Fucking hell, his technique is awful. What’s he doing? Why is he doing that?’” Oli groans today.

He left a comment trying to explain – it was an inhale approach he’d used sparingly on the original album – but it only fed the algorithm.

“I don’t go on Instagram much, but when I do now, I guess because I’ve engaged with it, it’s all these rock blogs: ‘Oli Sykes comes back at the fans,’” he despairs. “I hate it. It makes my stomach drop...”

Bring Me The Horizon are no strangers to hate. The clip Oli uploaded was part of an announcement that the band had re-recorded Count Your Blessings and would be releasing it under the name Count Your Blessings | Repented, as well as playing the album in full for the first time ever at two gigs in Manchester in July.

Under-produced, juvenile and messy in its embrace of deathcore, Count Your Blessings captured the young band – Oli was just 19 – at their most raw and disruptive. It immediately won the hearts of thousands of scene kids on MySpace, the nascent social media site that launched countless alternative bands in the mid-00s – even though metal’s old guard tried hard to keep Bring Me from getting through the gates.

Since then, Bring Me have released six more albums, evolving dramatically by bringing in metalcore, melodeath and electronics, and – especially with 2013’s seminal Sempiternal – creating a blueprint for modern metal in the process.

Today, the Oli Sykes who greets us over a Zoom call is the leader of one of the biggest heavy bands in the world. He’s dressed in an olive check shirt, his bleached, ice-blond hair buzzed short enough to show off the string of tattoos across his forehead. He’s dialling in from backstage at the Bell Centre in Montreal, where Bring Me are two days into their North America tour – which includes a sold-out show at iconic New York venue Madison Square Garden.

“It is, unfortunately, part of the lore and what Bring Me is now,” Oli says of the heated conversations in the comments. “There’s forever going to be arguments about which the best era is, which the best album is, if we’re better now, or if we dropped off after Count Your Blessings… that’s going to be there until the end of our band’s career. You have to accept that it’s all just passion.”

If you’d logged into MySpace in 2004, you might have come across the profile of budding frontman Oli Sykes. He liked American deathcore bands such as All Shall Perish and As I Lay Dying, had a thick, sweeping black fringe with blond and brown streaks hanging down past his ears, and was dedicated to maintaining his own page and that of his band, Bring Me The Horizon.

“I was an HTML wizard,” he explains today, speaking in a soft, serious Sheffield drawl, undimmed despite the fact he’s lived in Brazil for the last five years, with his wife, model Alissa Salls – their twins Grey and Zélia arrived last year.

“I did all the Bring Me MySpace stuff. I’d learn how to steal the code from other bands or artists and then change the images, so I was a real little nerd and proper into it on there.”

The first social media platform to gain significant cultural traction, combining music and alternative fashion, MySpace had none of the polish of Facebook or anything else that would take hold later, and featured cluttered backgrounds and autoplaying songs. Crucially, it was easy to upload demos so that anyone, anywhere could hear them. Bring Me regularly played local shows, but this was exposure on a new level.

“We did all these terrible-sounding demos where we recorded the vocals in the bathroom,” Oli explains. “We did all the clichéd things that someone who hasn’t got a clue about making music does! Suddenly, this music were going across the world.”

They signed to UK label Visible Noise, and in 2006 went into Birmingham’s DEP International Studios with producer Dan Sprigg (Napalm Death, Cradle Of Filth) to record Count Your Blessings. Splicing Oli’s love of US hardcore and screamo with guitarists Lee Malia and Curtis Ward’s passion for death metal, thrash and trad, by their own admission, there was little in the way of a grand vision for it.

“We didn’t have much ambition outside wanting to make an album where our friends would come to the shows and mosh,” admits Oli. “We struggled to get 10 songs on that record. That’s why there’s two interludes on there.”

They weren’t overthinking the lyrics, either. For Stevie Wonder’s Eyes Only (Braille) features the line: ‘It’s 3.18, mouth tastes like the corpse of every pregnant teen.’ In (I Used To Make Out With) Medusa, Oli sings: ‘Oh, your beauty is no, no more / So why don’t you just fuck yourself, you stupid fucking whore?’

“I guess at the time we were inspired by bands like Cannibal Corpse and Suffocation. So it was just, ‘What’s the most evil, fucked-up thing we can say?’” Oli explains of the lyrics generally. “But [revisiting them for Repented] I started to realise, ‘Oh, no, there’s a message here.’ I could see it’s songs about being on tour too long and missing family and loved ones. There’s some that could be interpreted as misogynistic. It’s not a sentiment I would put in my music today.”

For Repented, they considered changing some of the words, but decided against it.

“We realised, for better or worse, if we start trying to censor it and change things, it’s pointless doing it,” says Oli. “A lot of opinions and attitudes have changed over the years… and we just have to accept that it is what it is. It lives in its own capsule.”

Count Your Blessings was released on October 30, 2006. Famously, the band were unhappy with the result.

“I still can remember pretty clearly, coming out of the studio in Birmingham – we had it burned to a disc, and I put it on in my car. I had this huge subwoofer in the boot,” Oli recalls. “I was so unhappy with the way it sounded. I obviously loved playing shows, but the way I feel about our music now when I get onstage and play certain songs – I’m like, ‘I fucking love this song!’ – I can’t remember ever feeling that way about it.”

Count Your Blessings was released into a metal scene that, in the UK at least, viewed ‘MySpace bands’ with suspicion. Metal Hammer’s top three albums of the year were Mastodon’s Blood Mountain, Slayer’s Christ Illusion and Iron Maiden’s A Matter Of Life And Death, and traditional metalheads were offended by Bring Me The Horizon’s studded belts, hairsprayed fringes and skinny jeans.

Some magazines painted the band as obnoxious. They had to grow thick skin – and fast. One interviewer asked Oli about a website that had leaked nudes pictures of him.

“He was like, ‘Oh, so your dick’s on the internet? Do you like the fact your dick’s on the internet?’ And I was like, ‘No, who would want a picture of their dick on the internet?’ And it said I’d leaned in and I was snarling at him. We didn’t have no media training, we weren’t briefed and we were very naive. When we got the magazine, my mum were really upset. Everything that was a joke or lighthearted, he’d twisted it to sound aggressive in tone… we were on our guard after that.”

Oli compares it to his experiences of being bullied at school. Even though he was now a professional musician, his interactions with the industry felt similar.

“It just became this thing that you hated Bring Me The Horizon, and Bring Me The Horizon weren’t actually a metal band, and we were these little shits, and we were these snotty people, and I think they kind of turned us into that. We had our backs up against every interview.”

The backlash spilled into their live performances. When they opened for Killswitch Engage in Europe in 2007, some in the audience turned their backs. They were also heckled at their own shows, where, now and again, fights would break out between band and audience in the pit.

“It was very hostile. We didn’t go looking for it whatsoever,” Oli says. “We just had to tread that line between getting on with the gig and looking like it didn’t hurt us, but, you know, backstage after gigs, it did affect us a lot.”

They even cancelled a festival appearance for fear of being attacked.

“We said we were sick, because there were another band there that said when we got there, they were going to shave all our hair off and beat us up. It were mental at first. It were that era, when people latched onto something, like, ‘We hate this band, we hate My Chemical Romance.’ It were everyone.”

The volatility around the band escalated, and Oli made headlines in 2007 when he was arrested for allegedly urinating on a female fan who was on their bus – something he has always strongly denied. Charges were dropped.

“It was all lessons that I needed to learn,” he reflects. “I can sit here and defend myself from all that stuff, but at the end of the day, we were being idiots, and it was that realisation that there’s people out there that can hang you up to dry for that kind of shit. I’m glad all that stuff happened because it gave me pause personally. It gave me time to go, ‘Where the fuck am I going in my life?’, because it could have been something much worse.

“Things could have got way out of hand if we just carried on that trajectory, just getting pissed every night, getting into fights, bringing people on our bus that we didn’t know,” he continues. “Mate, I think back on my life and the amount of times I could have died, could have crashed my car. I’m so, so lucky to be even alive, let alone to have a career at this point. It gives me fucking shudders.”

20 years later, Count Your Blessings is being re-released in a different environment. Deathcore is in its blockbuster era, with bands such as Lorna Shore and Slaughter To Prevail proving disgustingly heavy music can flourish on a mass scale. For Oli, the timing is more than sheer coincidence – it’s a reflection of a turbulent global landscape.

“It couldn’t have come at a better time,” he says. “We’re seeing this real revival and love for it, and all these kids getting into it. It makes perfect sense, though, because in the early 2000s, America was starting [to go to war] with the Middle East, and there was a lot of uncertainty. I think that kind of tension fuels a yearning and a need for something more extreme.

“I think there’s two types of people in the world: some people want to listen to Happy by Pharrell and make themselves feel better and disassociate, and other people need to face it head-on.”

And you’re the latter?

“Definitely, yes. I want to talk about it. I want someone to agree with me that the world feels scary. That makes me feel better. I think deathcore is almost like escapism in the opposite direction: if everything’s fucked, let’s just press the fucking button and go to the core of evilness and live in there for a bit, because I’m already feeling like that anyway.”

For Repented, they worked with Buster Odeholm (who produced Orbit Culture’s 2025 album Death Above Life, and is also a guitarist in Humanity’s Last Breath and drummer of Vildhjarta), who’s cleaned everything up and given the music a sharp slap. Some fans may mourn the grittiness of the original, but this new version is what Oli longed to hear on his car stereo – “We would have been over the moon!”

It might even end up being some people’s introduction to metal...

“I think there’s this new wave of kids going, ‘Oh my god, Bruno Mars and Sabrina Carpenter don’t do it for me. I want to tap into something a bit deeper, a bit more raw.’ And I think that’s why we’re still connecting with kids even today, because our band does that,” says Oli.

It’s also a different era for Oli. Now a family man, who goes to bed early, has a personal trainer on tour and plays arenas, re-recording Count Your Blessings gave him “a lot more appreciation and love and respect” for his teenage self – the kid scrabbling around to fill 10 songs on a scrappy debut that would somehow end up meaning the world to their fans.

Three days after our chat, Bring Me play Madison Square Garden. As the set ends on a triumphant Throne and confetti streams from the ceiling, Oli stares out at a crowd that represents 20 years of progress, tears running down his face.

“We don’t take anything for granted,” the frontman had told us. “We have this massive underdog mentality because of the trauma we faced from all the hatred. It doesn’t matter how big we get, how well we do, we always think that someone’s out to get us. I think at the same time, we have managed to counteract that with, ‘No, stop and smell the roses, appreciate what you’ve done, and be grateful.’”

This article originally appeared in Metal Hammer issue 415, July 2026. Order your copy now and get it delivered directly to your door.

Count Your Blessings | Repented is out today (Friday, July 10) via RCA and Sony. Bring Me The Horizon will play the album in full at B.E.C. Arena in Manchester tonight and on Saturday (July 11). The band will then tour the Americas from August to October.

Few rock songs have enjoyed an afterlife quite like Rage Against The Machine's Killing In The Name did. Its adoption by a Facebook campaign in December 2009, intended to put the blocks on X Factor winner Joe McElderry claiming that year’s Christmas No.1 spot, was a phenomenal success. Killing... raced to the top by racking up more than half a million downloads, leaving McElderry behind and becoming the fastest-selling digital single ever.

The feat was all the more remarkable given that the track was 17 years old and peppered with potty-mouthed expletives – and the fact that Rage Against The Machine, who recorded it, had little to do with this second coming

“It took us completely by surprise,” admits guitarist Tom Morello. “It was a tremendous David and Goliath story. We only joined the campaign in the final week. It was completely ruled by the fans, and was one of the greatest things in my life.”

Killing In The Name was riven with meaning, written at a key moment in recent American history. The beating of black motorist Rodney King by four LAPD officers in March 1991, captured on CCTV footage, had enraged the nation after it was serially beamed across every news channel.

It was an episode that fed directly into the wiring of Rage Against The Machine, a radical bunch of rap metal-heads who railed against all manner of societal and political ills. Formed in Orange County, California that year, they were led by singer Zack de la Rocha, son of a Chicano political artist and grandson of a Mexican revolutionary, and Morello, himself the scion of African insurrectionists.

The track, Rage Against The Machine’s first single, bit hard on several levels. A righteous slam-bam of punk, hardcore and hip-hop, Killing In The Name was heavy on venomous polemic, burning its gaze into what the band saw as endemic racism in US security agencies. De la Rocha’s repeated mantra ‘Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses’ alludes directly to the Ku Klux Klan.

“I was in LA when the whole Rodney King episode went down,” explains Garth Richardson, producer of the song and 1992’s self-titled parent album. “That was a big thing for the city. Zack and I had a long talk about the power of speech and how whatever he needed to say, he had to say it. Malcolm X was a major influence in Zack’s life, and this was not the time to back down.”

The track’s slamming guitar motif, which echoed the no-compromise ferocity of its message, was more serendipitous.

“I was actually in the middle of playing bass in a guitar lesson,” Morello recalls, “and was teaching a student about the drop-D tuning when it came to me. I said to him: ‘Hold on one second’, and scribbled it down. Then we went into rehearsals that night and worked it out. It was part of the second wave of songs we ever wrote.”

Killing In The Name is particularly notorious for its final verse, in which de la Rocha, having built to something of a belligerent frenzy, hollers: ‘Fuck you! I won’t do what you tell me!’ no less than 16 times, topped off by: ‘Motherfucker! Uggh!’ It’s an extraordinary climax, made all the more primal by Richardson setting up the studio with a concert PA and recording the band as if it were a live show.

“My jaw hit the floor,” he recalls. “The song was a standout for an anthem and it knocked me off my feet. We all felt this was going to be big. I knew that Tom’s sound was going to change the way guitars were being heard.”

However, the band did not instantly earmark it as a single.

“Heavens no!” Morello laughs. “We had a particular guy at the record company, Michael Goldstone, who was very sympathetic to what we were trying to say as a band. He was our ‘fifth Beatle’ for a while and very much high in our counsel. It was his suggestion that we release it as our first single.

"It didn’t come from the band. So it was a case of, ‘Okay, let’s get this straight: it’s the record company who want our first record to be the one that goes, “Fuck you! I won’t do what you tell me!” 16 times, followed by a “motherfucker”?’ Sold! That wouldn’t have been my choice, but that’s how it worked.”

Goldstone may have been adamant about its release, but he nevertheless felt the track was too long. He asked Rage to remove two sections, but the band were having none of it.

“Michael called me, and I was the go-between with the band,” Richardson says. “It went like this. Michael: ‘I want you to cut out those parts’. The band: ‘Tell him to fuck off’. Michael: ‘Tell them to fuck off’. Band: ‘Fuck you’. We all knew this song was a huge hit. It had so much power that the band and I were unwilling to let anybody change it.”

It drew even more potency by the time it was released on the album, in November 92. Rodney King’s police assailants had somehow been acquitted by a jury in court that April, a barely believable verdict that instantly triggered the LA riots. The whole affair did little to dispel the song’s claims of institutional racism in certain sections of American society.

Killing In The Name, unsurprisingly enough, was slapped with a radio ban across most US stations. The unedited video version was also censored on MTV.

It was instead left to Europe to carry the flag, where the song enjoyed substantial airplay (albeit in ‘clean’ form, apart from one priceless moment when Radio 1 jock Bruno Brookes unwittingly played the original version in full on his Top 40 run-down) and made No.2. in the UK in February 93.

Bullet In The Head and Bulls On Parade were bigger UK hits for Rage in the 90s, but Killing In The Name remains their signifier.

“Having a UK Christmas number one in 2009, after all that time was a thrill of a lifetime,” says Richardson. “It just shows how much power people have and what they can do when they work as a group.

"This band is like no other, what they stand for and what they’ve done. I don’t think anyone will be able to copy them. They changed the musical landscape forever.”

As frontman of The Moody Blues, Swindon-born vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Justin Hayward played a key role in reinventing the band’s sound and leading them to global success. In 2017 he looked back with Prog.

Justin Hayward has had a long and successful career since joining The Moody Blues in 1966. Through songs like Nights In White Satin, he’s established himself as one of the most erudite and copied composers of the last five decades.

But Hayward’s impact has gone beyond his tenure with the Moodies. The Swindon-born musician has also had an acclaimed solo career, as well as working with fellow Moodies member John Lodge on the album Blue Jays. And let’s not forget that prior to being recruited by The Moody Blues, a teenage Hayward had already signed a publishing deal with skiffle king Lonnie Donegan, and in 1965 he was hired by British pop star Marty Wilde to join his backing band. It was from there he made the jump to the Moodies. But let’s not forget when he became a member, the band were a fading R&B act. Together with fellow new recruit Lodge, he helped to turn things around and put The Moody Blues firmly on the path to becoming the icons they are today.

He also found wider fame through the hit single Forever Autumn on the original recording of The War Of The Worlds in 1978, and even spent time onstage in the touring production of the Jeff Wayne musical. Yet, despite all this high profile attention, Hayward has retained his privacy, and it’s something he’s strongly protected. All of this makes it surprising that he was the subject of TV show This Is Your Life in 1997. But what this did was accentuate his widespread appeal, proving to everyone that he’s well known in the mainstream, as well as being a pioneer in the progressive world with the Moodies, who’ve long been renowned for the way they helped to develop symphonic rock.

Yet despite his high profile, little is known about the real man. For instance, where did his love for music begin, and what made him want to become a musician in the first place? And how does he feel knowing, despite being eligible for inclusion since 1989, the Moodies have been constantly overlooked for the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame?

Was there a moment when you knew you wanted to be a musician?

I got my first guitar when I was 10, and I hustled a few kids at school to get a group together. I recall how much I loved all of us being in someone’s front room, trying to work out the chords to some songs. It probably included Rock Around The Clock. And then when I heard Buddy Holly for the first time, that brought everything into focus. I knew what I wanted to do.

When you were a child, were you a natural performer?

No, I was never like that. And I’m still not what you would call a performer. For me, it’s all about the songs, and they open the door. I’m part of constructing and presenting them, but I am always hiding behind these as well.

Who were your musical heroes growing up?

Elvis was the king. When he came along, I must have been eight or nine. But Buddy Holly was the one for me. I was lucky to get to America in 1968, less than 10 years after he died, and was able to visit places like Lubbock, Texas, where he was born. The Everly Brothers were also a massive influence, because they got me interested in vocal harmonies. I was so pleased to be able to spend some time with Phil Everly some years ago. That memory’s precious to me now that he’s gone.

Was there one record that changed your life?

It would have to be Love Me Do from The Beatles. This was when I was still living in Swindon, and I recall thinking that something very different had just happened. I do remember seeing Steve Race, a jazz pianist who seemed to be on every music programme at the time, appearing on a TV show and saying The Beatles would never last. I thought he was a deeply unpleasant man after that. You have to be very careful what you say about other musicians! That was a good lesson for me at the time.

When you joined The Moody Blues in 1966, did you think it would last?

I don’t think any of us did. We were all trying not to do a proper job. At first, we were really doing another band’s act. Because the music belonged to [departed guitarist/vocalist] Denny Laine, and I don’t think any of us had our hearts in it until we began to do our own songs. Once that happened, then things began to change. But until then, nobody thought the band could last long.

The Moodies have been hugely successful, but remained almost anonymous. Was that deliberate?

For us, the music has always been the star. None of us wanted to be personalities or celebrities. We’ve gone out of our way to avoid that sort of thing. We never had a press agent in our early days. Quite early on, we got a little burned by the press, so we stayed away from that side of things.

When did you realise how successful the band had become?

It look a long time for this to hit me. I think it was in 1973, when we played Madison Square Garden twice in one day. Between the shows, Ray Thomas and I went for a walk and we saw our name in 50ft high letters in the square, and we said to each other, “Perhaps we’ve made it!” We also bought a load of tickets off a scalper and gave them away. They had no idea who we were!

Do you ever find your mind drifting onstage when you’re doing a song you’ve done countless times before?

I do with the Moodies, because there’s time to do that. But when I’m doing a solo show, I never do it, I always stay in the moment, because the musicians I’m with are so good that I want to keep up with them. Of course, I love playing with the Moodies, but there’s a real joy for me in doing solo dates.

Does it bother you that The Moody Blues continue to be ignored by the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame?

Not at all. For me, it’s irrelevant. I know some of our American fans are upset about the situation, but for us it means nothing. This band doesn’t feel we need that sort of award to validate what we do. We’re too busy getting on with our lives and careers to care. If a couple of guys had died in the mid-70s, then we’d probably have been inducted into the Hall Of Fame. We’re guilty of being boring and staying alive though.

You have done projects away from the Moodies such as The War Of The Worlds album. Do you wish you’d done more of that type of project?

Yes, I do. I’ve done a few. Some have been successful, others haven’t. Forever Autumn from The War Of The Worlds was the big one for me, and I was lucky enough to do the stage show for four or five years as well.

What does Forever Autumn mean to you?

I feel blessed to have been the one chosen to do the original version. It has a poignancy to it, and any time I play it live, people really get into it. It has been a great gift for me.

What made you want to work with Jeff Wayne?

He sent me a demo of the song, and was certain I was the person he wanted to sing it. I played it a couple of times, but wasn’t sure it was right for me. But that day, there was a young lad at my house, who worked in Threshold Records, The Moody Blues record shop in Cobham. He came into the lounge while I was playing, and when it finished he said, “You ought to do that song. It’s perfect for you.” So that convinced me to try it. I wasn’t up to anything at the time, so went down to Advision Studios in Central London, met Jeff, and you know what the first thing he asked me was? “Are you the guy who sang Nights In White Satin?” Just to be sure he had the right person!

You mentioned Nights In White Satin: what do you think makes it such a classic?

I often ask myself why it’s so popular. Even after we’d recorded it, people were saying it was too slow and too long to be a hit single. So when it happened, I was taken by surprise as much as anyone! It was a song I wrote one night, sitting on my bed. I took it in the next day and played it to the other guys, and they were a bit nonplussed by it. Mike Pinder then told me to play it again, and added in a Mellotron part, and somehow it made everything work. But as to why it’s loved by so many… I haven’t a clue!

What is your all-time favourite Moodies song?

I like the things we did with Tony Visconti. Those are my favourites. And top of my list would be I Know You’re Out There Somewhere. Whenever we play it live the crowd sings the chorus, and it resonates with people.

How did you feel when you first heard Poor Man’s Moody Blues from Barclay James Harvest?

I thought it was tongue in cheek. But do you know, I can’t even remember what it sounds like now. Sorry, boys!

Do you regard the Moodies as being prog?

Well, we were around before that whole era began. But I get why people put us in that category, and why we appeal to a prog crowd. But I always thought we were more melodic and our style was different to bands like Yes or Genesis. After a while, the prog label slid off us, really. We probably betrayed it. But in a way, our more pop-oriented approach set the template for the way some of these bands streamlined their sound in the 80s.

You and John Lodge have worked so closely together for so long, not just in The Moody Blues but also the Blue Jays. Are you friends?

Well, we’re not the sort of people who spend time together away from the band, if that’s what you mean. But then that’s the case of all of us in the band. People often say that members of a band are like family, but that’s not true for me. I have my brother and sister, and don’t have the same relationship with John. I also think ‘friends’ is the wrong term… there probably isn’t a term that’s been invented yet to describe the way John and I get on. It’s a combination of brotherhood, competition and the way our personalities both clash and also mould together.

In the first few years I was in the Moodies, there was a lot of testosterone flying around. But then the dynamic altered, as some people rose and others sort of retreated. In the 70s, there was an obvious tension in the band that had to be released. In ’74, I was on the sidelines watching what was going on. Thankfully, nothing was said that couldn’t be unsaid. But a few years later this did happen, and Mike Pinder decided he had to leave as a result.

Can you ever see a reunion with Pinder and Ray Thomas?

No. Those guys haven’t played for a long time. You can’t just pull people out of retirement and put them on stage. I was the one who never wanted The Beatles to reform. I loved it as it had been, and knew it could never be the same again. If we did, it would be five really old guys, and all people would end up saying is, “They’re not as good as they were.” That would be the end of the band. Now, there’s a magic and mystery about the five of us, but this would be destroyed by the reality if we ever did get back together.

How much of a shock was it being on This Is Your Life?

I was at a promotional event for a new recording. Then Michael Aspel, the presenter, came onstage with The Big Red Book, and announced, “Hi Justin, this is your life,” and I responded, “Very funny!” I thought it was a joke, and he was actually there to do someone really famous. But it turned out to be me. Then I was locked away for two hours. I was assigned a production girl and a security guy who told me nothing. No matter what questions I asked. In the end, I just said to the girl, “Just tell me, is my wife central to this?” And she replied, “Oh, yeah, yeah.”

Were you at all concerned who might turn up on the programme?

Well, there were some I wanted to be there, and others I really did not want around. But [wife] Ann Marie had been with me throughout my career, so she understood there might have been certain people I have met along the way who it wouldn’t have been appropriate to have there.

I have no clue how she managed to keep it a secret from me for so long. She knew three months earlier, but there were code words between her and the production company to ensure even if I was at home when they phoned I had no idea what was happening. She was captain of the golf club at the time, so for instance if I answered the phone when they called, they’d say it was the club and ask to talk to the captain.

You’re very private, so how did you deal with being on such a major TV show which opened up your life to scrutiny?

Oh, it wasn’t a problem for me. I was lucky that my mother was still alive, so delighted she was there. And I had a lot of friends around, like Kenny Swain the footballer and Marty Wilde, who I worked with just before joining the Moodies. So that was great. And the best thing was, they gave us a magnificent party afterwards.

Do you have hobbies outside music?

Not really. I try to keep fit. I’ve had horses for quite a few years. I always enjoy riding. I did it as a kid, and then got back into doing it in my 20s. But music is my whole life. If I’m off the road even for a few weeks, then I get edgy.

Do you constantly write, even when you’re on tour?

I can only write when inspiration strikes. I also have to have a project I’m working towards, in order to get into the right frame of mind to write songs. I can be very lazy, given the chance.

Have the Moodies written and recorded material which was never released, or have you always put out everything?

Well, when the box set [Timeless Flight] was released in 2013, I thought there were a few songs of which only I have copies. But they managed to find those. They also found things I had completely forgotten about. I listened to them when Timeless Flight came out and you know what? I can’t remember doing those!

In our early days with Decca, the company were very tight on tapes. So, if something was left over from a recording session, it would usually be wiped or recorded over. A lot of things got lost that way.

Do you look back with pride when the band reach a landmark like the 50th anniversary of Days of Future Passed?

I’m not one to celebrate anniversaries. I’ve got so used to seeing such occasions being used as no more than a promotional tool. While I understand the commercial value of these moments, it all gets a bit predictable, and takes away from the genuine pride you might personally have in the event.

What ambitions do you have left to fulfil?

Only to continue doing what we do. To play live and record new music for as long as we can. I’m fully aware that time is running out for me at my age. So many great musicians have gone in the last few years…

You must have seen musicians who were friends die in recent times. Has this made you think about your own mortality?

Not friends, more acquaintances. As for the way it has impacted on me, the only thing I can tell you is that when you get to the age of 71, then you will appreciate what I feel. Until then, no words I use can put people into my mind.

A lot of bands and musicians have done autobiographies. Is that something which appeals to you too?

A Moody Blues book would only be interesting if it was warts ’n’ all. I would be comfortable doing that, because it would make people sit up and take notice. But I can’t see the others agreeing to that. As for a Justin Hayward book… well, I’d rather let my music speak.

People would be amazed that there might be ‘warts ’n’ all’ stories connected to the Moodies. Do you actually have some that might shock everyone?

I’m not gonna tell you, ha! Maybe one day you’ll find out if we ever do this book. We avoided a lot of the controversies which blighted other bands. But we were around in the 1960s, when so much hedonism happened, so you would expect us to have had our moments of indulgence.

Might there be a Moody Blues musical one day?

It has been proposed, and there have been storylines suggested. But they’ve not been right. It’s an easy option, but not necessarily one we’d want to pursue.

How would you describe yourself as a person?

I don’t know. That’s a question for other people to answer. I never think of my attributes as a person. All I can tell you is that I’m committed to my music, and want to be as good as I can possibly be as a songwriter and musician. I’m always looking for ways to improve. Anything else I might or might not be as a human being I will leave for other to judge.

Mostly renowned in prog circles for being firstly a member of The Nice and then ELP, Keith Emerson built a reputation as a musical pioneer. Moreover, he was one of the most colourful characters in rock – whether stabbing his keyboard with knives or playing while suspended in mid‑air, he was always the centre of attention. In 2015, the year before his death, he spoke to Prog about his life and times.

ELP made their proper live debut at the Isle Of Wight Festival in 1970. What do you recall of that concert?

Well, I know that nobody expected much from us. We’d done a warm-up gig in Plymouth. But even so, this was a leap into the unknown. We got a decent enough reaction, so much so that the camera crew who had initially ignored us suddenly wanted footage of the band. A lot of that still hasn’t been seen.

There’s a great story that you wanted Jimi Hendrix to join ELP. Is that true?

Ha, no. This was a myth invented by the music press when we started to become well-known. They thought the idea of a band called HELP was funny. I had toured previously with Hendrix, which might be where that story originated. But by then I’d had enough of working with guitarists!

Talking of Hendrix, you and he did have one thing in common: Lemmy was a roadie for each of you. He played an important part in your developing knife act on the keyboards, didn’t he?

Ah, Lemmy, yes. I had already begun to stab knives into my keys, which I found helped the sustain. But these were small kitchen knives. So one day Lemmy came to me and said, “If you’re gonna put knives into the keyboards, then you’ve got to do it properly.” And he gave me some German army ones he had, which were much bigger. They certainly got noticed a lot more!

Greg Lake wasn’t the first choice for bassist in ELP, was he?

No. I wanted Chris Squire but he was too busy at the time. Carl Palmer always told me I should have gone for John Wetton…

Unlike some of your keyboard contemporaries, you never went to music college, did you?

No, I would say I’m self-taught. But I had three piano teachers when my family lived in Sussex. I had lessons from the age of three. Carol Smith, who was one of those teachers, once said that I was a very quiet boy and she couldn’t understand how I became a raving lunatic!

You were a quiet child?

I was very studious at school and really kept in the background. I never knew what to do with a woman until I was 22 – after which there was no holding me back! But I was a very serious child. I used to walk around with Beethoven sonatas under my arm. However, I was very good at avoiding being beaten up by the bullies. That was because I could also play Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard songs. So, they thought I was kind of cool and left me alone.

Would you regard yourself as an artist or an entertainer?

First and foremost, I’m a composer. When I think of entertainers in music, I think of people like David Bowie, who created characters onstage. I was nothing like that. If I had to choose between artistry and entertainment, then I would have to say that I am more of the former. But I would like to be known as a composer before anything else.

Yet you did become a showman, and that has certainly helped to define your career.

Well, when you’re stuck behind a keyboard then you have to do something to attract attention to yourself.

Like your flying piano?

Yes! The fact that I could play while suspended in mid‑air made me the centre of attention. And I have to say that I loved it. That was such an exhilarating experience. Dave Brubeck, the pianist who is one of my heroes, was keen to know how it was done. I met him a lot of times, but when he finally asked me about the flying piano, he was close to 90. I said to Dave that he shouldn’t even think about attempting it at his age!

It was a dangerous thing for you to do at the time, wasn’t it?

Oh yes, but I’ve always loved to challenge myself by doing things that others would call ‘dangerous’. And when you’re up in the air sitting at a piano, it really is more exciting than frightening.

Do you ever think about dying?

Not really. But when a good friend dies, as happened recently with Chris Squire, then it does hit home and make you appreciate that you have to ensure every second in your life counts.

Did you ever consider giving up playing the keyboard and taking up the guitar?

Actually, I did go through that stage. At one point I thought I would stand a far better chance of making it in a band. My father, who was an amateur musician himself, got me a guitar and I spent eight months trying to become proficient at playing the instrument. But it was hopeless. I was never gonna rival Jeff Beck!

Do you have a talent for singing?

You are joking. My girlfriend recently persuaded me, against my better judgement, to go to a karaoke club with her in California. It was a disaster. I looked at the list of songs they had on their list, and there was Karn Evil. So, I thought I’d try to do that. When the lyrics scrolled up in front me, they’d been changed. There were a couple of lines the club thought would be offensive, so they’d been cut. Anyway, I managed to bumble through the song.

As I left the stage, some guy who obviously didn’t recognise me said, “You just ruined a classic song.” But another chap replied, “He’s allowed. He wrote the fucking song!” It made me appreciate what Greg Lake had to do for all those years.

It’s often been said that the three of you in ELP never got on.

I regard the three of us as having a similar relationship to the one Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend had in The Who. There was antagonism between us. But when you’ve spent 10 weeks out on the road together, as we often did, then you got sick of the sight of one another. That wasn’t just peculiar to ELP – it applies to any band.

But did this affect the band’s live performances at all?

Never. I can honestly say we were thoroughly professional. Once we stepped out on that stage, all thoughts of problems between us disappeared. All we wanted to do was do our best for the fans.

Your first movie soundtrack was Inferno, a Dario Argento horror film. Did you particularly want to get into horror?

What happened was that after ELP had done Works Volume 1, I told our manager, Stewart Young, that I really wanted to do a film soundtrack. I didn’t really care what genre it was in – I just wanted the new challenge. Now at the time, Stewart had been talking to Dario Argento, and he suggested I do his next movie. Argento was into the idea so I flew to Rome to meet him.

How did you get on with him?

He was a little strange, but maybe that was to be expected, given the films he’d previously made. He gave me the script and it was tough to follow. It seemed to be about witches and a house within a house. But there was one scene that hooked me. It has a guy who hates cats, and he piles a load of cats into a bag and takes them to the river, to be drowned. As he pokes them into the river with his stick, a huge epidemic of rats spill out and devour him. I thought that was great!

What was your reaction to seeing the final film?

I saw it at the premiere in Rome and there were so many people screaming in terror and walking out, it was brilliant. These days Inferno wouldn’t even raise a whimper, but back then, in 1980, it caused a sensation. I loved being a part of it, and it gave me the impetus to do a lot more soundtracks.

You recently made a live comeback in the UK, playing at The Barbican. But you’ve since been critical of the behaviour of some of the BBC Concert Orchestra who played with you. What went wrong?

Frank Zappa, whom I got to know quite well, once asked me what was wrong with British orchestras. I told him it was bureaucracy. Most of the BBC Concert Orchestra behaved impeccably, but there were two or three members who spoiled it for everyone by obviously putting earplugs in, and also making a show of walking offstage at one juncture. To be frank, I thought their behaviour was disgraceful.

Hasn’t there always been an ongoing problem between orchestras and rock musicians?

In the past, there has been, yes. But for the most part, it has disappeared. I’ve performed with world-class orchestras everywhere and there’s never a problem. But at The Barbican, there were difficulties. I became a nervous wreck during the rehearsals. They insisted we had to have a perspex screen erected around the Moog synthesiser, when the whole concert was to celebrate the Moog!

Has this put you off working with orchestras in the future?

Not at all. As I’ve already said, I’ve successfully worked with a lot of different orchestras all over the world, and I hope to carry on composing music that will be played by orchestras in the future. But what it does mean is that if the BBC Concert Orchestra is to work again with a rock band, then some of the members will have to change their attitude.

You mentioned that you were a nervous wreck after rehearsing for The Barbican show, which brings up the question of whether you still get nervous in general before playing live?

Oh yes. I’m still nervous every time I go onstage. But in my opinion, having a little stage fright is a good thing. It keeps you on your toes. If you don’t have that nervousness then you could easily become overconfident and lose your edge. So I would never want to lose that feeling in the pit of my stomach.

There has been talk of you putting together a documentary on your life. Is that still happening?

Oh yes. It’s a work in progress. I’m gonna call it Pictures Of An Exhibitionist. A lot of interviews have already been done for this and I’ve also found quite a bit of unseen footage which should make it very interesting. Right now I have no clue when it will be finished. The idea is for it to be a complete look back at my life, and it will hopefully give people an insight into what makes Keith Emerson the man he has become.

Some people would say that a lot of your music appeals solely to the male psyche, and not to the female one.

In the ELP days, what I composed was definitely music men liked, as opposed to women. It was Greg who came up with the songs that brought in the females. But that had nothing to do with any sexual preferences. It was simply an artistic expression. I think in more recent times, women have been attracted a lot more to my music than previously.

Did it sit comfortably with you being called a prog rock musician in the ELP days?

When I was in The Nice and then at the start of ELP, nobody had ever heard of progressive music. What we did had some jazz in it, a little blues and also had the classical references. It was only later on that people began to call our music ‘progressive’, and that’s when the genre began to grow. With hindsight, I’d say that ELP were the pioneers of progressive rock, though.

You were part of a very short-lived supergroup called The Best in 1990. What was that all about?

That happened because I used to jam a lot in California with Jeff Baxter of Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers – well, he prefers to call himself Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter. We were good friends, and he called me up one day with the idea of putting together a band with him on guitar, myself, Joe Walsh of the Eagles on guitar, John Entwistle of The Who on bass and Simon Phillips on drums. Actually, Zak Starkey of The Who was the original choice of drummer, but he wasn’t available.

The band name was a little arrogant, wasn’t it?

I agree, but Jeff insisted on it. I’d have been more comfortable with a different name. However, I was outvoted by the other guys. Anyway, the idea was that the live set we did would feature songs from our respective careers.

But the band didn’t last long. What went wrong?

Nothing actually went wrong, but we found that our schedules were too busy to get the band off the ground. We did one show in Yokohama, Japan, and that went really well. It’s a shame we couldn’t have taken it further.

You’ve written your autobiography, which is also called Pictures Of An Exhibitionist, but do you have any ambitions to write other books?

Actually, I would love to write children’s stories. I have four grandchildren and they’re just so funny. They’re great, and I love reading to them. In fact, I’ve come up with some stories for them which I’ve written myself, but so far are unpublished. However, I am pursuing possible ways of getting these into the public domain.

What are they about?

I used to have a cockatoo that would sit on my piano and it was a great little character. It would react differently depending on what music I was playing at the time. So, I wrote some stories based around that bird. I think we can all sometimes forget how amazing children are, and I love having them around to remind me about how fantastic it is to be a child.

Talking of childhood, what is your earliest memory?

Well, I was born during the Second World War and I recall the sound of bombs dropping.

But you were less than one year old when the war ended.

It may seem strange, but I definitely do remember that happening. I also recall at the age of two going round all the bomb sites in the area looking for bits of shrapnel. At the time, they were as valued as marbles and conkers to a small boy. If you had cool pieces of shrapnel, you could swap them for almost anything.

We’re only two years off the 50th anniversary of The Nice. Can you see any sort of band reunion to mark the occasion?

Well, Brian [Davison, drums] died a few years ago [2008], and without him, how could we have any sort of meaningful reunion? It only leaves myself and Lee Jackson [bass], and both of us agree that there’s no chance of us doing anything under the name of The Nice. It would have to have been the three of us, but now that Brian’s no longer with us, The Nice should remain in the past.

Are you and Lee Jackson still on good terms today?

Absolutely. We talk all the time. Lee is my oldest friend from the music business, and one of my closest friends as well.

How about an ELP reformation for one final time. Could that happen?

I don’t know. I’m not thinking about that. I would rather look ahead to fresh challenges than think back and try to recreate what I’ve done before. I’m not definitely ruling it out because as long as the three of us are still alive, it’s always a possibility. But it’s certainly not on my radar right now.

Unfortunately, Greg Lake has been seriously ill. Have you been in touch with him at all?

I have reached out to Greg and tried to talk to him but so far I haven’t been able to do so. But that doesn’t matter. All I hope is that he’s going to be OK.

Do you have a list of things you still want to do?

Not really. But I do have certain things I’d love to do. For instance, it’s an ambition of mine to sit in the cockpit of a Spitfire. That would just be amazing. The closest I’ve got is sitting inside a Northrop P-61 Black Widow, which was an American plane from the Second World War. That was an experience, but nothing could compare to having the chance to be in a Spitfire!

What about on the musical side: are there things you still want to achieve in your career?

I am definitely still very active, and want to carry on composing music for orchestras as long as I can. That’s where my heart lies now.

London-based alt singer-songwriter A.A. Williams has produced some of the most hauntingly melancholic but beautiful sounds to have hit the UK underground in recent years. Her own tastes range from clattering industrial to 90s alternative rock to OTT horror metal - and everything in between. With that in mind, we asked her to make us a playlist and tell us all about it.

“My parents brought me the VHS of QUEEN Live At Wembley when I was six or seven and obviously it’s mindblowingly good. Who Wants To Live Forever is heart-wrenchingly beautiful. They also brought me the piano book for that release, it was a two-pronged attack: ‘You can enjoy this, but you’ve also got to learn it.’ It was my introduction to really good songwriting and I’ve internalised that.

“Before GARBAGE’s I Think I’m Paranoid, I’d never heard a woman in heavy music. I didn’t have many mates who weren’t into pop, so liking heavier music made me feel like an outsider at times. I went to see Garbage for my first concert and not only was I floored by Shirley Manson being an absolute goddess - confident, brash and ballsy, walking around the stage like she owned everything - but there were kids like me in that audience and I was like, ‘Maybe I’m not doing this on my own after all.’

“PLACEBO’s Without You I’m Nothing is one of the best songs of all time. I loved it so much I had to cover it. One of the things I loved about them was that they did proper B-sides, not just remixes. So I’d go and buy all the singles, it made me feel like a proper fan. I remember a version that had David Bowie on. It was absolutely incredible! I was 14, 15 when this came out and I don’t remember another song feeling so resonant in the sense of the angst, anguish and longing."

“A friend of mine introduced me to CULT OF LUNA and Amenra around 2012. I had no idea post metal was a thing, that these textures existed. Hearing Finland, I was working away a lot that year, and I was on tour in America with another artist. I basically spent the whole trip looking out the window watching landscapes shift and change, listening to Somewhere Along The Highway. Managing to get Johannes [Persson, vocals] and Fredrik [Kihlberg, guitars] on my first record made it feel like I’d come full circle.

“I didn’t know music could be sexy until I heard Dragula by ROB ZOMBIE. As a kid, you think rock music is full of angry blokes in baggy trousers, but actually it’s so, so hot. It was in The Matrix – or on the soundtrack at least – and I ate it up. You could attribute my entire musical personality to that movie and soundtrack, at least as a starting point.

“I could pick pretty much any song by NINE INCH NAILS. But Right Where It Belongs was the first time I cried to a song on first listen. I have to be in a certain frame of mind to listen to some songs, I can’t just have something on in the background. I can’t actually remember how I first heard it, but it just got me – maybe it was the wrong time, wrong place. It’s this little piano-vocal thing, but it’s beautiful and I love the sentiment behind it.

“It’s not always easy to understand how you feel about something, and it’s certainly not easy to vocalise that. So when you hear a song like Exit Music (For A Film) that resonates with you, that links with something inside of you, it’s almost like talking to someone about that thing. It’s like having a friend who is listening to those words. RADIOHEAD have always been that for me. As a teenager and a kid, I’d never even try to say some things out loud, so when I found songs that could do that for me, because I was a bit shy or didn’t have the bravery to talk to somebody, it was a huge help.

“I did a lot of classical music when I was a kid. I listened to a lot of alternative rock and metal, but I didn’t actually play any. Neon Ballroom by SILVERCHAIR came out in 1999 and it blew my tiny mind. I listened to the opening track, Emotion Sickness, and it verified both parts of me because I’d not realised those things could cross over. There’s strings, pianos, all this beautiful stuff, and the arrangements are absolutely killer. It was a seminal discovery.

“I really loved PORTISHEAD early on and then kind of forgot about them. Machine Gun came out when I was in my 20s and the jarring juxtaposition of jagged, disgusting drums and beautiful, raw, delicate vocals just did it for me. It was beautiful, a real masterclass in minimalism. It’s brilliant! I saw them live at Glastonbury and the whole set was incredible: understated, but in front of thousands of people. They created an intimate environment in the dark in front of 10,000 people or whatever. It’s a reminder you need beautiful and disgusting things to coexist.

“Is Rat Wars not the best album of all time? I absolutely adore HEALTH; Sicko has such a good groove to it and ever since the album came out that song has been on my pre-show playlist. Every night before a gig, I put it on because I want to dance around and have a good time. Its nice to have music that centres you. I feel weird now if I play a gig and there’s some other guy playing music before I go on. I don’t know what to do! So I have a playlist that gets me from doors to close every night.”

New A.A. Williams album Solstice is out now via Reigning Phoenix Music. She plays ArcTanGent in August

Every saga has an entry point, and Rush are no exception.

Before Geddy Lee was even a glimmer in Alex Lifeson’s eye, Rush featured a bassist by the name of Jeff Jones, one of their founding members. From the start, Jones was a different breed, namely because he was the only member of the band who wasn't a natural-born Canadian.

"My father was a jazz musician," Jones says. "So, music was always around me from a young age. I took up the flute first and then piano. The bass came later. I remember that Oscar Peterson used to come to our house for dinner on Sundays when we lived in Chicago. And we ended up in Toronto because my pop was working with Oscar a lot, and Oscar was in Toronto at the time.

"So, my pop was always crossing the border for work. My dad got tired of driving his gull-wing Mercedes 100 miles per hour for five hours back and forth, so my parents talked about it; we left Chicago, and off to Toronto we went."

Once on Canadian soil, music was integral for the lonely Jones early on. But not long after arriving in Toronto aged 13, he met aspiring guitarist Alex Lifeson. For two years, the duo soaked up the sounds of the Toronto music scene. But Jones hadn't chosen his instrument, and Lifeson was far from the virtuoso he would become.

"It's funny because the bass wasn't on my radar initially," Jones explains. "Of course, my father knew plenty of people who played bass, and they were around, so I was aware of it. But aside from the flute and the piano, there wasn't anything else. But then I remember being given a baritone ukulele for Christmas in 1967, and that, believe it or not, spurred on my eventual love for the bass.

"I started listening to songs on the radio and copying them with the baritone ukulele; I'd pick out the bass parts and copy them. So, it was a natural progression for me to pick up the bass from there. And once I did, I took to it almost immediately."

Lifeson and Jones got to talking, and that chatter led to jamming. But with no clear direction and no drummer, Lifeson would play rover, moving through several garage bands in search of a distinctive sound.

"I think the first time we played together as more than just messing around together was in Alex's living room," Jones says. "Now, Alex had been in a few local bands before, so he was no stranger to jamming. So, we had a couple of local guys there, and one of them had a tambourine. So, Alex told them he could play a little guitar and that I could play a little bass. Well, the guy with the tambourine turned out to be John Rutsey – who Alex knew from another band – and that's how the three of us came together for the first time."

"I remember that we played [The Beatles'] You've Got to Hide Your Love Away that day," Jones recalled. "And after that, we kept in touch. I'm not sure who asked John to join – probably Alex – and I can't remember who named the band Rush – I think it was John, or maybe his brother – but I can say that it wasn't formal or official. We needed a quick name before our first gig, we went with it, and it stuck. We were so young, and that meant everything was fly by the seat of our pants and fluid."

From that initial jam session, things escalated quickly for Lifeson, Rutsey, and Jones after the trio christened themselves "Rush" in early January of 1968. Playing anywhere that would have them, Rush mostly covered blues standards, and psych-rock, a far cry from the prog-rock ecstasy to come.

"We got right into it and became fast friends," says Jones. "John rounded out the lineup and allowed us to play as a band. We played a lot of Cream and old blues cuts. For a high school band – which is what we thought of ourselves – playing White Room seemed crazy, but there we were playing it at high school parties on the weekend. [Laughs]."

"We were a stark contrast to the other main band in our high school, which was this R&B type band," Jones continues. "But we crushed those guys; we felt like being a trio like Cream was the way to go about it. But the funniest thing that I remember is us getting kicked out of a battle of the band's competition called the Canadian National Exhibition. We got kicked out because we broke the only rule: we played past the allowed volume, so we were the early version of Spinal Tap, turning it to 11. [Laughs]. But I will tell you this, if we didn't get kicked out, we would have won that competition."

Doused in primitive feedback, this early version of Rush looked nothing like an eventual super titan of rock. And had Jones hung around, things might have continued that way. But by the summer of 1968, Jones was reportedly having trouble making practices and gigs. What's more, right under Lifeson’s nose, was a kid from Ontario named Geddy Lee.

"It's really funny when I see stories about Alex and me not getting along," scoffs Jones. "We never had an issue. But you have to remember; we were kids, man. We played parties and practiced every Saturday in Alex's mom's basement. She was like the original band mom; she was fantastic. But things between Alex and me were always cool. And I know the story that goes something like I didn't show up to a [battle of the bands] gig because I wanted to go to a party, and Alex kicked me out of Rush. I'm sure everyone has heard it, and it's pretty much the way I'm remembered within Rush's history. But it's not true."

"The truth is we played the battle of the bands, and I was there," Jones continues. "We played a few shows at the Community Center, a bunch of basement shows, and we played local coffee shops. As far as I remember, I was always there. So, the part that history always gets wrong – and this is important - is that we were kids. So, what happened was it got to a point where I had to take a long bus ride to get to Alex's house; it was taking me hours round trip.

"So, I just told Alex, 'Hey, this guy Geddy that you've been hanging around with plays bass. He lives right around the corner. Why don't you ask him to join?' And I guess Alex took that as me leaving, and that was it. Next thing I knew, Geddy was in Rush. There was never any formal conversation beyond that; we just drifted apart."

More than half a century after Jones vacated his position as Rush's bassist, history tells a story that includes Geddy Lee up front until the end for Rush. And while it’s hard not to wonder what Rush might have sounded like had Jones stayed on, he doesn't seem to care for second-guessing his choice.

"I don't think about it too much," Jones explains. "We were so young. We didn't even have a record deal. We never made an album or even got to record anything. And had I stayed on, we would have sounded nothing like Rush did with Geddy. And that's not a bad thing; it's just a fact. I couldn't hit those notes. [Laughs.] With me, in many ways, Rush wouldn't have been Rush.

"But the funny thing is, our trajectories were so odd. As soon as I left Rush, I joined Ocean at 17 years old, toured the world, and then had a big hit with Put Your Hand in the Hand. But I learned early on how badly record companies can screw you. And I had to come back to earth, and by 21, I felt washed up. But eventually, I joined Red Rider, and things were going well for me again."

"People ask me if Alex and I stayed friends, and no, we didn't," Jones admits. "There was no animosity; I just left town. I was off touring and playing shows while they were still playing high schools, and we lost touch. Honestly, I didn't see Alex again until sometime around 1983, after I was coming down with Red Rider, and Rush was now huge. Neil Peart had asked us to open for them because they were playing a run of shows in Toronto, Quebec, and Buffalo, and Neil thought it would be cool to have us there.

"So, during that span of about 12 shows, I finally got to see Alex again and get to know him again. And more interestingly, I finally got to know Geddy and Neil. Because Rush was a different band than it was 15 years before when we were kids, it was this full-circle moment, and there was no animosity. There never was, and there still isn't."

After those dates with Rush in 1983, Jones and Lifeson went their separate ways. Jones would leave Red Rider in the mid-80s – their 1981 hit Lunatic Fringe remains a radio staple – and eventually formed Infidels and the Carpet Frogs. More recently, he’s toured and recorded with former Red Rider alumni Tom Cochrane, and anchors his own Jeff Jones trio.

Fate always seems to loom large in the music business, and it sure as hell dealt Rush a winning hand when it dropped Geddy Lee in Alex Lifeson’s. Jeff Jones, meanwhile, remains a classic case of what might have been, had he kept making those long bus rides across town to Alex Lifeson's mother's house.

Heart’s Ann Wilson and Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale are two of the most iconic musicians of their respective generations. In 2022, as part of Classic Rock’s 300th issue celebrations, we got the pair together for an exclusive interview to talk about siblings, sobriety and covering Stairway To Heaven in front of Led Zeppelin themselves.

Lzzy Hale is smiling from ear to ear, looking like she’s 15 again. It’s understandable; the Halestorm singer-guitarist has just met her idol, Heart vocalist Ann Wilson, for the first time.

We’re in The Smoakstack, one of the many studios that has transformed Nashville neighborhood Berryhill into the next Music Row. Wilson is here recording a new solo album, and from the control room you can hear snippets of a playback with her unmistakable powerhouse voice.

For Classic Rock’s interview, the studio has set up what looks like a little staging set – a 1950s red formica table and chairs, with candles and flowers. As the two women settle into conversation, there are many knowing nods and bursts of shared laughter. By the end of the allotted hour it feels like a new friendship has been forged. And although age-wise they’re separated by a few decades, they’re part of a continuum of remarkable artists who have continued to overturn outdated notions about rock music. More than that, to use Wilson’s phrase, they’ve both answered “a calling”.

You’re both in bands with your siblings. What’s the best and worst thing about that?

Ann: For me the best part was and is always that we have a shorthand. We know what each other is feeling without having to say it. I can look across the stage and if she’s [sister Nancy]freaking out I can go over and give her some vibe. Or vice versa

Being women coming up through a business through the decades in a male-dominated industry – not so much any more – that was a real strong means of support. The dark side would be that you were kids together and you know how to push each other’s buttons [laughs]. And so things can get real icy. That’s hard when you’re trying to do a tour.

Lzzy: My little brother [Arejay Hale] is my drummer. We’ve been doing this since 1997, when we were teenagers. And everything we’ve been through together since then, it was always him and me against the world. We had been having trouble finding other members, and it was just a rotating door of kids in and out. I remember saying: “Bro, are we crazy for even doing this?”

Ann: [Laughing] We said the same. But you’re driven. It’s a calling.

Lzzy: He said: “Yeah, we’re crazy, but… what else are we going to do?”

Ann: It’s an interesting dichotomy. Sometimes it’s the best thing in the world, and sometimes you’re just like, I’m a grown up, I don’t want to be in this family.

Ann, you came into 1998 not with Heart but with The Lovemongers. Then, while Nancy took a break, the Ann Wilson Band. How did that shape the next chapters of your musical life?

Ann: We had come through the eighties and early nineties, which was Heart’s most commercially successful time. It was the MTV era, where you’d spend half a million bucks to make a video that would sell the record. It was an incredibly traumatic, stressful time. So by 1998 I’d gone back to Seattle, I had two kids, ages seven and newborn, and I felt like: “God, I’m just going to do whatever I want. I don’t have to play Magic Man any more” [laughs]. It was a reaction time. I totally shed the skin of Ann Wilson in Heart, and just went: “Fuck this, this is so not me.” Also, I was offended by the way Nancy was being presented. Sure, she agreed to it, but it was offensive to me that she was always trotted out front as this little cheesecake thing. I just felt really alienated. So I stepped out of it.

For you, Lzzy, around 1998 you had discovered Heart through their live album The Road Home. You’ve said it “set the tone” for what you do.

Lzzy: [To Ann] First and foremost, I would not be the singer that I am without you and without what you’ve done. There’s an otherworldly thing inside you. There’s a way that you flip yourself inside out and reveal your soul to someone. You’re queen of that.

Back then, I was just digging for anything that I could grasp on to where I could see myself. My dad introduced me to Deep Purple, Ronnie James Dio and Van Halen. My mom, God bless her, said: “Well, if you’re going to be into all of that stuff, you’ve got to know that women can do this too!” So she got me a bunch of CDs and one of them was The Road Home. I wore it out. In the Pennsylvania scene, everybody wanted to be Jewel; everything was all very soft and there was no passion and anger. [To Ann] So when I heard you sing on that live album, it made that bridge to what I wanted to sound like and who I wanted to be just a little bit shorter. It really helped me figure out my stage presence as well. Really, you put me through rock’n’roll school [laughs].

Ann: Oh, I’m honoured.

Lzzy: I also want to thank you for not giving up when it got tough, because I know the roller-coaster ride of what you went through. I’ve gone through my own version of it, and it doesn’t even touch what you guys had to do – the doors you had to kick down and the glass that you had to break to be here. The fact that I’m listening to you talk about making sure that Heart still has that edge and breaking barriers, and you still have that mentality? That’s life goals for me.

Ann: It goes back to the whole thing of it being a calling, like you said about your brother: “We may be crazy, but what else are we going to do?” People ask me: “Are you going to retire soon?” And I go: “No, because I don’t know what that means.” I’ve been doing this since I was fourteen.

You’re both very powerful singers. Can you talk about how you connect with an audience?

Ann: I don’t think about it when I’m up there. I use in-ear monitors, because they give the feeling of being in a studio. You can hear every little breath and really control the way you’re relating with an audience. The powerful stuff, that’s more physical. You want to throw your voice out to the back of the place, up to where people are breaking bottles in the hall [laughs].

Lzzy: As far as the dynamic with the audience, I think the bigness is intimacy. It’s amazing how you can look at somebody eight to ten rows in and they’ll know you’re looking at them. I found the reach from the front to back in an arena by picking people out and having that individual relationship, because there’ll be a weird ripple effect.

Speaking of that connection, I’ve watched Heart’s performance of Stairway To Heaven at the Kennedy Center in 2012 hundreds of times, and it always makes me cry. What stands out most for you about playing to Led Zeppelin and that star-studded audience?

Ann: The five minutes before we went out on stage, Nancy and I looked at each other and we almost did a psych-out. We went: “Fuck, do you know who’s out there?” At that moment, I had to use a meditation technique where you envision that you have a bowl of water and you’re going to walk across the room and not spill any. Just focus on something simple and positive, which we both did.

Ann, you got sober in 2009. Lzzy, you’ve started going to therapy in the past few years. Can you both talk about how you stay grounded in such a stressful business?

Lzzy: There’s a roller-coaster ride that goes with me. I have extreme highs and extreme lows. As many people do. It’s not just because of what I do for a career. We’re all in this together. I think it’s important to recognise those things, and when you need to ask for help. Understanding that you’re the one in charge of your own destiny. Therapy has helped. Music has helped. During the last two years I’ve had the opportunity to look in the mirror and get to know the person. Not just Lzzy Hale who’s on stage, but the Elizabeth Hale in her pajamas on the couch. I haven’t seen her in a while [laughs].

Ann: [Laughs] Wasn’t that something? It’s like: “Whoa, I guess I’ve got to feed her.”

Lzzy: Rediscovering the importance of why we’re in this. That’s important. Like we were talking about earlier. The calling that you’re meant to be doing this. This magic, this power, this intangible thing cannot be filled with anything else. That happy place that we’re in on stage. So it’s easy to get into vices. It’s easy to get into anything that will take you on a mini-vacation away from those feelings. It’s important to realise that those things can’t replace the happiness you can build inside of yourself.

Ann: For me, I just came to the end of an era in my life of just blowing it all the time. Going on stage feeling hungover because last night the band partied and I joined in. All that kind of stuff. I just came to the end of it. Especially because I had kids. I wasn’t going to be high around the babies.

I think it’s helped in some ways to be not partying all the time. But – and this is going to sound really old-fashioned Hemingway era – in other ways, to alter your senses is a way to let go of the mundane. Especially when you’re writing or something like that. But I don’t want to live by that either.

Another unexpected recent development has been the return of vinyl.

Lzzy: I think the act of putting on an album is profound. Instead of just putting songs on a playlist. Listening to the album as the artist meant it to be is one of the most enjoyable pastimes for me.

Ann: And you don’t have to be a golden-years person to feel and hear the difference – it’s more present, warm, more thrilling.

What in rock music is exciting to you right now?

Lzzy: There’s a lot of danger going on right now. A lot of young artists risking things, who don’t feel the need to grovel at the feet of a label any more. That’s exciting. Artists are taking the reins. I’m talking about middle school to high school age. They don’t care what anybody thinks about them. That’s exciting. Also, I feel like there’s a resurgence of appreciation for guitar-driven rock again.

Any final words?

Ann: Thank you for the good conversation.

Lzzy: Absolutely. And Ann, I can’t thank you enough for everything that you’ve meant to me over the course of my career and my life. You enabled me to be my best self and to follow something I thought was absolutely impossible, and it proved to me that nothing is impossible.

Ann: You’re welcome. Wow. I don’t know what else to say [laughs]. It’s so big and far-reaching. I’m just really glad to hear that.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 300 (April 2021)

"Have I considered leaving the US?" says Jon Spencer. "No! I'm engaged. I'm keeping up on the news, attending protests. I play rock'n'roll, one of the genuine, true American art forms – that and jazz. And as someone who has dedicated their life to this most American of art forms, I’ll be fucking damned if these pricks can plate it with gold and call it something else.

"I am hopeful that a change is gonna come, if I can quote a better songwriter than me."

Now on his fifth decade playing “this most American of art forms,” Jon Spencer is still a true believer in the power of music to effect personal and political change.

His new album, Songs of Personal Loss and Protest, is a response to the MAGA ‘pricks’ and ‘half-wits’ and their tech and media allies laying waste to his country. It also rages against the dying of the light, documenting the ravages of time on his friends and family.

It’s therefore a heavy record full of deeply “personal shit” intertwined with white-knuckled political fury. For Spencer, playing rock’n’roll is both an act of defiance against “fascism” and an opportunity to renew himself.

Songs of Personal Loss and Protest is also a funny and playful record, full of bizarro lyrical references – a sea horse, an incontinent cat and Kojak among them – and musical twists and handbrake turns. It’s a mutant, impure and very idiosyncratic version of rock’n’roll.

Spencer has not hoisted his freak flag alone. His band – for which he still does not have a name – is a power trio: himself on guitar, Macky (or Spider) Bowman on drums and Kendall Wind on bass, although she often uses the instrument as a lead guitarist would. Both are well under half Spencer’s age (22, 25 and 61 respectively) and are also the rhythm section of the Woodstock garage punks – and Jason Momoa protégés – The Bobby Lees.

Spencer talked to us about the genesis of his new album, the perilous state of his nation, the thrills and challenges of touring and his plans to release archive Blues Explosion recordings.

Firstly, and just to be clear, the title of this album is not ironic or a curveball. It’s meant to be taken straight?

Jon Spencer: It’s not a joke. It’s not a piss-take. It is certainly informed by that phase of life where you are dealing with people in ill-health and friends and family passing away, in addition to dealing with our own set of challenges of getting old.

Case in point, the final track ‘No More’. It’s a song about the death of your father.

The first verse is literally inspired by when my father passed and I was living with my mother because she was undergoing treatment for cancer. Both of my parents are/were not terribly sentimental people and in some ways guarded or closed off. Pretty quickly, she went right about just getting rid of all of this stuff in a very business-like way. So the lyrics came out of there.

Losing a friend or a family member is a heavy thing. That song was one of the ways in which I've been dealing with it and processing that experience.

It's an excellent song. Maybe the best track on the album.

I like that song a lot. It was just something which happened while we were on the studio floor waiting for a technical problem to be resolved in the control room. We were just messing about and that song came out. My favourite things from a session can be something like that, something unplanned and unwritten just coming together.

That really surprises me because I thought you would have been working on the lyrics over and over.

No, it’s been a heavy few years and so everything was there, ready to come out.

I was also surprised to hear a song so lyrically undisguised from you. It's essentially a poem. I'm not aware of anything similar to that that you've done in 40 years.

Thank you for the kind words but I would politely disagree. I think I've definitely written from a personal standpoint in the past. I think I've been quite open and honest in my lyrics, and raw and personal.

You could go all the way back to Hey Mom on Extra Width [The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion album, 1993], even Pussy Galore songs. Maybe the difference is that my vocal delivery on a song like No More is very plain and clearly audible and intelligible, whereas earlier Blues Explosion or Pussy Galore songs the vocals are admittedly a little garbled and buried in the mix.

Your father was a world-class organic chemist, a teacher and researcher at Dartmouth College…

The flag on the College Green was flown at half-mast for two days when he passed. There was a little placard explaining why. It was a very touching, nice tribute. I took photos to share with my family.

I did not have a very close relationship with my father. I’m thankful that I got to spend a bunch of time with him at the very end. To his credit, he was always very supportive - both my parents were always very supportive - for any and all of my artistic endeavours.

After my father passed, it was interesting and touching reading letters that people had sent my mother and hearing comments from some of my father's former students in college about what he meant to them and how he touched or affected their lives through his teaching.

He mentored a young chemist who went on to win the Nobel Prize. So maybe that's part of the answer to the question in No More about what does a life amount to?

Well, he was proud of that – it was a big deal. But I guess all of us are trying to figure that question now and I don't think there's one right answer. I don't know if it's about framing things in terms of success, winning awards or scoring points.

Is making your art, playing music, a sufficient answer for you?

It was important to me to make another record but it's always been mostly about the shows as a form of connection and communication. It's not so important to me to be on the cover of a magazine. I've never really been that fixated on any of that stuff.

Maybe what’s more important is to examine your relationships and how are you going to move through this world. Are you going to be a force for good? Are you going to touch people in a positive way? And that leads into the political.

Hence the songs of protest against the ‘knuckleheads and half-wits at the controls’. Who are your top three most despised, today?

It’s always the same ones. There’s been the same orange clown at the top of the hit parade for years now. I'm so fucking sick of that asshole. I don’t wish ill on anybody but when that guy finally does kick the bucket, there's gonna be such a worldwide hip-hip hooray.

I just happened to see J.D. Vance on the TV earlier today and that guy is a real fuckin’ prick – just completely soulless. Top three? They’re all scum. And you don’t have to limit it to politicians, you need to include these billionaires and the trillionaire and the oligarchs. These are evil fuckers.

It’s insane the amount of corruption and just how fuckin’ blatant it is. The grift is just so fucking insane. And the hypocrisy! It’s so out in the open, so in your face and yet we can all see it plain as day and yet we're told 24/7 like “No, this isn't happening.”

The Kennedy Center! So Trump’s name gets removed and people are watching and cheering, so they put up a tarp on the scaffolding so people can’t see the name has gone. These are such fuckin’ chickenshit babies.

Have you considered leaving the US?

No! I'm engaged. I'm keeping up on the news, I'm attending protests, I call my representatives. I speak to people when I play a concert. I try to engage with people who are coming to see my shows. I put out this record! Why turn tail and run?

I play rock'n'roll, one of the genuine, true American art forms – that and jazz. And as someone who has dedicated their life to this most American of art forms, I’ll be fucking damned if these pricks can plate it with gold and call it something else.

I am hopeful that a change is gonna come, if I can quote a better songwriter than me.

So, this new album covers death, aging, relationship woes, the MAGA shitstorm and more heaviness besides, but it’s also a fun, entertaining and frequently funny album. Sometimes just plain weird and bamboozling.

My music has always had a sense of play and I believe firmly believe that rock'n'roll is a really kind of beautiful art form because it has so much life, because it does have such a wonderful sense of the absurd, this sense of joy and sense of play.

That would apply to Orange Slice Blues – insomnia, anxiety, various kinds of emotional and spiritual damage but with mentions of Prince’s Under The Cherry Moon, [canned pasta brand] Chef Boyardee and actor Telly Savalas. Is that kind of clash something that you're particularly proud of?

Yeah, that clash or frisson. I mean, if it was all about like, ‘Shit, I can't sleep’ and ‘Fuck, I feel terrible about myself’ and ‘What the fuck am I doing with my life?’ – that can be a drag. I like listening to songs which have little light touches and weird kinks in them, otherwise it's just dreary. It's rock'n'roll and this is what I believe it should be.

It bounces through numerous different references and ideas - you get a lot in two-and-a-bit minutes.

You’re welcome! Mentioning Chef Boyardee just gave me a little tickle. I don't think every song and every line needs to be laboured and sometimes the trick is to not second-guess yourself, if it makes you smile or gives you a little rush. When I was a kid we used to eat Chef Boyardee a lot. It’s this incredibly bland and processed Italian food but I loved the canned ravioli as a kid!

Slip Away contains a note to yourself that you “gotta stop fucking up my life.” How's that been going since you recorded the song?

It's a work in progress, right? I don't know anybody who says, “I got all my shit figured out.” Would you believe someone who says that? I mean, you might think that for a moment or a day or a week.

Your press release says “the answer is always rock'n'roll.”

Playing rock'n'roll changed my life and enabled me to remake myself and that is something that continues to happen. That opportunity exists for me every time I play a concert.

This isn’t my original concept. I think it's in Greil Marcus’ great book Mystery Train. When I read that book a long time ago, it resonated with me.

If I understand correctly, some of the album was written as demos by you, some of it was worked out as a group with Spider and Kendall.

I wrote the songs on my own and demoed them, but the demos were a little more ragged, a little more loose this time around – Kendall and Spider were putting more of themselves into their parts. They should do that, that’s their department – I'm not playing the bass or playing the drums. It is a shared writing credit. I’m part of a band. You can look at the front cover – and it’s the three of us.

You've described yourself as the editor of the songs. Is that from your love of hip-hop?

Give It Up 4 The Devil – that is a collage, editing, cutting between two different isolated performances at different times in the studio. So that is in an assemblage. But even with songs that were written and rehearsed and played many times like Orange Slice Blues and Step On The Gas, even with those songs, I would say that there's an influence of post-punk or industrial, or musique concrète, noise kind of thing.

But hip-hop, yes it's always been a huge influence and it doesn't have to be like, “OK I'm going to take this jam from Wednesday and this other jam from Saturday and we're going to edit them together.” It can be an influence just thinking about, “after the bridge we're going to jump to this other time signature and throw in some kind of beat.” That comes from listening to hip-hop, like The Bomb Squad.

You went to Applehead Recordings in upstate New York to make Songs of Personal Loss and Protest. It's in a lovely location and near to where you live, but why else choose it?

Yes, it’s convenient. And yes, it’s a beautiful bucolic setting. They have an amazing 2-inch multi-track analogue recording machine and an amazing console but the main reason is that I enjoy working with Chris Bittner, who is a fantastic engineer. I kind of go through these phases and I’ll have these relationships with engineers, where I’ll do a string of records. I find it’s fruitful to return because the more you work together – kind of the same way the more I play together with Kendall and Spider – the language develops so that you're able to achieve greater things.

What – structurally - is keeping you and the band functioning as recording artists and touring?

I have a lawyer, a business manager, a booking agent for the UK and for Europe I have another person, an agent that handles North America and pretty much the rest of the world. The record is out on Shove which is the label I started in 1985 with Julie Cafritz to put out Pussy Galore records.But I don't do it by myself. I work with a company in Brooklyn called Virtual, which helps with the manufacture and distribution of the recorded product.

Anything else coming out on Shove Records?

My intention is to get back into reissuing Pussy Galore and Blues Explosion titles, not just strict re-issues but there's also some out-takes and stuff that's never been put out. There are two projects I'm interested in pursuing as far as the Blues Explosion: one would be a collection of B-sides from Plastic Fang (2002) and random bits and bobs recorded around the time of Damage (2005).

And the other is what we always called The Black Album after the Prince record, which is the stuff we recorded at the studio [Blues Explosion’s drummer] Russell Simins had for a while, called the Empire View Studio. There was a period of woodshedding that led up to Damage but there's a lot of stuff that never moved out of there.

And on tour, what’s the set-up now?

Typically, we are touring with one person, the tour manager - it's a pretty lean operation.

In Japan, for example, I'm working with a company over there called Creativeman Productions, who I’ve worked with since the early or mid-90s. In August, we’re going to be part of Summer Sonic, a big summer festival put on by Creativeman. The Blues Explosion headlined the first one. I'm not of the same stature as I was then, but it’s great to be included this year.

So, I do have several long-standing relationships - same lawyer, same business manager, same agents for Europe and America for decades.

You are reaping the benefits of those networks that you’ve built up.

Yes – and these are also old friends.

Speaking of which, you recorded some of the album in Perrosky’s studio in Santiago, Chile and you played again with Guitar Wolf in Japan. You must see a lot of familiar faces on tour?

We're going to play the Sjock Festival in Belgium in July. I was looking at the lineup: “I know most of these people!” It will be especially nice to be there the same day as Deke Dickerson. Maybe he’ll come up and we could do Come On! our protest song together. One of the first shows we play in Italy will be a small festival and on the bill will be Reverend Beat-Man, somebody I’ve been crossing paths with for decades.

There’s a flip side to that. For example, Dallas Good of The Sadies, who you played with countless times, is not with us anymore…

I just saw The Sadies in Bearsville. I had not seen them since Dallas passed (in 2022). They continued on as a trio. It was great, they definitely make it work, but it was a very heavy experience for me. It was very, very emotional to hear those songs without Dallas, especially a song (No-one’s Listening) from their last record (Colder Streams) on which they had very kindly asked me to contribute a fuzz guitar lead. So, to see and hear Travis Good sing his brother’s words and play that song and then also play my lead, that was just too much. I was in tears.

It was so nice to just see Travis and Mike (Belitsky) and Sean (Dean) because I had spent so much time with them. Most of the time we spent talking about Andre Williams. We all spent a lot of time with Andre. He made such a big impression. So there was me with The Sadies and we're missing Dallas and we're sitting around talking about Andre Williams, and we were missing Andre.

Even with your networks and connections, some places are easier to tour than others…

I mean, it's certainly a lot easier to fly to London than it is to fly to Melbourne! And there are some places and some countries and some tours which are a little more put together than others. France! They have amazing, beautiful venues. I think that these places are getting arts funding from the government, so you’re never going to get that in a place like… Ohio.

You obey ‘the Henry Rollins rule’ on tour - don’t eat within two hours of going on stage. What are the others, especially now you are in your 60s?

Trying to sleep as much as possible; napping is extremely important. And also just guarding my time. I need to conserve not just my physical energy but my psychic energy. Hanging out or pressing the flesh, sometimes I just I don't have the bandwidth for that.

You read a lot on tour?

Yeah. I’m I’ve recently read Miranda July’s All Fours and I’m currently reading Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor.

Kendall and Spider are in their mid and early 20s respectively ie. younger than your own son, so the cultural overlap you have must be limited – even the musical reference points – and yet you must have a language you communicate in to play in a band successfully.

That’s not to be taken lightly. “Oh, being in a band: you get together and you play.” No, it doesn’t work with everyone. It’s a very special thing to be able to play music together.

The common musical language is the songs we play together and the songs we write together. There’s some common ground but not a ton beyond that.

For me, it's very strange because I came out of ‘us versus them’ punk – what records you had, what you were listening to, what bands you were seeing was extremely important. For Kendall and Spider, it's “Yeah, I like it” or “I like this song”, it doesn't have to be a whole album or a whole artist’s career.

190 shows and counting with Spider and Kendall, but which ones stand out for you?

The one show that really stuck out for me may have been our second or third show. It was in Cleveland – some sort of hot dog place. It was the first time I felt, “Oh yeah this is going to work.” It really kind of felt like, “Yep, this is happening.”

Can you explain that feeling further?

I guess when things just sort of become weightless, if you will, like there's no longer so much thinking about things, just everything starts to just flow. With Kendall and Spider we don't use a set-list, same as the Blues Explosion. I’m very happy to be able to do that again. I really enjoy that it makes for a different kind of show. Kendall and Spider are such fantastic, smart players that they can handle it. I can start a song or call it out and then they're right there with me on the cue.

It just feels wonderful. It's one thing to feel the kind of awesome power of a band firing on all cylinders. That’s one kind of great feeling and then there's another kind – there is this great rushing of air that happens when you know the whole room is moving in the same direction. I'm talking about everybody there – the audience and the band – when there is this coming together.

Songs of Personal Loss and Protest is out now. Jon Spencer is on tour in Europe in June and July and North America in September and November.

Lord Of The Lost definitely put the ‘industrial’ in industrial metal. Formed in 2007 by frontman Chris Harms, the hardworking German industrial-glam-goths have released 12 studio albums including a covers album, plus a seemingly never-ending procession of new material in the form of orchestral records and live releases.

They’ve taken part in Eurovision (they came last), toured with Iron Maiden and recently graduated to arenas over on the continent. How’s that for the defiant, triumphant spirit of heavy metal? Hammer caught up with Chris to give him the grilling our readers felt he deserved. To quote one of their songs on 2022’s Blood & Glitter album, leave your hate in the comments.

If you were to show someone that has never heard of the band your music, what song would you show them first?
loganthecorekid, Instagram

“Right now, I Will Die In It from Opvs Noir Vol. 1, because it has a nice riff but also a nice singalong chorus. It has a great message, which is very positive, but still sounds sinister.”

What is the most difficult song you have written? Ziekmanpaula, Instagram

“I think it was See You Soon [from 2012’s Die Tomorrow]. It was one of our early ballads; a friend of ours had a girlfriend who was suffering with cancer. Luckily she’s still with us, but she nearly died a couple of times.

I’m agnostic, atheist or somewhere in between, but in those moments I could understand why we’d want to believe in something greater, that when we leave this world it’s not farewell – it’s ‘see you soon’. It’s very different to a heartbreak or something, which are champagne problems – you’re not going to die from them.”

Which country would you like to play where you haven’t performed before?
Alexandracarla15, Instagram

“We’d love to tour Japan. Iceland too, but I’m less interested in playing a show there than shooting a music video.”

Did that Eurovision last place affect you in any way?
Dylan Dunn, Facebook

“Hard as it might be to believe, we really enjoyed Eurovision. When 200 million people watch you on television, that has a big impact. Even if just 0.1% like you, that’s still a lot of people! Our numbers went through the roof for a while afterwards, but of course there was a peak to that and it’s levelled out. Our streams and sales have tripled since we did it. We’d do it again.”

How do you deal with depression?
Mo Jo, Facebook

“I’ve never had it. I’ve felt depressed in the colloquial sense but really, I don’t know shit about what depression is. Our bass player Klaas [Helmecke] has been very open about how his depression has highly influenced him and has gotten worse over the years. We support him in every way we can. It’s taken me a few years to realise it’s not the kind of thing that’ll just go away if you’re like, ‘Pull yourself together.’ That’s like telling someone with a broken leg, ‘Walk it off!’”

If you could collaborate on a song with anyone, who would it be?
Liz Caomhánach, Facebook

“Lady Gaga. I feel so connected to the way she does art. She’s a chameleon, a female David Bowie where she doesn’t just do straight pop, she’s so genius in what she does. For one of our recent songs, Bazaar Bizarre, we shot the video near Mexico City in the ‘Island of the Dolls’, Isla de las Muñecas.

It has a haunting, weird story and there’s broken dolls everywhere; there was a guy who lived there for 50 years and put dolls up to scare ghosts or whatever. The director pointed out two dolls that had been left just two weeks earlier, by Tim Burton and Lady Gaga, because she’d also shot a music video there. It was funny that when we put our video out, she also put her video out around the same time. I could see her singing in the same place I was!”

Hammer: You’ve already done a lot of collabs. When are you going to pull a Babymetal and do a full collabs album?

“We should give it some time! Opvs Noir is 33 songs across three volumes and, of those, I think we’ve got 15 or 16 guests. We wanted to give different spices to our songs. I’ve had the idea to do a collabs album with indigenous people from around the world – like Māori people for New Zealand, Aboriginal people for Australia, Native Americans… Try to do bands who have their own rich folklore.

We could call it ‘Cultural Appropriation’. Or maybe just ‘Culture’. But it’d be great to do that with bands like Bloodywood or The Hu, travelling around the world.”

Will there be another concept album similar to Judas in the future? Or any continuation of the story?
Hovelskull, Instagram

“I don’t know how to continue the story, because it wasn’t really one in the first place! It was a bunch of songs to explore the shades of grey between light and darkness using the character of Judas. But I’m pretty sure we’ll do more concept albums in future. In fact, our next big thing is going to be one, if we don’t change plans. I’m sure we’ll do an acoustic or classical album in between too because they’re fun to do.”

Which one of you is most likely to survive a zombie apocalypse?
Emma Kitty Opheliac, Facebook

“Nik [Kahl, drums]. He can build stuff out of pretty much anything.”

What was it like touring with Iron Maiden? James_Akrigg, Instagram

“Awful. Come on… it was amazing! Being asked the first time was like, ‘What the fuck?!’ Then they asked us a second time and it felt even greater, because it’s not like they’re gonna go, ‘The first time didn’t really work out, but let’s give it another try.’

The most impressive thing wasn’t the size of the venues, the crowds or whatever, it was getting to know them. Their crew too – they’re all so tight-knit, they’ve been together for decades and you can really feel that. They made us feel at home and had our back. Steve [Harris] came up a few times like, ‘If you’ve got any problems, don’t ask the crew – talk to me.’ He still writes on WhatsApp or will give us a call. Maybe we can have a third run with them someday.”

If you could have written any song from another artist, what would it be?
Tina Wyles, Facebook

“Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s a spectacular song, and from a composer’s point of view it’s a piece of art. It’s a hit, but somehow no part ever repeats. How do you do that?!”

Do you have your make-up done by pros?
Erick Ancillary Theorem, Facebook

“Sometimes. When we do important photos for album covers, posters etc, where you can see every detail, we have people we’ll work with. We credit a few artists in our albums – there’s one girl in particular who knows exactly what we want and somehow always makes it better.

Obviously sometimes you work with a team that you don’t know, and then there can be some adjustment: ‘No, I look like a sad clown today. Let’s try again.’ But on tour we do it ourselves because it’s gone after one song.”

How do you manage to rise above hate comments and general negativity on social media so gracefully?
Helen Forsyth, Facebook

“Mostly by ignoring it. I haven’t been on social media for almost a year – I have an email address where I can put anything I want to post so I don’t see the feedback. After all these years, I rise above it. It’s not hurtful anymore, just annoying. I bet there were a few hate comments among these questions!”

Why do you choose English instead of German for your songs?
Cristina Medina, Facebook

“Growing up, I listened to bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. So music for me, for years, was in English. Later I discovered artists like Roxette and Michael Jackson and they also sang in English, so it never occurred to me that I should sing in German.”

Will there ever be a Lord Of The Lost X David Hasselhoff collab?
Adam Bendickson, Facebook

“I hope so! Gerrit [Heinemann], our keyboard player, actually played with him for two tours, so we’ve got a contact there. I doubt he’s in the mood to collab with a German metal band, though. We will try. We’ve tried already, but he’s not actually said no yet.”

Opvs Noir Vol. 3 is out now via Napalm.

Never one to do things by halves, David Bowie threw himself the 50th birthday party to end all 50th birthday parties in January1 997, when he staged a show at New York’s Madison Square Garden at which he was joined by a dazzling array of special guests for a once-in-a-lifetime journey through his incredible back catalogue.

The evening saw Bowie share the stage with Smashing Pumpkins Billy Corgan, The Cure's Robert Smith, Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, Foo Fighters, Lou Reed and more, and the celebrations also ended up having an unintended effect on The Cure’s long-term line-up.

Bowie’s Musical Director at the time was Reeves Gabrels, his former Tin Machine bandmate, and it fell upon the Staten Island-born guitarist to make sure each guest joining Bowie onstage had learned their parts ahead of time. Not everyone got the personal touch that he afforded to Robert Smith, however, as Gabrels told this writer in 2021, recalling that the pair ended up going on a three-day drinking bender in New York.

We'll let the man himself pick up the tale…

“Robert [Smith] was the last one that I got together with," Gabrels explained. "He came into New York on the Wednesday evening, we got together, we were talking, went through the songs and it was pretty obvious he had done his homework. He was spot on.”

Rather than congratulate themselves on a good night’s work , shake hands and head off to get some solid beauty sleep ahead of rehearsals for the star-studded, prestigious gig which had brought them together, the two musicians instead decided to hit the town together.

“We decided to go out to get a drink," recalled Gabrels, somewhat underplaying the events to come. "The next thing I remember, it's Friday, early afternoon and we're sitting in the lobby of the hotel we were staying in, and we both looked at each other and said, ‘I think we should go to bed now, it’s time for us to get some rest before rehearsals.’ And so he went back to his room and I went back to mine and then late Saturday morning, we got on a tour bus that took us to New Haven to do rehearsals. There’s two days missing from my life. Apparently, we had a really good time!”

They may not remember the specifics of this epic bonding session, but the pair obviously got on incredibly well, to the point where,15 years later, Smith would invite Gabrels to become The Cure's guitarist, a position the American musician still holds today. We wouldn't necessarily recommend that you try to steer your next job interview towards a 48-hour sesh with your prospective boss, but if it happens, stay positive, because, undoubtedly, trust, respect and the ability to get on it without a second thought can be seen as admirable qualities even outside the music industry, we've heard.

Just don't blame us if things go tits up, okay? Cheers.

It’s 2007, and Evanescence are opening for Iron Maiden on the main stage at Download festival. They’ve sold 14 million copies of their debut album, Fallen, while mega-hit Bring Me To Life made them such a cultural phenomenon that they beat rapper 50 Cent to a Best New Artist Grammy. And yet… there are heckles. There are boos. There are constant chants of “Maiden! Maiden! Maiden!”

“Look, I know I’m the only chick to be up here all day, and I know I’m one of the only ones to be singing any melodies. But that doesn’t mean we fucking suck!” she tells them, before piano ballad Lithium. “As far as I’m concerned, we fucking belong here!”

It wasn’t the first time Evanescence had played Download. In 2003, they’d drawn a young daytime crowd for their first ever UK show, while Metallica played a ‘secret’ set inside a tent across the field. But ultimately their sound and image clashed with traditional metal ideals, and for some metalheads, like those baying for Bruce and co, it was too much to take.

It would be a long time before Evanescence played Download again. But when they returned in 2023, they were greeted as heroes. Headlining the second stage, while the crowd spilled around corners and clambered on top of food trucks to get a view, Amy held the diehards and a whole new generation of converts in the palm of her hand, with the kind of steely self-confidence that can only come from being a genuine metal icon.

Afterwards, she jumped in a golf buggy and zipped over to the main stage to join headliners Bring Me The Horizon on their collab song, One Day The Only Butterflies Left…, and Nihilist Blues. The sets themselves were great and all, she says today over a Zoom call, but what really struck her was how much the festival had changed for the better.

“It felt so much more inclusive,” she recalls. “I wasn’t the only girl on the bill. They had a nail artist backstage!”

After 2023, surely they’ve been approached to headline it themselves?

“If I had been asked to headline it, I would’ve headlined it,” she says, before flashing a cheeky grin. “Maybe next year!”

Twenty-three years on from their first Download appearance, Evanescence are members of an increasingly exclusive pool of bands for whom an album release constitutes A Really Big Deal. That’s in no small part due to the fact they’ve only released four studio albums in that time.

There was 10 years between their 2011 self-titled release and their last studio album, 2021’s The Bitter Truth. Being an Evanescence fan requires patience. In that ‘downtime’, Amy scored two feature films (2014’s War Story and 2016’s Blind), released children’s album Dream Too Much and recorded a covers EP. Plus, the band released 2017’s Synthesis – an orchestral re-imagining of their biggest hits.

Of course, the anticipation is also due to Amy herself. A defining figure of the 2000s, who pretty much patented the sound of heavy guitars and piano, her instantly identifiable voice has influenced everyone from Paramore’s Hayley Williams to Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale, and she became a fashion icon to millions of alt girls in the hyper-sexualised, misogynistic climate of the time. Protecting the integrity of the art is something she’s stood her ground on since day one.

“It’s definitely a spiritual thing for me, making music,” she says today. “That’s why it takes years between albums, to really think it out and let things come the way that they’re supposed to come, instead of saying, ‘Well, we’ve got to put an album out, because of whatever commercial reason.’”

The singer is chatting to Hammer from the white-walled studio at her family home in Nashville, where she lives with her husband, therapist Josh Hartzler, and her 11-year-old son, Jack. It’s an airy, wide-open space, one side of the room lined with windows. Behind her is the door to another room, an electric drum kit visible beyond the threshold. A grey and white patterned rug covers most of the floor.

“It purposefully looks like it’s stained all over, so that no matter who spills a drink, we’re good,” she chortles. “It’s just part of the art.”

Evanescence are gearing up to release album number five, Sanctuary, on June 5. Having had exclusive access to a stream, we can confirm fans will be delighted. Blending cinematic melodrama, romance and industrial guitars with an overt electronic influence (courtesy of producer Jordan Fish, previously of Bring Me The Horizon, who worked alongside fellow producers Nick Raskulinecz and Zakk Cervini), it blends the familiar with new ideas, and is easily the heaviest they’ve sounded since Fallen.

It’s also Amy at her most self-assured and inspired. That’s reflected in our conversation today. Her distinctive voice and reputation for gothic gowns proceeds her; you half expect her to float into view, an ethereal sylph trailed by wisps of lace. On the contrary, the singer is friendly and down-to-earth, albeit tough. She’ll only answer the questions she wants to answer, sometimes talking around answers, setting firm but polite boundaries.

Leaning comfortably back in her chair, sipping from a large tumbler, her glossy black hair tumbling over the shoulders of a loose t-shirt, she tells us, “I feel very fulfilled right now. If I think of something that I want to do, we’re gonna try it, and most of the time it works out. I’m so excited for this album to come out.

“I think they’re the best lyrics I’ve written, and I think part of that has to do with perspective and being here after all this time, but also when things start flooding out, you have to catch them…”

As we speak, she’s distracted by Jack, who appears outside the window. He accompanied Amy when Evanescence supported Metallica on the Australia and New Zealand leg of their M72 World Tour in November 2025. Has he twigged yet exactly who his mum is?

“Yeah, it’s starting to hit him in a new way,” she smiles.

He’s old enough now, she beams, to be catching the metal bug himself.

“First of all, to see his mom get up there… so proud,” she says. “But to see Metallica with the pyro, with the fireworks, the 80,000 people… I watched him get inspired in a way that I will have in my heart forever.”

There’s only been a five-year gap between albums this time around, positively supersonic for Evanescence. The band started writing in 2022 and recording in 2023, slowly building ideas and letting them grow.

By this point, you’ll have most likely heard Sanctuary’s lead single, Who Will You Follow, which contains the line: ‘When all your faith in reality fades away / Who will you follow then?’ among haunting piano and a nasty riff. It’s a fitting introduction for an album Amy explains is “coming from a place of righteous rage”.

“I mean, how do I say that everything is fucked without, like, just saying everything is fucked?” she says. “We’re in our screens more than ever. The people that run the media have a vested interest in what you believe.”

She called the album ‘Sanctuary’ because the music represents a place of safety and truth at “a chaotic and violent time where more and more it feels like things are spiralling out of control”.

Amy had always kept her political views private, until 2020, when on February 6, the day US President Donald Trump was found not guilty on charges of impeachment, she tweeted: “I can’t stand by and keep my mouth shut when my country’s freedom is taken away.”

A year later, the band’s 2021’s album, The Bitter Truth, buzzed with political sentiment, while she was photographed at the anti-Trump No Kings protests in both 2025 and 2026. Why was then the right time to speak out?

“Well, before that, I didn’t feel like it was so pressing in from every side. It’s inescapable now,” she considers. “When I was in my 20s and we were doing Fallen, [the music] was very introverted because I was focused on looking in. As you go through life and you have experience, you have to look out.”

Amy prefers to leave her lyrics open to interpretation, glossing over direct questions about themes and stating that, on Sanctuary, the lyrics “are all over the place”. One track on the album – she doesn’t say which – is about a relationship, inspired by the Fallen days.

She doesn’t reveal who it’s about, but does confirm it’s not about Seether’s Shaun Morgan, the subject of 2006 single Call Me When You’re Sober. She was inspired to write it while sifting through old Fallen memories.

“I was going through old audio from my handheld recorder and old footage. It put my heart in a place I hadn’t been in a while, and brought up some old things. It’s not like the album is about that, but there is a space for it where we go there.”

Meanwhile, the crunchy and direct Tell Me When You’ve Had Enough, which repeatedly asks ‘Where’s the light?’, and About Us, which taunts, ‘This is what you wanted right? … Now bow down to your God / You know he doesn’t give a damn about us…’ ripple with frustration and anxiety.

“Motivating people and telling people to get out there and vote; I did that real hard,” she says of the 2024 election. “I’m starting to wonder if that is going to be an option next time.”

She doesn’t want fans to come away from Sanctuary feeling hopeless, though. Album closer Wide Open Heart feels like a deep breath after being underwater. ‘You can’t kill real love / That’s the one thing they can’t touch.’

“I’m in a rock band!” Amy exclaims. “I’m gonna make the best music that I can, with the most inspiring message that I can… I hope that our album fuels people. I hope that it gives people inspiration and puts some light out there.”

When Evanescence broke through in 2003 with the world-changing juggernaut Bring Me To Life, their success was vast and immediate. At the time, nu metal, which had been the dominant sound in heavy music during the last half-decade, was losing its grip on the mainstream, but the band’s label, Wind-up Records, still insisted the track needed a male rapper if it stood a chance of being a hit.

Amy had argued against the move, but the label got their way; rapper Paul McCoy, from little-known band 12 Stones, was drafted in. And while Amy has been publicly critical about the creative choice, her stance has since mellowed, and she even performed the song with Paul at 2025’s Louder Than Life festival in Louisville, Kentucky.

“I was so worried about the first song being a collab, because I wanted people to understand us, and I was so worried the first look would be confusing,” she says.

“But all those things that worried me are all cool perks now. We have a built-in part to sing with people live when we go and do a festival. It’s this extra-special moment in the night where we get to do our thing and share nostalgia with fans, but then also include other people.”

Bring Me To Life saw the band categorised as both nu metal and goth, two genres they are still associated with today – but Amy never identified with either.

“Honestly, I never liked that word,” she says of the latter. “I was like an alt rock, ripped-up jeans kind of girl. The word goth [to describe our music] is stupid. I hate that word.”

“I don’t think that word is particularly modern, but I don’t really care,” she says of nu metal. “Labels are labels, whatever you want to call it, is fine. We know who we are, and where we’ve come to is full of so much amazing growth, but it’s also full of, like, respecting where we came from. So you get to hear it all together on this whole album.”

It’s not escaped her, though, that Y2K trends in general are having a resurgence, with artists from across both the commercial and alternative spectrum taking the fashion and downtuned sound of the 90s and 2000s in new directions. She’s glad Evanescence are part of the conversation.

“I think it’s natural, at this sort of 20-year mark, for throwback vibes and nostalgia to hit,” she muses. “There is so much interesting innovation in rock and metal today, it has come so far from where it was back then… the rules are out the window.”

On Evanescence’s second album, 2006’s The Open Door, Amy took full creative control. A more dramatic, atmospheric collection of songs, it’s stood the test of time and she was proud of it, but it sold a fraction of Fallen. Did she have trust issues after Bring Me To Life?

“Oh, yes, yes. Definitely, but also I think just the insecurity of being younger and thinking about what people think more than I wanted to, because that’s how it is when you’re younger,” she says, adding that in this latest era, she feels “more open” to working with other artists and producers, being “comfortable with myself enough to try things instead of being so precious”.

What’s behind this, she says, is her symbiotic relationship with Jordan Fish, whom she first met at Download in 2023.

“When you find somebody that you’re so in tune with creatively, and you know what you’re doing and you get each other, it’s… I don’t want to say the word ‘easy’, because it was a lot of work, but it feels easy. Jordan and I just get each other.”

In 2025 the collaborations continued, with Evanescence on a huge upswing. In May, Amy recorded two songs for the soundtrack of John Wick action spin-off Ballerina: Hand That Feeds, with popstar Halsey (produced by Jordan), and Fight Like A Girl, which featured rapper K.Flay (produced by producer and film score composer Tyler Bates).

Female empowerment is what drew her to Ballerina – not just the ass-kicking heroine part of it, but what the songtitle Fight Like A Girl represents.

It’s easy to draw parallels with her own journey through music, grappling with the inherent sexism of the metal scene. When Evanescence co-founder Ben Moody acrimoniously left the band in 2003, she was blamed and branded a diva by the media.

“It’s a line in the movie when the trainer is telling the main character [assassin Eve Macarro] how to get it done,” she explains of the context for Fight Like A Girl. “Because it’s not just about physical force. [Men are] always gonna have that advantage on you. They’re bigger than you. But you can be clever. You can get in there, fight dirty, do what it takes. Stay the test of time, wait it out.”

In September 2025, she teamed up with Spiritbox vocalist Courtney LaPlante and Poppy for the incendiary single End Of You. Produced again by Jordan Fish, it felt like a pivotal moment for metal: three female artists, each coming at heavy music from different angles, bringing their own individual vibe to the track, singing about liberation from toxic relationships. It felt powerful, a moment that perfectly summed up the progressive nature of modern metal.

“Yeah, that was the idea,” Amy nods. “To show our unity, you know? One thing I love about them both is how fearlessly they embrace their femininity within such heavy music. It’s beautifully rebellious. I mean, we all have different styles and different outfits, blah, blah, blah, but we’re here for the music.

“I love Courtney. We had a blast working together,” she adds. “And then, Poppy’s great too. I’ve gotten to know her more through this process. She kind of plays a character when she’s on, but she’s a very cool person in real life.”

End Of You came together remotely, with the three artists sharing ideas online after Poppy and Jordan visited Amy in Nashville. They sat on the patterned rug in her studio in a circle and “hammered a bunch of stuff out”, with Amy laying down her vocals then and there. She was energised by the collaborative nature of the session, an indication of how much her mindset has changed from the earlier Evanescence days.

“Just getting inspired by other people’s minds and spirits, and letting them in as much as you’re taking them in, is so good,” she smiles.

Working with other female artists in recent years, she says, has been a deliberate choice. Building a community of women around her is important – something she never had in the early days when diversity was scarce and she was often the only woman on a bill.

In June, Evanescence will go on a world tour with a line-up of female artists – Spiritbox, Poppy, Nova Twins and K.Flay – in tow. It’ll be an opportunity for the band to celebrate their present and future, as well as their substantial legacy.

Fallen celebrated its 20-year anniversary in 2023. We point out that a song like Bring Me To Life is a rare thing, a song with almost mythical status that everyone seems to have an almost embryonic connection to, and that continues to resonate.

“How I feel about that song is grateful,” she says. “I can’t credit it to any particular one thing or an equation that you could follow. I think it’s a combination of a whole bunch of things; the time that it happened, everything falling into place at the right time.”

Just as it is for anyone else, she says, untangling herself from the court of public opinion has been a “struggle”. She never looks at comments on social media.

“I post and I’m gone. I love our fans and ability to talk directly to them, but I don’t sit there and go through comments. That’s a faceless entity judging you.”

No doubt misogyny played a part in that hostile reception at Download in 2007. But while Evanescence have long silenced the hecklers, there’s no way in hell the Amy Lee sitting in front of us would give them the time of day anyway.

“You can’t base your actions on how you’re judged,” she says, her head held high. “Be you and be confident in that. It doesn’t mean being a bitch. It means you’re not one. If you know that your heart is true, and you’re doing your best, then that’s it… mic drop.”

Sanctuary is out now via Music For Nations/Columbia/Sony. Evanescence tour the UK with Poppy and K. Flay in September.

The mid-90s remains the most controversial period of Metallica’s career. The musical shift the San Francisco band took with the Load and Reload albums upset certain sections of their fanbase, though not as much as the fact that the band now sported a brand new look that involved short hair and make-up.

With hindsight, Metallica were simply trying to shake off the clichés of heavy metal – something apparent when they recruited controversial artist Andres Serrano to create the covers for Load and Reload. The former featured an image titled Blood And Semen III, which featured cow’s blood mixed with semen, while the latter’s cover was the self-explanatory Piss And Blood. Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett were big fans of the artist’s work, though James Hetfield was reputedly less impressed.

We asked Serrano how he got involved with the biggest metal band on the planet.

How did Metallica get in touch with you about your art?

“It was Kirk and Lars who asked for the picture for Load. I met with them at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, and we arranged for them to use the image for the album, merchandise and all promotional purposes. I was flattered and honoured they wanted it.”

Why do you think they wanted your artwork?

“Because it spoke to them. They were drawn to it and I’m glad they were, because the image and album was a match made in Heaven.”

Were you familiar with their music?

“I knew their reputation as the greatest heavy metal band ever. It was only later I became familiar with their music.”

Did they ask for those pieces for Load and Reload specifically?

“Yes, they knew what they wanted for both albums.”

Where did the inspiration for the art itself originally come from?

“It was part of a series called ‘Bodily Fluids’. They were photographs intended to look like paintings, using milk, blood, piss and semen.”

How did you get the bovine blood?

“I bought it at the butcher. It would be labelled ‘edible beef blood’ and I would buy a gallon of it whenever I needed it. The blood would darken after a day, so I thought I needed fresh blood to get the bright red. Later, someone told me to put the dark blood in a blender and it would brighten up again.”

What did you think of the Load and Reload records?

“They’re amazing! I was not aware of the evolution Metallica’s sound had taken. But I know they felt there was a connection between the two albums. That’s why they wanted another image from the series for the follow-up album. Related but different. Everything comes from somewhere, and sometimes an audience may not realise there is a connection between one body of work and another but there could be. Only the artist knows for sure.”

What was the reaction, from their fanbase and the band?

“I think the images were a hit. I read a review once where the Load album was named No.1 on a list of best album covers. We know Lars and Kirk were happy with it but James was not. I think James is still fuming!”

Future ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons was still in his teens when he founded Houston, Texas psych-blues band The Moving Sidewalks, and secured a booking to support The Jimi Hendrix Experience at shows in Fort Worth and Houston in February 1968. The Moving Sidewalks were required to play a 40-minute set each night in their contract, and Gibbons quickly realised that the only way that his band could stretch their set to the required length was by including the two Jimi Hendrix covers they regularly played at gigs, his 1967 singles Foxy Lady and Purple Haze. It's not as if Hendrix would notice, right?

Wrong.

"I'll never forget the opening night, we played Foxy Lady and were going into the intro to Purple Haze, and I happened to look over to the side of the stage, and there in the shadows was Jimi Hendrix with his arms folded, grinning," Gibbons recalled in a later TV interview with US broadcasting legend Dan Rather. "He made a bonded friendship right off the bat."

In a 2021 interview with MOJO magazine, Gibbons picked up the story.

"When we walked off stage, he grabbed me and said, I like you. You've got a lot of nerve. Later, there was quite a bit of panic as we tried to get hotel rooms. We were escorted to the far end of the hallway. But Jimi said, 'Hey, take the room across the way'."

Asked by writer David Fricke what lessons he took from his time with Hendrix, Gibbons noted that the Seattle-born guitarist "was doing things with the electric guitar that had not even been thought of, that it was not designed for."

"I was playing a Stratocaster, another thing that endeared me to him," he recalled. One night, in the hotel, he said, 'Come check this out.' He was taking the spring off the whammy bar, cutting two [coils] off the spring so you could really push the bar down - just dive bomb."

"There was the string-bending - how he got that effect in Foxy Lady - and that powerhouse backing of Mitch Mitchell on drums and Noel Redding on bass. Jimi often said, 'Man, isn't it great? I can go from here to the stratosphere, knowing that l've got a rock-solid wall supporting those excursions. Nobody loses the beat. Nobody loses the sense of where the music is going.' From that, I had Dusty [Hill, late ZZ Top bassist] and Frank [Beard, ZZ Top drummer] doing much the same, offering a rock-solid foundation: going through the changes but hammering the tonic [note]. That lives on today."

In his interview with Dan Rather, Gibbons recalled Hendrix being a "shy" character off-stage, but added, "but when the lights came on, he came aglow. And man, he would set about doing things with that guitar that were just otherworldly."

Gibbons would later tell Classic Rock that the whole experience was "a real mind-bender and eye-opener to say the least."

Watch a clip of the interview with Dan Rather below:

Few bands can legitimately lay claim to pioneering an entire new genre, but Korn are one of them. With their self-titled 1994 debut album, the band from Bakersfield, California single-handedly ushered in the nu metal movement which would go onto dominate the rest of the decade and the start of the next one.

But nothing exists in a vacuum, and even trailblazers need inspiration. For the members of Korn, their sound was shaped by a melting pot of metal, hip hop and funk. But there was one classic late 80s alternative metal album that did more than any other to open up the future Korn members’ minds to different styles and sounds.

Speaking to Metal Hammer in 2019, Korn guitarist Brian ‘Head’ Welch looked back on the late 80s – a time when the burgeoning alternative scene was sneaking up behind the all-pervasive glam metal movement. Head admitted that, a few years before he co-founded Korn in 1993, he was still enamoured with late 80s hard rock.

“I didn’t want to let go of Whitesnake and all these bands that had huge guitar parts, because I was a guitarist too and I loved all that stuff,” he confessed.

But there was one album that changed everything for him and his future bandmates. Formed in San Francisco in 1979, Faith No More had cycled through countless members and styles before settling on the post-punk-inspired proto-funk metal style of their self-titled 1985 debut album and 1987’s Introduce Youself. But everything changed when the band replaced singer Chuck Moseley with 20-year-old wunderkind singer Mike Patton in 1989. The first album the new line-up made was 1989’s The Real Thing – a genre-mashing alt-metal classic and the album Head said changed his and his Korn bandmates’ lives.

“All the guys in Korn changed after they heard The Real Thing,” Head told Metal Hammer. “It turned them from being the Mötley Crüe guys into something more alternative. Hearing Faith No More for the first time though, I really felt something. It was darker than other bands you’d hear at the time like Red Hot Chili Peppers, but also had this incredibly cool bass sound that really got me to let go of the old and embrace the new. I caught the vision for where music could go and where we could go later even though it came out long before Korn were a band.

“They didn’t fit in completely with anybody,” he continued. “Sure, they’d got the alternative thing going on, but they’d also got these thrash metal guitars they’d picked up being around the scene with bands like Metallica. That’s what I loved about it – it was guitar focused, but there weren’t too many leads getting in the way.”

Thanks to singles such as early rap-metal anthem Epic and the keyboard propelled From Out Of Nowhere, The Real Thing got Faith No More onto MTV. Along with fellow mavericks Jane’s Addiction, FNM would crack open the door for what would soon be christened ‘alternative rock’, allowing it a way into the mainstream – something that exploded with the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind in 1991.

Korn themselves never hid the influence The Real Thing had on them, taking Faith No More’s funk-inspired grooves and hip hop swagger and putting a darker, more angsty spin on it.

“Even now, if I had to explain what influences go behind what we do in Korn, I’d pick a song like The Real Thing, 100 per cent.” said Head. ‘The way the song starts, with that opening drumbeat and those keys, really reminds me of Blind. And that vocal line! Its perfection, man. All minor music with this bright vocal – ‘I know the feeling/it is the real thing’ is just perfection to me. I’m sad that I’ve never met those guys – I know James [Munky] and Jonathan [Davis, Korn singer] have. We were supposed to go on tour with them before COVID hit and I really hope we actually get to do that some day.”

In 2004, former Guns N’ Roses bandmates Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum were all out of their old group, presumably never to return. But with wayward Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland onboard, they launched the supergroup Velvet Revolver –even if, as Slash told Classic Rock at the time, their future was as unpredictable as their past.

Slash is talking in his familiar, woozy SoCal drawl. “Hey,” he says, “it’s the second day of this fucking two-day picture shoot, man. You can always tell when you got a record coming out, because all this bullshit starts up again…”

As laid-back and straight as he might be these days, the guitarist can’t keep the excitement out of his voice when he talks about this particular new record of his, though. Because for all of the knockabout rock’n’roll kicks of his band Snakepit and the many other GN’R spin-offs and side projects he’s been involved in, Velvet Revolver represents a return to the big-time for assorted members of two of the last decade’s biggest bands: Guns N’ Roses and Stone Temple Pilots.

Slash and ex-GN’R bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Matt Sorum began jamming around again in 2001. As their writing gathered momentum and the good vibes returned, in his head Slash began hearing one particular voice singing their material: that of Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland. Slash sent the STP singer a CD of some of their songs, and word came back that Weiland liked them very much.

It was never going to be that easy, though. It took Weiland a year to disentangle himself from the mess that STP had become. The GN’R three had by then become four with the addition of guitarist Dave Kushner, a friend of Slash’s since junior high school.

“Eventually,” Slash says, “after we’d been through this tortuous process of trying to find a singer, doing however many fucking auditions, we got this offer to do a couple of movie soundtracks. So I said to Scott, ‘Let’s just hang out and make music. But right from the start it was this great thing – that doesn’t usually happen twice. It was very organic and natural. We hooked up in April last year and we wrote over the summer. We did one gig just for the fuck of it, and that really cemented it. You can sometimes get away with shit in the studio, but there’s nowhere to hide up on stage. It was just that chemistry right away. Why we all work together, I don’t know.”

The gig was at a small theatre, the El Rey in Los Angeles, and it was the first time that Slash had ever seen Weiland sing live; the singer’s skill and passion enthralled him. With the deal sealed, the band recorded their forthcoming debut album, Contraband, in the last three months of 2003, co-producing with Josh Abraham. They boiled down the final running order from some 50 original songs.

“I’m telling you, every fucking track of these twelve is something different,” Slash says of the results. “It’s like a journey. There are no fillers. Every song has its own vibe. It’s a really fucking killer record.”

The stand-out tunes are Slither, a song that Weiland describes as having “that STP vibe”, and Falling To Pieces, a show-stopping ballad in the manner of GN’R’s November Rain. There’s even “an older punk track”, Illegal Eye.

Weiland, too, has been seduced by the combination of sounds: “It’s a true representation of STP’s music and also the best of Guns N’ Roses’ music when they were at their best – vicious, streamlined, living off strippers.”

Just one dark cloud has blighted this idyllic horizon: as the band worked on the album, Weiland had to go back into rehab, falling victim once again to his well-known junk habit. It meant that Slash and co were once more working with a singer whose behaviour was affecting the course of their professional lives. How come?

"In reality Scott’s dealing with stuff," Slash replies. "He’s such an amazing talent.”

Clean again, Weiland is back taking a full part in the build-up to the album’s release. However, the true test will come when the band hit the road. Plans include some low-key English and European dates around the release of the album, followed by some extensive work in America.

“I would like to think that being in the band has helped Scott,” Slash says. “But you would have to ask him. I hope that working with us has made it a little easier, man. I mean, shit, we’ve all had our problems in the past.”

Velvet Revolver are attempting to absorb those lessons and learn from them, in both a personal and business sense.

“As naïve as it sounds, we didn’t want any of this bullshit about X amount of dollars for this or whatever; all the obvious things,” says Slash. “My whole thing was just to have a fucking amazing rock’n’roll band. Scott was the only guy who had that voice, what we thought was a genuine rock’n’roll voice. For most artists today it’s not about rock’n’roll any more, but it is for us. I don’t care about baggage or any of that shit. It’s not my big concern what everyone is going to think. I don’t have time to sort them all out. I just want the record to come out and to go on the road. I don’t care what size theatres or arenas or whatever, just fucking play, man. That’s what it’s about, after all.

“We lost sight of that in Guns. Once we’d played a stadium, Axl would never go back, it was stadiums or nothing. But to me it’s about being close to the crowd, too. I thought I’d got it out of my system with Snakepit, which was a kind of haphazard, thrown together thing, but it never really goes.”

To that end, Velvet Revolver are expected to play in the UK later in 2004.

“Hey, you gotta remember I was born there, man,” Slash says. “Stoke-on-Trent. And we just have very warm feelings about it there, from that first time with Guns. I just feel partial to the place. It seems like people take you at face value there.”

And with that, Slash is off to face the cameras and kick the big machine into action.  

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 64

Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett has criticised the state of the current pop scene in a new interview. Speaking to The Irish Times during the metal legends' stayover in Dublin where they played two huge shows as part of the latest leg of their ongoing 72 Seasons world tour, Kirk took aim at the more straightforward ways in which people are able to make music now, chiefly thanks to the huge advances in technology over the last two decades.

"I kind of lament those days when people had to really struggle to learn, because it’s all in the struggle," he explains. "And it’s all in the determination and being inspired at the same time that forces you to come up with your own stuff and eventually your own sound and style. I just worry about, how things are so perfect these days, the musicianship. It’s great that all these guitar players have all this vast knowledge of technique at their fingertips. I wonder where it’s leading to.

"I hope it leads to a better quality of pop music, popular music, and just a better quality of songwriting," he muses. "Because right now, songwriting and pop music is crap. I’m hoping that all these great musicians who can teach themselves through the internet step up and put all that great learning and all that great inspiration into creating new stuff, new songs, the future of music, and at a higher standard than what it is now. Because I’ll say it again, K-R-A-P. Crap. Sorry for all you pop fans out there."

Elsewhere in the interview, Kirk pays tribute to hugely influential, Dublin-based rock icons Thin Lizzy, who put on the first show Kirk ever attended as a fan when still a young teenager.

"I saw Thin Lizzy when I was 14-years-old in San Francisco," he says. "It was the first concert I ever saw. And I couldn’t believe that was the band on stage. The guys that I would stare at on the album cover were actually up there on stage.

"These people were real. To me, they’re like comic book superheroes, come to life. I’ll never forget that concert. And Phil Lynnott, Brian Robertson, Scott Gorham, Brian Downey...it was amazing I have to say. It was fantastic."

Metallica's 72 Seasons tour will climax with a historic residency at the Las Vegas sphere later this year.

It seems incredible to think that when the Sex Pistols released the eternally excoriating Never Mind The Bollocks…, their debut album, they were just 78 days from extinction.

That’s how quickly it happened; vaporised into a cloud of acrimony, embezzlement, addiction and death, that’s how fast the world’s most vilified group flipped from present to past tense. At the end of what would be their final concert for 18 years, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, on January 14, 1978 singer Jonny Rotten exited the stage with a rhetorical summation that has since become arguably the most famous quote in all of rock’n’roll; “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

Decades later, I had the opportunity to ask Rotten ( now answering to his birth name John Lydon) exactly what he meant by this.

“I meant that all of us had been cheated,” he said. “All of us. I meant that this had become a Rolling Stones fiasco, where everyone should be doing better. It was just a monumental fiasco of couldn’t-care-less. I wanted commitment. They were asking what all the fuss was about. Well, the fuss was about the fact that I meant what I said, and I still do. My music means a lot to me.”

Never mind that the blueprints for punk rock were drafted in New York City – a pair of concerts by the Ramones in Camden Town in the summer of 1976 helped spread the disease to members of the nascent Pistols, The Clash and The Damned – it was Rotten who gave the movement its voice. And just in case a band whose debut single began with the words “I am an antichrist” weren’t quite bracing enough, the sight of guitarist Steve Jones calling the host of a teatime television show a “dirty fucker” live on air – in the very same week, no less - made the Sex Pistols infamous in an instant.

As the horrified forces of politics, commerce and media united to drive to group into the ground, really, they were doomed from that moment on. Despite outselling their nearest competitor by a factor of two to one, in the summer of 1977 the Sex Pistols’ alternative National Anthem God Save The Queen was kept off the top of the official singles chart by Rod Stewart’s version of The First Cut Is The Deepest.

By the time Never Mind The Bollocks… arrived, gnashing and foaming its way into the world, the band were on their third record label (Virgin), having been ‘dropped’ by nervous patrons at EMI and A&M. As the moral panic began to bite, that year the Pistols were denied even basic momentum. Banned by councils, promoters and venues up and across the country, in 1977 the group were restricted to just a dozen concerts on British soil. "We're not into music, we're into chaos," Steve Jones had told the NME the previous year, and by late '77, playing music played precious little part in the Pistols' day-to-day existence.

With the notable exception of two joyous sets on Christmas Day at Ivanhoes nightclub in Huddersfield, in support of the families of striking firemen, at which Johnny Rotten handed out presents and cake to delighted children, the advent of the group’s debut LP then is best viewed as being the final flare from a dying star. Certainly, the presence of Never Mind The Bollocks… atop the British album chart served only to fuel the group’s many persecutors.

In November 1977, Chris Searle, the manager of the Nottingham branch of Virgin Records, escaped a possible prison sentence after the band’s barrister, John Mortimer – the author of the popular Rumpole Of The Bailey books - successfully argued that “bollocks” was a 19th Century colloquialism for a clergyman. The following day, The Sun announced it ‘astonishing’ that ‘Johnny Rotten and his foul-mouthed Sex Pistols [were given the chance] to put two fingers up to the world’.

Really, it was a lot. By the time manager Malcolm McLaren dispatched his fractured charges on a short tour of (mostly) southern states of America at the start of 1978, the train was ready to jump the tracks. With the dope-sick and wholly unmusical Sid Vicious having replaced original member Glen Matlock on bass – oh look, oh no, yet another concussive blow to the group’s stability – the seven-date caravan was defined by dysfunction and violence.

In Memphis, Vicious endured a beating from his security detail after wandering out into the night in the hope of sourcing drugs (depending on the telling, the words ‘I need a fix’ were either written, or else carved, into his bare chest). In San Antonio, the bassist struck a member of the audience over the head with his guitar. Trouble flared in Dallas, and in Baton Rouge. Centre-stage, a flu-ridden Johnny Rotten was coughing up blood.

Asked to describe the experience in 2018, Lydon told me, "Well, you’ve got the horrid scenario with Sid, you’ve got the dreadful Nancy [Spungen, Sid’s heroin-addicted girlfriend] scenario, you’ve got the dreadful Malcolm-in-hibernation scenario [the manager materialised only for the tour’s final date in San Francisco], and you’ve got me, Steve and Paul not talking scenario. And we’re all on the road in America. That’s almost guaranteed not to work.

"We were living completely different lives. And, again, we were being poisoned by the corrosive management who were spreading innuendo, rumours and lies. It was ugliness personified, really, when it should have been about us all getting along with each other."

In truth, they never did learn to get on with each other. Re-united with Glen Matlock on bass, live campaigns in the '90s and noughties were besmirched by divisions, certainly, between the group’s musicians and their singer. In 2018, insisting that the band would never play live again, John Lydon said, "We’d rather be friends than enemies, and I guarantee you that we’d be enemies within 30 seconds of going on tour."

Three years later, after losing a high court case against Jones, Cook and Matlock over the trio's decision to license the Pistols' music for use in Danny Boyle's fact-based TV drama Pistol, he'd rather changed his tune.

"None of these fucks would have a career but for me," he fumed in right-wing tabloid The Sun. "They can all fuck off. I supported them for years and years and years, knowing they were dead wood.”

As it turns out though, the "dead wood" are doing just fine, for the other three original Sex Pistols don't need John Lydon quite as much as he imagined. With Frank Carter fronting the group, the Pistols will kick off a US tour at Dallas' Longhorn Ballroom on September 11, celebrating 50 years of punk.

Every morning before entering Mogwai’s Castle Of Doom studio in Glasgow to work on most recent Jesus And Mary Chain album, Jim Reid would head out on two-hour walk around the city. A meandering amble is one of the singer’s favourite things to do when his band are on tour, aimlessly wandering around a new town, taking in the sights, getting lost. It was the same but different in Glasgow, a location Reid knows inside out having grown up eight miles away in East Kilbride, where Jim and his brother William formed the Jesus And Mary Chain in 1983.

On some occasions Reid would look around and not know where he was. Other times, if he’d fallen off the wagon, he’d settle into a local boozer for a liquid breakfast. When he was sober, he'd find himself spending time at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, a place he hadn’t been to since the '80s. All around him was memories, the shards of four decades of one of rock ’n’ roll’s most potent and visceral forces.

Reid isn’t sure if being back on home turf had an effect on the latest record by The Jesus And Mary Chain but mulling it over down the phone from his home in Devon, he concedes that maybe it did. For starters, it’s called Glasgow Eyes.

“My immediate reaction would be that it could’ve been recorded anywhere but maybe that walk makes the difference,” he says. “Maybe it makes you feel a little bit more in a Glasgow frame of mind. It probably does seep in in ways that I don’t realise.”

Similarly, Reid says, him and William tried not to think about the fact the band’s 40th anniversary was approaching as they made their eighth album but that also must have worked its way in. Those four decades have taken in turmoil, chaos and vicious rows between the brothers but The Jesus And Mary Chain are still standing. There is a sense of celebration at the heart of Glasgow Eyes, not the sort of celebration that would ever raise a smile - this is The Jesus And Mary Chain, after all - but more a feeling of ebullient defiance that they’re still doing it.

“I’m proud of the fact we’ve been here for 40 years but, making a record, it should have nothing to do with it,” reckons Reid. “To us, it’s just another Mary Chain record but that in itself is something to celebrate.”

As Reid well knows, there was a time when the idea of “just another Mary Chain record” was a very unlikely scenario.

The band had emerged in the '80s with a sound that melded Phil Spector-ish 60s pop with squalling feedback and chainsaw guitars, a tug-of-war between soothing melodicism and barbed sonics that was perfectly captured on their game-changing 1985 debut Psychocandy. It was a pioneering form of rock music that would become a springboard for shoegazing and experimental noise-pop, inspiring a wave of bands to mix hooks with ear-shredding effects. Their sound was built on tension until the tension got too much – by the time of 1998’s sixth album Munki, the Reid brothers couldn’t bear to be in the studio together and recorded their parts separately. They split up later that year: more on that later.

They patched things up and reunited in 2007, though, with a seventh studio album, Damage And Joy, following in 2017. Glasgow Eyes, which homes in on their love of Suicide and Can and brings out the more electronic and synth-y side of their sound, shows they have lost none of their devotion to the cause. Reid says they are still doing it for the right reasons.

“We’re still making records because we think we’re the best band in the world,” he declares. “Now, loads of people may disagree with that but that’s the way we are going into this thing – we’re better than anybody else, we believe that whole-heartedly and I think it comes across in the music. Whether you agree with that statement or not, I think you can hear that we at least believe it.”

The Reid brothers possessed that self-belief from the very beginning. The reason they started the band in the first place, Reid recalls, was because they thought music in the 80s was so bad they were compelled to fix it.

“The 80s was particularly hateful,” he states. “We used to always have the conversation where it would be like, ‘Fuck , we’re so unlucky that this is our decade, we could’ve got the '60s or the fucking '70s but what do we get, the fucking '80s!’ We were so disgusted with it that we thought, ‘Let’s change it, the 80s doesn’t have to be all bad, let’s go and make a little corner of it pretty good’. To us, the music coming out of the radio was diseased and we wanted to inject penicillin into that radio and cure the disease.”

When he looks back at their career, Reid thinks The Jesus And Mary Chain did make a difference but fell short of their world-conquering aims.

“We actually did think we were going to completely change the music scene,” he says. “We had massive ambition and we thought we were going to completely destroy all of what needed tearing down. In the end, we did cause a bit of a shake-up but we were hopelessly naïve about the scale of the problem.”

Whilst the new album is powered with a sense of forward-thinking urgency, there is some looking back. Propulsive lead single Jamcod revisits one of the most harrowing nights in the band’s history - when the two brothers ended up in a fight so bad after a 1998 show at Los Angeles venue the House Of Blues that it brought an end to the first incarnation of the group.

“That night has been raked over so many times and everyone always wants to know about it,” states Reid, “but I’ve talked about it so much that I just thought I should write it down, try and get it across in a way that simple language doesn’t, how it actually felt at that time. It was a terribly traumatic experience, it wasn’t just one night, it was over a period of two or three nights, a prolonged explosion and the boom was at the House Of Blues, that’s when the actual gunpowder went off. It was horrible but memorable all at the same time.”

After the band split up, Reid says he thought of nothing other than that fateful night for months to come.

“I tried to make sense of it and make sense of what happened,” he recounts. “I don’t know if I really have done but maybe I started to at least realise that the band didn’t need to break up then. I also started to realise that at the time I thought it was all his fault but when I reviewed a lot of the arguments and occurrences, I started to realise that I was a complete arse as well, so I think we each gave as good as we got… or as bad as we got.”

Not only has Reid never seen another band who argued with such feistiness as he and his brother did, he’s never witnessed another set of humans go at it so ferociously.

“Seriously, we used to argue and we could clear a room,” he laughs. “There would be a room of two dozen people who would all have to leave because it was so uncomfortable the way that we used to scream at each other. People would be like, ‘Oh god, I don’t know if I should be witnessing this’. That was the way it was.”

These days, he says, both he and his brother have learned that there’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed.

“We argue now and we scream at each other but we know that the things that you say that are unsayable should stay unsaid, and they didn’t stay unsaid back then. We said horrible things to each other and it left festering wounds for years afterwards. The wounds have healed so why open up new ones?”

Instead, they have a legacy to celebrate. As well as the new record, there will also be an autobiography released this year. You only have to look at the breadth of artists who’ve covered their songs to see how influential they are – Pixies, Sandi Shaw, Fontaines D.C., Richard Hawley and, um, David Hasselhoff have all had a crack at reworking tracks from their catalogue.

“Hasselhoff was quite funny, I thought that was amusing,” Reid says. “We had a bit of chuckle. It's good when people do covers, it shows we’re getting through to people.”

They might not have changed the world quite in the way that they set out to but they remain an exhilarating band still pushing things forward. They wanted to remedy music’s ills but it’s no quick fix. The Jesus And Mary Chain’s intoxicating shake-up continues.

Glasgow Eyes by The Jesus And Mary Chain is out now on Fuzz Club. The band are currently on tour in the UK, and will launch their European tour on April 2 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

"Take the best orgasm you've ever had, multiply by 1000, and you're still nowhere near it."

These are the words which Ewan McGregor's character Renton uses to explain the allure of heroin in Danny Boyle's 1996 film adaptation of Irvine Welsh's acclaimed debut novel Trainspotting. Three years later, this writer asked former heroin addict Steven Tyler, Aerosmith's frontman, whether he could relate to this.

"Oh no, it's much better than that," Tyler answered sincerely, before delivering a crucially important addendum. "At first..."

Speaking to People magazine in 1988, Tyler confessed that his own past drug use involved taking "heroin, coke, Valium, anything that anyone came near with."

"I have an addictive personality so I found certain drugs I loved and didn't stop to the point of hurting my children, hurting my life, hurting my family, hurting my band," he admitted on Fox News programme OBJECTified in 2018. "There was a point where I didn't have a band and I didn't care."

As he watched Nirvana's meteoric rise in the early '90s, Steven Tyler says he recognised the "pain" in Kurt Cobain's eyes and later discovered that Nirvana's frontman was using heroin. In a bid to try to help the younger musician avoid pitfalls of which he had personal experience, Aeromith's frontman went as far as contacting Nirvana's management in 1992 to enquire about getting Cobain's phone number to set up a heart-to-heart chat with the vocalist/guitarist.

In Everybody Loves Our Town, the definitive oral history of grunge, Gold Mountain Entertainment's Janet Billig, recalled, "Right when It started coming out that Kurt was doing drugs, I remember Steven Tyler called and wanted to help. I told Kurt, Holy shit, Steven Tyler called my office and he wants to help you. Can I give him your number?' And he was like, 'Steven Tyler got to be a junkie for 18 fuckin' years. I've only been doing drugs for an hour'."

Like many drug users, Cobain was somewhat in denial about the extent of his drug use.

"It’s not my fucking fault that anyone knows that I did heroin," he told Details magazine writer Gavin Edwards in July 1993. "I’ve never talked about it. When I’m high, it’s really obvious. That’s why I’ve never gone out in public on it. I tried as hard as I could to keep it from everyone.

"I just hope to God nobody is influenced to do drugs because of me," Cobain continued. "I definitely have a responsibility to talk negatively about heroin. It’s a really really evil drug—I think opiates are directly linked to Satan."

The singer then told Edwards that he was no longer capable of using heroin, stating, "now if I take heroin it makes me vomit right away." The very next week, on July 23, while in New York to play the Roseland Ballroom, the singer overdosed on 'Bodybag' heroin, and could have died but for the quick thinking of Nirvana's UK press officer Anton Brookes, and Kurt and Courtney’s nanny, Michael ‘Cali’ DeWitt.

This near-death experience may have been on Cobain's mind when he finally met Steven Tyler face-to-face the following month, backstage at Aerosmith's August 12 show at Portland Memorial Coliseum, in the company of Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl. Tyler took Cobain aside and spoke about 12-Step recovery groups

"He wasn’t preaching,” Novoselic remembered to writer Charles Cross, as related in definitive Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven, “just talking about similar experiences he’d been through. He tried to give him encouragement."

Within nine months, after discharging himself from a Los Angeles rehab facility, Cobain was found dead at his home in Seattle. Interviewed on US TV show Turning Point ( see below) the week after Cobain's body was found, Steven Tyler admitted, "I'm angry about Kurt. This guy didn't have to die."

When you’ve been toiling in the underground circuit for years, desperately trying to make your rock star dreams come true, and then it finally happens for you, the last thing you want is for it all to be snatched away within a year. But that’s the situation that Wednesday 13 found himself in when touring for the Murderdolls' hugely successful breakthrough 2002 album, Beyond The Valley Of The Murderdolls, wrapped up.

“I was nervous, I was excited, I didn’t really know what to do,” Wednesday recalls. “I knew that I definitely didn’t want to go back to my day job though. I knew 100% I was going to do everything I could not to do that.”

The reason for his concern: any Murderdolls activity was, and always would be, at the mercy of his bandmate Joey Jordison’s commitments with Slipknot.

“When I first came off the road, the carrot was dangled,” smiles Wednesday. “It was, ‘You only have to wait eight months, Slipknot is only going to tour for six months, then we’ll be back’. Well it soon became apparent that wasn’t going to happen. I waited and waited.”

There was a real chance that he could have become, in his words, “just a guy that did something in one of those Slipknot side projects”. But rather than fade into obscurity, Wednesday decided to take a leap of faith and start a solo career, and over 20 years later it’s still going strong - thanks in part to a song that he wrote in his bedroom whilst he was figuring out what to do with himself: I Walked with a Zombie.

“I just went into my basement and wrote and wrote and wrote,” he says. “I literally wrote what would become my first album in that period.”

Wednesday had songs, but he still wasn’t sure what project they would eventually be attached to. In 1996, he’d formed Frankenstein Drag Queens From Planet 13. That band released four albums, but had fallen apart somewhat acrimoniously in 2002, around the time he headed off to Murderdolls land. Wednesday thought about forming a new band, but there was a voice in his head that was pushing him towards going solo.

“I had doubts in the beginning, for sure,” he says. “I didn’t know if I wanted to call it 'Wednesday 13'. I had a band name in my head at one point, it had the word funeral in it...that’s all I can tell you. But something in the back of my mind said, ‘Dude, if you put this band together, within a month, this guy will quit and that guy will quit, and then you’re back to square one. If you just call it Wednesday 13, you’ll never quit the band.’ Here I am, 20 years later.”

It was a concept that he was still grappling with, until, just to pass the time, he found himself grabbing an acoustic guitar and heading over to the UK to play some shows, performing songs by Murderdolls and his first band, Frankenstein Drag Queens from Planet 13, for his new fanbase.

“Every night was packed out,” he excitedly proclaims. “We completely sold out and the fans loved it. I went home and I thought, ‘You know, maybe I could just do a Wednesday 13 solo album’. I felt like it was something I should at least try and put out.”

Decision made to become a fully-fledged solo artist, there was now the issue of finding a label to release his work. Unbeknownst to himself initially, Wednesday was actually still signed to Roadrunner Records, the label that had released Beyond The Valley….

“I had been down in my basement writing songs and I found out that I was still an artist on Roadrunner,” he tells us. “So I went to my A&R guy and said, ‘Hey, would you put out a Wednesday 13 record?’ He said ‘Wednesday, I like you... but I don’t think we’re going to put your record out.”

But there’s nothing like the sense of FOMO to kick a record label into action, and within a week of passing on the idea of releasing the debut Wednesday 13 solo album, Roadrunner performed a huge U-turn.

“I shopped it out to other labels and one came back within a week and said they’d like to release it,” he recalls. “I went to Roadrunner to say, ‘Hey, can you guys release me please, I’m signing to someone else to put this record out. and they said, ‘Oh... really? Well...now we do want you! We’ll put your record out!’ (laughs) I got that deal, just from them being fearful of someone else taking it.”

It was a situation that Wednesday was happy with, rubber-stamping his decision to go solo in the first place.

“I wanted to be on Roadrunner, I loved my team there,” he says with a shrug. “It was an accomplishment! It gave me a life too, because it showed I wasn’t just Joey’s friend, you know what I mean?”

It was all set up, but Wednesday needed an anthem to showcase this new solo direction, a song that would prove that he could make horror-themed rock’n’roll even without the rest of Murderdolls. It came in the shape of I Walked with a Zombie, a song that mixed his love of old school horror themes with fantastically rough-sounding glammy, punk metal riffs, a sneering, sleazy vocal with plenty of hooks and, the cherry on the top of the cake, some poppy hand claps.

“Zombie… was one of the first songs that I wrote in those sessions,” Wednesday remembers. “I was literally just goofing around in my room playing that ‘Da-da-da-da-da-da’ open string and the riff just came to me. Then I just started singing ‘Zombie... Zombie!’ over the top of it. It came really easily.It wasn’t even written about the movie [1943’s I Walked With A Zombie] necessarily, a zombie voodoo priest thing. It’s a cool movie, but that’s not where it was inspired. It just flowed out of me.”

Usually, artists will say they knew they had a special song when it was played to their record label for the first time, or when they saw the reaction from an audience when playing it live. But, for Wednesday, he knew he had something with I Walked With A Zombie when it was sang back to him by someone much closer to home.

“My daughter was like, three years old at the time, and I made the demo of it, and she started singing it,” he says with a laugh. “I realised, ‘A little kid is singing this, how many people tell me that some of the first songs they ever sang was something their parents were playing!’ So, something simple like that is kind of when I knew that this was a catchy song.”

Thanks to his daughter, Wednesday had decided on his first solo single. Riding the crest of the Murderdolls wave and delivering a proper earworm, it was always destined to succeed. But the now iconic video, featuring Wednesday inserting himself into scenes from the legendary Night Of The Living Dead movie, made I Walked With A Zombie a real crossover smash.

“At the time, that sort of green screen technology wasn’t as easy. You can do that on your phone now,” Wednesday says of the making of the video. “On an iPhone you can flip something and have it in 10 minutes. But for us it was one hour per second to edit; it was the most time-consuming thing to get that little thing right. We thought we were on the brink of breaking technology, it seemed like we did something futuristic at the time. It’s funny: the cheapest part was actually getting the footage!”

Released as the first single from his debut album Transylvania 90210: Songs Of Death, Dying And The Dead, I Walked With A Zombie launched Wednesday 13 as a solo artist. The album’s subsequent success – it hit number 34 on the US Heatseekers chart – showed that he could make it all on his own. As Wednesday is quick to point out, it’s been 20 years and 47 band members since then, and he’s still going strong.

“Still all these years later, when that riff comes in you see the excitement in people’s faces,” Wednesday says of the song’s legacy. “They actually get ready to do the handclaps. It’s funny. That’s its legacy; it’s a crowd pleaser. It represents who I am and what I do.”

Mid Death Crisis is out now via Napalm. Wednesday 13 plays Bloodstock Festival in August

As the next wave of black metal continues redrawing the map, Bianca arrive not as tentative newcomers but as visionaries already fluent in its new contours. Formed in 2024 by bassist and principal writer Ͷ, along with vocalist B, guitarist ES and drummer Sathrath, the fiery Italians released their self-titled debut in 2025 - an utterly thrilling eight-track affair that showcases seismic waves of blackened riffage and icepick shrieks, balanced with spectral vocals, doomy atmospherics and post-BM’s cinematic swell.

“We don’t see rules,” says B, turning up to our chat in a Gaerea shirt. “We see black metal as a language.”

It’s a crucial distinction. In a genre that can treat tradition like scripture, Bianca use the second wave’s frostbitten brutality as raw material rather than relic. Ͷ and B’s influences - ranging from Watain and Marduk to Blut Aus Nord, Akhlys and Witch Club Satan - aren’t paraded as fandom; they function as coordinates suggesting where black metal might yet travel.

What emerges feels at once recognisable and bracingly new: black metal fluent in its own history, yet unwilling to be contained by it. Central to Bianca’s identity is the concept of the feminine - not as gender, but as inner dimension.

“It’s fertility, resistance, sensitivity,” B explains. “Something that belongs to men, too.”

Sonically, that manifests in her ability to pivot from piercing, banshee-like screams to ethereal cleans without fracture.

“The question mark going into the album was finding the voice,” says Ͷ, “We wanted something really different to fit inside this project and I think we nailed it.”

Tracks like Abysmal and the epic To The Twilight highlight this claim - immersive, three-dimensional works that suggest that vast possibilities within the realm of black metal remain unexplored. For listeners craving intensity with intelligence, and evolution without dilution, Bianca are required listening.

Sounds Like: A glacial surge of black metal orthodoxy twisted into something vast and visionary.
For Fans Of: Watain, Deathspell Omega, Chelsea Wolfe
Listen To: Abysmal

Bianca is out now via Avantgarde Music

Long before Dream Theater or Tool fused prog and metal, Rush were serving up long, intricate, lyrically mind-bending songs that mixed heaviness with intelligence. In 2013, as the Canadian trio geared up for a reissue of their iconic 1976 concept album 2112, bassist and vocalist Geddy Lee looked back on the history of the band who helped invent progressive metal.

Geddy Lee has a knowing smile. We’re sitting in the lavish surrounds of a room at one of London’s more exclusive hotels. And the subject that’s come up is how Rush are continuing to influence succeeding generations of metal bands.

“It’s nice to know there are young musicians who like what we’ve done,” says the bassist/vocalist. “It’s flattering that these people are taking what we once did and developing it for the modern age.”

When it comes to the birth of progressive metal, Rush have strong claims to be seen as the true pioneers of a style of music that has been taken by Dream Theater, Meshuggah, Cynic and Tesseract, to name but a handful. “I can’t say I’m familiar with the new crop of bands coming through, but all I can hope is that they enjoy the sort of career we’ve had. And stick to what they believe in as much as we’ve always done.”

For Rush, it all started rather unpromisingly in Toronto during August 1968. Guitarist Alex Lifeson put together the first lineup with bassist/vocalist Jeff Jones and drummer John Rutsey. Within a few weeks, Jeff was replaced by Geddy.

“I was a school pal of Alex’s and he asked me to come into the band,” explains Geddy. “But it wasn’t plain sailing back then. We went through a lot of different lineups over the next couple of years, with people coming and going. I don’t think we quite knew what we were doing. In our minds, we were the Canadian Led Zeppelin. In reality, we were probably seen as a bit sad. But at least we got to play regularly in local bars and at high-school dances.”

In May 1971, Geddy, Alex and John stabilised, and Rush were born as a power trio. Two years later they released their debut single. It was a cover of the Buddy Holly classic Not Fade Away, with the Geddy/John song You Can’t Fight It on the B side.

“It wasn’t a success,” laughs Geddy. “We didn’t get much radio airplay, and the media in general was indifferent to it. In fact, such was the lack of interest in us that we couldn’t even get a record deal. We were forced to start our own label in conjunction with our manager, Ray Danniels.”

By 1974, the band had released their self-titled debut album, which got noticed by one radio station in Cleveland, Ohio. “We got little support at home. But WMMS in Cleveland picked up on the song Working Man. Donna Halper, one of the DJs at the station, gave it a lot of airtime, for which we shall always be grateful.”

As a result of this exposure, Rush got signed by Mercury, though this breakthrough was dampened by John leaving the band.

“John had health problems; his diabetes meant he wasn’t very much into touring. So there was no falling out; he simply felt it was in all our best interests for him to bow out.”

John made his last live appearance with the band on July 25, 1974 in London, Ontario. He died on May 11, 2008, from a heart attack brought on by his diabetic condition.

The man chosen to replace him was Neil Peart, who had just returned from living in England, where he’d hoped (but failed) to make his mark as a drummer. He was a member of Hush, another Canadian band, when he was persuaded to audition for Rush.

“He turned up wearing shorts and driving a battered old car. He also had his drums stored inside trash cans. It was all very amusing, but I was very impressed with his drumming technique, and also liked him as a person straight away. Alex was a little less sure, but I managed to talk him round.”

Neil officially joined the band four days after John’s farewell performance. On August 14, he played his first gig with Rush. It was also the trio’s debut show in America, as they opened for Uriah Heep and Manfred Mann in Pittsburgh.

Neil quickly assumed the role of writing lyrics for second album Fly By Night, released in 1975, and he immediately made his presence felt. There was a definite shift towards fantasy and science fiction, as was showcased on the band’s first epic track, By-Tor And The Snow Dog. This move, which was also mirrored by a more complex musical vision, was even further in evidence later the same year when Caress Of Steel was released, which featured two more examples of their growing connection to sophisticated and imaginative ideas, namely The Necromancer and The Fountains Of Lamneth.

This was supposed to be Rush’s big break- through album but it was a commercial failure. Tickets sales on the subsequent tour were poor enough for it to be blunty labelled the Down The Tubes Tour. “We’d turn up at venues and sometimes they didn’t even expect us. Other times, there was no publicity at all, so we never played in front of big crowds. It was as if everyone – record company, management – had given up on us. Nobody seemed happy with what we were doing musically, and wanted us to return to the simpler blues-rock on the first album. We were bracing ourselves to be dropped by Mercury.”

However, going against the grain and showing they were ready to ruffle feathers in the process, Rush refused to listen to the business heads, instead going even further than they had done on Caress Of Steel. The result was the landmark 2112 album, which had the first side totally dedicated to the 20-minute-plus title track, which has a theme of freedom against tyranny in the year 2062.

The album captured the imagination and was the first from the band to chart in the Top 100 in America. It got to No.62, while in Canada it was a chart topper. The UK also took serious notice of what Rush were doing, even if they didn’t make the mainstream charts.

“It was an important moment for us because we’d shown that we did know what to do, and there was a growing audience out there for Rush music. We weren’t arrogant enough to think we were suddenly the most important band in the world. We just knew we were – ha! But if you look at what we were wearing back then… we had no fashion sense!”

Over the years, 2112 has come to be regarded as a standard-bearer for progressive metal, and Geddy recognises its appeal. “To us this is just another album on the way, albeit one that made a difference. But so many fans and musicians see it as some sort of turning point. All we can do is be grateful for the way it’s continually received.”

However, the album led to controversy surrounding the band. When Neil publicly stated that his lyrics were inspired by the ‘genius of Ayn Rand’, some parts of the press labelled them Nazis. This is because of novelist Rand’s own right-wing tendencies. But it was a fallacious claim, and Geddy is still confused and puzzled by such attacks. “We had to endure a lot of interviews where the journalist was out to prove we were Nazi sympathisers. Nothing could be further from the truth, and anyone who took the time to study Neil’s lyrics could never make such a connection. The good thing was that our fanbase was expanding, and we saw no signs of Nazis turning up at our gigs.”

The release of the double live album All The World’s A Stage in 1976 saw the band finally make their debut on British stages. They did seven shows in June 1977 on the tour to support this first live record. “It was incredible to finally have the chance to play in the country which had so influenced our music. At the time, we were on the way to Rockfield Studios in Wales to record the album A Farewell To Kings, so grabbed the opportunity to play live. We also introduced keyboards on this tour, and it was our last one where the setlist was varied every night. We became boring after that and generally stuck to the same songs for each gig.”

A Farewell To Kings was released in 1977 and became the first Rush album to sell over 500,000 copies in the States. It was also the first to make the UK charts, getting to No.22. This album, and 1978’s Hemispheres, marked a turn towards introducing keyboards and synthesisers.

“I was really interested in all the developments in that area of music. Things were moving very fast and I liked what it might do for our music. Alex wasn’t at all enthusiastic. Well, he was the guitarist, so felt we should still be focused around that. But I really believed that if we were to have anything to offer in the new decade, then what we needed to do was explore different sounds.

“We’d also discovered more progressive bands like Yes, Van der Graaf Generator and King Crimson. They inspired us to think about making music more complex and challenging. The trick was to find some way of combining these influences with our own personalities, so what you got was definitely still about us.”

Just how much Rush had moved forward became clear on 1980’s Permanent Waves, when they introduced elements of reggae and new wave into the music. Going back to shorter songs, they enjoyed their biggest success yet, as songs like The Spirit Of Radio proved they had much to offer at a time when some established bands were struggling to come to terms with the changes in the musical landscape.

They were to ride even higher the following year when Moving Pictures gave them their biggest album to date, selling over four million copies in America alone. It appeared that their reinvention had been a triumph. They were now accepted as doyens of a new hard-rock approach, and they’d done it without disenfranchising their diehard fans.

“It was a gamble, and we could have ended up with no audience, losing the old-school ones without getting any new faces. But thankfully that didn’t happen. I think it’s because those who’d been following us for so long knew we’d always adapted our style, yet we still sounded like Rush.”

In 1981, the release of Exit… Stage Left, yet another double live album, marked the end of another chapter in Rush’s diversifying career. By 1982’s Signals, synthesisers were almost the dominant instrument in the band, and this continued throughout the decade. For 1984’s Grace Under Pressure, long-time producer Terry Brown, who’d worked with them since Fly By Night, was no longer involved. “We never fell out with Terry, but it was decided by all parties it was in everyone’s best interests to move on.”

At the end of the 80s, Rush had left Mercury and signed to Atlantic, and this saw a return to a more guitar-oriented approach on the albums Presto (1989) and Roll The Bones (1991).

“By the time we did Presto, I was getting sick of technology and wanted a return to a more basic approach. We were lucky that our producer, Rupert Hine, agreed, so that’s why it’s more about the vocals than anything else. However, I have to say that the album didn’t turn out the way we hoped. If there’s one album we’d love to do all over again, this is it. The songs are so much stronger than the way they came out. I’m not blaming anyone in particular, it’s just a statement of fact.”

By 1997, when the band had augmented their credibility and success with the albums Counterparts (1993) and Test For Echo (1996), Rush were forced to take an extended break, as Neil suffered a double tragedy. His daughter Samantha died in a car crash in August 1997, and 10 months later, his wife Jacqueline passed away from cancer.

“Neil need time to himself to grieve and reflect on what he wanted to do. Alex and I gave him as much time as he needed. There was never any question of putting him under pressure to return.”

In 2001, Neil said he was ready to go back to work, the result being 2002’s Vapor Trails. The first album since the early 1970s not to have any keyboard or synth parts, it was also unusual because Alex refused to play any conventional guitar solos.

“Again, this was us moving on. But it was a tough album to make, and probably took something like 14 months in all. I’m not sure why we appeared to find this one so hard to make. Possibly because of what Neil had been through, and also because we had stripped so much away from our sound. But we never turned our back on technology because computers were extensively used in the writing and arranging of the songs. It’s just we decided it was time to move on from keyboards.”

After celebrating their 30th anniversary in this current incarnation in 2004, with the release of the covers EP Feedback, Rush returned three years later with Snakes & Arrows. Chart-wise, this was their most successful album in America since Counterparts, reaching No.3. The subsequent tour saw the band returning for their first shows in the UK since the Roll The Bones tour in 1992 – a gap of 15 years.

“It wasn’t our choice to avoid coming over to the UK. Promoters kept telling us that nobody was interested in seeing Rush. We believed them and stayed away. Imagine our surprise when gigs sold out quickly!”

Always regarded as reticent public figures, Rush surprised many when the documentary Beyond The Lighted Stage was released in 2010. This saw the band open up like never before, giving people a significant and unprecedented insight into who they are.

“I think what shocked a lot of people is that we showed we have a keen sense of humour, and we interact with each other by sending ourselves and everyone else up. We don’t take everything so seriously, as most of our fans probably believed we did. We’re not po-faced professors of philosophy, but rock’n’roll musicians. And these days we’re probably more about being comedians who play some music, rather than vice versa.”

The release of Clockwork Angels in 2012 again showed the band were able to bend the rules and move into hitherto uncharted territory, as they brought steampunk influences into their world. Moreover, a novel written by renowned steampunk author Kevin J. Anderson (a friend of Neil) was published to coincide with the album’s release. It was based on the story that runs through the songs, and was more proof that Rush are always looking for ways to push the envelope.

“We still don’t want to stand still and repeat ourselves. Even at our advanced time of life it is all about making the right choices, so we keep everyone – especially ourselves – on our toes.”

It says much for Rush that as they approach the 40th anniversary of this lineup, they are once again seen as being at the cutting edge of music, and are influencing so many in the world of metal. “I don’t think about things like the 40th anniversary. We have no plans to celebrate it. We did enough for the 30th. So, if anything is being planned, it will be without our involvement. We are still looking forward, not back.”

So, just what is the secret behind Rush’s enduring career, and how have the trio managed to stay together for so long without killing each other?

“It’s not been easy! Of course, there are moments when we’ve fallen out. But the trick is that we all know how well we work together. We have also become very good at giving each other space to breathe. Ultimately, we are three individuals who can come together and create something special. But it doesn’t take over our lives. And at the end of the day, we can still have a good laugh about anything. Perhaps that’s the secret to longevity: learn to laugh!”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 241, February 2013. Rush retired in August 2015 following their R40 tour, and drummer Neil Peart passed away in 2020. In 2026, Rush returned to the road.

In 2012 – a year after rejoining The Darkness and putting his interim band Hot Leg on hiatus – Justin Hawkins told Prog how he discovered Todd Rundgren and why the multi-talented American was his prog hero.

“The first record I bought of his was his 1972 double album Something/Anything?, which Axl Rose once said was his favourite album of all time. I used to cover one of the songs on side four – Dust In The Wind – when I was in Hot Leg.

It sounds as though a lot of studio trickery was used on the first three sides to achieve the sound of several people when it was actually just him; and the last side featured Todd and a band. I like the way that on the track Wolfman Jack he speeds his voice up to sound like female backing singers.

I’ve bought everything I can find on him since. I’ve even started buying his DVDs, especially of Utopia because I was told pyramids were involved [circa 1977’s Ra] and they might provide The Darkness with some ideas.

You’ve also got to respect the way he followed the gold-selling Something/Anything? with an hour-long record of stream-of-consciousness tunes and sounds. He’s the kind of artist who’ll make those sorts of radical departures. He went from piano ballads to freak-out prog in three years – amazing!

He’s huge in America – it’s hard to go a day on public transport there without hearing loads of his songs. He’s really influential as well, without people realising.

Not many artists are as wildly eclectic as Todd. Is he prog? If prog means abandoning convention, being challenging and deliberately difficult, then yes, he is. He’s also one of my guitar heroes. And a synth pioneer.

I’ve never met him, but I know people who have. I won’t say who because then you’ll ask what he was like! But then, you want him to be arsey, difficult and hard to understand. Nothing important was ever achieved by being nice.

You want Todd to have optimum ego power. He’s got mystique, he’s misunderstood – he’s definitely a hero.”

In 2018 Roger Waters commenced the UK leg of his Us + Them tour. He’d earlier sparked speculation that his career was winding down – but that was before the experience of 2016’s Desert Trip series of events. With a new lease of life, the typically sharp-talking Waters, at that time 74, continued telling it like he saw it.

On June 26, Roger Waters’ latest live extravaganza, the Us + Them tour, rolls into Dublin for the first of two shows. There will then be six concerts across the UK, the centrepiece of which is almost certainly going to be his headlining performance at London’s Hyde Park on July 6.

It’s the kind of massive live concert for which Waters became famous with Pink Floyd in the late 70s, and over the last decade, few have surpassed prog’s arch-conceptualist when it comes to stadium-sized events.

Following Pink Floyd’s final performance at Live 8 in July 2005, Waters toured The Dark Side Of The Moon from 2006 to 2008. In 2010 he took The Wall out on a tour of the world’s arenas, which later moved on to outdoor stadiums.

And now there’s his Us + Them jaunt, a kind of Pink Floyd’s greatest hits, plus a few songs from last year’s Is This The Life We Really Want?, his first solo album proper for a quarter of a century.

Given that, as of 2013, The Wall Live is the highest grossing tour by a solo artist, you’d have to say that Waters is doing alright. Is This The Life We Really Want? is a fine piece of work, while the continued runs around the world with the Floyd back catalogue prove that the man behind a lot of the ideas and music that emanated from Pink Floyd in the late 70s is getting things right.

Perhaps even more interestingly is that, in 2010, as he launched the tour of The Wall, the now-74-year-old announced: “I think I have a swan song in me and I think this will probably be it.” Eight years down the line, the facts tell a somewhat different story...

“Very good point,” Waters says. “I think the tour is because two years ago now, Paul Tollett and the people from Goldenvoice [Tollett’s promotions company] asked me to do Desert Trip, which was a Coachella thing. Because I did Coachella in 2008 and they’d always go, ‘Oh, we want you to come back and blah blah blah…’

“But Coachella is all sorts of young people doing whatever it is that young people do. then he had this idea of getting a bunch of more established acts together one autumn, and that’s what we did.

“So basically his idea was: ‘Let’s get Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and The Who up. That’s the six acts, and we would do it over a weekend, you know: two acts a day, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And if the tickets go well, we’ll do another weekend.’

“Well, the tickets did. I think there were 500,000 ticket requests in the first few hours. And so I put a lot of work into putting that show together, and realised I had been asked to don the Pink Floyd mantle, which hadn’t really happened before. And I said, ‘Yeah, okay, I can do that,’ and I did.

“But having done all that work, I thought, ‘Maybe if this new record comes out well, maybe I can put a show together that’s some of what I did at Desert Trip and a few songs from the new record.’ So that’s what I’ve done.

“The ideas in it are kind of embodied by the song Us And Them from Dark Side Of The Moon, which is about searching within ourselves to find love and empathy for all fellow human beings.”

As you’ve mentioned, this tour is 75 per cent old material, 25 per cent new material; but you also said it will be connected by a general theme. So what links it all together?

Well, it’s called Us + Them, and it’s called that largely because there’s a verse in the song that says: ‘With, without, And who'll deny it’s what the fighting’s all about?’

The answer to that question is: almost everybody will deny that with/without is what the fighting’s all about. It’s a war on terror; also it’s about ideology – but what is it really about?

Most people think that everything has happened because somebody is right and somebody is wrong and the people who are wrong have to be put in their place, and the best way to do that is to bomb them, or invade their country, or whatever it might be.

But that’s not what war is about. War is actually about keeping rich people rich and poor people poor. That’s the function of it. There’s just so much money in the economies of the Western countries. Well, the ones who make weapons, which is mainly the United States, the UK, Russia, Germany, France, Belgium – those are the main ones.

So much is tied into the armament industries, in the great military industrial complexes Eisenhower warned us about. So that is the reason we’re in perpetual war.

Do you think you’d ever be able to make an album with songs that weren’t connected in theme?

I couldn’t personally. I can’t write a song that isn’t connected with how I feel. I think that maybe if my songs have an enduring quality to them, it’s that they’re truthful, that they’re very heartfelt. I mean, I’m not saying I know the truth and other people don’t, but I’m saying I tell the truth I believe in as directly as I can in the songs I write.

Are any of the gigs on this tour being filmed for a future release?

We’re actually filming the show in Amsterdam. I don’t know what we’ll do with it when we’ve filmed it but that’s where we’re going to do the filming. That’s been decided now.

Is there anything else Pink Floyd-related that you’ve been working on?

Yeah. I’ve just been working with Po [designer Aubrey Powell]. There’s a reissue of Animals, a 5.1 mix of Animals so I’ve been working... Well, I haven’t been working, he’s been working. He came up with some new photographs of Battersea Power Station to use as a CD cover for the new 5.1 mix. It’s beautiful.

“I don't feel like there’s unfinished business with Code Orange. We left an awesome legacy and a great discography.”

Jami Morgan is looking forwards, not back. Having spent the majority of his life associated with one of the best hardcore bands of the modern era, he had to re-evaluate everything when Code Orange abruptly ended after their 2024 Download Festival performance. He won’t divulge details about the split, but admits he needed to try something new.

“I had to learn to let go of the bitterness of the split and stop being so one-track minded,” he says.

That ‘something new’ was Nowhere2Run, a project he formed with Code Orange guitarist Eric ‘Shade’ Balderose. Rather than making a straight-up band, Jami envisioned Nowhere2Run as a collective that not only make their own music but produce other artists too, and promote a series of wild-looking live collaborative experiences that they’ve christened ‘Bloodraves’ (not coincidentally, Bloodrave is their debut EP).

“It’s just been a godsend to create this whole new world,” Jami says enthusiastically. “I’m stoked on the state of music in general, and to be able to blend all these different projects and genres has been so rewarding.”

Nowhere2Run are certainly much more than just a continuation of what Jami and Shade were doing with Code Orange; experimental hip hop, dream pop, ambient electronic music, harsh techno and more all swirl around the various songs and projects they’ve dropped. But that doesn’t mean they’ve turned their back on heavy music.

“We’re not running away from metal in any sense,” Jami barks. “We love guitars, we love hard vocals, we’ve been inspired by artists that bring that in from outside of metal. I might not be able to sell it to a Judas Priest fan, but if you love dark art, that’s kinda what we’re doing here.”

Bloodrave is out now via Pale Chord/Rise

IN SHORT

SOUNDS LIKE: Harsh, pummeling electronica one minute, hardcore beatdowns the next
FOR FANS OF: Nine Inch Nails, JPEGMAFIA, Pop Will Eat Itself
LISTEN TO: Ant In The Afterbirth

Uncultivates dressing like cowboys while being from Ireland only makes sense if you don’t think about it. It’s even easier if you just don’t believe it.

“The fake news that we’re from Cork will not be tolerated,” says bassist Col. Goon. “It’s not true. We’re strong Texan men, as you can clearly see, sir.”

The band dress in the best Western finery, but they don’t play bluegrass. Their debut album, This Will Become Clear Later, Like the French Revolution, unleashes a blistering rodeo of intricate post-hardcore (dubbed ‘yee-hardcore’) that hits like a shot of 140% proof whiskey. The chaser? Humour and charisma, myth and lore.

“Lots of these songs are given to us in dreams by Chelsea, a hobbyhorse,” explains vocalist Dr. Eli Gravedigger.

Chelsea’s gospel preaches the inescapable despair of blue-collar life in I Am Your God, Your Father And Your Boss; how even the Lord of the Dance faces his mortality on Flatley; and that Hell is getting cornered by a “Joe Rogan apostle” while he spouts “facts about gorillas”.

That song, Every Day I Wake Up On The Bonnet Of A Different Car, was not “an attack on Mr Rogan,” says Dr. Eli,” but on apostles that follow him–”

“–and force every thought they’ve ever been told to think down your ear holes at 4am,” adds Col. Goon.

The album is full of riffs as tasty as a Southern barbecue, breakdowns meaner than a hungover rattlesnake and melodies as sweet as the Texan sky at night. But don’t take Uncultivates’ word for it. Seriously.

“I think the line drawn in the sand, so to speak, is whether or not you think for yourself, sir,” says Col. Goon. “We probably would not be in this position if we thought things through.” Yeehaw, indeed.

This Will Become Clear Later, Like The French Revolution is out now via Horsebox

IN SHORT

SOUNDS LIKE: Getting into a bar fight you know you’re going to lose
FOR FANS OF: Mclusky, Party Cannon, Gay For Johnny Depp
LISTEN TO: Every Day I Wake Up On The Bonnet Of A Different Car

Mongolia's ambassadors to the scene, The Hu helped popularise a new breed of folk metal that incorporated throat singing and traditional instruments such as the horsehead fiddle and the Tsuur flute. Their 2018 debut single, Yuve Yuve Yu, was authentic, innovative and as catchy as a cold, making the band a viral YouTube sensation.

Since then, the Ulaanbaatar metalheads have refused to stop doing incredible things: they’ve played pretty much every major metal festival, toured with Iron Maiden and even appeared in the Star Wars franchise. Horsehead fiddle player and backing vocalist Enkhsaikhan ‘Enkush’ Batjargal tells Hammer about the lessons he’s learned on this whirlwind journey, from his childhood in post-communist Asia to meeting his metal idols.

THERE’S ANOTHER SIDE TO EVERYTHING

“I was born in 1990, just as communism fell in Mongolia. As a child, I couldn’t really grasp communist ideals, but what I do remember is everyone having a job. I appreciate the choices that democracy’s brought us, and the value of feeling free, but socialism also had its good side in that all of the people were looking out for each other. That mentality by itself wasn’t something that was bad.”

MONGOLIANS ARE NATURAL REBELS

“We’re kind of like the rebels of Asia. Under communism, Western ideals were banned, and heavy metal was part of that, too. Many people bought banned CDs from the black market. I know a brother – we call each other brothers – who was going to train at the police academy, but they were like, ‘Are you going to choose heavy metal? Or are you going to join the police?’ He was so hardcore he went, ‘I’m choosing rock!’”

ROCK’N’ROLL RUNS IN THE FAMILY

“My mum did her best to introduce her kid to international music. She used to play a lot of vinyls from Russia, and Russia was so heavy! She’d find them on the black market, bring them back to the countryside, and then have me listen to them. Ever since I was a baby, I used to hear heavy metal vinyls, and it made me fall in love with heavy metal.”

LEARN HOWEVER YOU CAN

“My uncle is a monk who used to play bass guitar. He was going to go to the capital [Ulaanbaatar] and form a band with his fellow monks called Nisvanis [named after the Buddhist term for negative emotions such as fear, anxiety and anger]. It turned out there was already a band called that, so they called it off and he went back to just being a monk. When I was a little kid, I tried out his bass, and he encouraged me to learn.”

NATIONAL IDENTITY MATTERS

“Mongolian identity was essentially banned under communism. After it fell, everyone was invested in trying to find who we are, and the horsehead fiddle has been part of the identity of Mongolia for generations. I loved music, and used to ‘play’ my mum and grandma’s hairpins like a horsehead fiddle, so they enrolled me into horsehead fiddle classes.”

DON’T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER

“Under communism, every city had an art theatre where all the artistic people, like dancers and musicians, would gather under one roof with a director who auditioned kids. That carried on after communism ended. I auditioned for horsehead fiddle, but they initially refused to take me. They said my fingers were too small and that I should learn a wind instrument. I hated it! I was sword-fighting with the instrument with a classmate and I broke the damn thing.”

THROAT SINGING IS AS TRICKY AS YOU’D IMAGINE

“Not only do you need to have a talent for throat singing, you have to learn the technique, because it’s so heavy on your throat. You have to control your airflow, and if you stop doing it, your throat will go back to normal. It requires practice every day for the rest of your life.”

TRUST YOUR GUT

“When [producer] Dashka approached me about joining The Hu, I was in a traditional band that toured around Asia. He texted me, ‘Hey, I heard you’re really good at throat singing and horsehead fiddle, and I need you to audition.’ I felt so special because he was reaching out! I did the audition and loved the song, which was Yuve Yuve Yu. I was like, ‘Regardless of what my group is doing, I’m in!’”

MUSIC IS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

“Because Yuve Yuve Yu was on YouTube, we could see its success right there. Within a week, so many people responded. It shocked me how much the Western audience was commenting. So many reaction videos! I really appreciated how you could have the Western Hemisphere, the rest of Asia and the rest of the world responding to this traditional music with Western components. We were really grateful, and it put us into this good space of, ‘OK, let’s finish the album!’”

PLAYING DOWNLOAD IN 2019 WAS SHOCKING BUT INCREDIBLE

“Playing at Download and Rock Am Ring so early in our career, we were in shock! As traditional musicians, we toured around a lot individually, but to that scale, with that many people shouting your name, in that short a period of time, it wasn’t something we’d seen before. We believed in what we were doing, but we didn’t imagine that it was going to be that big of an audience that fast. We were so happy!”

MONGOLIAN CROWDS ARE VERY DIFFERENT TO INTERNATIONAL CROWDS

“Generally speaking, Mongolians are very stoic, and that transfers into the audiences. Expression is not a really big thing in Mongolia. The younger generations are doing better, but the difference is there. Western audiences are much more vocal in terms of how they feel; Mongolians loosen up after a drink or two.”

YOU NEVER KNOW WHO’LL BE A FAN OF YOUR WORK

“The fan that surprised me the most was Randy [Blythe] from Lamb Of God. It was our first tour, I was eating breakfast on the bus and looking out the window, and here he goes! I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna go down and take a picture with him!’ Turns out, he was looking for our bus! He said that his brother showed him our music video.

I have got a big Lamb Of God tattoo on the back of my neck, so I showed him that. It was glorious! Lately, I’ve been trying Redneck on horsehead fiddle. It requires talent and a different approach, but it’s one of my go-to’s at the moment. If there’s enough interest, we might release it.”

MAKING IRON MAIDEN MONGOLIAN IS SURPRISINGLY EASY…

“The cover of The Trooper came together rather quickly. I played the horsehead fiddle solo, and that was tricky, but because I love those guys so much and we were about to tour with them, there was no way I wouldn’t make it happen.”

ROCK GODS CAN BE PRETTY DOWN-TO-EARTH

“Touring with them, we found out that Iron Maiden are legends for a reason. They’re highly regimented: onstage, absolute rock’n’rollers, but backstage, they’re so polite. They’d come individually to our room and say hello. We couldn’t play The Trooper onstage, because it was on their setlist, but I’d love for them to hear it live one day if the chance comes up.”

OTHER LANGUAGES DON’T NEED TO BE DIFFICULT

“We did a song [Sugaan Essena] for Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order that featured an alien language, and the language was actually perfect for throat singing. To be really fair, we didn’t just come up with the language. There is a Tenger belief in Mongolia [Tengrism, a shamanic faith centred around the sky god Tengri], and we’ve obviously interacted with the shamans and done historical research. We translated our lyrics into this ancestral language, basically. It fit like a glove.”

THERE ARE ALWAYS MORE POTENTIAL COLLABORATIONS

“We’re touring North America with Apocalyptica and The Rasmus. Would we ever do a song with Apocalyptica? They’re one of our idols, so if the chance was given, we’d love to! As a high school kid who was listening to Apocalyptica, I couldn’t imagine that we’d be touring with them at this level. No matter what your circumstances are, if you really, truly believe in what you have to do, that is gonna lead to the life you’ve always wanted.”

Having endured darkness, despair addiction in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Nine Inch Nails leader Trent Reznor realised it was time to clean up or die. The result was 2005’s With Teeth and 2007’s Year Zero. When Metal Hammer sat down with Trent at the time of the latter album’s release, we found the one-time Prince Of Darkness clean, serene and uncharacteristically happy.

It’s impossible to tell if anyone’s on stage. The Glasgow Academy is dense with smoke, and you can just make out a silhouette clutching the mic stand: “Hello pigs,” comes a voice from the fog. Lights flash, the music starts, and the dark spectres slowly emerge from the smoke to reveal the cast of this theatre macabre before they throw themselves soul-first into a two hour flight of blackened, angst-ridden fancy.

Onstage, Nine Inch Nails’ great architect, Trent Reznor, throws his guitar and the mic stand around and spits his despondent lyrics into the microphone. But there’s something wrong and worryingly alien to the spectacle. He smiles, jokes with his bandmates, and banters with the crowd. He’s famously misanthropic, but tonight he seems friendly – as if the dark cloud that has for so long hung over his head has gone. It’s worrying.

“Manchester sucked last night, but you guys are fucking awesome!” he says with a grin. “Show me you’re better than those fuckers!” Has the voice of a disillusioned-generation undergone a permanent misery-bypass?

The next morning Trent is holed-up at his hotel to talk about the new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero. It’s there that our worst fears are confirmed. Trent is happy.

It usually takes over half a decade for a new NIN album to surface. Not this time. May 2005 saw the release of With Teeth, the long-awaited follow-up to 1999’s The Fragile, the latter the sound of helplessness and despair of drug addiction committed to tape. Now, both clean and sober, Reznor is on a roll. Having woken up from a deep dependency, he has found that the creative juices are still flowing, and in under two years, With Teeth’s successor is here.

Two years ago when Hammer spoke to the newly drug-free Trent, he was in good health, but his manner still painted a picture of an anxious sociophobe. Conversation came uneasily with little eye-contact. Today the classically-trained musician is the relaxed and sunny antithesis of his former self.

Explaining when and how he started this new album, Trent admits that it had a lot to do with boredom. That while “it’s fun to play the show,’ the rest of the day is just waiting around. So he started working with the “limitation” that all he had was a laptop, and so, “some cool stuff started happening.”

After the With Teeth tour, he decided against taking a break. He started expanding the ideas he’d created using only his laptop, and the lyrical concept was born. Trent had just moved to Los Angeles – an incongruous choice for the renowned antisocial – from where he’d previously moved to isolate himself, New Orleans.

“I didn’t go to LA for the culture,” he says smiling a wry smile. “I moved there to be around my peers. The fake tits and celebrity bullshit is all there, but it’s not all that’s there. You don’t see me out, or see pictures of me shopping – I’m repulsed by it to be quite frank – but I needed to be around people who do what I do, to make the whole Year Zero thing happen.”

With everything going so swimmingly, Trent moved from his new home to a remote and “creepy” house in the Californian hills to write and build lyrics out of his concept. Disappearing into the woodwork for a while, the isolation allowed him to escape the usual urban distractions, and Trent centred himself.

After three months on the far side of nowhere, all that remained was the odd nip and tuck, and Year Zero was road-ready. The new record was not to be simply another album of gloomy introspection, but the first of two albums: a big picture political narrative about a dystopian very near future in which a selfish people abuse their world and have to suffer the consequences, and an elusive force called, The Presence.

“Oh hey, we can talk about that”, Trent says before addressing the label person charged with keeping his schedule running on time. “Give me five more minutes, OK?”

Reaching the end of our allotted interview time, we mention something that he’s keen to talk about, and he extends our interview. Shocked that the socially anxious recluse would want to spend more time being probed, we sit down again.

He explains that the main purpose of the record was to call attention to the totalitarian political climate and how we are destroying ourselves and our planet.

“It was an epiphany of sorts,” he says. “And it revolves around sobriety. When you’re an addict you feel like your problems are the biggest problems in the world. I’m not saying I can change the world, but now I feel like it’s my duty as a human to do try and do something.”

Trent has admitted that when he quit drugs he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to write again, but that With Teeth proved he could. Does his lyrical choice of a fictional concept suggest he no longer has personal demons to confront?

“I was writing fiction for the first time,” he says before quickly reassuring us that: “it’s clearly fiction. I couldn’t write another Downward Spiral because that would be lying.”

So is ‘the concept’ a substitute for personal exorcism? Or are you really just tapping into emotions that are fast fading into the rear-view mirror?

“This is a good question because…” He stops for a few seconds and averts his eyes.

“Let me just think about this for a sec.” Again he pauses.

The silence is uncomfortable.

“I’ll just keep my mouth shut.”

About what?

“I know you’re baiting me,” he says, smiling warmly. “When the day comes that I have to hire the flavour of the day to write my records for me so I can sound like what my records used to sound like so I can make money… just stick a fork in me. Honestly. I don’t mean to sound like I’m on a high horse here but when it gets to that state, that’s absolutely not what I’m about. From principle. I’ll walk the highway before I start doing that shit.”

Trent becomes animated as he asserts that whether or not you like Nine Inch Nails, loved or hated this or that record, he made them all for the right reasons. “Because it means more to me than anything else in my life. I can sleep well at night – when I can sleep – knowing that I have always kept that pure.”

It is hard to believe that Year Zero’s subject matter is as separated from real-life as Trent wants not only us, but himself to believe. It’s easy to draw parallels between Year Zero and Trent’s own story: abuse of body/planet, an ambivalent force against which you have no power, be it addiction or The Presence, and having to cope with the aftermath. Year Zero is far more autobiographical than Trent admits.

While he says that it was a conscious decision not to let the words just pour out of him, he also says that he, “didn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking, ‘Am I writing as a character?’” adding, “It’s just what came out.”

But, whether he agrees or not, nothing is ever truly fictional: you can only write what you know.

“For anything to be believable it has to have ‘you’ in it,” he says, indirectly denying the suggestion that Year Zero is as much about his life as it is a futuristic setting.

Today, Trent comes across like a man who is happy in the way that only someone who has returned from the brink of auto-extinction can enjoy.

“And I don’t have the darkness,” he says in a manner that proves his point. “I’m not ready to jump out that window. And a few years ago I was.”

When he wrote 1992’s Broken EP, he thought his musical career was over. When he wrote The Downward Spiral two years later. the demons were closing in on him. During 1999’s The Fragile, he was trying to fight his way out of addiction. Each album is an accurate picture of where his head was at that time. Year Zero is no different.

“I haven’t found out the answers,” he says, “but I’m not at war with myself as much as I was.”

He goes on to admit that his troubles continued into sobriety.

“I was a fuck up, and I had fucked a lot of shit up – maybe even my career. So I approached With Teeth with kid gloves – slightly afraid to touch it at all. I look back now and see things I wouldn’t do again,” he says honestly. This lack of confidence meant he allowed too many people to comment on the album before it was finished. “I wasn’t in a place to say, ‘thanks, but I disagree’. This time I didn’t let anybody in.”

Did that make you want to indulge again?

“No,” he says honestly. “I gotta say, truly not. When I got clean, I had really had enough. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll get clean. Maybe I’ll try it out’. I spent several years making sure that I’d had enough! I reached a point where there was no romance, no illusion of fun, so even in dark times now, I honestly don’t look back like, ‘Ah, if I could just…”

He taps his arm and simulates injecting, laughing at the thought.

“I’m not saying that can’t happen,” he continues. “I could walk out of here, go get a drink and within a week I could be dead, or…” he pauses again. “Who knows what? But I’m not interested in doing that. I’m on a path of healthiness. The process of working on this record has been more rewarding than any other thing. I fucked up relationships and my health, but I never wanted to abuse music like that.”

It’s hard to imagine that only a few years ago he was knocking at death’s door. Whatever he sees as the conceptual basis for Year Zero, it’s about more than addiction. It’s about a man catching himself before going over the edge; the struggle to redefine himself. It’s a new day for Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. Long may it continue.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 165

In April 1971, the BBC current affairs show 24 Hours ran a short film about bootleg albums – then an emerging problem for the music industry – and spoke to two band managers whose names would become synonymous with the battle against illicit recordings: Led Zeppelin's Peter Grant and Pink Floyd's Steve O'Rourke.

"The latest fad to hit the pop world is bootlegging, the illegal production of records of music by top groups by backstreet manufacturers," intones the show's host, in perfect BBC English. "These illegal records are made from tapes secretly recorded at live concerts by well-known groups at big pop festivals."

"A few weeks ago they were being sold under the counter, like dirty books," he adds. "Now, they're being sold openly."

Peter Grant, introduced as manager of "The Led Zeppelin", claims that the band have lost between $150,000 and $200,000 as a result of bootleg activity, while fixing the reporter with the kind of stare that suggests he's not a man to be trifled with. Grant then reveals that the famed Blueberry Hill bootleg was recorded via radio transmitters placed inside the Forum in Los Angeles, with the signal subsequently broadcast to a mobile recording studio in the car park.

And what does Grant do when confronted with bootleg recordings?

"I personally confiscate the records," he says. "I just walk in and take them. They're not going to get anyone heavier than me, are they?"

24 Hours then speak with bootleg importer Jeffrey Collins, who claims that he no longer sells Led Zeppelin bootlegs after reaching an agreement with Grant, but has been given official managerial approval to sell covert recordings of Pink Floyd.

This claim comes as news to Pink Floyd's actual manager, Simon O'Rouke, who is interviewed alongside the band in a recording studio,

"I can't remember talking to this geezer at all," says O'Rourke. "No, it's not true at all. I wouldn't be happy about a bootleg album coming out, and if the guy comes on to me I'll attempt to tape his conversation. I'll certainly find out more about him, get his name and address. Anyway if you've got it, I'd be very happy to take it off you."

The band then listen to Pinky, an early Pink Floyd bootleg taped in Hamburg, Germany, the previous year.

"It's disgusting," says O'Rouke. "I mean, it's just conning everybody, all the way along the line. If we chose a live recording, it would be a far superior quality than that."

Floyd are then filmed playing a working version of Echoes as the show's host further warns the TV audience about the dangers of bootlegging, and the segment ends with an interview in which Yoko Ono provides some balance while John Lennon sits next to her, encased in a sleeping bag.

"He prefers to be in a bag today, for some reason or another," reports Yoko. "Power to the people!"

In 2012 Canadian pomp rockers Saga were celebrating the return of original singer Michael Sadler, who’d quit five years earlier and left his colleagues with the near-impossible task of continuing without him. Marking the release of 20th studio album 20/20, Sadler and co-founder Jim Crichton looked back – and forward – with Prog.

A career in rock music isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Even for those who beat the odds to achieve longevity, the devil known as artistic compromise must be faced and often fought. Just ask Saga, who’ve been around so long that they share their name with a company that sells holidays for over-50s.

Melding the accessibility of FM radio to the joyful fruitiness of classic pomp-rock, Saga formed in Ontario, Canada, in 1977. Three years later, UK fans marvelled at both their levels of musicianship and vocalist Michael Sadler’s imposing walrus ’tache as they supported Styx during a heady three-night run at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. It was interesting to see the players – and Sadler – all swapping instruments during the course of the show, and many of the audience left for home unable to extricate songs such as You’re Not Alone, Don’t Be Late (Chapter Two) and Careful Where You Step from their memory banks.

Returning for a mini-headline tour, Saga stopped off at the capital’s Lyceum in February 1981 and appeared at the Reading Festival that summer. By the time of the Heads Or Tales album two years later, they had become Hammersmith Odeon bill-toppers in their own right.

However, like so many before them, Saga’s impending triumph was scuppered by a support system that prioritised success in the lucrative singles chart above an album-based career. Indeed, the following decade would teach the Canadians that while scaling the mountain can be tough, attempting to remain at its peak is more challenging still.

The sad truth is that Saga were always bigger around the rest of the world than here in the UK. Many years earlier, Sounds magazine had travelled to Puerto Rico to file an unlikely report of demented Saga fans smashing their way into a sold-out venue with sledgehammers. Later on, while the group maintained visibility in mainland Europe, following a further Hammersmith appearance – this time to promote their sixth album, Behaviour – 13 years elapsed before Saga returned to Britain for a one-off club date in London in 1999.

For a devotee like yours truly, lucky enough to have witnessed those early gigs with Styx, following Saga’s fascinatingly topsy-turvy fortunes evenly matched the frustrating years of deprivation. “I lived in London a while, so I know all about the English press,” cackles Jim Crichton, the band’s bassist and keyboard player. “You guys love taking an act that’s never been heard of, building them up as The Second Coming, and three weeks later they’re being shredded. So after 35 years, I guess we haven’t done so bad.”

Beyond blaming their record company, neither Crichton nor Sadler can adequately rationalise the decade during which Saga stayed away from the UK. “I suppose we made some poppier-sounding records that confused the fans, and the whole music business began to erode in the 90s,” points out Sadler. “But when you think about it, it’s strange what a small body of water [The English Channel] can do to a band’s fortunes.”

Saga’s rocky relationship with the UK appeared to reach a nadir in May 2006, when a one-off gig at London’s Garage attracted approximately 150 people. Even the presence of dedicated fans Steve Harris and Nicko McBrain of Iron Maiden couldn’t soothe the group’s disappointment and bemusement.

“The size of the crowd freaked us out,” Crichton admits. “We were scratching our heads backstage. It had happened once before in Denmark; we later found out that we’d actually been billed as a Saga covers band that night, so we stopped the show and chatted to the audience instead. But the most puzzling thing about that London gig was that we were playing great shows throughout that whole tour. Whoever promoted that show should be ashamed of themselves. There were no posters, no advertising. It was suicidal.”

Crichton was unsurprised when Sadler announced his intention to quit Saga in late 2007, seeking to focus on family life and extricate himself from the stress of being in an active travelling band. “Mike had been thinking about leaving for four years,” reveals Crichton. Sadler had been battling problems with alcohol – since vanquished; his 2011 solo record was called Clear) – but was about to become a father.

“It would have killed me to be on the road and have the wife call and say, ‘Today he said his first word.’” explains the singer. “That’s far, far more important than anything I could do musically.”

After some dates to promote the 2007 album 10,000 Days (named after approximately the amount of time Sadler had spent with the band – 27 years), Saga were without a lead singer. Presumably they came close to breaking up at that point? Crichton laughs: “Weirdly, no. We never even discussed it. Whenever Ian [Crichton, guitar], Jim [Gilmour, keyboards] and I get together, it’s always fun. We just needed to find a way to do it differently.”

After what Crichton now terms “the silliness of a singer search on YouTube,” Saga appointed Rob Moratti, a fellow Canadian whose voice was very different to that of his predecessor. The resulting Saga album, 2009’s The Human Condition, received a generally lukewarm response. Prog’s verdict: “This isn’t awful by any stretch of the imagination, it’s just not a Saga album in the truest sense of the term.”

“What can I say?” shrugs Crichton. “Everybody wanted The Voice. Nobody sings quite like Michael. It was inevitable that without him Saga would become something different. But I still really liked that album; it was edgy and a lot heavier. We tried to reinvent ourselves – but as often happens when something like that is attempted, it didn’t really work. Half of the fans loved it, the rest hated it. We’ve had to get used to the fact that they just want Saga to sound like Saga.”

Appearances in the UK were conspicuous by their absence, but the Moratti-fronted incarnation of Saga came to Europe twice and also toured North America. According to Crichton, some of the fans accepted the change but the band quickly knew “it was going to be an uphill battle.” In an extremely strange cloak ‘n’ dagger twist, Sadler actually attended a show by the ‘new’ Saga.

“I didn’t tell the band I was going to do this; but I bought a plane ticket, went to the gig and sat at the back with a baseball cap, then left without saying anything to anybody,” he laughs. “It was very, very strange to see and hear this other guy singing my lines.” He continues: “But let me say this – I think Rob took an unfair amount of stick from some quarters. The guy had played maybe three live gigs before he joined Saga. I spent 30 years learning my craft. I really felt for him.”

It wasn’t too long before Sadler decided that he would like to return to Saga. While this was excellent news there was just one problem: the group had already started writing a second album with Moratti. So how did the stand-in singer take the bad news? “Rob was a total gentleman about it all,” says Crichton. “It wasn’t a complete shock, let’s put it that way.”

“When I left, there was an unspoken thing between myself and the guys that I probably would be coming back,” Sadler admits now. Of course, the million-dollar question is how Sadler’s personal circumstances changed enough for him to allow him to rejoin Saga? “Basically, I wanted to be there for the child’s first year – to secure that bond,” he responds. “He’s older now and aware of what Daddy does for a living, and also that he must be away sometimes.”

Crichton can scarcely conceal his joy at working with his old friend again. “When you think about this band’s history, it’s almost like he was gone for 10 minutes,” he enthuses. “You close your eyes, reopen them and there he is again.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the group knuckled down to create some familiar-sounding yet exhilarating new music. Titled 20/20, their handiwork is a signature Saga record. Anywhere You Wanna Go, for example, is a superb ong that plays to all of the band’s familiar strengths. “Given that we started working on it with Rob and ended up doing a complete 180 degree turn, I’m absolutely thrilled by the way it came out,” says Crichton. “Luckily, the way this band works, the music tends to come along first.”

So it’s only fitting that Saga display restored levels of confidence in the record label responsible for releasing and promoting their music. Following the concert release Heads Or Tales – Live, which featured Moratti, 20/20 is their second product to be worked by earMusic, the fast-growing German company whose roster includes Deep Purple, Chickenfoot, Uriah Heep, Marillion and Keith Emerson.

“Our previous label [Inside Out] came apart, which is happening to a lot of companies, so it’s wonderful to be working with a company that feels pretty healthy,” points out Crichton. “I love their energy.”

“Better still,” chirrups Sadler, “they actually seem to have a plan for us! Though of course some of the reasons [the band failed to break though] were down to us.”

The band’s AOR-friendly era certainly figures among those factors. Prog wonders whether Saga can swear they never crossed the line between wanting to share their music with as many people as possible and selling out their art. “Wow! Saving the tricky questions till the end, huh?” retorts a clearly amused Sadler.

“Okay, I suppose we came very, very close on a number of occasions, especially on Steel Umbrellas [1994]. Some people might say Wildest Dreams [1987], but I really like that record. I don’t know that we crossed the line with an entire album, but there were songs that almost made me – I don’t want to say cringe... I’d rather we hadn’t recorded them. There were some ‘What were we thinking?’ moments, definitely.”

Take Prog’s word for it: 20/20 is reassuringly free of such dips and should allow this fine Maple Leaf institution to find its feet again.

Searching for a true heartland American band, you need travel no further than Cleveland, Ohio, home in the late 1960s and early 70s to the James Gang. Like the legendary outlaws they took their name from, the James Gang were a bunch of mavericks whose reputation would far outlast their actual achievements.

The short time they were together resulted in one of the most lasting stories in the folklore of rock’s Old West. And it was a story that would have a surprise final chapter, when Dave Grohl asked the James Gang to play at the Taylor Hawkins tribute show at London's Wembley Stadium.

Starring a 22-year-old singing, songwriting, officially amazing guitarist named Joe Walsh, the classic three-piece James Gang line-up – drummer James ‘Jimmy’ Fox, guitarist Walsh and bassist Dale Peters – only recorded three albums together (or four if you count their live album). But when the Gang opened for The Who at a show in Cleveland in 1969, Pete Townshend liked them so much he took them home with him for a tour of the UK, declaring them “the best new American band I’ve seen” and Walsh in particular “a genius”.

“We never thought about tomorrow, only what was going on today,” says Fox, founding member and eponymous leader of the Gang. “Maybe that’s why we never quite made it. But it sure was a lot of fun while it lasted.”

The band had started in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1966, when the 19-year-old Fox decided he’d changed his mind about being the new Art Blakey and wanted to be Ringo Starr instead.

“The Beatles changed everything for me,” says Fox, speaking over the phone from his Ohio home. “I was a big Buddy Rich guy until I heard Ringo. Then I discovered Cream and Ginger Baker, who was spectacular. That’s how the James Gang came about.”

If Joe Walsh was the onstage frontman of the band, Jimmy Fox was the heavy presence at the back that allowed his guitarist to fly. A bearlike figure in full black beard and shades, Fox had a steady, rolling style that was percussive without being showy, the groove-laden halfway point between John Bonham and Keith Moon. As Dale Peters puts it now: “Jimmy was the guy who kept it all together, for all of us. He’s still that way now. He’s the guy who always take care of business.”

Starting as a five-piece, with an additional guitar and keyboards, the early James Gang drifted through various line-ups before becoming a trio, almost by accident. “I don’t quite remember how we lost that keyboard player,” laughs Fox. “His parents may have made him quit. He just stopped showing up.”

Carelessly, they lost another member just before they were due to open for Cream at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, in 1968. “When we got to Detroit the other guitar player wasn’t there either!” says Fox. “We were sitting around looking at each other, like, ‘Damn! We don’t have enough money to get home! What are we gonna do?’”

Fortunately, they still had an ace up their sleeves. Joe Walsh had dropped out of Kent State University and was already veteran of half a dozen different acts before he hooked up with Fox. Recalled now as the party-hearty guy who later struck solo gold with Rocky Mountain Way and Life’s Been Good To Me, before going on to put real feathers on the chests of the Eagles, the young Walsh was a far more serious and dedicated musician than his later persona might suggest. At the time of the Grande Ballroom show, he thought of the James Gang as just another band he was passing through on his way to something better.

“We thought, ‘Oh well, this’ll be our last job,’” Walsh later recalled of that fateful night. “It was a make it or break it night and we were deadly scared. It was purely experimental on stage that night, three guys trying to get together what five guys normally did. But we got an ovation.”

“He was just a pure guitar player,” says Fox, “who could also play keyboards, sing, write. But it wasn’t until we went on that night as a three-piece that we realised how much Joe could do. By the end, we did seven encores. We ran out of material and were forced to play Jimi Hendrix tunes. Imagine that, opening for Cream and finishing with Hendrix tunes?"

Fully saddled up, the Gang rode home to Ohio and never looked back. Playing almost every night in every dive in the north-east Ohio area, they were soon talent-spotted by another fast-rising star, ABC Records house producer Bill Szymczyk – most recently responsible for such giant hits as BB King’s The Thrill Is Gone – who memorably described the Gang as “a three-piece that sounded like a 10-piece”. Especially impressed by Walsh, Szymczyk went back his paymasters at ABC and persuaded them to sigh the band for a $1700 advance.

The first Szymczyk-produced James Gang album, Yer Album, was released in March 1969. It was a grab-bag of artful originals – not least the Walsh-penned Take A Look Around, which showed a delightfully melodic side to the band – and workmanlike covers, such as Lost Woman, which took the Yardbirds original and railroaded it into the kind of barnstorming boogaloo that would come to represent their harder-edged live act.

“We weren’t thinking about how to best represent ourselves on a record,” recalls Fox. “We were still just excited to even be making a record.”

All that is save for original bassist Tom Kriss. In another example of what was to become the defining – and ultimately deflating – motif of the James Gang’s stuttering career, Kriss decided he “didn’t like the music” and left just as interest in their debut album was gathering momentum. “Joe said to me one day: ‘Have you heard Tom actually say anything lately? Cos I haven’t heard him speak a word for about two months,’” says Fox.

Sure enough, when the pair collared Kriss about his sudden muteness, the bassist confessed he was “hearing something different in his head and wanted to leave”.

Enter the final member of what is now regarded as the classic James Gang line-up: bassist Dale Peters. “Any great band is a little bit of talent and a ton of chemistry,” says Peters. “We could just play really well together from the get-go.”

The first album by the Fox-Walsh-Peters line-up, James Gang Rides Again, was released in 1970 and found the band beginning to crest their own wave. “Rides Again was just dressing room jams, really,” says Peters, who co-wrote five of its nine tracks. “We just knew where each other was going musically. Joe started playing something. Jimmy and I would just pick it up. We had just been playing clubs continuously all over the country while we were making that album, so it felt very easy to do.”

Their most complete collection – from homespun rock-funk-boogie band compositions like Woman to beautiful acoustic Walsh tunes like There I Go Again and, most ambitiously, The Bomber, a seven-minute epic that began with the original Closet Queen before moving seamlessly into Walsh’s demented take on Ravel’s Boléro, before climaxing with jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi’s Cast Your Fate To The Wind – Rides Again also contained the track that would become the Gang’s signature anthem, Funk No.49.

Now a staple of classic rock radio in America and a popular soundtrack choice in a number of movies, TV shows and video games, Fox says he is still “kind of amazed” by the afterlife that one track has bequeathed the Gang.

“I was sitting there just a few weeks ago watching Joe play it with the Eagles,” the drummer says, “and I turned to Bill Szymczyk, who was sitting behind me, and I said: ‘Who the fuck knew?’ Cos at the time it was just another good tune we had that would go down great with audiences.”

Not just in Ohio either. Already known as the best warm-up band this side of the Mississippi, with Funk No.49 now blasting from the newly established FM radio formats then fuelling the more album-oriented rock sound of Midwest America in the early 1970s, and national recognition coming their way from beard-stroking arbiters of the new good taste like Rolling Stone and Creem, suddenly it was deeply cool to want to be a follower of the James Gang.

When Pete Townshend then invited the band to open for The Who on their 1970 UK tour, word was truly out in a way that it would never be for similar heartland American bands of the same era, like Grand Funk Railroad.

“We were hip without really knowing it,” says Fox. “It was cool being able to check in with someone like Townshend, but inside the band not much changed – we were still playing every single night, never taking a break.”

This appetite for the road belied their image as what Fox describes now as “a bunch of rag-tag guys, hanging loose, just getting up there and grooving. That was what the music said when we played but in fact we were working real hard.”

Even their drug use was minimal, considering the wild era they came from. Another Fox belly laugh. “We had the hair and the motorcycles and the guitars but that was pretty much it. In 1969, there was some weed around. There was some alcohol. I don’t think anyone had seen cocaine, though, until about 1970. Even when we did, it was not something that was life altering. There was some experimenting with LSD too. But it was very, very minor. Later, those things became more of a problem for Joe. But in those days we were straighter than many. The influences were more direct. They weren’t artificially induced.”

Nevertheless, the pressures on Walsh, as the creative wellspring of the James Gang, were starting to take their toll by the time their third album, simply titled Thirds, was released in April 1971. It was recorded while they were on the road, with the band studiohopping across five different locations.

“Joe was kind of tired at that point of doing everything,” recalls Peters. “He was the main writer. He was singing lead, he was playing lead, and he wanted us to be more involved in the writing. Or maybe he wanted to do less of it himself.”

The upshot was an uneven album featuring only one group composition, the throwaway Yadig?, plus four Walsh tunes – the best of which, the raucous Walk Away, and the sublime Midnight Man, were as good as anything he would ever write – and two no-biggie songs each by Fox and Peters.

“My own opinion of my own tunes? I didn’t think they were very good at the time,” admits Peters. “Joe was just a better writer than we were. He had some tunes that I think we didn’t use. But he was like, ‘No, I’m starting to do everything, blah bah blah, I want you guys to come up with some tunes.’”

Walsh initially agreed to speak to Classic Rock, though he backed out at the eleventh hour, blaming commitments with the Eagles. While he has never been explicit on the subject, the guitarist has hinted that it was the inability of the three-man Gang line-up to accommodate the guitarist’s more melodic side as a songwriter and musician that caused him to leave. Live, lush musical moments like Midnight Man simply could not be replicated.

“I was frustrated at having several musical ideas that were difficult to do with just three people,” he admitted back in 1982. “I was burning out through having played with them for three years and the group developed and got as far as I thought it ever would.”

“Joe always wanted it both ways, and I think that’s admirable,” says Fox. “He had the ability, he had the chops, he had everything it took. And he has since proven that you can have it both ways. When you reach a certain level of talent, some of the labels slip away. And that’s what happened to Joe. Joe can play anything with credibility.”

In order to realise that ambition, though, Walsh had to strike out on his own – which he did, shortly after the release of his final James Gang album, Live In Concert, recorded at Carnegie Hall, New York, in May 1971. Like so many other heartland American artists of the period, the live Gang album also cemented the idea that the group’s albums never fully captured the excitement of the band playing in the flesh. It was also, tellingly, their first – and last – foray into the US Top 30, the beginning of what should have been their mainstream breakthrough. Except that when Walsh left, so did whatever commercial momentum that had built up behind them.

“There was also frustration at having a lack of control of the quality of the music,” said Walsh. “It turned into a successful group and therefore it turned into big business with expensive ticket prices and heavy schedules and not so much creativity as there had been at the beginning. There were no real bad vibes when I left though.”

Well, almost none. “It was horrible!” says Peters now. “We had found our groove and we were playing great together, just everything was working. But Joe was unhappy for whatever reason, and he left and so we had to completely regroup. It was pretty much almost impossible. You can’t really replace the main person in a three-piece group and expect it to still work.”

Fox adds: “I called Pete Townshend and asked what I should do and he said: ‘As far as I can see, you just need to find yourself a kick-ass guitar player.’ Of course, it wasn’t as easy as that. That’s like saying if Pete left The Who, all you needed to do was replace him with a kick-ass guitar player.”

Admirably, Fox and Peters decided against following Townshend’s advice, bringing in two extra players – former Mandala members singer-guitarist Domenic Troiano and singer-percussionist Ray Kenner – with whom they released two further James Gang albums, Straight Shooter and Passing Thru, both in 1972. Neither contained the inspirational fire of the Walsh era though and the band broke up, dispirited and now some way off the critical radar.

“We made some nice stuff with Dom and Ray,” says Peters, “but after Joe, we weren’t really accepted. People missed the original line-up. I missed it too.”

There was a last-ditch attempt to rekindle what they had when Walsh personally introduced them to a brilliant but wayward young hotshot guitarist named Tommy Bolin, but that too was a postscript doomed to failure – though for different reasons.

“Tommy was quite a character,” says Peters. “A rock star 24 hours a day. He was just a very intense guy. And actually we made two pretty good albums with Tommy. But once you knew Tommy, you knew that the end was inevitable. He was absolutely on a self-destructive path that was obvious to everybody. Really a shame, cos he was a very nice guy, and incredible guitar player. But he was absolutely burning the candle at both ends. After the gigs he’d go out, come back at four or five in the morning, start again. I mean he was just going full tilt 24 hours a day."

The errant young guitarist was certainly going too fast for the James Gang to hold on to him, and in 1974 he left the band, initially for a solo career, but then for Deep Purple – and ultimately an ignominious death from a drugs overdose. Fox and Peters continued with other musicians until 1977. By then the drummer knew it was all over.

“I just didn’t have the heart to carry on,” he says simply. But then, none of the great outlaws of rock’s Old West lived long enough to enjoy a happy ending. And where would have been the fun in that for the rest of us, anyway? Instead, the James Gang are now rightly remembered as what they were: live fast, die young, rootin’, tootin’ rock cowboys from the good ole days before the rules had been written and all the maps drawn.

“Back then there was no thought for how to be successful,” says Fox. “It was all about the next gig – until one day there was no more next gig.”

Eventually, there were other gigs. The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2001. The Beachland Ballroom in Cleveand four years later. And, in 2006, a full reunion tour with Walsh back on board, the original lineup augmented by a keyboard player and three backing singers.

“They’re like everything we should have done with Joe back in 1971,” says Fox. “I was so in love with the idea of us being a trio I couldn’t get my head around bringing in extra musicians, which we do now, of course. But those were different days, you know?”

The original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock 168, in September 2013.

In 2018, former Jethro Tull and Blodwyn Pig guitarist Mick Abrahams – who died in 2025 – told Prog about the highs and lows of a career that began in the '60s and all but fizzled out as a result of health issues.

There’s a moment during this meeting when Mick Abrahams gets rather emotional and has to choke back the tears. It’s understandable, because we’re talking about his poor health.

“I had two heart attacks and a stroke almost at the same time [in November 2009]. Those have left their mark on me. I’m using a mobility scooter today because sometimes I find it hard to walk. And my speech can be a little slow. But I’m not paralysed, thank goodness. I’m still a rock’n’roller, I love a Jack Daniel’s [he even has a glass in his hand to prove the point] and I can appreciate an attractive woman. So, it could be worse.

“But it has affected my guitar playing. I doubt I’ll ever play live again,” he adds. “I watched a DVD recently of me onstage with Blodwyn Pig. I found myself saying, ‘Blimey, that guy can play a bit!’ Because it seemed as if I was watching a different person. These days, I can join in a bit on guitar with others, but nowhere near the level I was once able to achieve. That upsets me.”

Abrahams first got into the spotlight in 1967 as a co-founder of Jethro Tull. He was the guitarist on the band’s 1968 debut This Was before being… well, was he fired or did he quit?

“Listen, this is what happened. I got very pissed off with Ian Anderson, who saw Tull as his band, and he wasn’t prepared to let anyone else voice their opinion on what was going on,” he explains. “So I left. But what I told them at the time was that I’d stay on until they found a replacement for me, because there was no way I wanted to leave them in the shit. A short while later, I was called to a meeting at the office of Terry Ellis, the band’s manager. You know what he said to me? ‘Ian and the boys don’t want you in the band any more so you’ve been fired.’ I just replied to Terry, ‘How can you fire me when I quit three weeks ago? Just go fuck yourself!’”

Thankfully, relations between Abrahams and Anderson are a lot more amicable these days. “I even get on well now with Terry,” he says. “Actually, Ian’s manager, his son James, has been helping me out a lot recently. What a great bloke. I told Ian that I thought James was a credit to him, and that not only was he a very nice person, but thoroughly honest and truthful. You might have thought Ian would be happy to hear such praise for his own flesh and blood. Instead he said, ‘So what? That’s the least I would expect from him.’ Typical Ian!”

After leaving Tull, Abrahams put together his own band, featuring Jack Lancaster (saxophone/flute), Andy Pyle (bass) and Ron Berg (drums). Abrahams himself handled vocals. Taking the name Blodwyn Pig, they released debut album Ahead Rings Out in 1969, which reached No.9 in the UK chart, underlining the feeling that this band could be a force in their own right.

“From the beginning of Blodwyn Pig I had a vision for what I wanted,” Abrahams explains. “Essentially I’ve always thought of myself as a blues player, but with a little country, jazz and other styles thrown in for good measure. I never wanted us to be seen as performing one type of music or another. However, we inevitably began to get lumped in with certain other bands of the era. Some called us blues while there were those who insisted we were progressive. And when we did Top Of The Pops [playing the single Same Old Story on the episode that aired on January 29, 1970], the band were introduced as being ‘avant-garde’. It would have been closer to the point to call us ‘’aven’t a fucking clue’!”

In 1969, Blodwyn Pig featured at such major events as the Bath Festival Of Blues, the Isle Of Wight Festival and the Reading Festival. They got to play live with the likes of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Fleetwood Mac, King Crimson, Soft Machine, The Nice and Colosseum. It’s an eclectic mix of names, but it underlines how this foursome could fit in with anyone.

“Oh, that’s totally true. We could hold our own with any company. It didn’t bother us if we were put on the bill with Crimson or Zeppelin. Nothing changed for us, and nothing phased us.”

But by the time second album Getting To This was released in 1970, making it to No.8 in the UK chart, Abrahams admits there had been a change in attitude within the band.

“I have to say that maybe I allowed my input on this album to be reduced too much when compared to what went on with the previous album. So, it wasn’t as coherent as it should have been. Jack’s influence was obvious, in that he wanted the sound to be more orchestral, and to a large extent he pulled this off. But then he was a very talented musician.

“It’s just that what I loved about Ahead Rings Out was that it sounded as if we were playing live in the studio. Yes, we added some overdubs when required, but there was a flow to the music that really caught what I felt the band were all about. That’s missing to some extent with the second one.”

Abrahams also reveals there was a certain friction between himself and Pyle, something that would surface in a more pronounced fashion later, to the serious detriment of Blodwyn Pig.

“One day Andy said to me that he felt he should have more songwriting credits on the second album. I told him he already had a couple, and that was because he’d only contributed to those songs and no others on the writing front. His response was, ‘Oh yeah, I guess so.’

“But he left the whole subject hanging in the air, and wouldn’t accept the reality that you can only get credit for what you do. So I did something insane, and I’ve never told anyone this before. I had written a great song called Worry on my own, but decided to give the full writing credit to Andy, just to keep him happy! Yes, it was a stupid thing to do, and I regret it now. But I just wanted to make sure everybody in the band was satisfied with what was going on, and if that meant giving Worry to Andy then so be it.

“Andy was someone who was only in it for the money,” he continues. “When he joined the band, one of the first things he said to me was, ‘Okay, so can I now go out and buy a flash car on what you’ll pay me?’ I had to explain it didn’t work like that. And he was seriously pissed off that I wasn’t going to be his ticket to making a fortune!”

One interesting song on Getting To This is Variations On Nainos. Not because of the music, but due to that title – was there a veiled nod to Ian Anderson in the word ‘Nainos’? Rearranged, it could read ‘Ian Son’…

Abrahams laughs. “Yes, that’s definitely supposed to make you think of Ian. Not in any nasty way, but… well, I’m not sure in what way we meant it. Jack had done a great solo for the song and I then did one that was quite good. We were both stoned in the studio and the title just came to us. I have no clue what we were thinking of, but we were certainly consciously referencing Ian.”

While things were looking good for Blodwyn Pig, in September 1970, something astonishing happened – Abrahams left his own band. What on earth was going on?

“We were preparing for an American tour and I called Andy to ask what was going on with rehearsals. He said, ‘Well, Ron, me and Jack are going to rehearse, but without you. We don’t want you involved because you hate flying, and to tour over there properly you have to fly.’ That was it.

“I’m convinced this all came from Andy. He was a real shit-stirrer and would have talked the others into following his lead on this. So they got in two guitarists [former Yes man Peter Banks, plus Barry Reynolds] to take over from me, went out and toured. However, it didn’t work at all without me and the band soon split up.”

What’s amazing is that Abrahams had not only started Blodwyn Pig and was the leader, but he also owned the name. So why on earth did he allow his bandmates not just to sack him but also carry on playing live as Blodwyn Pig? He simply shrugs his shoulders.

“I couldn’t be bothered to get into a legal fight with them over it. I thought it was easier to allow it to happen. And it soon fell apart anyway.”

But the guitarist does think that this unexpected twist in the Pig tail so soon after the release of the second album left things unfulfilled.

“I do feel that had we stayed together, this band would have been huge. There was a lot of potential we never got to explore, and we had a unique magic, which you can hear on our albums. I did try to revive the band a few times with different line-ups, but they all failed, and that’s because they never had the creative connection the four of us had in the original era.”

The impact of Blodwyn Pig has been enormous, especially in America where bands such as Aerosmith cite them as a huge inspiration. Punk icon Joey Ramone even covered See My Way, a track from Ahead Rings Out. And the band have infiltrated the silver screen too. Dear Jill, also from their first album, can be heard in the celebrated 2000 Cameron Crowe movie Almost Famous.

“That took me by surprise, but it’s meant there’s been some money coming in, which helps. We also get a namecheck in the British film Still Crazy [1998]. That’s about a fictitious band called Strange Fruit. And one member of that band does have a line that Strange Fruit will not go onstage following Blodwyn Pig! I loved that.”

One question is left to be answered: is the original Blodwyn Pig male or female? It’s something that has never been fully stated. Time for Abrahams to clear up the confusion… or not!

“I’ve no idea!” he says. “It was Graham Waller, a maniac friend of mine, who came up with the name. He was off his head at the time and just came out with it. People have always assumed the name was inspired by the Dylan Thomas play Under Milk Wood, but that’s not at all true. I can tell you for a fact that Graham wasn’t thinking of anything literary when he blurted this out – he was too stoned for that.

“The word ‘blodwyn’ is Welsh and loosely translates as ‘love’, which is a nice thought. But we have never seen our pig as being male or female. Maybe that fits in nicely with the current climate, because Blodwyn Pig could be seen as a pioneer for the LGBT movement. That would be a cool way to see the creature.

“One thing I can tell you,” Abrahams adds, “is that unlike Pink Floyd, who were once asked which one was Pink, nobody in the band was ever asked what happened to our female singer Blodwyn!”

So, what would Abrahams like the band to be remembered for?

“Making good, honest music,” he says, “without any prejudice.”

Picture the typical heavy metal listener. What do you see? Perhaps you’re envisioning a denim jacket patched up within an inch of its life, or a lone figure brooding wistfully on a camping chair awaiting X band at Y festival. You don’t exactly imagine someone wearing a cute pink cowboy hat and matching sparkly boots, do you?

While a vision in pink might not seem like the stereotypical audience for heavy music, that doesn’t mean that the girlies don’t love a hard-hitting riff. Might we draw your attention to the Queen Of Pink: the one and only Barbie. The pointy-toed sensation was famously portrayed on-screen by Margot Robbie in 2023 – and the actor is a lover of all things loud, sweaty and blisteringly heavy. It’s official guys: this Barbie is a metalhead.

In all her plastic fantastic glory, the Barbie, Suicide Squad and Wolf Of Wall Street star is a self-proclaimed heavy metal diehard. Margot has repeatedly discussed her experience seeing Slipknot back during her time on Aussie TV soap Neighbours, recalling how it stands out as the time she has been recognised by the most fans in one evening. Who decided that the figurehead of femininity can’t also be someone you’d bump into at a Slipknot concert, eh?

Margot recounted the tale in January 2023 on The Graham Norton Show. She also labelled herself as “very goth, very emo” and described her teenage years of having dyed black hair that she exclusively “cut with a razor blade”. It’s an image that you can totally envision when you also discover that her first-ever album was AFI’s Sing The Sorrow, as she revealed in 2019.

The importance of Margot’s metal fandom is exemplified in that Graham Norton interview. When a rather bemused (and condescending) Cate Blanchett asks, “Does anyone really like heavy metal music?”, Margot instantly responds with, “I still genuinely like it.”

Further prodding queries are thrown around about liking “monster trucks”, emphasising the issue at hand: the mainstream consensus of heavy metal is incredibly misunderstood. The genre has long been ridiculed by pearl-clutchers who get heart palpitations if a track on the radio sounds heavier than Olly Murs. If you say you enjoy heavy music and don’t look like your garden-variety metalhead, it has to be a punchline – how could a “normal” person ever indulge in the horrors of this nasty, loud, Satan-worshipping music?

If you’re in the same doubtful camp as Cate Blanchett as to whether Margot “really likes heavy metal”, don’t be. BBC Radio 1’s Nick Grimshaw has already hooked the Barbie star up to a heart monitor and proven that her adoration for heaviness is true and pure.

Absolutely hungover on jägerbombs, her pulse was pushed to its limit when Grimshaw surprised her with a clip of Bullet For My Valentine’s Matt Tuck dedicating Tears Don’t Fall to her back in 2018. And, while that alone was enough to have her heart rattling in her ribcage, Grimshaw even showed her a personalised message from Corey Taylor in the same interview. A pretty blissful way to ride out a hangover, if you ask us.

After Barbie annihilated the box office, officially raking in more than $1 billion in global ticket sales (as well as surpassing Wonder Woman as the biggest-ever movie directed by one woman), Margot undeniably became the face of Hollywood that year. She’s one of the biggest names in the biz – and that means any praise she directs towards heavy tunes is going to be heard loud and clear.

We can only hope that, in the near future, Margot pulls off a repeat of her 2016 appearance on The Tonight Show, openly geeking out over Metallica also being guests on the show, and asserting, “Even if you don’t like metal, you’d like a Slipknot concert.” She has always comfortably and confidently waved the heavy metal flag.

Until then, we can only hope that the Margot Robbie effect lures in some curious music fans to the world of heavy metal, as well as shifting public perception of what a ‘metalhead’ is supposedly allowed to be. Metalheads can sparkle too, goddamn it!

Greenslade’s 70s heyday might have been short – but in 2018 Prog told the story behind this “thinking man’s band” from their controversial decision to disregard guitars, through unlikely tourmates to hopes for the future which faded with the death of Dave Greenslade in June 2026.

“I’ll tell you what is really staggering – it’s 47 years since the first Greenslade album and now they’re all being re-released,” says Dave Greenslade. “After all this time, we’ll be an overnight success!”

The band were only around for a short time – from autumn 1972 until their last gig at Barbarella’s, Birmingham, in December 1975. They recorded for a major label, Warner Brothers, and Spyglass Guest (1974) reached No. 34 in the UK album charts. It followed the group’s 1973 debut, Greenslade, and Bedside Manners Are Extra, also 1973, while 1975’s Time And Tide came last.

“I’m very proud of these compositions,” says Greenslade. “I’m lucky to have had a chance to form a band with those guys. We made a great combination. And it was a most unusual band at the time – no guitar and two keyboard players.”

He’d played keys in Colosseum, who broke up in 1971, leaving him with a number of unrecorded pieces. Looking to form a new band he recruited Colosseum bassist Tony Reeves, who got in touch with keys player and vocalist Dave Lawson, who’d been in Samurai and Web. Lawson in turn contacted drummer Andy McCulloch, who’d played in Fields and King Crimson.

One can hear some similarities in the music of Greenslade – particularly their debut album – and Colosseum’s side-long Valentyne Suite, which was largely written by the keyboard player; but overall it’s quite different in feel. So had Greenslade any plans as to the sort of music he was going to make with his new group?

“It wasn’t a conscious thing; it was just a development,” he replies. “I never thought, ‘Come on, lads, let’s form a prog rock band!’ It never crossed my mind. So very quickly the four of us got together and started rehearsing and writing – I was writing a lot of stuff. We had great fun, and we got signed up to management.”

The fact that Greenslade had no guitarist and two keyboard players gave them a certain hip cachet at the time; but to some, such a line-up appeared to be ill-advised. “When I told my chums and musical colleagues that I was going to form a band without a guitar – I didn’t have anything against guitars, I just had this idea in my head of two keyboard players using an array of instruments – everyone said, ‘It’ll never work, Dave.’ Well, they were wrong.”

Clem Clempson, formerly of Colosseum and later in Humble Pie, did play guitar on two tracks on Spyglass Guest, but apart from that it was all keys. Lawson remembers how, from the outset, their choice of instrumentation contributed to the group’s particular sound and approach. “We didn’t give the guitars a thought at the time,” he says.

“We just jammed with two keyboards and it seemed to work. With a guitar you’ve got a weapon in your hand – you wind it up and it’s very powerful. It’s extremely dynamic, whereas an electronic keyboard isn’t, really. You can wind clavinets up because they’ve got pickups in them, and you’ve got synthesisers which are powerful, but not in the same way as a guitar.

“It was a mixed bag. I was bringing some Samurai and Web things to the party and Dave had the music he’d been writing when he was in Colosseum. Bar some numbers he wrote in their entirety, he would have chord sequences and I’d come up with a melody line and lyrics, and we’d knock it into shape from there.”

Greenslade feels that Bedside Manners Are Extra is perhaps his favourite of the band’s albums, but agrees that their self-titled debut – “Virgin Greenslade,” as he puts it – has a particular freshness about it. “There’s a very interesting selection of material on the first album; I’ve never really heard any other band play like that at all,” he says.

But although some of the music is rhythmically and melodically complex, from the outset the group’s considerable technical ability always served the material; as demonstrated on the twists and turns of the instrumental An English Western.

And while McCulloch isn’t mentioned as often as his more famous peers, his speed, deftness and impeccable timing made him one of the most gifted rock drummers of his generation. “It’s a question of having an affinity with the guys you’re working with,” Greenslade says. “Musically, we just slotted in like a jigsaw puzzle with the right pieces.

“Although we didn’t look like one, we were actually a live band,” he continues. “We enjoyed playing live more than being in the studio. We would rehearse the material, do a perfectly good recording and then we went on the road, and in six months... wow! We’d developed those pieces again.”

But was the absence of an onstage frontman a problem? “That’s the thing: we did have someone out at the front,” Greenslade replies. “The most unlikely person – the bass player, Tony Reeves. He was more than a bass player; if you listen to his lines they were almost like lead guitar work. We let him have his head in that direction, because he was very good at it.

“Each of us were playing at least three keyboards. It must have been a nightmare for the road crew – six keyboards in a band – and they weren’t small and portable in those days. Bloody great Hammonds and Mellotrons. I played the Hammond quite a bit, and a Fender Rhodes. Then I bought an RMI, an American electric piano and an ARP synth. Dave had a lovely ARP, and we wrote for all these voices.”

“It was a kind of thinking man’s band,” says Lawson. “We used to get quite a large following of gearheads, because synthesis was in its infancy; and I was slightly unusual because I chose an ARP. After the gig all these guys would be queuing up for autographs in loon pants and tie-dye t-shirts, with not a mini-skirted fan among them, except perhaps a Scotsman.”

But when the band strayed away from this core audience, enthusiasm was not guaranteed. Lawson recalls one time when they appeared live on a TV programme. “The audience, mainly teenage girls, had to be bribed with T-shirts and all sorts of things to even clap, because Slade were on the bill as well. So it was quite confusing.”

Lawson reckons that Greenslade were, image-wise, “a bit of a low-profile band.” But by 1975, Bambi (the wife of music critic Robin Denselow) was making clothes for them. Lawson wore a fetching number with diamanté trim, McCulloch had lived a while in Japan and dressed with a Japanese theme, while incumbent bass player Martin Briley was kitted out in a skeleton suit. “Dave had a polka dot thing – he could have doubled in Billy Smart’s circus. It was the closest we got to Genesis,” Lawson quips.

Their keyboards attracted some unwanted attention from a particular type of gearhead, when in a typically-odd 70s billing, Greenslade toured in the States with Kraftwerk. “In those days the sounds were made rather than just pressing a button,” Lawson explains. “On an ARP Odyssey, if you can imagine a surface with loads of little faders on it, all those faders are ‘in tune,’ if you like, so you’re in tune when you play the thing.

“When I got onstage, one of Kraftwerk’s crew – or Kraftwerk – had pulled every single fader down to zero. My solo must have been the weirdest thing, because I was trying to tune it at the same time as play. I mentioned it to our roadie, an ex-marine we called Lurch – huge, about six foot seven. Lurch wanted to have a word with Wolfgang Flür, and Kraftwerk barricaded themselves in the dressing room. Our reviews were great and Kraftwerk’s weren’t very special – put it that way – so we were asked to leave the tour.”

On Spyglass Guest it might have seemed that the two Daves were going their separate ways, as they recorded some of their compositions in isolation – although they both played on them live. But it was partly out of necessity ,as album deadlines were always looming, so any time off the road involved writing new material.

“I’d have my Fender Rhodes suitcase at home and a 7-inches-per-second Revox tape recorder,” Lawson explains. “When I got to Doldrums, I recorded it and thought, ‘Well, there’s not a lot wrong with this recording.’ I wasn’t going to do it again in the studio. It wasn’t a cop out – I’d got it where I wanted it.”

After they released Time And Tide in 1975, the life of the band was rather cruelly cut short. They were with a management company who also looked after artists like Rod Stewart, and things weren’t working out.

“We were always treated as something else because they didn’t understand our music anyway,” Lawson recalls. “It sounds arrogant, but they didn’t have a clue or the faith to carry it forward.

“When I took the decision to leave the band, the van was on its last legs, we didn’t have a car to take the band around in, the infrastructure was crumbling and I couldn’t see that we had a future.”

Greenslade is loath to go into detail, but he notes that the two parties were bound together by a contract and so the only other option was to buy themselves out, which would have been beyond their means.

He was approached by the producers of the BBC TV series Gangsters, which ran for three years in the 70s, and he’s continued writing soundtrack music, alongside an intermittent solo recording career which began in 1979 with The Pentateuch Of The Cosmogony – a kind of multimedia concept album with illustrations by fantasy artist Patrick Woodroffe.

While still in Greenslade, Lawson had been approached to do session work, initially for Stackridge’s album Mr Mick. He become “the synth guy you go to” in film music. He’s heard playing synth horn in the famous Star Wars cantina scene, and has worked on a number of other high-profile films like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Dark Crystal, and the BBC TV series The Blue Planet.

A version of Greenslade reformed in 2000 and made an album, Large Afternoon; but in the opinion of the man who gave the group its name, it didn’t have the magic of the original line-up. So is there any chance of more from the group, in some shape or form, live or on record?

“I wish the four of us now could go and do it all again,” says Greenslade. Health issues mitigate against them playing live, but Lawson confirms he has some material left over from the 70s and that Greenslade played him some demos of material from the Pentateuch era that could be worked on.

“It would be nice to do something, but the practicalities of it all... it’s a possibility,” says Lawson after a pause. “It hasn’t been shelved for definite. The material’s certainly there.”

Hey Zakk, you’ve got a new Black Label Society album, Engines Of Demolition, out. That’s exciting, isn’t it?!

“Oh, for sure! Of all the Black Label Society albums… this is the next one! That’s why it’s special! Ha ha ha!”

You still get excited about releasing new music, though?

“Yeah, without a doubt. I love everything. I remember reading an interview with Keith Richards and they said to him, ‘Do you think you’ll ever retire?’ and he goes, ‘Retire from what? Reading a good book? Having a cup of coffee?’ Why would you retire from this? It’s a good analogy from Keith. He loves playing music, what would he retire from this for?”

One of the songs on the new album is dedicated to Ozzy - Ozzy’s Song.

“Yeah, I already had the music written before he passed, but after we put Ozzy to rest, I went home and wrote the lyrics. Obviously, I wouldn’t have wrote it if Oz hadn’t passed, but I kept playing it to my wife and she just kept referencing it – ‘Put Ozzy’s song on.’ So, I just ended up calling it Ozzy’s Song.”

Ozzy must have taught you a lot over the years…

“Oh, of course! So many things. But I remember talking to Ozzy about the vocals on Sabotage and I was like ‘Whoa, Oz, you really took your Wheaties that morning, didn’t you, because the vocals are incredible!’ I tried to get some tips, and asked if he was having vocal lessons back then, and he said, ‘No, Zakk. Just lots of alcohol and drugs.’ Ha ha ha! I guess those are the steroids of rock’n’roll!”

You have your own Death Wish Coffee blend, Valhalla Java Odinforce. How do you take it?

“Straight up, man. I can’t drink it with cream and sugar. Put it this way, if there’s a lid on it and I get it for my friends, who have those syrup ones that are about 560 million calories, and I accidentally take a sip, I feel like my teeth are about to explode. I can’t even taste the coffee! I like the espresso taste; I like it bitter!”

It’s super-strong, right?

“Oh yeah, it’s like putting a shot of espresso in your coffee. When they sent me that as a sampler to try, I knew it was the one.”

You’ve also put your name to Berserker Hot Sauce. How hot do you go?

“Well, there’s ‘hot’ and then there’s ‘burn the top of your oesophagus’. I like it kinda mellow; I want to be able to taste the food. But I got buddies who will not be satisfied until you have to take them to the hospital after they eat. I’m talking molten lava, bro!”

What’s the hottest thing you’ve ever eaten?

“I don’t! I won’t even go there. You know what’s going to be hot, what do I wanna put myself through that for? That takes me away from my Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber albums!”

We were looking on Instagram and a pug account recently named you as the celebrity pug owner of the day!

“Oh, I’m a big animal guy. Every time I go to a shelter I just wanna scoop them all up and take them all home!”

Are you a bit soppy around your pets?

“Yeah, totally, man. I make out with all of my dogs! I just make sure I brush my teeth before I make out! Ha ha! I gotta look out for them!”

You were famously in the movie Rock Star. You still hang out with Mark Wahlberg?

“I haven’t seen him for a while, but Mark is good people, very mellow. Everyone involved was super-cool, not just Mark but Jen [Aniston] and the director Stephen Herek. Great experience.”

So, did you manage to turn Marky Mark into a metalhead?

“Actually, it was very funny, because he said to me while we were doing the movie, ‘Zakk, I have to be honest with you, I didn’t even know any of this music existed.’ His brothers just played him rap growing up. You think, ‘How can you not know about Led Zeppelin?’ But he just wasn’t from that world. Super-cool guy, though.”

Engines Of Demolition is out now via Spinefarm. Black Label Society play Bloodstock in August

One of Neil Peart’s most moving lyrics appears on Rush’s 10th album, Grace Under Pressure. The song Afterimage deals with the mark people leave when they’re gone, and the memories and emotions their absence stirs.

It was a tribute to Robbie Whelan, an assistant engineer at Le Studio in Quebec, where Rush had recorded several of their recent albums. Whelan had been killed in a car accident while driving to the studio. ‘Suddenly you were gone,’ sings Lee, vocalising the drummer’s words. ‘From all the lives you left your mark upon.’

The poignancy of those lyrics has only intensified since Peart’s death in 2020. Today, sitting with Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson in a London hotel suite, the drummer is almost an invisible presence. They talk about their old bandmate and friend warmly – but they’re not above laughing at some of his stranger foibles, presumably like they would if he was sitting between them right now.

Ask them about the funniest thing they ever saw Peart do while he didn’t mean to be funny, and they both bring up the exploding golf ball. Back in the day, to alleviate the drudgery of touring, Rush would hold golf tournaments for the band and the crew. Most of them didn’t play golf, but that didn’t matter – they turned up anyway. “It was always so much fun; everybody just hacking around,” says Lifeson.

Peart was a hold-out. He wasn’t a sports guy and had zero interest in golf. But they chipped away at him, and eventually he grudgingly – very grudgingly – agreed to come to one of their silly tournaments. “He was so uncoordinated,” says Lifeson, laughing. “It was hilarious watching him try to swing at a ball.”

Lee: “Remember the one where he nearly hit somebody? He drove the ball and pulled it so fast. There was somebody on a golf cart and they had to hit the deck ’cos it would probably have killed them!”

But the pièce de résistance? That would be the exploding golf ball. “So somebody puts one of these things on the tee for him without him knowing,” says Lifeson. “And he drove the ball and it exploded in this big cloud of powder.”

He does an uncanny impression of a livid Peart, face like thunder. “He was, like, [makes furiously grumpy muttering noises].” The guitarist is almost crying with laughter now. “He never came to the golf tournaments again!”

When Peart replaced John Rutsey in 1974, Lee concedes it was hard for such a gawky, slightly awkward kid to insert himself into the tight friendship he and Lifeson had. “Oh yeah,” says the singer. “We’d talk about him all the time like he was an alien, ’cos he seemed kind of like an alien.

“He was very different to anyone else we hung around with. His hair was too short, and he would talk about things we never talked about – big, weighty subjects. And he was reading all the time.”

And you two weren’t readers? Lee: “We read things like Lord Of The Rings. We read the fun shit. He read everything.”

Lifeson: “He was deep, all the time.”

Lee: “He was so verbose. He could talk about anything. And that’s when me and Al said, [conspiratorial whisper], ‘Hey, he reads books. Let’s make him do lyrics.’”

Lifeson: “He was a little reluctant, but then he said, ‘Yeah, OK, I’ll give it a try.’”

Lee: “It worked out OK, I think!”

It did work out OK. But Peart was more than just an extraordinary drummer and unique lyricist. He was a key component of the perfectly balanced chemistry that made Rush who they were.

Even with Rush back on stage, and Annike Nilles behind the drumkit, it’s hard to imagine the band without him – not least for Peart’s family. How was that conversation?

“It was uncomfortable,” Lee says slowly. “They had to get their heads around us moving forwards, which they did, and they eventually gave us their blessing. But yes, of course it was surprising for them.”

As founding keyboard player of The Zombies, Rod Argent was responsible for the band’s biggest hit, She’s Not There, and after their split went on to become the leader of Argent. He’s since collaborated with some of the best known names in music, including Andrew Lloyd Webber, Phil Collins, The Who and his Zombies bandmate Colin Blunstone, which led to the band’s reformation at the turn of the century. In 2023 he told Prog about the his early years and the enduring appeal of his music.

Rod Argent is a pretty satisfied man these days. The Zombies, the band he co-founded as a teenager in 1961, have recently returned from a sell-out tour of the UK, promoting their best album for decades. Different Game finds them doing what they’ve always done best: deftly orchestrated pop songs with exquisite harmonies, great melodies and heaps of musical invention.

Almost exclusively written by Argent, and voiced by Colin Blunstone – the other mainstay of the original lineup – it’s better than anyone has any right to expect from a band whose core duo are now deep into their 70s.

It’s hardly been straightforward getting here though. Having started out by gigging locally around St Albans in south-east England, The Zombies won a competition to find the “top beat group in the country” in May 1964, after which they were ushered into the studio by Decca. Written by Argent, debut single She’s Not There was an instant classic, hitting big both at home and in the US.

It also established the band’s sound, largely based around Argent’s dextrous keyboard-playing, informed by rock’n’roll, jazz and classical music. George Harrison gave it the thumbs up on BBC TV show Juke Box Jury, which delighted Argent no end. “He said, ‘Oh, well done, Zombies. And if that’s actually their real piano player then he’s really good,’” Argent recalls. “I can feel my excitement even now. It was like having word from Mount Olympus.”

But a mixture of bad luck and mismanagement meant The Zombies could never quite build momentum, despite the Billboard success of another Argent hit, Tell Her No. By the time they recorded their psych-pop masterpiece – 1968’s Odessey And Oracle – the band had more or less decided to split. They landed a posthumous North American hit with Argent’s majestic Time Of The Season, though its creator had already moved on. “We’ve never been musicians that would want to capitalise on things, we always wanted to look forward,” he explains. “When I first formed Argent I just wanted to explore a few boundaries and see where it took me.”

Argent were an altogether heavier, more prog-centric outfit, with the keyboardist sharing lead vocal duties with guitarist Russ Ballard. They enjoyed a decent run through the early 70s, scoring a signature hit with Hold Your Head Up, before calling time after 1975’s Counterpoints.

Rod spent much of the following decades switching between solo artist, producer or hired help, collaborating with such diverse names as The Who, Barbara Thompson, Nanci Griffith and Andrew Lloyd Webber. He finally reunited with Blunstone at the turn of the millennium. The pair tentatively cut an album under their own names (2001’s Out Of The Shadows) prior to reviving The Zombies in earnest three years later for As Far As I Can See…

The group have since become the primary focus of Argent’s creative life, releasing three more albums and spending much of the time on the road. “You’ve only got one life and when you get to the end of it, you’ve got to look back and say, ‘Well, I gave it my best shot. And I did things for the right reasons,’” he maintains. “Because when you start out playing, you do it through a huge feeling of excitement. And it’s still such a joy, playing with this band.”

Was it always going to be a musician’s life for you?

Yeah, I desperately wanted to be in music. When The Zombies started out, we were all at the stage where we were leaving school or, in [bassist and co-writer] Chris White’s case, leaving art college. That’s when we won the beat group competition and [Decca’s then head of A&R] Dick Rowe walked into our dressing room: “I’d like to give you a contract to make a session and a couple of singles with Decca.” We were over the moon. My headmaster had wanted me to apply to university, but I didn’t. I left it too late, deliberately. Everyone at that time thought being in a band was something which would only last for two or three years.

You were into Elvis Presley and rock’n’roll, but there’s always been a jazz component to your playing as well. You can really hear it, even in the very early Zombies songs…

We didn’t do it consciously. When I first heard Elvis, to my parents’ horror I didn’t want to hear anything else but the rawest rock’n’roll I could lay my hands on. And that led me to hear, by proxy, all the Black music that inspired it. It was just a wonderful time for music. When I was about 14 or 15, Miles Davis’ Milestones [1958] was the first record I bought. I can still sing you the solos on that. A wonderful band with John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. But it didn’t stop me loving Elvis and rock’n’roll as well. And I still love the classical music I was hearing, too, so it was all in there.

When we made She’s Not There I thought, “Okay, we’re being The Beatles in a funny sort of way.” I didn’t think of any other influences being there. But when I first met Pat Metheny, in America, he said: “Rod Argent, you wrote She’s Not There. That song made me feel I had a way ahead in this sort of jazz fusion that I wanted to do. All that modal stuff!” I wasn’t even conscious of that at the time, but now I know it came from just loving Milestones so much. So it did find its way through. Later on, Roger McGuinn from The Byrds said that Eight Miles High would never have been written without hearing The Zombies record and the improvisation on it.

After you’d written She’s Not There, did you realise you’d done something exceptional?

I’d only written one song before She’s Not There. I thought, “Yeah, I can write something that’s as good as The Beatles.” We were all very excited. I expected it to be a big hit and it was. It sounds ridiculous. And then when other things didn’t happen like that, I thought, “Hang on a minute…” I had no idea of any of the pitfalls that can affect every stage of what you do.

What kind of pitfalls?

I came to the realisation that everything has to be working for something to really come together and happen. We had management and an agency in the early days that weren’t good, and I think we suffered very much from that. Our rivals at that early time were people like The Who – who had fantastic management from people that knew exactly what they were about – and the Stones with Loog Oldham and, of course, The Beatles with Brian Epstein. But we didn’t have any of that, so that was a real disadvantage.

Was that essentially why you broke up The Zombies after 1968’s Odessey And Oracle?

We felt frustrated, for many reasons. There were two writers in the band – myself and Chris White – and we were both fine, because we had honest publishers, which meant I had a terrific income right from the start. But the other guys in the band were only breaking even, which was crazy, considering all the touring we were doing. On top of that, we were really downhearted with how our recent singles had been produced. The songs weren’t turning out how we imagined them. So Chris and I thought that if the band is breaking up, we have to try and produce an album ourselves, to at least show our own ideas of how we imagined the songs.

We managed to record Odessey And Oracle at Abbey Road and had a real ball. I think the Mellotron I used was John Lennon’s. I’ve always assumed it was because The Beatles had just walked out, having finished Sgt. Pepper. With the Mellotron I thought, “We can’t afford an orchestra, so we can use this for all these tone colours. It’s wonderful.”

What happened?

At the end of the sessions we thought we’d made something that was really good. But nothing was happening for us in the UK, so we thought we’d give it one last single. And if it wasn’t a hit, then we’d break up. So we put out Care Of Cell 44 and the only guy that played it was Kenny Everett. I remember Chris and I doing a show with him. He played the single then put on an album track too – I think it was A Rose For Emily. Cat Stevens, who was also on the show, came over afterwards and said, “Oh, man, I love that song. It’s beautiful.”

But no one else wanted to know, so we broke up. And then, of course, a year and a half later, Time Of The Season went to No.1 in [American music trade magazine] Cashbox and No.3 in the Billboard charts. But I didn’t want to capitalise on that, because it didn’t feel like the right thing to do. I just thought, “Okay, let’s move on to the next thing.” Chris White and I wanted to form a new band. Chris didn’t want to play anymore, but he wanted to be involved in the project and do some writing for it. And that’s how Argent started.

There’s a story about John Lennon offering to manage The Zombies if it meant keeping you together. Was that ever a thing?

Years ago, someone told Chris that John Lennon had said, “I really wish I could produce The Zombies.” That’s the story I’ve heard. That was a lovely thing to hear, because The Beatles were gods to us.

Was Argent a case of unleashing your inner rock beast?

I’d always loved the excitement in rock’n’roll, things with a real energy and drive. That’s why I loved the early Beatles records, because they had this soaring feeling. I actually think The Beatles were the first really progressive band, because they were always expanding what they were doing.

The first Argent album [1970’s Argent] is not that far away from what The Zombies were doing, but we started to expand the improvisation afterwards. And you write for the people around you. Bob Henrit, Russ Ballard and Jim Rodford all coloured what was possible and where we were going. We still loved melody and harmony, but if we discovered other things that felt exciting, we wanted to follow that as well.

You seemed to embrace more prog on the later Argent albums, didn’t you? From 1972’s All Together Now onwards…

Strangely enough, I only recently heard an EMI acetate of the very first thing that Argent ever worked up, from around 1970. It was a version of Aquarius from Hair, but it’s unbelievably prog: 16-and-a-half minutes long.

Because obviously nothing’s written down with that, we just worked and worked at it. And we had it so that we knew it like the back of our hands. I didn’t even know a live recording of it existed. But someone brought it along to a Zombies gig and Jim Rodford’s phone number and name was on the acetate.

We’re currently in the process of trying to get it copied the best way possible. It’s extraordinary. That’s what we were doing back then, but that never made its way onto the first two Argent albums. I was really excited by some of the things I was hearing at that time.

I went to see Janis Joplin at the Royal Albert Hall [April 21, 1969] and Yes were the support band. I seem to remember they played Starship Trooper and Yours Is No Disgrace, which weren’t on record yet, and we were blown away. We thought they were absolutely fantastic. To me, Janis paled against what Yes were doing. I felt some pull within me that wanted to expand into those areas and see where it went – to use the keyboard and my own feelings of harmony that I’d heard in classical music and jazz. And for a couple of years I think we were all on that page.

So, what went wrong later on?

I think it got to a point where Russ wanted to go back to a more standard sort of song idea. It was never personal – I still love the guy – but musically there was a bit of tension within the band. And sometimes it didn’t feel like we were going in the same direction. So eventually it did fall apart. But when I hear the odd track from some of those prog albums – like Music From The Spheres from the Nexus album [1974], which I listened to about a week ago, for the first time in years – I think they sound fantastic.

Didn’t Rick Wakeman once say that the organ solo on Hold Your Head Up was the best thing he’d ever heard?

Yeah, I heard him say it! I think it was one Christmas two or three years ago, on Johnnie Walker’s radio show. The original Hold Your Head Up was six minutes long, but nobody would play it, except for Alan Freeman, who played it once a week on his show. Despite that, the single wouldn’t stop tickling just under the Top 50, so without asking us, the record company cut all my organ solo out of it and of course it became an immediate hit.

Anyway, Johnnie Walker played the long version and Rick Wakeman said something like, “In my opinion, that’s the greatest organ solo that there’s ever been on a record.” It absolutely made my Christmas.

What’s next for you?

We’re still trying to get the most out of this album at the moment. Getting played on radio is still difficult, but people who hear Different Game are giving it a terrific response. Management even told us that the average age of people that stream The Zombies is between 22 and 34. And I find that aspect of it beautiful, that we’re still able to relate to a young generation. That’s not something we ever expected to happen. It feels like a privilege to be at this stage in our careers and still be able to fulfil what we want to do. It’s just so exciting to play with this band. It’s very musical, but it really kicks arse.

How did you approach making Different Game?

I really wanted to go back to a very old-fashioned way of recording, in the sense of everybody being in the same room at the same time. The possibilities are endless with modern production, but there’s something about capturing a performance that goes slightly above what you would expect.

That’s what it was all about in the old days, because you had four tracks and had to play live together, so everybody responds minutely to how everybody else is playing. And it was great to get back to that. We were full of optimism and energy when it came to recording Different Game.

It felt really enlightening. I’ve been writing for Colin’s voice for so many years now, so I know it well. I know exactly where he likes to sing and how certain phrases will sound at a certain level. And I refuse to write anything that’s any lower than the originals, I won’t make any concessions to that at all. We do all the old stuff in the original keys and we do the new stuff in just as high keys too.

Why do you think that dynamic works so well between the two of you?

Colin still wants to do things for the same reason as I do: to make the best record he possibly can. We’ve made this last album and we’ve gone back to Odessey And Oracle in a strange sort of way, in the sense that we’ve completely produced it ourselves.

And Colin’s got the same feeling. In some ways, I think he sounds better now than he ever did. His voice has changed a little, as it will over the years, but I think it’s stronger than ever. Colin feels that he learned to sing by doing my songs, going right back to 1962. And I learned to write songs, in a way, by basically writing for Colin’s lead voice and what he could bring to everything. So that’s always been a really enjoyable dynamic. We’ve stayed friends over the years, even though we haven’t always seen a huge amount of each other, because we’ve been on different paths. But nevertheless, we’ve maintained that relationship.

What initially brought the two of you back together for 2001’s Out Of The Shadows?

I was living near Milton Keynes and had become very friendly with John Dankworth, who was developing his theatre there, The Stables. John believed in all music. So he’d have concert pianists, jazz groups and anything else that he thought was interesting. I saw a great concert there, where Keith Emerson played Tarkus on piano, with a big band. It was fantastic.

Anyway, John asked me to do a charity concert. I played a couple of classical pieces with a string quartet and I had a little jazz group, then I got the original Argent back together for about 10 minutes. Colin was in the audience and on the spur of the moment I asked, “Do you fancy getting up and doing She’s Not There with me?” We followed that up with Time Of The Season and it went down a complete storm.

A few weeks later he asked if I wanted to go out on the road with him, for just six gigs. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get back into all that again, because my memories of breaking up with Argent weren’t good. You’d travel in a huge lorry, with PA systems and all the old vintage instruments that would break down every day. And you’d have to have someone mend all the problems in the afternoon before you could actually go onto the stage. It seemed to get to the point where the actual playing was the last consideration. But in the end he persuaded me and I had an absolute ball. We gradually started doing a few more, and that’s now turned into 22-and-a-half years travelling around the world.

For a man who was one of the most fearsome footballers of his generation, Terry Butcher cringes at the thought of looking back at his career in the game. “I get embarrassed by it,” says the defender who won the UEFA Cup with Ipswich Town and three Scottish titles with Rangers, and captained the England national team. “I don’t like seeing myself or hearing myself talk.”

He’s made an exception for Butcher: Invisible Wounds, a new hour-long documentary currently streaming on ITVX in the UK. It’s a portrait of a sporting warrior – a man who put the fear of god into opponents, was once reprimanded for kicking a referee’s dressing room door off its hinges in anger after an especially fiery game, and, famously, played virtually an entire match against Sweden in 1989 while bleeding profusely from a head wound, resulting in one of the most iconic images in football history.

But that’s only part of what Invisible Wounds is about. The documentary also address the death of Butcher’s son Chris, a former soldier who died in 2017 following a struggle with the PTSD from his time serving Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s far more than just the story of a footballer’s career,” says Butcher of the documentary. “I wanted to tell Chris’s story. That was more important to me than any football I kicked.”

It’s a moving watch, but one thing it doesn’t get into is Butcher’s love of heavy metal – and especially Iron Maiden. His fandom stretches back to the 80s, a time when most of his teammates were listening to Phil Collins or R&B.

“I used to listen to Iron Maiden on my little headphones to psych myself up before going on the pitch,” says Butcher. “It was always the music for me.”

What got you into metal in the first place?

“The first album I bought was actually an Al Stewart one, Year of the Cat, which is an absolute classic. I love that. I actually like John Denver – whisper that one. But heavy metal was always there. The more I got interested in football, the more it played a part. A lot of people listened to disco or R&B, but that never got me going. If I was in my car and had heavy metal on, my foot tended to press down on the accelerator even more. I could really relate to [then-Liverpool manager] Jurgen Klopp talking about ‘heavy metal football.’”

You were the original heavy metal footballer.

“Yeah, I was probably one of them. Me and my friend [late Ipswich striker] Paul Mariner. He was a real character – he had the long hair and everything. Marrers was the one I used to go to the Ipswich Gaumont with to see heavy metal bands. I went to see Iron Maiden with him there. He took me along to see AC/DC at Wembley Arena too. Funnily enough, when I watch Ipswich now, they play Thunderstruck just before the start of the game, and Enter Sandman by Metallica. It’s perfect to get the crowd going – loud, brash… bang, bang, bang.”

Were your teammates into metal?

“No. Me and Marrers used to commandeer the team cassette player, and the rest of the players didn’t like it at all. I remember coming back from a game and someone put a cassette on that we didn’t like. I went to the front of the bus, took the cassette out and threw it through the skylight onto the road. We were both quite tall, so we could fend off any retribution from whoever owned it.”

When did you first see Maiden live?

“I'm sure it was at the Gaumont. I got to know a guy who was close to Maiden and Steve Harris. He introduced me to Steve, and we got to know each other very well, going to concerts and backstage. I always wanted to be a heavy guitar player or drummer. It's amazing how rock stars all want to be footballers and vice versa.”

The legendary Bobby Robson managed you at Ipswich and, later, during your England career. Was he a Maiden fan?

“No, Bobby Robson did not like heavy metal. He’d say, ‘Don’t you play that, Butcher’, so there was no chance. He was a big Sinatra guy – his favourite track was My Way. Graeme Souness, who was the manager at Rangers when I was there, wasn’t into music, but his number two was Walter Smith – a really tough guy made of granite and steel, but actually quite warm underneath. We used to play Bon Jovi, which Walter Smith actually fell in love with. Then we got him into AC/DC and a few records we suggested. We converted him into a heavy metal fan.”

Maiden famously have their own football team. Did you ever play with them?

“Yes. When I was in Scotland, they played the Playhouse in Edinburgh. On the morning of the concert, they played a football match with the roadies and local people. So yes, I was invited to play for Iron Maiden’s team.”

The other team must have been shitting themselves when they saw you.

“They were, like, ‘What a ringer! You can’t have him play.’ Another time, I went to Steve Harris’s house in Essex for an album launch. Everybody was there in their leather jackets. He’s got a beautiful house, and there was a football pitch in the garden. And to the side, he’d built a bar. It was always my ambition to walk straight off a football pitch and into a bar with my boots and shorts still on. So that’s what I did – played the game, walked into Steve’s pub and had a couple of pints straight after the game.”

You talked about listening to Maiden to psych yourself up before games. Did that really work?

“It did for me. I used to go to the toilets, put the headphones on and listen to heavy metal, and then I'd want to break down the door to get out on the pitch and go kill someone.”

Of all the musicians you’ve met, who are the tastiest footballers?

“I wouldn’t say any of them are tasty – they’re bang average. Actually, one of the best is Rod Stewart. I played with him in a testimonial for [former Aberdeen player] Alex McLeish. He was pretty good. I was wondering what the singalong was going to be in the bath afterwards, but he was knackered and couldn’t speak.”

What about Steve Harris? Is he any good?

“Yeah, he’s probably one of the best I’ve seen. He’s not a tall guy, though I’m 6’4” so I dwarf most people. But he’s got the energy for it. I guess you get that from playing onstage for two hours a night. But he’s going to be disappointed this season cos West Ham have gone down.”

Do you go easy on tackles when you’re playing amateur teams

“I always go in hard. If you don’t, you could come out injured. I met a guy who played in that game at Steve Harris’s house. He told me, ‘You nearly destroyed me with one tackle – you absolutely wiped me out. The impact was felt all around London.’ If I’m going in for a tackle, I steam right in.”

If push comes to shove, what’s your favourite Iron Maiden song?

“I love Run To The Hills because of the children. Chris, in particular, loved that one. We’d all do the drumming to it. But I think my favourite would be Wasted Years, just because it's a great song. I did try to get Paschendale as my ringtone., but I’m not great with technology. I actually have Guns N’ Roses’ Sweet Child O’ Mine as a ringtone. When I was assistant coach for Scotland [in the late 2000s], I did a press conference but I forgot to turn my phone to silent. Halfway through, I got a call and Sweet Child O’ Mine started playing. I got absolutely slaughtered for that.”

What‘s the best Maiden show you’ve ever seen?

“It’s got to be Twickenham [in 2008]. I've never been to Twickenham to see a rugby match. In fact, I've only been there once, and that was for an Iron Maiden concert. I had my three sons all with me, and it was the perfect night. We went backstage before and afterwards. We were all plastered, but it was incredible.

“But there was a concert at the Playhouse in Edinburgh. Normally, I stand right next to the mixing desk, and that night this roadie came up to me and said, ‘Come with me, you’re going onstage.’ I said, ‘No, no, no’, because I’m in Scotland and I’m a former England captain, so I thought I’d get pelted. But they dragged me onstage with Iron Maiden to sing along with one of their songs. Did I get any grief? Yeah, I got a bit of stick.”

Are you going to be at Maiden’s big show at Knebworth this year?

“Yeah, I’m thinking about going to that.”

We’ve got to talk about the current World Cup. What are England’s chances of finally winning this year?

“I think they‘re very good. I think the way [England coach] Thomas Tuchel goes about his work is great. He demands performances and sets his stall out right away so everybody knows what they have to do. He desperately wants to win the World Cup for England and for himself. There's also a bit of fear from the players of being left out or given a rollicking, which hasn't been there in many years. With the weather out there as it is, it's going to be even worse than when we were in Mexico in '86 with the storms and everything. But as long as the players are mentally stronger than the opposition, they'll get through it. The more games they play, the better they'll be, and there's good competition for places. I can see them going all the way.”

So should we all go down the bookies and put 50 quid on England winning the World Cup?

“No, go buy a few more Iron Maiden records you haven’t got already.”

Butcher: Invisible Wounds is streaming now on ITVX.

Tony Levin has been omnipresent in the world of progressive music for over 50 years. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, he joined his first band, the wonderfully named Aha, The Attack Of The Green Slime Beast, in 1970 – and never looked back. By the end of the decade, he was playing in Peter Gabriel’s band, before joining the rejuvenated King Crimson in 1981.

The bass, Chapman Stick and synth player is also heard on Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason and the Anderson, Wakeman, Bruford And Howe album. In 2013, as he prepared to join the “final” incarnation of King Crimson, he looked back with Prog.

You’ve been working with Peter Gabriel for nearly four decades. What’s the best thing about being his bass player?

Through the years it’s become a whole adventure and a lifestyle. Publicly he seems like a great guy, right? Well, he actually is like that, so we have a lot of fun together and it’s never rigid, structured or corporate in any way. He’s very open-minded. He’s someone who looks at things sideways. He’s always open to some new, innovative way to do things. That’s really the definition of progressive music. To me, as a guy who just plays bass, that’s a big inspiration and helps with my own approach to my instrument.

Would you say that King Crimson has been the defining experience of your career?

It had a big influence on me in 1981 when I joined for the first time. Robert Fripp is unique, but at the same time I was meeting Bill Bruford and Adrian Belew for the first time too, and both are unlike anyone else. So it was one of those defining periods for me. I was soaking up information about how to approach music and looking at myself as a player in completely different ways. I still look at King Crimson as the most challenging thing I do.

Given Robert Fripp’s refusal to repeat himself, being a fan of King Crimson is challenging too, isn’t it?

I love that. I believe that a band gets the fans it deserves. It’s a temptation to always give the fans what you want. Peter Gabriel is another good example of someone who doesn’t do that. Robert is always surprising the fans and it’s too bad if they don’t like it! But they know him, so they know that.

Do you think Crimson fans have an accurate perception of what Robert Fripp is really like?

I honestly don’t know what the public perception is of Robert, but there’s always a lot of humour in the band. It is very intense, especially the writing and rehearsing periods. I wouldn’t describe it as fun, but it’s very deep and a huge challenge and we always survive it. Hopefully, the music that comes out in the end warrants the small degree of suffering we endure in rehearsals! Emotionally and artistically we’re stretching ourselves.

Robert’s great at respectfully asking everybody in the band to break away from what’s comfortable and find something new. We all have tremendous freedom. Complete freedom, in fact.

One of the first big names you played with was Buddy Rich. Would it be fair to say that he made Robert Fripp seem like a pussycat?

He was notorious for being an awesomely great drummer and a pretty difficult guy to get along with. In the early 70s I was in the city of Rochester and was very successful as a bass player and not sure I wanted to leave when I was called to join the Buddy Rich band. At that time, to be in a jazz big band on the road meant permanently. So I decided to do that, and I got rid of all my stuff except for my bass and a suitcase and I joined the band in Boston.

But Buddy had changed his mind and he’d talked the old bass player into staying. I thought I was going on the road for the rest of my life and I found instead that I’d left Rochester and I had no gig at all. I wasn’t thrilled about that!

You did eventually worked with Buddy in 1974. Did you escape unscathed?

We did two days recording in New York and he fired the whole band on the first day but thankfully he re-hired us all the following morning! Buddy had a small jazz club in New York, and the following week I joined him to play there in a quintet. During the show he’d talk to the audience and do some comedy. It was very intimate.

One night, he told the audience that Mel Tormé – a very famed and wonderful jazz singer – was playing a concert in New York and after his show he’d come to the club. Buddy told the audience that they’d seat him in the front row and that he would give him a very elaborate introduction and then they’d shine a spotlight on him. At that point, Buddy asked the audience to be completely silent and not clap or anything.

It went down just as he planned it. It was really evil. The spotlight came on Mel and he stood up and turned around with this big smile and he heard complete silence. It was a great moment! That was Buddy.

There are a thousand stories about Eric Burdon, most of them true. Like freaking out Jim Morrison by playing Russian roulette with a glass chandelier. Or dropping acid with Janis Joplin at the Fillmore. He was tight with Jimi Hendrix, hung out with John Lee Hooker in Detroit, was once sacked at gunpoint, tore through the desert with biker pal Steve McQueen, and, after one episode of cuisine-related fellatio, became the inspiration for the Eggman in The Beatles’ I Am The Walrus.

Burdon’s life is as storied as those of the great bluesmen he aspired to as a kid. He had one of the most declamatory voices of the post-war era, and his 60s tenure with The Animals led Brian Jones to call him “the best blues singer to ever come out of England”.

Others in awe of his guttural boom included Robert Plant, Iggy Pop, David Johansen, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen. At 2012’s SXSW festival in Austin, Texas the latter credited The Animals with shaping his own musical vision. There was Burdon, he said, resembling “a gorilla in a suit”, who sounded “like Howlin’ Wolf coming out of some 17-year-old kid”.

Monster Animals hits like The House Of The Rising Sun, We’ve Gotta Get Out Of This Place and Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood bottled the raw sexuality of white-boy blues for British and American audiences alike. Springsteen guitarist Steve Van Zandt has called Burdon’s voice “big and dark. He invented the genre of the white guy singing low.”

After The Animals split, Burdon helped usher in 70s street funk with Californian groove-lords War. Yet none of it ended prettily. Eric Burdon is a man for whom the term ‘survivor’ is, for once, more than just a rock’n’roll platitude.

The low burr that greets Classic Rock down the phone line from his home some 70 miles north of LA is a curious mix of Californian and Geordie. A US resident for over four decades now, Burdon explains that the mountain air is good for his asthma. He moved there just after the original Animals bit the dust.

“So when the band broke up, I took off to join the revolution in San Francisco,” he says. “And that suited me fine, to be amongst that lot and all of the dope and everything that went with it. That was part of growing up, that was part of getting through my late 20s and into the 30s.”

Burdon may have thrown himself into the hedonistic pleasure palace of the hippie revolution, with its ready promise of hallucinogens and free love, but it wasn’t an age he took lightly. One of the key songs on his last album, 2013's Til Your River Runs Dry – easily his best for some years – was 27 Forever. Like much of the album, it transposed Burdon's preoccupations on to a map of his younger self. It was both a requiem for those whose lives were snuffed out prematurely and his own narrow escape from the same fate.

“Back then, I remember having endless discussions with people like Hendrix and John Steel from The Animals. We were convinced we weren’t going to live past 30. So that made us wanna live life to the full, which led to the consumption of alcohol and drugs. Every time you tried something new you took a chance. I made it through, but a lot of my friends didn’t. Janis Joplin was someone I knew personally and I realised she was a wreck in the making.

"And Jim Morrison was absolutely out of control, all the time. They were both very talented, but also very mixed up. Jimi was someone I saw more of, so I was around to see what was going wrong. He was in such a mess. But I knew I wasn’t going to get across to him. That act of trying to reach him was one of the things that got me through that period. I was depressive, but I was distracted by other things.”

’Til Your River Runs Dry found Burdon in pugnacious mood. Memorial Day decried the global conflicts that blighted his lifetime; Old Habits Die Hard addressed the rebel blood pumping through his veins (‘They know me as Mister Anarchy’); Water was a scathing piece of eco-polemic. On a more personal level, Bo Diddley Special was a tribute to one of his heroes, compounded by a rousing cover of the Gunslinger’s Before You Accuse Me.

Both songs tied in to Burdon’s lifelong admiration of the iconic bluesman. The Animals opened their 1964 debut LP with Burdon’s Story Of Bo Diddley, set to his shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits rhythm. Yet despite a mutual appreciation of each other’s talents, the pair could never get together. “We were always in the same building but in different rooms,” says Burdon. “I would’ve left when he was on stage, and vice versa. We were ships passing in the night. But there was an understanding between the two of us about what we were trying to do. The last thing he said to a road manager of mine was: ‘Tell that little white bastard to record more of my songs!’”

American blues was Burdon’s first love. As an art student in Newcastle in the late 50s and early 60s, he soaked it all up.

“The blues pretty much meant the world to me,” he says. “It was my escape, and I made a crusade of it. I tuned in to guys like John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, and found they were doing the same thing but in a much more sophisticated way; it was the first time we’d heard electric guitars. It sounded very exotic to a young hot teenager running around art school chasing the girls.”

When these great bluesmen passed through, the local promoters would ask Burdon and his mates – the music-loving “lags of Newcastle University” – to look after them.

“Back then, the Brits in every level of life didn’t know how to deal with black folks. Especially black Americans. So I was given the job of minding John Lee Hooker when he came over, showing him around. I also used to sign his autographs; at that time he couldn’t even write his own name. He was really appreciative of that. When I eventually got to America with The Animals, the first thing I did was go to John Lee’s house in Detroit. We spent the better part of a week there.”

The two defining features of The Animals’ sound were Alan Price’s wailing Vox Continental organ lines and Burdon’s vocals. His approach was to take the soulfulness of Ray Charles and give it the wallop of Big Joe Turner. Burdon was primarily a blues shouter. His voice, in the words of Price’s replacement Dave Rowberry, “came from the bollocks”. As the singer himself admitted in the lateperiod Animals track New York 1963 – America 1968: ‘The Negro was my hero and leader… I tried my best to sound just like him.’

Originally known as the Alan Price Rhythm And Blues Combo, The Animals were formed in late 1962. A big hit in their native North-East, their rowdy live shows at venues like the Downbeat and Club A’Gogo became the stuff of local lore. Soon they were supporting John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson. By January ’64, they’d settled in London, signed to Columbia and been taken under the wing of producer Mickie Most.

Success was almost instantaneous. The band’s emotive cover of the traditional The House Of The Rising Sun, reached No.1 in the UK that June. By September it had repeated the feat in America, becoming the first post-Beatles chart-topper of the British Invasion.

Yet all was not well. Due to lack of space on the label, only Price’s name appeared in the song’s arrangement credits. The result was that none of the others saw any royalties. According to various sources, the idea had been for Price to share the proceeds with the rest of The Animals later. Burdon was convinced that Price and manager Mike Jeffery had planned the scam between them. The incident magnified the growing friction between the pair, with Burdon contending that Price was jealous of his role as frontman.

Talking about Price with Animals biographer Sean Egan, Burdon didn’t hold back: “I hope he fries in fucking hell.”

More transatlantic hits followed, but The Animals suffered the same fate that befell so many of their contemporaries: bad management. It was too much hard graft for precious little financial reward. By the time Price quit in May ’65, citing exhaustion, the band had already released three albums and six singles, done three tours of the US and two in Europe – all in the space of 15 months. For Burdon, The Animals is a stained legacy.

“In essence, it ruined my life. At art school we had long holidays, during which I’d take jobs doing anything I could to make enough money to trek to Paris and London to buy records. And I got to jam with people like Alexis Korner. I’d go down south and meet up with Mick [Jagger], Keith [Richards] and Brian Jones. It was a wonderful life.

"Then when we got into The Animals, what seemed to be a wonderful life suddenly turned into something else: being locked up in dressing rooms, having to be at certain places on time, photo-shoots. It wasn’t really what I signed on for. It was fun for a while, but it soon became really tiring. As soon as you got into a band like that you were a prisoner."

His mode of escape was to fully embrace the 60s lifestyle. His first acid trip was at a James Brown gig in Paris, after which he became a serious devotee of mind-altering substances. One of the reasons he took LSD, he explained in Animal Tracks: The Story Of The Animals, was “to heighten my sexual performance. I wouldn’t put anything into my body that would stop me from having sex.”

Today he explains that “acid let me see things in a different light. It made me aware of different forms. It made me aware of plant life. You could go into the forest and watch the trees grow. It was pretty amazing. It woke me up in a lot of ways. And it opened me up to a lot of things. I admit I did a lot of experimentation with various alkaloids. Some of them were nothing short of amazing.”

A favourite acid hangout was the Belgravia flat of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, whose lavish soirees would be attended by the cream of the British rock establishment.

“We were neighbours, and went to a lot of parties where there was a whole bunch of people,” Burdon recalls. “He bought a theatre [the Saville] in the West End, and it opened to a great fanfare, but it died on the vine. It looked like the whole of Brian’s world collapsed. And when The Beatles ran off with the Maharishi, stuff was crumbling all around him and he just couldn’t take it any more, I guess.

"I felt really guilty, because I felt that I could’ve maybe done more for him. But I was afraid that people were going to think that I was as gay as he was. Back then it was a big no-no, socially. That’s what made me back off from Brian and his problems. He was a guy you couldn’t reach. You’re not gonna change the mind of somebody who goes skirting around the West End of London in a white Bentley/Rolls-Royce with the top down, looking for rough trade. His death was inevitable.”

Burdon was already living in LA by the time Epstein overdosed on barbiturates in August 1967. He rented a hilltop house in Laurel Canyon where his neighbours included Canned Heat, David Crosby, John Phillips, Cass Elliot and Frank Zappa.

Further up the coast in San Francisco, he also found himself in the crucible of the 60s counterculture, hanging out with the Grateful Dead. For the working-class boy from the North East, it was a heady trip, a flood of the mind and senses. Burdon began documenting the times in song. Now backed by a fresh version of The Animals, songs like San Franciscan Nights captured the lysergic dream-life of Haight-Ashbury.

The song itself was inspired by an evening at the Fillmore with Joplin, Morrison and the Grateful Dead. Burdon was ushered in at the venue’s side door by Joplin, who slipped a small red tab into his hand with the words: “It’s hot off the press. [Grateful Dead acid guru] Owsley’s. You’ll love it.”

San Franciscan Nights was his biggest US success since The House Of The Rising Sun. Others songs, like Monterey, served as a victory lap for the festival that took place at the County Fairgrounds in the Summer of Love. But, as ever in Burdon’s world, it wasn’t all utopian bliss. Sky Pilot, in 1968, was a seven-and-ahalf-minute epic that lambasted both the war in Vietnam and the hypocrisy of organised religion.

Maintaining his flat in London meant that he was also something of a go-between for like-minded groups in California and at home. “I remember gathering round a record player at the Grateful Dead’s house in the Haight. I put The Beatles’ I Am The Walrus on and they went: ‘That’s the most psychedelic thing we’ve ever heard!’ They were raving about it.

"On the other hand, I took Frank Zappa’s Freak Out! over to England and played it to The Beatles. They were like, ‘Wow! Where did this come from, man? This is incredible!’ They couldn’t wait to meet him. So I did a lot of shipping stuff back and forwards, trying to turn people on to stuff."

In the past, Burdon has claimed to be the Eggman referenced in I Am The Walrus. He had told Lennon that the nickname came about after a Jamaican girlfriend had once broken an egg over his naked body and begun sucking the yolk from his cock. He gives a dry chuckle. “I just remember being at a party and eyeing up this girl. John Lennon was standing next to me and saying. ‘Go for it, egg-man!’ And it kind of stuck.”

The next major phase in Burdon’s career began in 1969. Producer Jerry Goldstein introduced him to Night Shift, a predominantly black funk band from Long Beach. Renaming themselves War (the idea being to take the most negative word possible and spin it into a positive), they became Burdon’s new backing band. The only other white member was harmonica player Lee Oskar.

“They were gang guys, really,” Burdon remembers. “They were from the South Bay area, and I always loved those Latin flavours in the music. It was a good marketing idea to put a white English rock’n’roller with a black band. They didn’t know me from the far side of the moon. I had a lot to pass on to them about stage performance and how to reach a wider audience.

"And I learned a lot from them about the funk movement. In fact they were the funk movement in the beginning. A lot of bands came along later and copied what we were doing – Earth, Wind & Fire and even Sly Stone. I really enjoyed playing with the guys in War. We did a lot of damage for the time we were in the music world together.”

In 1970, Burdon and War had an immediate US hit with their debut single Spill The Wine, which slipped an insidious groove under Burdon’s partly spoken narrative. Meanwhile, debut album Eric Burdon Declares War also made the Top 20. Yet his world was about to come crashing down.

After their debut UK gig, in Hyde Park on 12 September, 1970 (on a bill that also included Canned Heat, John Sebastian and Michael Chapman), one NME journalist gushed that War were “the best live band I ever saw”. But what should have been a triumphant stand at Ronnie Scott’s club the following week turned to heartbreak when Jimi Hendrix, who’d guested with the band, overdosed in an apartment in a Notting Hill hotel two days later. Burdon and two of Hendrix’s girlfriends helped clean up the place before the police arrived.

“We were the last people Jimi ever played with. It shook me up pretty bad. I went back to California for, I hoped, peace of mind. But it just got uglier and uglier. It was a pity to see a guy with whom I’d had lots of conversations about life and death end up like that. What started out as a really beautiful period of my life and great friendship turned into a real tragedy.”

He was tiring of his other associates, too. After one debauched night out too many with Jim Morrison, Burdon came downstairs the next morning wielding a .44 Magnum, which he fired into the chandelier. Morrison fled as the glass rained down. It was the last they ever saw of each other.

Already disturbed by the fallout on LA’s musical community from the Manson murders, Burdon thought about quitting. Early in 1971 his mind was made up for him when a contingent from War summoned him to the office and informed him – at gunpoint – that he was no longer needed. “It was hurtful for me when the band went to a record company across the street, got a deal and I was never told about it,” he says.

The 70s were not kind to Burdon. He was prevented from working in the first half of the decade because of red tape over an old contract. He spent a year in Mexico trying to escape. He also decided to try his hand at acting. “I went to the Actors’ Studio in Los Angeles one year, only to be grabbed on the street by people telling me: ‘What’s all this about you wantin’ to be an actor? You’re never gonna make it. The only thing you can do is use what you’ve got. You’re a singer.’”

In 1975, against his better judgement, he took part in a reunion of the original Animals. The resulting album, Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted, became a subject of legal issues. By the time it was finally released, two years later, at the apex of punk, it never stood a chance.

Burdon contented himself by hanging out with famous non-musician buddies like neighbour Steve McQueen. The two bonded over a mutual love of motorbikes. “I went riding one morning and saw this guy go past me doing 80 miles per hour across sand dunes. I was like, who was that? And it was Steve. I tore after him and caught him up. He actually had a berm of sand, naturally formed by the moving desert, that was the same dimensions as the jump he was supposed to have done in The Great Escape.”

Germany became Burdon’s main stomping ground in the late 70s, playing the club circuit and touring with the likes of Udo Lindenberg. In the early 80s there was another attempt to revive The Animals, this time via a largely flaccid collection called Ark. Unlike Noah’s Biblical vessel, it sank without making a ripple. The accompanying tour of the US and Europe did little to quell the simmering bitterness and warring egos within the band. As Burdon wryly noted later: “The Animals could never stay together and should never have even attempted to reunite. With our personalities, it could never be just about the music.”

There followed sporadic solo albums, two volumes of autobiography, various tours, the odd guest appearance, and an album with keyboard player Brian Auger. But Burdon seemed to have lost focus and direction. The situation wasn’t helped by the ongoing bitterness over The Animals. When the band were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 1994, Burdon was conspicuous by his absence.

By 2008 a British court had granted drummer John Steel full ownership of the Animals name, preventing Burdon from touring or recording under it. Undeterred, he appeared to be rejuvenated by the time of ’Til Your River Runs Dry, only his fourth solo album in a quarter of a century.

“Some of the tracks for ’Til Your River Runs Dry were recorded a while ago,” he says, “but I had to go through a back operation, which took me out of the game for six months of recuperation. Six months is a long time in my world, and you get to thinking that this stuff’s gathering dust and it’s never going to rise. So I had to step up to the plate and make it count.”

In 2013 he toured the US and Europe. Plus there was a triumphant appearance at music and film bash SXSW, and an EP recorded with singer-songwriter Brendan Benson and garage rock linchpins The Greenhornes. The truculent blues roar of Old Habits Die Hard, from ’Til Your River Runs Dry, is perhaps the most apt expression of the hard-nosed defiance that Burdon has shown throughout his life and career.

“That song was my portrait of a guy like myself, who from time to time was on the barricades. Someone who knew it wasn’t gonna fly. So for me itwas amazing that I could have that attitude when Iwas young and be singing about it today. I’m still getting away with it, but that’s what music allows you to do. In rock’n’roll you can say anything you like, as long as it’s got three chords and a backbeat.”

Despite the hard knocks, the bitter feuds and the deaths of those around him, hindsight has allowed Burdon to concede that his life could have worked out a lot worse.

“I was lucky to have been around at a certain point in time. I was in a bookshop in my home town the other day and saw an old copy of Life magazine. It was from 1968. And I realised I’d been just about everywhere. It was magic to realise I’d been a part of it. Now I can see the wonderful side of things rather than the dark side."

The original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock 189 (October 2013)

In 2018 Prog presented the 50 greatest keyboardists in the genre’s history, planting Jon Lord at No. 10. Admitting he was “perhaps the odd man out” since “Deep Purple were unequivocally heavy rock,” we argued: “Lord’s early solo albums like Gemini Suite and Sarabande showed progressive inclinations. Equally he was the man behind Concerto For Group And Orchestra, which is pretty darn prog too.”

We placed Rick Wakeman at No. 2 – just behind Keith Emerson – saying: “The capes, the ambitious live shows on ice at remarkable settings like Hampton Court… doesn’t do proper justice to a man who was never afraid of taking huge risks,” and adding: “Wakeman’s time with Yes helped define prog as we know it.”

In the same feature Wakeman paid tribute to his great friend Lord, who died on July 16, 2012, expressing regret at never getting time to make the album they’d begun planning together.

“Jon Lord is one of the greatest keyboard players there has ever been. He’s not really considered a prog rock musician, but he did things that nobody else did. When you look at early Deep Purple especially, there was a lot of prog in there – they were breaking rules. Jon did things that you ‘shouldn’t’ do on in the context of a rock band. If that’s not progressive, I don’t know what is.

I bought Shades Of Deep Purple, the very first album by the original Deep Purple line-up, back when it came out. What I really loved about that album was that they did a version of The Beatles’ Help! on there, where Jon did amazing things on the Hammond and Leslie. I thought, ‘I like this guy,’ so I always kept an eye on what he was doing.

Like Keith Emerson, Jon had such had such an identifiable sound – one that nobody else could play. He worked hard on his Hammond to get new noises out of it. And the only way to do that was to continually experiment.

He could have been whatever he wanted to be. He loved playing in a rock band, and he had a phenomenal feel for solos – listen to a song like Speed King. But he also had a classical edge to him. Ian Paice, the drummer from Deep Purple, once told me that no one else in the band knew what was going on with the Concerto For Group And Orchestra thing they did, because it was all in Jon’s head.

I first met Jon very briefly in the 70s and the days of the Melody Maker poll awards, but our bands were always on the road or in the studio in different places so we never really got a chance to talk. Then about seven or eight years ago, I was round at Ian’s house and Jon was there – they were married to twins, Jacky and Vicky.

The girls were talking and Ian was off doing something else, and Jon and I ended up having a chit-chat about what we wanted to do. Five hours later, it’s three in the morning and we’re still talking. Ian popped his head in and said, ‘I didn’t want to disturb you, because you looked so engrossed.’ We became great friends after that.

I only got to play with him onstage once, which was at the Sunflower Jam charity gig at the Albert Hall in 2011. Vicky, who organised it, said, ‘You two can do something together’ – and you just don’t argue with her. We met up in a rehearsal room a few days before the concert and started to think about what we were going to do.

We decided he’d deal with the organ and piano and I’d deal with the synth side of things. Jon had this intro piece, which I loved, and I had this other piece, and we built it from there. After four or five hours, we had this thing that we knew really worked. My keyboard tech told me it was the most magical moment of his life.

That led to the idea of us doing an album of completely new material together. We were serious about it. It got to the point where we’d arranged to sit down in a couple of weeks to properly work it all out, when he called me. ‘Look, I’ve been to the doctors and they’ve told me I’ve got pancreatic cancer. I feel good, but do you mind if we put things on hold until we get this sorted out?’ And of course, sadly that never happened.

Jon was a true gentleman, and he had a wicked sense of humour. At one Deep Purple gig, he introduced the rest of the band, and then he introduced himself: ‘I’m Rick Emerson!’ I think one of the hardest decisions he made was leaving Purple. I asked him about it and he said, ‘I had to leave because there are so many things I want to do.’ I knew what he meant. It was the same for me in Yes.

He was the one who inspired me to remake Journey To The Centre Of The Earth – he once told me that he didn’t want to leave behind something that wasn’t what he wanted it to be, and that was what had happened with that album for me originally.

When I was driving back from his memorial, that’s when I made the decision to redo it and put in all the bits I’d had to leave out. I told my wife, and she said: ‘Why do you want to do it?’ And I said, ‘Because Jon Lord was absolutely right when he said that.’ And that’s why there’s a dedication to him on that album."

Many musicians dream of hearing their music on national television, and singer Jessica Douek, from up-and-coming alt metallers Mallavora, experienced just that… in a weird way. She provided the vocals for a challenge on reality TV show The Celebrity Traitors, in which contestants had to stick their head in a pond, listen to a ‘banshee scream’, imitate that noise, and then match it to one emitting from a locket hanging from a tree.

“Stephen Fry trying to replicate my vocals was the most surreal thing I have ever witnessed,” Jess gleefully recalls. “Every time they opened those little lockets and these horrific wails came out, it was all me. I did it all at home. I was recording these eight-second clips of the most unhinged vocal sounds possible.”

But it very nearly didn’t happen. “The hilarious thing is, I genuinely thought it was a scam!” Jess admits. “One of the assistant producers DMed us completely out of the blue. I was like, ‘Ha ha! Yeah, of course, no worries. Drop us an email’, and then she whacked an NDA in our inbox. They wanted a wide range of the weirdest vocals I could possibly come up with.”

The end result was spectacular, with national treasure Celia Imrie attempting to mimic one of the ‘death wails’ while the other contestants cowered in fear.

“I traumatised them all,” Jess says, beaming with pride. “Put that on my gravestone. This is it, I’m done now, I’m happy.”

When they’re not busy terrifying celebs, Bristol-based Mallavora have been opening stages at Download and ArcTanGent festivals, and working on their debut album. Safe to say, it’s been a very busy time.

The fruits of their labour, What If Better Never Comes?, is a melting pot of influences: Smile encompasses everything from Middle Eastern-inspired vocals to pig squeals, while Waste is all drop-tuning and cathartic rage that manages to be simultaneously incredibly heavy and catchy. Meanwhile, the nine-minute-long title track offers plenty of epic instrumental work for prog fans.

The title is a nod to the chronic health conditions that Jess and guitarist Larry Sobieraj live with. It condenses the rage, frustration, guilt and longing about the hand they’ve been dealt into song form, with the vocals veering from clean melodies to brutal screaming at the flip of a coin.

“Larry’s got Long Covid, and I also have various chronic illnesses – I’m disabled,” Jess explains. “Our writing process is us using the music to get out what we’re dealing with, really. The ultimate fear for a lot of people who become chronically ill or become suddenly disabled - before you reach that period of acceptance – is the big thing you’re scared to say out loud: ‘What if better never comes? What if this is my life? What do I do then?’ That’s where it started.”

The record is the definition of catharsis, but the band also tackle subjects including politics and trans rights. Jess describes Smile as “the angriest thing we’ve ever put out”, its lyrics tackling how society patronises disabled people while also sidelining them, with frustration boiling over in the chorus: ‘I don’t want your admiration / I am not your inspiration.’

Despite its heaviness, the song was picked up by a clothing company called Unhidden that specialises in making adaptive clothing for disabled people. They asked Mallavora if they could use it for their show at London Fashion Week.

“The song and the music video were playing on loop for that entire evening!” Jess recalls. “Smile is pure fury at the treatment of disabled people, and it felt relevant with the political rhetoric around benefits and disabled people being portrayed as lazy scroungers. Hearing our song on a runway of these incredible disabled models felt like it was a massive protest.”

But while Mallavora are outspoken about disabled rights, they also acknowledge that being so active can be overwhelming, whether you have health issues or not. The way Jess sees it, we’ve got a long way to go in terms of accessibility and making music a viable and healthy career for more people.

“We’re seeing major artists cancelling tours, being burnt out, becoming really unwell, people who wouldn’t identify as being disabled,” she says. “If we don’t start genuinely caring about the wellbeing of the people in the industry – not just artists, but the crew behind the scenes, everyone in the industry, where are we headed?

“It’s not going anywhere good at the moment. Things do need to change, because not only are we excluding disabled people from this world, but it’s making everyone sick.”

Despite the challenges Mallavora have faced, failure was never an option.

“As artists, we are trying to forge a way for ourselves that works in the industry,” Jess says. “There is still an expectation for artists to fit a certain mould and be able to do certain things. We’re not willing to give up, we’re not willing to feel that this life isn’t for us.

"We are determined to do this as disabled people, as neurodivergent people, and if that means we’ve got to carve a path out that maybe we’ve not seen other people do before, we’ll do it. We’re just not willing to accept the concept that disabled people or chronically ill people can’t do this music thing.”

What If Better Never Comes? is out now via Church Road

Hailed as a genius by everyone from Eric Clapton to Noel Gallagher, late Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green was one of the greatest British blues guitarists of his generation. In 2012, eight years before his death at the age of 73, Classic Rock was granted a rare audience with a reclusive man who changed music without ever truly conquering his demons.

Peter Green sits in his lawyer’s office overlooking one of London’s most popular shopping thoroughfares. As you climb the stairs, you can hear the guitarist’s sing-song East End accent drifting down from above. Later, Green will compare his appearance in the 1960s to that of a “riverboat captain”. In fact, the description better suits his 65-year-old self. Today, he wears a yellow polo shirt, is clean-shaven, and has the remains of his white hair cut short, but he’d still look at home behind the wheel of a tugboat puttering up the Thames.

Then again, incongruity is all part of the Peter Green story. His work with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Fleetwood Mac has inspired musicians as diverse as Carlos Santana, Gary Moore and Noel Gallagher. Then, just as rock music was becoming big business, Green turned his back on it all, tortured by guilt over the money he was making and with his thought processes damaged by hallucinogenic drugs.

Too often, though, the mythology surrounding Peter Green crowds out his musical achievements. During a creative burst that lasted a little over five years, Green became the guitar hero’s guitar hero. An instinctive musician with a powerful but unadorned style of playing, he eschewed the flash and braggadocio of his peers while earning their respect and admiration. Even in the decade of Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, Green carved out his own niche. Tracks such as the timeless Oh Well, Man Of The World and Need Your Love So Bad established him as a singular songwriter, a blues purist who ended up creating his own style of blues. Peter Green is a unique but these days often overlooked talent.

When he cracks a smile, you briefly glimpse the pop star he once was. While he’s anything but the hopeless acid casualty of rock legend, Green broadcasts on his own wavelength. During our hour together he’s funny, fascinating, confused, confusing, sometimes frustratingly self-deprecating but, most importantly, lucid – not least when talking about his music and where it came from. “The thing about the blues,” he says, “was making it mean something to me personally.”

Peter Green was born Peter Allen Greenbaum on October 29, 1946, the youngest of four, into a Jewish family in Mile End, East London. Ten years earlier, Oswald Mosley and his British Union Of Fascists had clashed with the local Jewish community while trying to march through their neighbourhood. Two years after Peter’s birth, his father changed the family name by deed poll to Green and moved them west to Putney.

For many years, Green hinted at a childhood troubled by anti-Semitism. “I was always a sad person,” he claimed in 1978. “I felt a deep sadness with my heritage.” Elder brother Michael, talking to Green’s biographer Martin Celmins, recalled: “A couple of times local kids would throw stones at the window and shout, ‘Yid.’” He admitted that it may have left an impression on Peter, who he described as a sensitive child who “questioned everything”.

Green first picked up a guitar at the age of 10, after watching Michael and his other brother Lenny playing, but claims he “didn’t take it seriously” until he reached his teens. By then he’d developed a good ear for music and could mimic singers he heard on the radio. His playing was now far ahead of both siblings. “Peter was a natural,” said Michael. “I’d be thinking: ‘God, I’ll never be able to do what he’s doing there.’”

Hearing a friend’s 78rpm record of Muddy Waters’s Honey Bee turned Green on to the blues, a musical obsession that would never leave him. After quitting school, he took jobs as a butcher’s boy and apprentice French polisher, while playing bass in a West London dance band called the Ken Cats and, later, with Eel Pie Island regulars The Muskrats. When he wasn’t playing gigs himself, Green could be found back at the Crawdaddy club in Richmond or the dilapidated Eel Pie Island Hotel, watching the likes of The Yardbirds and assessing the competition. It was while playing with The Muskrats that his musical ambition became apparent. Just as with his brothers, his playing ability was ahead of his bandmates. It quickly became apparent that he wouldn’t stick with the amateur group forever.

In August 1965, Green felt confident enough to hustle his way into a gig with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, a boot camp/finishing school for some of the UK’s finest blues musicians. Bluesbreakers guitarist Eric Clapton had taken temporary leave and gone to Greece. Such was his reputation that the words ‘Clapton Is God’ had been spray‑painted on a wall in North London. Mayall appointed a replacement, Jeff Kribbett, but Green caught a show at London’s Marquee and was unimpressed.

“He kept coming down to all the gigs and saying: ‘I’m much better than him,’” recalled Mayall. In the end, he let “the Cockney kid” take over. But the pushy 19-year-old who talked his way into one of London’s hottest groups is utterly at odds with the self-deprecating 65-year-old of today.

“John Mayall paid me a great compliment. He said I was the best guitarist he’d heard since Eric Clapton,” says Green. “I tried to float on that. But I used to drink before I went on. It seemed to be the thing where everyone went to the pub. I couldn’t play properly. Most of them [gigs] I flunked.”

If Mayall was disappointed, he never said so. When Clapton returned, he was impressed by his understudy. “He was a real Turk,” the guitarist later said of Green. “A strong, confident person who knew exactly where he was going.” But after just three gigs, Clapton resumed his place in the band, to Green’s profound disappointment.

Undeterred, in February the following year, Green auditioned for Peter B’s Looners. Peter B was Peter Bardens, a keyboard player who would later find success in Camel. Their drummer was a gangling, six-foot-five loose cannon named Mick Fleetwood. “They had funny clothes on,” Green says now. “Hipsters with big belts and fancy buckles. It might have been Carnaby Street stuff, but it blew my mind.” Green landed the job, but with his denim jeans and “river boat captain” sideburns, he’d yet to embrace the boutique fashions of the era. “Peter Bardens would say to me: ‘You look like a dustman,’” he grins. For Green, it really was all about the music.

He made his recording debut with Peter B later that year, on the Booker T-inspired single If You Want To Be Happy. In July, when Clapton quit the Bluesbreakers to start Cream, John Mayall knew whom to call.

Mayall’s landmark album Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton had only just come out. By October 1966, Mayall and his group were back in Decca Studios in West Hampstead – but minus their godlike lead guitarist. “As the band walked in the studio, I noticed an amplifier which I never saw before,” recalled producer Mike Vernon. “So I said to John Mayall: ‘Where’s Eric Clapton?’ Mayall answered: ‘He’s not with us any more. He left us a few weeks ago… Don’t worry, we got someone better.’” Vernon was incredulous. But Mayall was adamant that “in a couple of years he’s [Peter Green] going to be the best”.

The Bluesbreakers’ next album, A Hard Road, featured two Green compositions, including an instrumental, The Supernatural, on which he sketched out a sinuous, improvised style of playing, later revisited on Fleetwood Mac’s Black Magic Woman.On the road, though, Green faced sceptical audiences.

“I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t be worried about having to follow Eric,” he says now. There were hecklers. But within a fortnight, Green had won them over. While Clapton would soon be finessing a high-speed style of playing with Cream, Green favoured slow, measured solos. “Peter had a deftness, a more melodic style… deeper blues,” said Mike Vernon.

Green has mixed feelings about his playing from that time: “Sometimes I’d feel confident. Other times I feel like I’m going too fast.” He also noticed that the faster he played, the more favourably some of the audience responded. The era of the guitar hero had arrived. But Green condemned the craze for what he called “7,541 notes a minute”. He wanted no part of it. “I don’t like people to say to me: ‘Oh, you’re better than Eric Clapton,’ all this kind of thing. People used to do that, and I didn’t know where to put myself.”

Green had another fortuitous encounter while in the Bluesbreakers. Their bassist at the time was 20-year-old trainee tax inspector John McVie. Then, in April 67, Green’s old Peter B’s Looners bandmate Mick Fleetwood became the Bluesbreakers’ drummer. Fleetwood lasted just two weeks before getting sacked for turning up drunk, but for a short time, the three key members of what would become Fleetwood Mac performed together. As a birthday gift to Green, John Mayall paid for a recording session. One of the tracks recorded at the session was given the title Fleetwood Mac.

By now, though, Green was getting restless. “I didn’t agree with the kind of material which was being played [in the Bluesbreakers],” he told Record Mirror. “It was becoming less and less of the blues. We’d do the same thing, night after night. John would say something to the audience and count us in, and I’d groan inwardly.”

With Mayall’s blessing, Green handed in his notice and started auditioning musicians for his own group. Mike Vernon had discovered an Elmore James-obsessed 19-year-old guitarist called Jeremy Spencer playing in a trio called the Levi Set. In June, Vernon arranged a support slot for the group with the Bluesbreakers in Birmingham. He also tipped Spencer off that Green was leaving.

“I met Peter at the Birmingham Metro Club,” says Jeremy Spencer now. “He wanted to hear me play because he wanted to form a new band and was intense about doing straight Chicago blues.”

Spencer auditioned, but didn’t think he’d passed. At the end of the night he was surprised when Green told him he’d got the job. Green then showed Spencer something he’d written in his notebook on the drive up to Birmingham. “It was like a prayer that said something like, ‘I can’t go on with this music like it is. Please have Jeremy be good, please have him be good,’” says Spencer.

Next, Green called Mick Fleetwood. The drummer was about to buy a set of ladders for his new job as a window cleaner, and he accepted Green’s offer. John McVie, however, was reluctant to give up a regular pay packet with Mayall, and turned Green down. As a temporary measure, Green hired 24-year-old trainee teacher Bob Brunning on bass. But it was evidence of Green’s lack of ego and belief that McVie would join eventually that he christened the new band Fleetwood Mac, the name they’d given to a song recorded at the Mayall-funded session.

“In my personal estimation, Peter Green was just about the very best blues guitarist this country has ever produced,” Mike Vernon said in 1994. Vernon lost no time in signing Fleetwood Mac to his new Blue Horizon label. The band made their live debut in August 1967 at the Windsor Jazz & Blues Festival. Eric Clapton strolled around backstage, sporting a Hendrix-style perm and draped in what one eyewitness thought was a bedspread. Spotting Green in T-shirt and baggy jeans, Clapton told him: “Peter, you’ll never be a star if you dress like that.” Green smiled, but said nothing. It was still all about the music.

A month later, as Green predicted, John McVie took over from Bob Brunning. Fleetwood Mac’s debut album – titled, against Green’s wishes, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac – was released in February 68. It reached No.4 and stayed in the UK chart for a year. Mixing Spencer and Green originals and a cover of Elmore James’s Shake Your Moneymaker, it was, says Spencer, “a spontaneous release, which we all enjoyed”.

Green is less sure. “I don’t have fond memories of it, no,” he says. “Because I had to do the singing, and I really shouldn’t be doing it.” To listeners then and now, Green’s expressive voice is a highlight of the record. But he won’t be swayed. “In the traditional old jazz bands, they’d get one of the musicians to try a bit of singing. But he would only be talking. I categorise myself as like that. We used to play down the Flamingo. One night Ruby Turner got up and sang with us, and I was so relieved. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be good if I could play like this all the time.’”

If Green felt insecure at the time, he hid it well. In May 1968, Fleetwood Mac’s single Black Magic Woman, a song about the guitarist’s sexual frustration, snuck into the Top 40. With barely time to draw breath, Fleetwood Mac were back in the studio in the spring of 1968 to make their second album, Mr Wonderful.

From these sessions came another single, the exquisite Need Your Love So Bad. But while the album itself bottled the band’s on-stage energy, it flagged song-wise. Still, the first peek into the darker side of Green’s psyche came on Trying So Hard To Forget: ‘I can’t stop my mind wandering back to when I was a downtrodden kid,’ he sang. ‘…I would spend most of my days running and hiding from the world outside.’

Fleetwood maintains that Green was haunted by the discrimination he’d experienced as a child. “He was an East End lad with a chip on his shoulder – a Jewish boy who got beaten up,” the drummer said in 1997. Green won’t elaborate. “It [childhood] wasn’t as bad as all that,” he says. “It wasn’t terrible.”

He may have felt downtrodden in his youth, but as a bandleader, Green had a clear idea of what he wanted. “He was incredibly ambitious,” Mick Fleetwood has said. But while the drummer and John McVie fell into line, Spencer was reluctant to follow Green’s instructions. “Peter would invite me to the studio with parts mapped out for me,” he says. “But I thought he should just go ahead and do them himself.”

“That’s because Jeremy didn’t like to be told what to do,” Green laughs. “He’d say: ‘Last time I was told that, I was at school!’ Jeremy wouldn’t play on my tunes, and I don’t know why.”

Spencer: “In hindsight, I should have been more accommodating.”

Although Spencer was now distancing himself in the studio, on stage he was a vital part of the show, with his bawdy jokes and impersonations of other pop stars. His attitude in the studio partly drove Green’s decision to bring in a third guitarist. Eighteen-year-old South Londoner Danny Kirwan was another Mike Vernon discovery. “Danny was a fabulous guitarist,” recalls Green. Whereas Spencer stayed out of Green’s songs, Kirwan wanted to get involved. Fleetwood Mac’s sound expanded for the better.

Despite his new recruit, Green played all the guitar parts on the band’s1969 single Albatross. The slow, almost ambient instrumental broke Fleetwood Mac out of the blues ghetto and on to daytime radio. Purists winced as their favourite band went to No.1. At the time, the group were touring America. Fleetwood says: “When we came back it was all over the music papers: ‘They’ve sold out!’”

But they also returned having tried LSD for the first time in New York. It was a watershed moment for Peter Green. The single, Man Of The World, reached No.2. This plaintive song is impossible to listen to without wondering how much lyrics such as ‘I wish I’d never been born’ related to their composer’s troubled frame of mind.

“The solo part is nice,” Green says now. “The instrumental break with the slide, in the Hank Marvin style, I thought was good.” And the lyrics? “It’s very corny in a way.”

He smiles and takes a sip of tea. Green talking down his talent is an occupational hazard for any interviewer, but there’s none of the false modesty most musicians have when dismissing their best work. Discussing the same song in 1969, Green said: “Words get in the way. The music is a more precise way of telling someone something.”

For Mick Fleetwood, though, Man Of The World was clearly “a cry for help”.

In early 1969, Green got a chance to live out his blues fantasies when the band took part in a jam-come-recording session with Otis Spann, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy and David Honeyboy Edwards at the Chess Records studios in Chicago. But by the spring, as Fleetwood Mac worked on their third album, Then Play On, Green seemed to be in the grip of an identity crisis. As the 60s drew to an end, many pop musicians were seeking spiritual enlightenment. The Beatles had dipped into the teachings of the Indian guru Maharashi Mahesh Yogi, while The Who’s Pete Townshend had become a disciple of Meher Baba. Green now renounced Judaism and converted to Christianity. He grew his beard long and began wearing robes and a crucifix on stage.

Talking about his conversion now, Green’s eyes twinkle: “It’s a fantastic feeling. You bubble with it. All your problems are nowhere to be seen.” But a stipulation of his conversion was spreading the word of Jesus to people in the street. Easier said than done. “I think it was a soldier first of all, in Denmark,” he grins. “He went by, and I said something to him about Jesus. You’re stumbling at first. But then a chap went by in a suit, a city gent, and he slaughtered me.” He starts laughing. “He knocked it out of me. I can’t remember what he said, but I didn’t bother again.”

For Green’s bandmates, though, there was another, bigger, problem. “I decided to leave,” he says. “I bought a cello. I was going to learn cello. But the managers came to me and said: ‘Stay on for the boys, cos they’ve got families… and you’re doing so well writing the hits, so it would help.’ So I stayed on.”

Then Play On, released in September 1969, was their first record for major label Warner Bros. The writing was split between Green and Danny Kirwan. The latter’s choirboy voice contrasted with Green’s world-weary vocals. Their weaving guitars on Coming Your Way were a blueprint for twin-guitar rock bands such as Wishbone Ash. On Closing My Eyes Green sang the haunting line: ‘Some day I’ll die, and maybe then I’ll be with you.’ He told interviewers that it addressed the comedown from his failed attempt to convert to Christianity.

The album’s most startling feature, though, was its ambition. It wasn’t pure blues, but it was Peter Green’s blues: fusing Chicago with London; shades of English folk, Jewish and African rhythms. Whatever turmoil the guitarist was experiencing, he was, says Fleetwood, “determined to push the band forward”. And never more so than on the album’s centerpiece, Oh Well. The nine-minute composition was a masterclass in dynamics: a jabbing riff segued into a mini-symphony filled with Spaghetti Western guitars, orchestral drums and Green’s new discovery, the cello. Oh Well was split in half and released as two sides of the next single. It gave them their third top-five hit in less than a year. Fleetwood Mac appeared on Top Of The Pops, with Green singing about God and confusing the teenyboppers with his mad monk’s beard and gown.

Back on tour, in March 1970 Fleetwood Mac flew to Munich for a gig. They were met at the airport by delegates from the High-Fish Commune, a left-wing collective preaching free love and drugs. Green was smitten. “One of the girls was very attractive, a very famous model. Clifford [Davis, Mac’s manager] was very hurt when I walked off with them.” The model was Uschi Obermaier, a pin-up and actress who went on to have a long-running affair with Keith Richards.

Mac’s roadie Dennis Keane, who accompanied Green to the commune, later claimed they both had their drinks spiked with LSD. The commune’s leader later admitted inviting Green so they could get a message to the Rolling Stones. Fleetwood thinks Green stayed at High-Fish for three days. When they finally persuaded him out for the night’s gig, he was still tripping on acid. On stage, his playing became increasingly unhinged. “I did this thing with my guitar which made it sound like an air-raid siren,” he recalls. “I said to Mick: ‘What did you think of my playing?’ He said: ‘You were mad tonight… mad.’” He breaks off, laughing.

For many, Green’s spell in the commune was a tipping point in his mental decline. Back in England, he told the band that he wanted to give away all of his money. “Some of it, not all of it,” he corrects. Ever sensitive, he had apparently been moved to tears by TV footage of the recent famine in Biafra. “I just wanted to make a contribution. They [the band] thought I wanted to give it all away, but I wanted them to do it as well.” Green wrote cheques for large sums to a number of charities; the rest of the group and their management were reluctant to do the same. But the guitarist’s messianic vision persisted.

One night after a drug-induced dream, Green began work on a new song. With its sabre-rattling riff and Hammer Horror imagery, The Green Manalishi (With The Two-Pronged Crown) suggested a mythical beast of the kind that stalked Black Sabbath’s just-released first album. For its composer, though, ‘the green manalishi’ was a symbol for money. Released as a single, it went Top 10 in May. Perversely, a song about the evils of money was about to make its composer even more of it.

That summer, Green finally quit Fleetwood Mac. Fleetwood says: “He was good about it. He told us what he was going to do.” In August, the band announced his replacement: ex-Chicken Shack keyboard player and John McVie’s wife Christine Perfect.

Why did he leave? Green reacts to the question as if he’s never been asked it before. “I don’t know,” he shrugs. “I probably could remember if I tried… Let me see… I wanted to be free or something.” At the time, Mick Fleetwood explained that Peter “wanted to be just Peter Green. Not Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac.”

After his departure, Green recorded an improvised solo album, 1970’s The End Of The Game, and went to the US to spend time at Goddard Free College in Vermont, “just to hang out and do whatever I like”. Surrounded by beautiful girls, he took a hit of LSD. “But I still haven’t returned from that. You’re not allowed to return.” He hesitates. “It’s like someone’s playing with you.”

Back in England, he carried on living with his parents in the house he’d bought in suburban Surrey, occasionally jamming with other musicians and telling the press that there had been “no challenge” in remaining with Fleetwood Mac. When Spencer quit the band in 1971, Green stood in for a few US shows. But the albums the group were making without him – 1970’s Kiln House and the following year’s Future Games – held little appeal. “I couldn’t identify with it,” he says. “It wasn’t blues, was it?”

According to Green, he took LSD once more after Vermont. “It was in Surbiton. I listened to Donny Hathaway all night long. It was a beautiful night.” But the experience left him “halfway between this” – he holds his hands apart in the air as if gesturing towards something unseen – “and that. And that’s no good.”

Some close to Green maintain that LSD was the trigger rather than the cause of his problems. “I think there has been a bit too much blame put on it,” says Jeremy Spencer. “Unfortunate mental afflictions have been around for centuries before the existence of drugs.” In the mid-70s, Green was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

As he disappeared from public view, the band he started were becoming one of the biggest in the world. Did he ever listen to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours? “Yeah, I like Rumours. Just as well. It sold about 22 million – just last week,” he chuckles.

The contrast between Mick Fleetwood’s and Peter Green’s lives since 1970 is not lost on the man whom Green spared from a job as a window cleaner. Interviewed in 1997, when Fleetwood was touring the re-formed Rumours-era band around the US, the drummer told me that he “wanted to help Peter in any way I can”. The air of unresolved business – even guilt – was palpable.

You can still hear Peter Green’s blues in the music of Led Zeppelin, Gary Moore, Black Crowes, Rory Gallagher and Brian May, to name a few. In 1978, Judas Priest covered The Green Manalishi and turned it into the heavy metal song it always threatened to be. Green’s style of guitar playing – the sustained notes, the trembling vibrato – has inspired hundreds of guitarists. The man who never wanted to be in competition with Eric Clapton has been described by Clapton as “a truly phenomenal player”; more recently, Oasis’s Noel Gallagher has cited Fleetwood Mac’s reluctant frontman as one of his favourite singers from the 60s.

After a stint of recording in the 1990s and a 2009 tour billed as Peter Green And Friends, Green spends most of his time now at home, listening to the radio and his vast collection of CDs. He still plays with the members of the Peter Green And Friends line-up, but only in a rehearsal studio; there are no current plans for gigs or tours. Often, when he’s on his own, he picks up the guitar and puts on a recording of his music. “I play along to Peter Green And Friends,” he smiles.” I sit on the couch – with a speaker here and a speaker there – and I play along with it.” He pauses and offers another fleeting pop-star smile. “Nobody’s watching me, so I can’t go wrong.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 174, July 2012

In 2022, Metal Hammer sat down for an audience with Tarja Turunen, the former vocalist of Nightwish and OG symphonic metal queen as she released her first greatest hits compilation, Best of: Living The Dream.

Speaking to Hammer, she discussed everything from her history with Nightwish, to the musicians she'd influenced and a stroke she'd suffered three years earlier.

You’ve said before that Nightwish’s music was meant to be downbeat and acoustic, but your voice pushed them into a more metal direction. Would you have been miserable if they had remained a folk band?

“That’s difficult because, at that time, I really wanted to be an operatic singer and that was the only voice I had. I wasn’t able to do much with it beyond full-on power, so it didn’t fit nicely with the acoustic music we started with.”

You were one of the first female lead singers in that more symphonic end of power metal. Who’s the most famous person that’s come up to you and called you an influence?

“Simone Simons [lead singer of Epica]. She was just like, [starts bowing]. Ha ha ha! It’s funny, I’ve just come home from a tour and one of the girls in one of the support bands was singing backstage. My musicians turned to me and said, ‘This is completely your fault, Tarja.’ Ha ha!”

2022 marked 25 years since the first Nightwish album, Angels Fall First. What do you think of that album now?

“I am looking at the gold record hanging on the wall right now. It was kind of a second demo for us. When we were making it, we had no idea that it would become a complete album or bring us a record deal. It was very exciting. We were so young that, when I listen to myself, it’s unbearable. Ha ha ha! But, hey, everybody needs to start somewhere.”

Nightwish fired you using an open letter that was publicly shared. What’s your relationship with them 17 years later?

“The only guy that I had contact with was Marko [Hietala, bass], but he’s no longer in the band. I even sang with him some years ago. The rest, it’s been emailing. Everything is fine but we’re not in touch. That all died a long time ago. I wrote Tuomas [Holopainen, Nightwish band leader] a message when his father passed, so we’re fine.”

Do you want more of a relationship with them, or are you happy with how things are?

“I’m happy. I don’t have any regrets. I hope they’re happy.”

You’re releasing a new retrospective of your solo career called Living The Dream. Why is now the time for a best-of album?

“It took catastrophically long to come up with this record because we had the Covid pandemic; I’m still doing those tours that have been postponed since 2020. I feel like this is a good time because In The Raw, my last album, was my most personal. It came from the shock of my stroke [in 2019] and the struggles with my health. Now, I can release this and start again. It can be the platform for a new album and new start.”

How are you feeling nowadays?

“I’m very good, thank you. Probably in a better condition than ever, physically. The stroke was caused by stress. I’m an artist, not the boss, so when my husband [who’s also Tarja’s manager] stayed home [and I went on tour], I needed to handle things I was not ready to face. When there was a problem, people came to me.”

Why did he stay home?

“Our daughter had been touring with me since she was a baby and, when she turned four, we wanted her to go to school. I had to leave [to go on tour] and closing that door was a bitch. That was the hardest thing to do.”

How did you recover?

“I got a mentor. I had talks with a very old Argentinian man that were a sort of therapy. He just made me realise that I need positive people around me, so that my artistic wings can spread wide open and I can be happy.”

What can you tell us about that new album you mentioned?

“I’m currently writing songs for it, but I can already say to you that it’s pretty heavy. It’s because of my live band. They are absolutely amazing musicians and, when they play, it’s a massive support for me and my big voice. They lift me up with their energy, so this is going to be really powerful, with metal guitars and grooving bass and drums.”

Frisson Noir is out June 12 via earMUSIC

In 1983, Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian saw a band that changed his life. Growing up in New York, he’d been aware of punk since the arrival of the Ramones, but heard enough horror stories about what the punks would do to “longhairs” that he decided to avoid the city’s legendary CBGB’s venue. That all changed when The Exploited came to town.

Scott was a big fan of the Scottish band’s 1982 album Troops Of Tomorrow, and he headed to downtown Manhattan club The Great Gildersleeves with then-Anthrax singer Neil Turbin and bassist Dan Lilker to see the band play and watch anarchy unfold.

“The Exploited came on and the crowd erupted into what I soon found out was called slam-dancing; I’d never seen anything like it!” Scott says now. “All these punks and skinheads losing their minds and stagediving, it was very physical and I was blown away. I wanted to go down and get into it, but Neil grabs me and is like, ‘You don’t wanna do that - they don’t like longhairs!’”

Hopped up on aggro and sporting foot-high mohawks, The Exploited and kindred spirits Discharge and GBH led a wave of bands who took punk and made it heavier, faster and more brutal.

This movement – retrospectively dubbed UK82, after an Exploited song of the same name – would be a huge influence on the nascent thrash and extreme metal movements that followed, inspiring everyone from Anthrax and Metallica to Napalm Death, Neurosis and countless bands around the world today.

“When I was 12 I was searching for something that would inspire me and help release the aggression I had inside,” says Anastasiya Khomenko, drummer with Ukrainian hardcore newcomers Death Pill.

“I discovered The Exploited, GBH and Discharge around the same time – I heard [Discharge album] Never Again and since then I’ve always been very close to fast punk music. It was amazing: raw, aggressive, fast… what else do you need when you’re 14?”

At the end of the 70s, punk was in bad shape. The scene’s founding fathers had either split up (Sex Pistols) or were moving away from their original fast and furious sound (The Clash, The Damned). The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal had repurposed punk’s DIY spirit, and was producing its own heroes in the shape of Saxon, Def Leppard and Iron Maiden.

The news of punk’s impending demise clearly hadn’t reached Edinburgh when The Exploited formed in 1979. Fronted by Wattie Buchan, an ex-squaddie with an enormous red mohican and a Scottish accent that bordered on indecipherable, their defiantly titled debut album, 1981’s Punk’s Not Dead, plastered football-terrace chants over high-speed, ultra-aggro beats.

A couple of hundred miles south in Stoke-on-Trent, Discharge were similarly upping the ante. “In the early days Discharge were basically a Sex Pistols cover band,” explains guitarist Tony ‘Bones’ Roberts, who co-founded the band in 1977.

But as the band’s line-up changed, so too did its sound. “It was like a new band once [singer] Cal joined. We started playing faster and our sound just became harder as a result.”

GBH formed the following year in Birmingham – specifically in The Crown, the same pub that hosted Black Sabbath’s early gigs.

“Everyone that went to The Crown was trying to form a band, but we carried through with it,” GBH singer Colin Abrahall recalls. “We’d run everything through this one amp and [original GBH drummer] Wilf hadn’t got a full drum-kit, so he’d tap along on an electric fire! We played faster because it hid the mistakes.”

The sound the three bands eventually developed had as much in common with Motörhead’s grimy, forceful noise as it did the Sex Pistols or The Clash’s snotty broadsides, yet the wider punk and metal scenes were like oil and water, each eyeing the other with disdain and sometimes violence, though a few brave souls did occasionally cross the line.

“There were always a few metal fans at our gigs, even in the early days,” says Bones with a laugh. “The brave ones.”

Where punk’s original poster boys swung between nihilism and rebellious posturing, The Exploited, Discharge and GBH were fuelled by frustration and anger at the state of the world around them.

“Birmingham was an industrial city that’d just got out of the three-day weeks… power cuts, lots of unemployment. It was a rough, tough place,” Colin recalls. “Getting off the bus, you could be attacked by a gang of skinheads, bikers or straights. It was hairy.”

Unsurprisingly, disdainful major labels kept these spiky haired hooligans at arms’ length. Instead, it was down to independent UK labels like the London-based Secret (which released The Exploited’s debut) and Stoke-On-Trent’s Clay to unleash this snarling noise on the world. Both GBH and Discharge were signed to Clay, the latter after label founder Mike Stone saw an audience member throw a slab of beef at the band during a show in Stoke.

Released in April 1981, Discharge’s EP Why? was a cacophony of feedback, proto-blastbeats and infuriated howls, cramming 10 tracks into a little under 15 minutes and reaching No.1 in the UK Independent Charts. That same month, The Exploited’s debut Punk’s Not Dead reached No.20 in the official charts, earning the band an invitation onto Top Of The Pops for a memorable performance of the song Dead Cities. Wattie later joked that The Exploited “were probably the only band to sell less records after [our] appearance”.

Suddenly, provincial towns and cities up and down the country had their own clique of kids with Exploited-style mohicans and Discharge logos painted on the back of their jackets: Vice Squad and Chaos UK from Bristol, Anti-Nowhere League from Tunbridge Wells, Derby’s Anti-Pasti... The list is endless.

In December 1981 The Exploited and GBH played together at Leeds’ Queens Hall, sharing the bill with the Anti-Nowhere League and punk pioneers The Damned, as well as US hardcore trailblazers Black Flag.

“It was the first time we met Americans and realised there was stuff happening out there too,” Colin says. “There were thousands of people there, all going wild. The whole world seemed punk!”

If 1981 had been a formative year for the new punks, 1982 was the year everything exploded. The Exploited’s second album, Troops Of Tomorrow, upped the speed and aggression of its predecessor, while GBH and Discharge both released landmark debut albums in the shape of City Baby Attacked By Rats and Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing.

“Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing had a huge impact on Anthrax, Slayer and Exodus,” says Scott Ian. “There was a level of intensity, aggression and brutality that was unlike anything we’d ever heard. Those short bursts of anger, those sparse lyrics… it sounded like the apocalypse.”

Off the back of these albums, the bands made their way over to the US, which had a thriving punk scene of its own in hardcore. As wild as their shows in the UK had been, the US was a whole other world.

“There were some mad gigs,” Colin says. “We played one place and the security were these old military guys still in uniform! But whenever anyone would get onstage, a lot of venues would cut the PA off and drop the fire curtain.”

The Exploited fared even worse – more than one gig ended prematurely after tear gas was fired into the venue. Still, at least they got to play.

“There were times we’d turn up to a venue and the promoter would just say, ‘It’s been called off, go home,’” says Discharge’s Bones.

The gigs that did happen certainly left an impression on those that witnessed them. Just as Scott Ian had seen The Exploited in New York, Dave Lombardo of up-and-coming young thrashers Slayer saw GBH play at the venue Madame Wong’s West.

“The GBH gig really felt like what we [Slayer] wanted to do,” Dave tells Hammer. “The aggression, the anger, the conviction that you’d play your music with… there wasn’t anything pretentious about it. It was a bunch of street kids into music, pissed about society, about home and whatever. As a drummer I was realising I needed to step up if I was going to keep up with these bands.”

He wasn’t the only fresh-faced thrasher in the audience that night, however.

“When we got to San Francisco, Metallica came along to see us,” Colin remembers. “We got quite friendly with them. Three years later we were rehearsing in Birmingham and Metallica ended up rehearsing right next door to us for this massive tour they’d got booked. They’d take us to the pub at dinner time!”

As thrash bloomed in the 80s, the UK punk scene that had helped inspire it began to wane. GBH soldiered on, as did The Exploited, although Wattie remained the sole constant member. Bones left Discharge in 1982 to form Broken Bones; four years later his old band released the infamous Grave New World album, which saw singer Cal adopt a high-pitched wail plucked straight from the Sunset Strip – something that didn’t go over well with their existing fans.

“There was a famous time when Discharge played The Ritz [in New York in 1986], and HR from Bad Brains dumped a whole can of garbage on Cal onstage because he hated their new sound so much!” recalls Scott Ian.

Discharge took the hint and split in 1987, but a resurgence of interest in the 1990s from the likes of Sepultura, Slayer and Metallica – who covered Free Speech For The Dumb on 1998’s Garage Inc. – saw three-quarters of their Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing line-up reunite in 2001.

GBH stayed the course, releasing a steady string of albums over the years, as did The Exploited, although their last release was over 20 years ago, 2003’s Fuck The System. All three bands still gig regularly today – even two onstage heart attacks in the last decade can’t stop The Exploited frontman Wattie in his tracks.

“There are hundreds, if not thousands, of fans all over the world, playing covers of their songs and getting tattoos in honour of the musicians,” Death Pill vocalist Mariana Navrotskaya says of the original UK82 bands. “We’re talking about a large-scale influence on the modern music scene: at a minimum, these bands still get thousands of people to their shows each year, which shows their importance.”

“Everything’s come full circle and we even see parents bringing their kids,” says Discharge’s Bones. “Metallica came to see us one night before they played London. They got a quiet table away from the rabble and you could see them headbanging all night. Later, they went over to the merch to ask if there were any free shirts and the girl working it had no idea who they were. She said, ‘You can pay for them like everybody else!’”

Formerly of Arch Enemy and The Agonist – and currently blazing her own trail as a solo artist, plus a member of Dragonforce and Blue Medusa – Alissa White-Gluz has been an instantly identifiable figure in metal for more than a decade. In 2020, when she was still singing with Arch Enemy, Hammer caught up with her to find out what she’s learned about life over the course of her career.

Fame comes at a price

“I feel like I never complete life lessons – I’m just learning them, getting my degree in them, then getting my doctorate in them, so I learn more as I go. The most difficult thing to learn is how to deal with having people know my name and my face when I don’t know them.

“I obviously keep a lot of stuff private, so people really only know 1% of what there is to know about me, but because of the day and age we live in, people think they know a lot more about musicians they follow. It’s a strange thing for me to think about. I’m just not built that way.”

Express yourself

“I see myself as separate from my body sometimes and I think, ‘Man, my body must be thinking I’m in a fight every night!’ I get onstage and my heart rate goes way up, I’m screaming for 90 minutes straight and doing all sorts of athletic moves. My body must think I’m in a war zone, which explains why I’m so tired every night. I personally love having a huge stage because I want to be able to run around. I want stairs and risers and pyro! If I could, I’d be swinging off the ceiling!”

Manage your shit

“One of the biggest aspects of stage production is where you are and where you’re heading. We just finished a tour where we were flying every day for the last two weeks, so you can’t bring 17 pyro cannons with you on flights. We’ve gone from Russia to Finland, Denmark to Ukraine and all over the place but we still make it work.

“When it comes to putting on a huge production, the ideal route is being on a tour bus and you play a couple of shows in a row but you have plenty of days off so the truck that’s lugging all the stage gear can get there and set up, then do run-throughs to make sure everything is working properly.

“That’s not always the case, even for Arch Enemy; the most important thing to us right now is getting to as many places and playing as many shows as possible. If it comes down us not having our full production but we can still get there with time, we’ll still go.”

Never forget where you came from

“My proudest moment was the first time I played in Montreal with Arch Enemy, where I grew up and started playing music, so my whole family was there that night. Last week, I turned 34, which officially marks the point where I’ve played music for more than half of my life now… that makes me feel old!”

Clean your damn tour bus

“We’re all really clean and because there’s sometimes 15 of us in the same bus, everybody is respectful of each other, which takes a while to learn. The first bus I was on many years ago wasn’t like that; there were 27 of us in one bus, every band on the package shared one.

“There were a lot of younger people so there wasn’t that unwritten rule book to respect people’s privacy and keep your stuff organised, or to try to be quiet in case somebody’s sleeping.”

The internet changed everything

“I began my career before social media. I’m the last generation that grew up without the internet and cell phones. I was a teenager when I got a cell phone and the internet existed but it wasn’t commonplace and it wasn’t something everybody used. I grew up while all these major shifts were occurring for everybody and their lifestyles, especially in the music business, so I’m part of a weird, ever-adapting scene.”

Keep your eyes peeled

“When I see bands live, my friends’ bands or not, I watch them play and I’m always picking up on things like lighting cues or the way their drumkit is arranged, even the way their mics are set up. I can’t help but analyse what I’m watching. I try and just enjoy it, and I do, but for a lot of it I see all the little details because I’m in that world and they stand out to me.”

Be a good guest

“I’ve been doing a lot of guest vocals since I started because I was one of the only girls in metal, especially in my local scene, so local bands asked me to do ‘the girl parts’ on their work. I never charge for guest spots, or demand anything weird. I always just say, ‘Send me the track and if I’m feeling it, we’ll make it awesome.’

“It’s only happened once or twice where I turned it down because I wasn’t feeling it, but for the most part, the person or band who wrote the song writes to me with their vision and I can really see it, it feels honest and authentic.

“Stepping out of my comfort zone and trying something totally different excites me; working with people I don’t normally work with is a great way to learn and grow as an artist because it’s like going to a new school where you suddenly have all these new classes and you want to do your best.”

Good lighting is key

“I really appreciate the visual aspect to a show. Our lighting guy is brilliant, he’s worked with a lot of artists and knows how to put together a stage and make it seem like this whole world, an experience. I did a bit of lighting in my early 20s for theatre, so I really appreciate making a show not just a presentation of songs but a whole audio-visual experience.”

Set your expectations

“One thing I’ve mastered over the years, also because it’s part of my character already, is not being super-interested in the fame side of things. I feel the same playing a huge festival as I did when I played my first show to three people in a bar in Montreal. I just wanted to sound good, look good and for these people to be our fans and go tell their friends so we have more fans next time.

“I never hit the stage thinking, ‘We’ll definitely deliver.’ I go onstage ready to fight and hope people are satisfied and moved by our performance. I wish I had the confidence to think we’re going to own it every night. I just want to make sure we’re presenting our music in the best way possible.”

This article was originally published in 2020.

Mike Vennart – leader of Vennart, touring guitarist with Biffy Clyro and member of Empire State Bastard, among other projects – discovered Cardiacs by accident and fell in love. In 2015, a decade before becoming the band’s lead singer and appearing on long-unfinished album LSD, he explained how the work of the late Tim Smith became a lifelong connection.

I’m Mike Vennart and I play guitar for Biffy Clyro at all their live shows. I just released my first solo record The Demon Joke under the name Vennart, and I’m also a member of British Theatre.

I’m typing this initial sentence in the blind hope that the words will come. In truth, Cardiacs mean so much to me, and their work is so incredible, that the idea of explaining it in any other way than simply forcing you to listen to them is futile. I’ve learned to not do that anymore because I’ve ruined way too many parties over the years. Nevertheless, the internet won’t fill itself.

I almost discovered Cardiacs against my will. After growing up on a strict diet of heavy metal, I started flirting with the weirder stuff around the age of 14. Faith No More’s Angel Dust showed me that music could express a sort of psychosis and schizophrenia that Iron Maiden and Pink Floyd couldn’t. So a couple of friends started lending me Cardiacs tapes – it was the early ‘90s. I really couldn’t be arsed with them. Like all the greats, they didn’t make sense the first time.

Or, indeed, the second time. It wasn’t until I saw Cardiacs three times that I realised they are the greatest band of them all. I don’t say that lightly. There’s simply no-one like them. As an artist, it’s impossible to tap into ‘Cardiacsisms’. What they do is so niche, so theirs, that such efforts can only smack of half-arsed pastiche. Trust me, I’ve tried.

I’m not going to try and explain which other bands they sound like. They simply don’t. Sure, they’re a ‘rock’ band – guitars/bass/drums/vocals all mixed up with whirling Mellotron, horns, angelic female backing vocals and, and…. oh, fuck it. There are sounds and detailed textures in Cardiacs records you’ll never identify or hear in any other music.

There is only one problem with Cardiacs; once you understand them, and have felt them in your heart, you will struggle to find anything that will ever come so close for the rest of your life. Their catalogue is comprised of some 17 albums, including live albums and side projects, all of which are essential. They existed between 1976 and 2008.

These songs are not really in order of preference, more in order I think a newcomer will be able to digest them. Nor are they Cardiacs’ definitive Greatest Hits. I could’ve listed another 25 songs as good as this. But time is of the essence and I must put up resistance.

The Icing On The World (Cardiacs Live, 1989)

This is basically where I came in. At my first Cardiacs show in Leeds in 1995, on came these four middle-aged men in shirts and ties. They each could easily have passed for my geography teacher. And there they stood, banging on bass drums, ushering in this sinister shanty. ‘There must be truth in what I say seeing as how the sun shines from my arse,’ sings Tim, probably ironically, but actually entirely accurately.

This tune employs a signature Cardiacs trick to the hilt – where the dynamics are often emphasised by a dramatic rallentando – or a shift in tempo. Each section drags so elegantly and wonderfully into the next. Most bands wouldn’t have a fucking clue how to do this.

Eat It Up Worms Hero (Sing To God Part 1, 1995)

This is where things get really fucked. At the time I found them 20 years into their career, Cardiacs were about to drop this monumental bomb on my life. I already held them in high regard, but until they released Sing To God, a sprawling 2-CD masterpiece in 1995, I had no idea what they were truly capable of. I’d underestimated them. That tired old cliche people trot out, ‘This song contains more ideas that most band’s careers,’ has never been more applicable than this.

Beginning with something approaching speed metal, coming to a cartoon halt ala Roadrunner, there’s a lightning fast atonal run, a musical toilet flush that should really be at the end, followed – finally – by some gentle singing. ‘Make eyes pretty, wear clean dress…’ Some twisted a cappella harmonies enter, which recall Queen, albeit with far less conventional approach to tonality. A comic double take, and we’re off again, into a thrashing world of total dissonance, as the garbled vocals croak insanely about males giving birth in their throats.

Possibly Cardiacs’ most deranged moment. A song so impossible they never played it live, instead instilling that responsibly on my band Oceansize. We were invited to invade their set at the Astoria in 2002 to perform this song, which we attempted and royally fucked up. As usual.

Two Bites Of Cherry (All That Glitters Is a Mares Nest, 1995)

Here’s an example of Cardiacs’ live capabilities. Once again, in classic Cardiacs style, here’s a huge, rousing burst of melody with several motifs and ideas coming at you all at once. It’s often said that Cardiacs don’t have melody, but only by fucking morons. Cardiacs exude nothing but melody, it’s just that usually there’s multiple melodies scrambling for your attention, often at breakneck speed. ‘World’s too big for danger, jeopardy and risk is ten miles high’. Fucking heart-stopping.

Let Alone My Plastic Doll (The Special Garage Concerts Vol 1)

An early example of Cardiacs’ more dramatic, epic moments; a style they’d eventually master to full effect with Dirty Boy, (more on that later). This song is originally from a crusty demo cassette, written when Tim Smith was only 16 or thereabouts. These demos songs were all exhumed in 2003 for three live shows at the Garage in London, where they were rightly dusted off and given the sheen, verve and volume they deserved.

A Game For Bertie's Party (The Special Garage Concerts Vol 2, 2005)

Another ancient song from the late 70’s demos. Once again, possessed of a magical and queasy dissonance and the unusual chord patterns that Cardiacs have made entirely their own. Presented here is the original demo, although the superior (but non-YouTubeable) re-recorded live version is partially sung by drummer Bob Leith in a deranged, most-likely drunk and haunting manner, giving way to more changeable prog runs and whimsical ska, punk sections sung by Tim. It’s all good, but it’s inclusion here is solely for the initial verse’s otherworldly aura.

Jitterbug (Junior Is A) (Guns, 1999)

This is an epic odyssey from the surprisingly mild-mannered Guns, which was to be their last studio album. It’s more muted, soulful and sombre than all other Cardiacs albums, perhaps leaning more into the sci-fi folksy lullabies of Tim’s side-project, The Sea Nymphs. Nevertheless, it’s immensely rich in timbre and ideas.

The section from 2 mins 53 seconds is quite unlike anything I’ve ever heard. To appreciate this bewildering mesh of synth and hypnotic ghostly vocals to the fullest, one should seek out the lyrics, at the end of which the author effectively thanks you for sticking with it. It pays off in sonic gold.

Home Of Fadeless Splendour (Heaven Born And Ever Bright, 1991)

A hymn for Cardiacs’ mysterious keepers/record label. Seemingly sung by a stadium full of people – most likely millions of overdubbed Cardiacs – this was frequently their opening song in a live setting. An exhausting, exhilarating and beautiful song of praise, Home Of Fadeless Splendour is a prime example of Cardiacs’ ability to overwhelm without a guitar in ear-shot. ‘One drop in the winter sea, no more to rise forever… We are those whose thunder shakes the skies’….. Damn right they are.

Dog Like Sparky (Sing To God Part 1, 1995)

A classic Cardiacs oom-pah pop stomp, each section more melodic and exciting than the last. Key change after key change. Those fucking tempo changes again. ‘Put your hand on the holy bible and scream ‘WANK’.

Signs (Guns, 1999)

Another from the darker and more human Guns album. One of Cardiacs’ straighter, overt rock numbers, but again with the same ‘hairdryer to the face’ drama and power as the likes of Is This The Life? and Dirty Boy. ‘Oh my saviour create me to die alone’. One of the most painful and mortal songs i’ve ever heard.

Dirty Boy (Sing To God Part 2, 1995)

Good god. How many times have I listened to this song? How many times have I blubbed with joy? This is a prime example of just how powerful music itself can actually be. I think the first 10 or 20 times I heard it, I couldn’t grasp the pattern or the melody or the form (verse/chorus/bridge etc) anywhere, but when it clicked, oh my God. Dirty Boy is my most favourite song of all time. It is all at once grandiose, relentless, loud, beautiful, sensitive and ridiculous.

The use of the signature Cardiacs trick of never-ending key changes has never been more perfectly utilised than here. The mid section employs a chord sequence that, somehow, manages to repeat itself whilst moving steadily upwards in key with each rotation. The tension and drama this creates is absolutely agonising. I’ve heard this song fucking countless times and I still don’t understand how this is possible. When you get to the end of this song, ask yourself what could have done to make it any more spectacular.

Where do you go from this? It’s the last fucking word. ’My arms are changing and you will no way live long enough to repay me, I’ll praise you anyway.’ It is truly the sound of the world ending.

Jeff Beck was the guitar hero’s guitar hero. The British axeman – who died in 2023 – dazzled with his sizzling six-string sonics for more than half a century. From the psych-tinged R&B of The Yardbirds, to the Jeff Beck Group with Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart, to the radio-friendly jazz/rock instrumental masterpiece Blow By Blow, a Who’s Who of guest appearances (Mick Jagger, Roger Waters, Brian May, Paul Rodgers, Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner) and beyond, Beck was constantly exploring and moving forward. In 2009, he sat down with Classic Rock to look back on some of his more memorable encounters.

Jimi Hendrix

When I saw Jimi we knew he was going to be trouble. And by ‘we’ I mean me and Eric [Clapton], because Jimmy [Page] wasn’t in the frame at that point. I saw him at one of his earliest performances in Britain, and it was quite devastating. He did all the dirty tricks – setting fire to his guitar, doing swoops up and down his neck, all the great showmanship to put the final nail in our coffin. I had the same temperament as Hendrix in terms of ‘I’ll kill you’, but he did in such a good package with beautiful songs.

Reporters got the number of my flat the day he died. I was suicidal at the time, because my girlfriend had dumped me. And to have to the deal with a call saying “Jimi Hendrix is dead. How do you feel about that?” At first I thought it was a bloody hoax, but as the day wore on I realised it was tragically true.

I don’t want to say that I knew him well, I don’t think anybody did, but there was a period in London when I went to visit him quite few times. He invited me down to Olympic studios and I gave him a bottleneck. That’s what he plays on Axis: Bold As Love. We hooked up in New York and played at Steve Paul’s club The Scene.

Sly Stone

Carmine [Appice, drummer with Beck, Bogert & Appice] knew that I was a big fan of Sly so he arranged the session. We went to San Francisco to do some recording and we were stuck in a hotel for 10 days and never saw him.

Eventually we got into the studio and Sly saw Carmine’s drums and said: “You can take half of that away, we don’t need that.” Then he disappeared into a back room and never came out again. He eventually called me through his microphonic system. I remember sitting in his office cross-legged, with his wife giggling, and we played for about two hours. I’ve got it on tape somewhere.

Ronnie Wood

We did a gig in Florida and there was this monsoon-type rain going on; there was a lot of condensation in the air. Ronnie did this fabulous bass solo, I slapped him a high five and 400 volts went across our two hands and blew us both off the stage. We’ve both got small pockmarks on our hands where the sparks hit.

I’d seen quite a lot of him and then, to my amazement, his marriage took a left turn and he’s ensconced in a new relationship, so I haven’t so much of him recently. But he did induct me at the Classic Rock Awards, and that was fun.

Keith Moon

I’ve got plenty of stories about Keith. There’s the one about when he wanted to sell me a car. It started off in the gents at the Speakeasy – as most of his stories do. He came up to me and said: “I’ve got a roadster I want to sell you.” I said: “I don’t want it.” He said: “Alright, come down the house tomorrow and I’ll give it to you.” So I drove down. Right on time he turned up in this white [Rolls-Royce] Corniche with this beautiful blonde-haired girl and said: “She’s yours. This is my house-warming present for you.”

That night he put me in this room with a jukebox in it and a single mattress on the floor. I went to sleep, and right in the middle of the night Beck’s Bolero [Beck’s first hit single] started up and it played over and over again, it wouldn’t stop. So I unplugged the jukebox. The girl came in and said: “Why did you unplug that? Keith and I were really enjoying it.” Then she said: “By the way, I’m not to go back up to Keith’s, I’ve got to stay with you.” It was a very enjoyable weekend.

Cozy Powell

I was auditioning for drummers and I was late. When I finally arrived there were 15 drum kits set up and one double kit in red glitter. I said to my assistant: “Whose is that flash-bastard kit over there?” And she pointed and said: “He’s the guy you want.” I said: “Let me hear him first and then we’ll go from there.” Cozy and I played for about a minute and you could see all the other drummers packing up their kits. He looked the part as well as being the part. Cozy had the image and he played great. We struck up a friendship from that time on. His idol was John Bonham, and I guess he was my John Bonham.

Jimmy Page

My sister knew Jimmy from Epsom Art School. She came to my room one day and said: “There’s a weirdo at school, he’s got a weird guitar like yours,” and then slammed the door. I ran after her saying: “Where is he?” She said, ‘I’ll take you over there because I’d like to see him play. I don’t believe he can play.” We went over there, he opened the door and we got tea and cake. We visited regularly from then on. His mum had bought him a really good-quality tape recorder, so we’d record there. I don’t know where those tapes are now but there’s some rare stuff on them.

When I first heard what he’d done with Led Zeppelin I thought: “That’s a little bit more than inspired by the [Beck’s] Truth album.” When I finally got over that I realised I needed more than I had. I needed a frontman with girly appeal. Plant certainly had that in abundance – the bare chest, golden locks and all that. We [the Jeff Beck Group] had Rod Stewart [laughs].

Eric Clapton

I know he didn’t like the fact that I took over from him in the Yardbirds and we did great. The general buzz of the band was that they thought they were finished when Eric left. At my debut with the Yardbirds at the Marquee I showed them what was what and I got a standing ovation, so that was the end of that.

Two months after that things took off in the States, which pissed Eric off big time. I think he was hankering after going there – like we all were. That was our holy grail, going to America to see the blues players. Within a week we were down in Chicago looking at Howlin’ Wolf. So I think Eric was a bit jealous on that front. But then along came Cream and he blew everybody away.

Nowadays he’s a changed person. He seems a lot more mellow and happier with himself. I think he’s realised that you don’t have to be mean or in anyway guarded, you can offer yourself in so many ways. And he’s given so much pleasure with his playing and deservedly got the accolades.

Frank Zappa

I loved his political outbursts. From what I could read between the lines he probably could have made the best American president ever. He was very knowledgeable about world affairs and he had a deep cynical streak.

Me and Ronnie Wood knew no fear when we were together [in the Jeff Beck Group] in ’69. I knew where Frank lived and I drove up to Laurel Canyon in a rented Camarro and did a rubber burnout outside his house. He of course heard it, and came out and said: “You can cut out that shit,” and invited us in. He took a shine to me and Ronnie big-time.

Stevie Ray Vaughan

I met him at a CBS convention in Hawaii in 1981. He was a little worse for wear. He was eating KFC out of a box and then ate the box as well.

We went on the road together in ’89. He’d got a beautiful new girlfriend and he was as straight as a die. We were on the road for about three months. And then the tragic story was when he went in that helicopter he didn’t want to get on it. The people around him talked him into it by saying: “Look Eric [Clapton] has just got on one.” So off he went and never came back. I think Stevie Ray was the closest thing to Hendrix when it came to playing the blues.

Eddie Van Halen

He was the great white hope when he did the solo on [Michael Jackson’s] Beat It. I’d seen him, and I don’t like the speed tapping style very much, but he had it down. I once saw him play a blues solo and it was astonishing, he really can play. But he was on the booze, and objectionable a lot of the time.

Mick Jagger

I used to get mistaken for him all the time in ’61. I used to have girls screaming at me and I didn’t know what the fuck they were screaming about. I’d pull up along somebody in a car and they’d go: “Mick!” And I’d be thinking: “Who the fuck is this Mick?” Then I realised it was this guy in The Rolling Stones called Mick Jagger.

I was always thinking: “I wonder if I could play in that band?” I seemed to fit the style, loved the blues and all the rest of it. I kept my eye on them. And lo and behold Mick calls me up and wants me to do an album [She’s The Boss]. And that was the first time I met him. I thought Mick was charming. He treated me really well. Loved women, of course.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 133, May 2009

After more than 40 years of thrashing, Brazilian icons Sepultura are calling it a day. They didn’t plan on making new music after their final tour kicked off in 2024, but, as guitarist Andreas Kisser told Hammer earlier this year, a change in personnel laid the stage for new possibilities. This is the story of their four-song farewell, The Cloud Of Unknowing.

Two years after kicking off their ongoing farewell tour – and six after putting out their final album, Quadra – Sepultura have put out their last-ever studio effort. Brazil’s extreme metal trailblazers released the EP The Cloud Of Unknowing on April 24, putting the cherry on top of their 42-year career with four new songs. It also marked the band’s first recording to feature their recently-appointed 23-year-old drummer, Greyson Nekrutman.

Sepultura revealed their intention to retire at the end of 2023, and longtime guitarist Andreas Kisser has offered multiple reasons why in interviews since. They don’t want to force themselves to outdo Quadra, they’re sick of the high-pressure album/tour/album/tour cycle, and they want to call it quits while they’re still on good terms. Kisser’s wife Patricia dying of cancer in 2022 is also a massive contributor for him personally.

“[It impacted] everything in my life,” he says on a video call with Hammer. “Not just professionally but everything, because I had plans with my wife – we stayed together for 32 years – that are not there anymore. It gives you a whole new perspective on life, and the band is just one aspect of that. It was a big influence.”

Sepultura didn’t plan on making new music during their retirement run. But then, three weeks before the first show, ex-drummer Eloy Casagrande abruptly stepped down to join Slipknot. We can see the hurt and disappointment in Kisser’s expression when we broach the subject.

“Two days before he announced he was leaving, we were discussing elements of the setlist like nothing was happening,” he remembers. “So it really came out of nowhere, and I don’t understand why he did that. There were many, many different ways you could handle a situation like that.”

Fortunately, Kisser’s son Yohan had shown him social media footage of Nekrutman’s playing, and singer Derrick Green had seen the drummer perform in crossover thrashers Suicidal Tendencies. Coincidentally, Suicidal would later replace Nekrutman with Casagrande’s Slipknot predecessor, Jay Weinberg.

Within 48 hours of Casagrande leaving, Sepultura hired Nekrutman. He was so young that he had his parents accompany him to the first band meeting.

“He was basically the main reason why I felt energised to write again,” says Kisser. “He brought a new energy: he’s a great guy and an amazing musician. This EP is a consequence of the atmosphere we have in the band now.”

They wanted to create again, but they wanted things to be as organic as possible. When they were in Miami for the 70,000 Tons Of Metal cruise in February 2025, they decided that local studio Criteria would be the perfect place to track the material they had. “Black Sabbath recorded Heaven And Hell there!” Kisser explains with a smile.

Although The Cloud Of Unknowing was written without an agenda, the songs demonstrate Sepultura’s range. Sacred Books is an all-metal onslaught, All Souls Rising integrates some orchestral grandeur, Beyond The Dream is a moody ballad, and the proggy intro of The Place makes use of Nekrutman’s jazz roots.

Meanwhile, the lyrics touch on current events, continuing the social awareness the band have had since the days of Anti-Cop and Arise. The Place addresses immigration and All Souls Rising uses the 1790s Haitian Revolution as a cry for modern-day unity. The EP’s title comes from a 14th-century Christian text and is meant to urge people to unplug.

“Screens and fake news and artificial intelligence… we don’t need that in the way of our connection to nature or God or whatever energy you want to give a name to,” says Kisser. “Alan Watts [late British-American writer/philosopher] talked about the Cloud Of Unknowing as a straight connection with yourself. Be yourself, go to the beach, step on the sand, feel things for yourself!”

After the EP comes out, the band will focus on finishing their tour, with the new songs as part of the setlist. The last European show will take place in Dublin in August, and their final concert will be in São Paulo in November. Kisser promises “amazing guests” for their swansong show, although he claims the band’s founding Cavalera brothers won’t be among them. “We don’t have anything [confirmed],” he says when we ask for details.

Like all good things, Sepultura will end. However, Kisser still has creative plans. He wants to release a live album featuring 40 songs recorded at 40 different stops on the farewell tour. Then, he wants to write more music on acoustic guitar and make audiovisual art projects with his new girlfriend, who’s a painter.

“I have so many possibilities,” the guitarist says as he casts his gaze to the future. “I don’t have to make any decisions; I want to enjoy the process. I want to enjoy everything until the very last moment.”

This article originally appeared in Metal Hammer issue 412, May 2026. Sepultura are currently touring Europe and will play their last-ever show at Estádio Municipal Paulo Machado de Carvalho in São Paulo, Brazil on November 7.

Muse started out as a series of irreverent party acts before making their first steps towards success in 1994. Even in those early days the trio were convinced they could achieve their ambitions, and in 2013 – after nearly two decades of effort – they told Prog how they’d done it.

“I can’t believe I actually just did that,” laughs Matt Bellamy. He’s talking to himself – but a sold-out O2 Arena rammed with manic Muse obsessives is hanging on his every word. What he actually just did was perform a song without the security blanket of his guitar – which he rarely does – giving it the proper rock-messiah works: falling to his knees, rolling on the stage, shrieking in falsetto.

When he does have his guitar he gives it even more, to the accompanying roars of the ever-growing faithful. In fairness, he’s got an eye-catching set for support. Featuring a circular runway on which to posture, it’s festooned with banks of video screens which bombard us with images both socio-political and comical. As the show goes on, the screens gradually form a vast upside-down pyramid shape which envelops and consumes the band, before they emerge heroically from within, apparently an unstoppable force.

Backstage, minutes before he goes on, bassist Chris Wolstenholme tells me, “It’s not just a stage. It’s pretty amazing.” Does he get stage fright? “If you don’t get nervous in front of 18,000 people, it means you don’t care. You should be nervous. You’re alive.”

Muse are most certainly alive and living the dream now. How did three average guys from Teignmouth in Devon go from being just another bunch of teenage garage-grunge hopefuls to all this: penning bonkers Olympics anthems, filling stadia and arenas around the world, selling 15 million albums, fathering children with Hollywood stars, being hailed as the new Queen and being showered with awards across the board. What madness is this? “They let their madness show through,” Brian May has said. “And that’s always a good thing.”

Rather gloriously, they’ve achieved this stratospheric ascent not by tailoring their act to fit in, but by becoming progressively more and more out-there and ludicrous, with albums that discuss Orwellian dystopias, revolution, aliens, thermodynamics and black holes; music that mixes up wallpaper-peeling riffs, electro-funk and neo-classical symphonies, and a sensory-overload live show that thinks nothing of chucking in a few satellites, giant globes and deeply symbolic explosions.

They also display a sense of humour, as if to let us know they’re aware that it may be riotously over the top – but as Freddie Mercury would have agreed, that’s the point. They want to see how much they can get away with. In an age where too many interchangeable, forgettable bands mumble and stare at their feet, afraid of being accused of bombast or pretension, Muse reach brazenly for the higher ground, to make a splash, to pin you to the wall. In many ways they are the modern face of classic rock, carrying the torch for the proud heritage that’s burned through Hendrix, Zeppelin, Yes and Pink Floyd. Even though their own early influences were Nirvana, Sonic Youth and Rage Against The Machine, they’re happy to accept the mantle.

“For sure,” agrees Matt Bellamy. “We’ve always liked Zeppelin, Queen, The Beatles. Jimi Hendrix was my first favourite guitarist. When we were growing up we veered towards the bands that were great live performers: Nirvana and Rage Against The Machine had great energy, emotion and drama. Then mid-90s it all got a bit quiet, a bit mellow. When we got up on stage, we always wanted to just give it everything.”

Few bands ‘give it’ quite as much as Muse. Their transformation from the Radiohead-indebted nerdlings of the late 90s to the hi-def superstars of today reached its apogee with their pyramid-based stage show – shamelessly over the top and loaded with mildly paranoiac meaning. In that respect, you can trace its lineage back to the big daddy of arena rock stage shows, The Wall.

“The upside-down pyramid represents the power structure at its most extreme, the all-seeing eye, and the idea that a powerful elite profits from everyone’s hard work underneath them,” says Bellamy. “That seems to be the way of the world. So the pyramid comes down and gradually consumes the band. You can see something in common with The Wall there, creating a separation between the band and the audience… which ultimately with us is broken down.”

We’re speaking a fortnight after the London show, Bellamy’s dad, George, was a member of The Tornados, whose Joe Meek-produced 1962 song Telstar became a transatlantic hit – and pre-dated Bellamy Jr’s own space fixation by 40 years – but at first glance, he couldn’t look less like a 21st-century rock star with a conspiracy theory fixation.

Muse have always had one eye on confounding expectations. Even in their younger days, playing the toilet circuit, they came flying out of the gates, and gear was regularly smashed onstage. “In our early years I was genuinely a bit more… I wouldn’t say angry, but I was definitely prone to ‘anger moments,’” he says. “I would explode. On those early tours it was a cathartic experience for us: the gear-trashing was the real thing. But then around the third album there was a period where it was just a bit of fun.”

Is it true he holds the record for the most number of guitars smashed onstage during one tour? Apparently it was 140. “I think that the Guinness compilers or whoever claimed that record for me; they got mixed up. Around 2001 we did 57 festivals in one year, which was a record. They must have assumed I trashed my guitar at every one of them, and at every other gig as well. So I don’t know. It’s certainly not verified. I bet Pete Townshend would definitely have the edge over me on the numbers.”

Conversely, Muse’s early years were as conventional as it gets. Bellamy, bassist Wolstenholme and drummer Dom Howard met in the early 90s in the seaside town of Teignmouth. A series of school bands followed – Gothic Plague, Fixed Penalty, Rocket Baby Dolls. It was as the latter that they won a local battle of the bands competition, destroying their gear in the process. They realised that if others were taking them seriously, they might be wise to do the same, and chose their less silly name. They forsook university and played learning-curve gigs galore while taking jobs in an ice-cream van (Wolstenholme), on a building site (Howard) and as a caravan-park toilet cleaner (Bellamy).

Far from being an overnight sensation, they nevertheless began to get some traction playing in London and Manchester, supporting Skunk Anansie, and with second release, 1999’s Muscle Museum EP (a self-titled debut EP had appeared the previous year). Via a blend of good judgment and dumb luck they signed to a then-new label, Taste Media, in the UK, and Maverick (the label owned by Madonna) in the States, where their potential to “go big” was instantly perceived. John Leckie – who learned his craft working with Pink Floyd in the 70s – came on board to produce their first album, 1999’s Showbiz, and co-produce their second, 2001’s Origin Of Symmetry. “We hadn’t really listened to Floyd until he played The Dark Side Of The Moon to us,” confesses Bellamy.

The leap between their first two albums was astounding: while Showbiz contained hints of the epic sound that would come later, Origin Of Symmetry blazed away from the launch pad and didn’t look down, with Bellamy’s burgeoning guitar heroics sending their sound spinning off into outer space. Their third album, 2003’s Absolution, gave them their first No.1, and from there on, they just mushroomed: 2006’s sizzling Black Holes And Revelations with its bizarre slabs of funk and prog; 2009’s The Resistance with its glam-stomp calls-to-arms and dizzying conspiracy theory-themed concept; headlining appearances at Glastonbury, Reading and Wembley Stadium (they were the first band to sell out the new stadium, a few weeks after it re-opened); and, earlier this year, writing one of the official Olympic anthems in the shape of the admirably OTT Survival.

The less cool they were with critics – for not chickening out of layering Brian May guitar flourishes over three-part symphonies while recommending we stick it to the man – the more fans adored them for the very same reasons. The more they sent their music out on a limb and concocted crazier live shows, the bigger they ballooned.

Success has brought with it the expected rock-star trappings: mantelpieces groaning under awards trophies (from Brits to Grammys to a prestigious Ivor Novello), Hollywood wives (Bellamy is married to actress Kate Hudson) and, in the case of the ursine Wolstenholme, a battle with alcoholism (he conquered his addiction, writing and singing two songs on the new album, Save Me and Liquid State, about his problems). Not bad going for three blokes from Teignmouth. Do they ever have to pinch themselves and ask, ‘How the hell did this happen?’

“Yes,” says Howard, backstage at the O2. With his slight frame and fine features, the drummer looks like he could be related to Bellamy. “But then, it was kind of the plan. In some ways we never thought we’d get to this level, but at the same time, we always wanted to be the biggest band in the world. If you’d asked me at 15, I’d have gone, ‘What are you talking about?’ At 18 I’d have gone: ‘Yeah, of course we’ll get there!’ We believed. We always had the desire, and we’ve always taken risks.”

“The first time we played Wembley Stadium,” says Wolstenholme, “I spent most of the set having flashbacks. I was remembering playing to 30 people in Exeter or Plymouth. Of course this is way beyond what we expected then, but we always had confidence. Maybe it was insecurity, but we thought: ‘We’ve got to fill these big spaces up.’ This is not a band that’s ever been ashamed to say we want to be a big band. During the 90s it was cool to say you didn’t want to be big. But then why are you in a band? Why do you go and play in front of people? I never understood that. I wanted as many people to like this band as possible.”

In the North London café a fortnight later, Bellamy mulls over the same issue. “It is unusual, absolutely,” he agrees of their irresistible rise. “But it’s also unusual to hear it put that way. Because I suppose from our point of view, it’s usual to get what we want. I know that sounds odd. But we wanted to be a great live band, and we got it, so… still, luck must be a part of it. Though nobody can deny we’ve been hard-working.”

Muse albums have been increasingly hinged around overarching concepts that question authority, corporate greed and humanity’s future. It’s all drawn on an epic scale, of course – The Resistance was a grandiose sci-fi rock opera based on what Bellamy described as “a story of humanity coming to an end and everyone pinning their hopes on a group of astronauts who go out to spread humanity to another planet,” all set against a backdrop of global socio-political conspiracy theories.

In that respect, Muse are a protest band – a very modern one, granted, but one who aren’t afraid to call for revolution and for the established order to be upended. It’s a noble idea, but one that could be viewed as naïve, even quaint, in an era when rock music struggles to make itself heard against the din of X Factor and video-game culture. Is it even possible for a rock band to spark a revolution in this day and age?

“Oh, I think nowadays probably more so,” counters Bellamy instantly. “Now, we do a song like Uprising and a year later the news is all about global uprisings everywhere. There’s no connection, obviously, but it’s happening. Whether it’s directly caused by music or not remains to be seen.

“But I could probably tweet something – if I wanted to get arrested – and say: ‘Hey, let’s all go do this outside 10 Downing Street,’ and thousands would probably show up. Anyone well-known in the media can have a direct influence if they want to. We’ve chosen to do it through music rather than other means.”

Such views have occasionally found Bellamy – who Hudson once described as “a complicated farm boy” – hovering around the ‘crackpot’ end of the conspiracy theory spectrum. Most infamously, he once offered the opinion that 9/11 was an “inside job”; he’s since retracted that statement, though the idea of challenging the consensus is still there.

“I’d like to think our songs have some influence on people who feel they don’t need to fall in with everything,” he says. “The structures keeping people in place these days are far more covert and coercive: advertising, the media, the way corporations and governments function, and so on. A lot of young people are born into bondage and don’t necessarily know it. I do feel we’re keeping up that tradition – that it’s the job of bands, musicians, artists in general, to at least shed light on things people might not be aware of.

“I wouldn’t pretend we’re a starting point, but in combination with other artists out there, I think we collectively influence younger people to come up with new ways of thinking. And they’re the ones who will form policies in the future. An amazing piece of art can transform someone, can awaken them to ways of perceiving reality that they hadn’t thought of before. And that someone might go on to be an Obama or a Steve Jobs or someone in a position to make a change. It’s all part of evolution. We’re all interwoven together, evolving in that way.”

That’s not to say Muse aren’t immune to the more traditional perks that rock’n’roll has to offer. A few years ago they made no secret of their love of magic mushrooms. And certain members of the band have been known to have fun with ‘the ladies.’ “I’ve never been a heavyweight in that department,” says Bellamy with a laugh. “When I was single for a couple of years I had a lot of fun, but we wouldn’t be on album six if we’d burned out, like many bands do. Dom is still flying the flag pretty strong, even though he might deny it. His idea of a normal week is different from the rest of us. He’s pretty rock’n’roll. But I’d say even he’s trying to calm it down a little.”

Howard adds: “There have been all kinds of random occurrences over the years, lots of silly excess, yes. Right now, we’re a bit sensible and healthy because the tour’s just started. Once you’ve been on the road for a year, things start to get a little crispy around the edges.”

Before I can ask Bellamy if Hudson has calmed him down, he answers for me. “Anyway, my partner is way more rock’n’roll than me. She likes to come out and get the party going more than I ever could.”

He reflects that becoming a dad (his baby’s in-utero heartbeat features on Follow Me, from The 2nd Law) has given him “a reduction in long-term anxiety. I used to be overly concerned about certain things, like…” The impending apocalypse? “Yes, exactly! Things you can’t necessarily control in life. Natural disasters. Elections. Watching your baby from a young age focuses your worries onto something more direct. I’m still interested in what’s going on, but perhaps less emotionally engaged than I was. But who knows – in a few years that might all come back. ”

For all their singer’s new-found domesticity, there’s still little chance of Muse falling into line with convention. The 2nd Law was the most out-there album of 2012, its blend of rock operatics, electronic flourishes and tongue-in-cheek excess putting further clear water between them and the competition. The sight of them performing at the Olympics was simultaneously a mark of how far they’ve come and how far out there they are.

“Even we thought playing Survival at the Olympic ceremony in the eyes of the world was odd,” says Bellamy. “It was pretty surreal. Anyone who watches that back will think there’s one thing there that looks and sounds… extreme.”

Inevitably, there’s a gap between the histrionic rock star onstage at the O2, Wembley or wherever and the affable 30-something talking to me in a cafe today (even if, when I mention that I walked past Helena Bonham-Carter just outside, he mutters, “Yeah, she and Tim Burton are our neighbours…”). Does he become another person onstage? Adopt a persona?

“No – if anything, you’re more honest onstage. Up there, the true self comes out. The socialisation levels that we use to modify our behaviour for everyday life can peel away. Onstage you get the chance to see someone’s craziness a little. I like to think when I go and see other artists I’m seeing what’s going on deep down inside them. You get a sense of freedom to express yourself any way you want to. You can say anything you want, do anything you want, behave as you want.”

That, surely, is one of the enduring bullet-points on the manifesto of rock’n’roll.

“It’s only in everyday life where you have to put on the jacket, the mask.”