“What’s all this about?” asks Stranglers’ bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel is leaning forward in his chair and enquiring why he’s sitting next to the rather less buff former Yes keyboard player and all-round prog overlord Rick Wakeman.

We decided to bring together two men from opposite ends of the musical spectrum to find out what things were really like on the frontline all those years ago. In 1977 Wakeman had spent six months in Queen’s Mountain Studios in Montreux working on Yes’ Going For The One album. In stark contrast, The Stranglers were preparing to release not one but two albums, six months apart: Rattus Norvegicus and No More Heroes. For Yes it marked the end of their imperial phase. For The Stranglers it was the beginning of theirs.

The pair greet each like old friends – and it turns out that they are old friends, their paths having crossed several times over the years. “1977, then,” booms Wakeman, settling back into his chair. “I’m not certain either of us will remember that far back…”

For JJ, 1977 would have been the start of an adventure, whereas Rick had, to put it bluntly, been round the block a few times.

Rick Wakeman: Thank you!

Jean-Jacques Burnel: It was the first time we’d released an album. We felt something was going on – a bit of a revolution, and with every revolution you chuck the baby out with the bath water. It was a Year Zero for many people. It was only years later that people started admitting to having liked anything before Year Zero.

How long did that take?

JJ: A long time. I do remember Captain Sensible at the time, without any irony, admitting he liked Abba; and when I saw the Sex Pistols they were playing old Monkees covers. There was a dichotomy between what people were doing and what they were claiming in the press.

A lot of the bands claimed punk had nothing to do with drugs. I was like, “What?!” We used to get called hippies because we smoked dope. Everyone was broke and tight, so speed was the drug of choice because it was cheap.

What was 1977 like for you, Rick?

RW: In 1977 I’d just rejoined Yes and we were recording Going For The One in Switzerland, which took six months…

JJ: Six months! We recorded our first two albums in 10 days!

RW: A lot of that time was spent with Alan going skiing, Steve tuning his guitars, and trying to wake Chris up! But [label boss] Ahmet Ertegun came to us and said: “I don’t know how much longer I can keep funding records like this.” We realised that this was the last bastion of prog rock as we knew it. We were aware of punk – I’d seen it coming a few years earlier when I saw The Tubes and took them to A&M, who signed them.

JJ: Really? We used to love The Tubes.

RW: We were aware that something was going on. And it kills off what went before it, at least for a bit. When prog came along, it did away with the old beat and psychedelic groups, the way the beat groups had done away with the crooners before them.

JJ: When something new comes along, everyone wants to be a part of that peer group, to the extent that they’ll deny their history. It’s only when they’ve gained some confidence that they can start to admit where that history actually came from. Up until that point it’s almost politically incorrect to admit your influences!

But you can tell by just listening to the music. On our first album, the nearest thing we had to a prog rock song was this four-part piece called Down In The Sewer. That was about 11 minutes long and it was a suite. Prog rock, essentially, even if it was prog à la Beefheart and The Doors.

Did that kind of rivalry exist in prog, Rick? Did you have any dust-ups with ELP or Genesis?

RW: No. The press tried to stir things up, between myself and Keith Emerson especially. But we were great friends and we used to laugh about it all. We let it go on because it fuelled press.

But that rivalry did exist between punk bands and prog bands?

JJ: We used to laugh at things like Pink Floyd taking years to make an album. But we’ve just taken two years to make our album [Giants, 2012]. The creative process can take time, because you’re not on an assembly line. And you have a life outside the band as well. The two worlds did occasionally meet: Freddie Mercury bumping into Sid Vicious in the studio, members of Led Zeppelin turning up to punk gigs…

I don’t really recall fraternising with any bands from the previous generation apart from Dr Feelgood. When I was a kid I’d go and see bands like Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac and Black Cat Bones, who became Free, and I felt that kind of vibe in Dr Feelgood.

Our keyboard player, Dave Greenfield, was a prog rocker, though. When I first met him he had platform boots on, his jacket had frills, and he had long hair and what we called a semi-pro moustache. He introduced me to In The Land Of Grey And Pink by Caravan. I did like that. I do remember the Yes singer [Jon Anderson], though. Is he still into elves?

RW: Jon has his own little world. When he doesn’t like what’s happening in
the real one he retreats into his own one. He’s a big fan of yours, though,
JJ. We were touring together recently, driving around in the same car, listening to all sorts of music. We played some Stranglers, and he said to me: “You know, there’s a few of their songs that Yes could have done.” He was right. Certainly something like Golden Brown.

How did get you away with that?

JJ: There was a lot of hypocrisy involved at the time, like people claiming to be working class when they weren’t. I remember Joe Strummer crying on my shoulder when we were the first band to support Patti Smith and the Ramones. He was in a rhythm and blues band called The 101’ers; he was going, “Oh, I wish I had a band like yours!” He used to live in the Notting Hill squats at the time. No one knew his dad was a diplomat.

Was there a rivalry between the punk bands at the time?

JJ: Not until success kicked in. I remember meeting Steve Jones and Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols when we supported Patti Smith in 1976, and all Steve said to me was: “We’re going to be famous in six months’ time. I like your haircut!” Then a year later I remember having a punch-up with Steve and Paul and Paul Simonon from The Clash at the old Dingwalls. That’s when the rivalry seemed to start – when we started outselling everyone.

JJ: I’ll tell you something about Golden Brown that I’ve never told anyone before. It actually developed out of a prog rock suite. We were recording the La Folie album, and Hugh and I were pissed off because we seemed to be writing all the songs. So we said to Jet and Dave, “Right, you two are going to write a song. We’re off to the pub. Have it written when we get back.” We fucked off to the pub all afternoon.

Now, with Dave being a prog rocker and Jet being a jazzer, when we got back they presented us with this six-part piece of music. And we were like, “Fucking hell, we can’t record this.” We went, “Don’t like that bit… don’t like that… oh, wait a minute, we could something with that.” And the part we did like formed the basis for Golden Brown.

1977 has retrospectively been cast as the year of punk, but the biggest-selling albums of the year were Bat Out Of Hell and Rumours. Has there been a bit of rewriting of history?

JJ: Have you seen these re-runs of Top Of The Pops from 1977 on telly? What a load of shite! It’s like karaoke central.

So, 1977: was it fun?

JJ: It certainly was. I knew a year later that things were changing, though. I had a bank account, and I went in and the teller was a young girl with streaks of green in her hair. The great British assimilation had begun.

RW: It becomes mainstream.

JJ: Yes. It had become the norm.

By his side, frontman Kadeem France diligently joins the hunt. Given that the cathedral took well over 70 years to be constructed, the final fixture could be anywhere – it could be an element in the intricate vaulted ceiling, a pane in the stained glass windows. As the pair joke about the unfortunate possibility of the poor builder slipping off the roof after laying down the last piece, Erik points out the most important thing: “Well, at least they finished it.”

It’s a sentiment that feels especially appropriate considering Loathe’s own creative endeavours. Their second album, 2020’s I Let It In And It Took Everything, positioned the band in the vanguard of modern metal. They took a sharp left-turn with the following year’s surprise-released ambient album The Things They Believe, indicating a restless creative streak. And then? Nothing.

The last five years have been a long wait for a record that, at times, seemed like it would never arrive. In 2022, the band cancelled a UK and European tour to “complete the recording process”, but it proved to be a false dawn. Three years later, a new single, the knotty, prog-facing Gifted Every Strength, raised hopes, only for things to go silent on the release front once again.

But what Erik admits has been “a long and tedious process” is finally over. Loathe’s fourth album, A Stranger To You, is finally here.

“We’ve not stopped working on this record, because we had to get it right,” says Kadeem as we leave the cathedral and into the blazing sun, heading towards the leafy cathedral graveyard, a beloved smoking and hangout spot throughout the band’s adolescence. “It’s been a cycle of writing songs, throwing them out and trying a different approach. It’s easy to shit out a half-decent song, but, if you don’t believe in it, it means nothing.”

Tellingly, the first words Kadeem whispers on A Stranger To You are: “Back to life”. They come at the start of Block Of Flats, a cement-block slab of industrial-edged noise.

Except Block Of Flats isn’t even the album’s opening song. That honour falls to piano-led piece Entrance, which features a spoken word passage courtesy of UK hip hop/R&B artist Bucki Sugar. How many other bands would herald their big comeback by letting someone else do it for them?

But then confounding expectations is the Loathe way. Anyone expecting the new album to be a re-run of I Let It In… will be in for a surprise. While its DNA remains fundamentally the same, the band have expanded their boundaries way beyond where they were before.

Loathe clearly haven’t been twiddling their thumbs in the years since they last put out an album. A Stranger To You sounds like the result of a lot of effort and thought: not just ‘how do we make a record?’, but ‘how do we make a record that’s significantly different to everything else out there?’.

A Stranger To You shifts effortless between styles and genres. Where Block Of Flats represents Loathe at their densest, Harder To Pretend is decked out with plush, velvety jazz interiors. Elsewhere, Fangs could be the soundtrack to a noirish speakeasy, The Ladder busts out an acoustic guitar to soundtrack a tale of broken hearts, and Gemini’s distorted electro is the musical equivalent of being sat with your head in your hands in the toilet of a hardcore techno club. Sonically, it may seem like they all exist in different worlds, but each is recognisably a Loathe song.

The sheer breadth of guests on the album is a measure of Loathe’s ambitions, too. The album also features collaboration with Code Orange’s Jami Morgan and Eric ‘Shade’ Balderose (in their guise as NOWHERE2RUN), UK post-hardcore buzz band Static Dress, New Zealand singer-songwriter Jordan Rakei and London musician, composer and artist Mansur Brown. This is a long, long way from I Let It In… part two.

“If we tried to make something ‘palatable’ and expected, it would be sacrificing our intentions,” Erik says. “If we can change someone’s perspective about music, that's a job well done.”

A short while later, and we’re sitting on a hill, admiring the grandeur of the cathedral from a distance. Kadeem grew up here in Liverpool, in the working class area of Toxteth, while Erik is originally from St Helens, 10 miles away.

Absent today are bassist Feisal El-Khazragi and drummer Sean Radcliffe, though three of the four of them are represented on the album’s artfully abstract cover, which features a sun pendant belonging to Kadeem, a ring owned by Erik, and Feisal’s bracelet, all designed to act as a representation of each of them. The only hold-out is Sean.

“He didn’t like the idea, so he didn’t want anything on it,” says Kadeem. “Which is the most perfect representation of him.”

Given the amount of praise that was heaped on them in the wake of I Let It In And It Took Everything, you could forgive the members of Loathe for having a bit of an ego about them. But that’s not the case.

“In this band, we all individually have our own struggles with imposter syndrome,” admits Kadeem, who manages to be both charming and shy at the same time. “Not all the time, obviously. Y’know, we can be...” “Confident?” interjects Erik ironically, after a pregnant pause. Kadeem sheepishly admits he’s gotten a little more assured over the years. “But you’ve got to be confident,” Erik says. “Even if it’s naive, you’ve got to think you’re the shit.”

Kadeem jokingly puffs out his chest. “I try to project myself a bit more now. I don’t know if that’s ever a bit much, though…” “I don’t think you ever go over the line,” says Erik, reassuringly.

Listening to them speak, it’s clear that a mutually supportive bond exists between the two of them, with Kadeem’s disarming humility and Erik’s unwavering self-assurance simultaneously balancing and complementing each other. It’s something that has kept them level-headed, even when interest in the band has been at its most intense.

“We’re hardly rockstars that wake up first thing in the morning and snort cocaine and fly around on private jets!” says Kadeem, who met Erik at Liverpool’s Hub festival in 2011, when they were both 14 years old. “I mean, we're still working from Erik's shed in his back garden.”

That self-contained, DIY aspect has helped get Loathe to where they are today. “You’re just as excited about music as when I first met you,” Kadeem says. “That’s what drew me to you. You went from being a real music boy to... a real music man.”

Erik snorts with laughter, but Kadeem continues. “Even back then, Erik made [Attack Attack!’s] Stick Stickly in under a minute on [digital music software] FL Studios, and I was amazed,” the singer recalls. “Did I?” says Erik. As Kadeem nods in confirmation, the even the guitarist looks impressed at his own achievements as a 14-year-old.

Of course, there’s been a lot of growth since then. “When I was younger, I felt very angry at the world,” Erik admits. “I had a ‘fuck everyone’ attitude, and a lot of music would be me putting all this resentment out there. I’ve definitely been more self-centred in the past. I was a bit selfish. As I'm getting older, I’m becoming more of a human in the world.”

Erik gestures towards his bandmate. “Kadeem’s always had an innate maternal nature, though – he’s very family-oriented, very considerate of everyone,” he says. “It's an inspiration for me, in that sense.”

The relationship between the two of them has undoubtedly helped Loathe get through the new album’s lengthy gestation period. “This album is an accumulation of everything that has happened to us over the last six years,” Erik notes.

What exactly he’s talking about is unclear. Frustratingly, if there’s any drama involved, the pair aren’t giving it up. Instead, any struggles appear to be entirely creative.

“I think we were conscious of not wanting to fuck this record up, so there was this extreme sense of second guessing everything,” Erik admits, while Kadeem recalls the “overwhelming pressure” they felt after dropping Gifted Every Strength last year. They began to wonder if they should start to take onboard what fans wanted out of them, rather than just doing what they wanted. Erik says it was their friend, Static Dress frontman Olli Appleyard, who gave them the best bit of advice.

“Olli said to me: ‘You just need to live with the fact that it'll take some people a year or two to understand. You’re thinking ahead, and people will catch up.’”

The day is progressing and we’re getting hungry. We decide to go for sushi. As we wander through the streets to find a restaurant, Kadeem and Erik point out various places of interest, such as the bar where Kadeem once accidentally set his hair on fire.

“I was working there and had to light all the candles,” he says. “On the CCTV you could see the flames all over my head!” Along the way, we bump into Loathe’s original bassist, Shayne Smith, who is keen to join us when he hears that sushi is on the menu. Shayne stepped away from the band in 2018, but he says he’s proud of his musical “brothers” for doing so well.

We arrive at the restaurant and settle in for an intimidatingly generous serving of sushi. Sake is ordered, and Kadeem ensures Hammer’s glass is kept topped up.

“We should start asking for sake on our rider,” he says. “We used to be too scared to ask for pistachios,” says Shayne, erupting with laughter.

Loathe have got a bit more confident with their dressing room requests these days. Their rider requires venues to supply them with a framed picture of Liverpool football legend Steven Gerrard.

As we eat, talk drifts back to the new album. A Stranger In Me is undoubtedly the product of a band in perpetual forward motion, but it’s potentially also not what people expect from them. Are they worried its sheer stylistic breadth might put people off?

“I really want people to go in and process this album from start to finish,” says Erik. “It’s like a recipe. If you just pick out the ginger and eat it on its own, you might hate it. But if you put it all together – like sushi – it changes everything. It’s the same with genres – you might think you hate a certain sound, but, once you’ve tried it as part of a bigger piece, you might love it.”

He knows he doesn’t need to justify what Loathe have done with A Stranger To You. The time and effort were worth it - it’s an album that underlines their uniqueness and willingness to push forwards on their own terms and no one else’s. Loathe, just like Liverpool cathedral and its 70-year gestation period, are proof that great things come to those who wait.

A Stranger To You is out now on Sharptone

Dickinson himself was diagnosed with and later cleared from throat cancer a few years earlier, and offered Mustaine some useful thoughts on the matter. "Bruce had some fantastic stuff to say as a cancer survivor," Dave tells Hammer. "There's a big difference between someone saying, 'You're in my thoughts and prayers', versus somebody who goes into detail about his treatment and tells you about the outcome. I needed hope, and he gave me it."

Bruce's advice? A simple but effective mantra: "surround yourself with good people...make sure you're spending time with people who are upbeat and positive."

Mustaine made his cancer diagnosis public soon after receiving it himself - "to let the people who are my support system know", he explains - and it prompted an outpouring of well-wishes from many of his peers. Amongst the names to have sent him messages were Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, Kiss man Paul Stanley and even his former Metallica colleague James Hetfield.

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

Mustaine talks at length about his cancer battle in In My Darkest Hour, which hits shelves September 24 via Constable. Pick up the latest issue of Metal Hammer to read more from MegaDave, as well as exclusive new interviews with Motionless In White, Ghost, Five Finger Death Punch, Mastodon and more.

I’ve been quite involved with VR and immersive worlds for a while. I think the Covid period played a role of an accelerator in our relationship with digital worlds and interfaces.

Everyone is talking about immersive worlds visually; no one is talking about immersive worlds of sound. The visual field for a human being is 140 degrees – but the audio field is 360 degrees.

And really, we don’t care about technology; only the result matters. Is it working? Is it creating feeling or emotions or not? This new approach is sending us back to a very natural way of listening to sounds in everyday life.

I wanted to create a live event for Oxymore, and in VR we can explore the visual possibilities. I thought it would be fun to create a music city: the city of Oxyville, somewhere between Metropolis and Sin City, with buildings made from the broken parts of old synths and old tape recorders.

Then I’ll play live in the city. Each track will be dedicated to a district, and at the end of each track you’ll be teleported to another district.

The whole thing is based on spatial audio and surround sound, because I’m convinced that’s the way we’re going to listen to music in the very near future.

People have electric cars, which are going to eventually become pocket auditoriums. People have incredible soundbars with their TV sets. We’re going to have a much more 3D relationship with the music.

If I play live in reality, I want to do it without any visuals and go back to what the music is about: closing your eyes, listening and having a real trip and a real music experience. But I want to keep the visual experience within VR.

It will make sense to young people, I think. But this idea of imaginary worlds is not new. Our first virtual world is a book – it could be Dickens or Harry Potter, and you’re imagining the faces of the characters. You’re being an observer within the story, in a sense. We’re just going one step further.

I think young musicians are very lucky to live in this world of ideas and disruption. We always have a very dark vision and attitude about the future. We always think tomorrow is going to be worse than today. But if all those previous futures were so bad, we wouldn’t be here to talk to each other!

I’ve been lucky to live through three moments of disruption. The first was when I started, at the beginning of electronic music. The second was the digital era, with the rise of computers, and the third is this revolution of immersive worlds and the metaverse, and the fact that we can again push the boundaries of creativity.

This project makes me feel like a beginner – I’m opening doors on something new.

“The JIMI HENDRIX version of Wild Thing was the first thing I learned. I watched footage of Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival, where he burned the guitar and that whole thing was amazing to see. My dad’s friend had lent us his guitar double-cutaway Gibson painted a bright orangey pink and splashed with blues and reds, like a punk thing. So I went out onto the street with his guitar and I was loosely playing Wild Thing in front of the house. This little old lady put 10 pence on the wall, so that was the first money I ever made playing the guitar.

“Growing up in the 80s, BRYAN ADAMS was massive. My father took me to see the Into The Fire tour at Wembley. It was my first live gig in an arena and my dad used to take me out in the car preparing me for how loud it was going to be. We'd go out in the car and crank Reckless really loud and drive around listening to songs like Run To You at full volume.

“Everyone at school was getting into guitar music but instead of buying a Guns N' Roses record like everyone else was, I bought Live After Death by IRON MAIDEN. I remember trying to learn Hallowed Be Thy Name with the light and shade and the different parts. The guitars panned left and right, so you had Adrian Smith on one side Dave Murray on the other. I'd learn Murray's bits and then turn him off and play the gig, essentially.

"After school my friends would go out and I'd just play guitar night after night [to] Iron Maiden. Fast forward 15 years and I’m out on the Somewhere Back in Time tour playing with Lauren Harris. We used to play a GUN cover called Steal Your Fire, which was such a great song. She shared her dad's (Steve Harris’) DNA; I never saw Lauren back down from anything. And from my point of view, when Priest were looking, it was a big part of my CV. You know, ‘I've been around the world, I've been on that sort of schedule, played some big stages’. Apart from playing your instrument I think that helped in the audition process.

“Going back to my early influences, Maiden. Metallica and PANTERA were the big ones. I loved Pantera and songs like Five Minutes Alone. I remember my friend’s parents were away for the weekend, so everyone was at his house, smoking weed and drinking. We did a Ouija board ‘cause we wanted to speak to the Devil and everyone was calling names and being rude to it. Suddenly the Far Beyond Driven CD case just flew across the room. We stopped doing Ouija boards after that! I never got to see Pantera with Dimebag but obviously I became friends with [Pantera bassist and former Elegant Weapons bandmate] Rex Brown.

“METALLICA’s One had a big impact on me as well. …And Justice For All was the first Metallica album I heard. It was so different from anything I'd ever heard, kind of syncopated and complex. I was a big Kirk Hammett fan. I’d learn all his solos and it definitely influenced my own playing.

“I was discovering a lot of music in my early teens and I probably heard Painkiller by JUDAS PRIEST at around the same time. I’d heard songs like Another Thing Coming and Breaking The Law but this was something else. You hear that drum intro and that fast and heavy guitar-work and it’s just…whoa. Back to the Ouija boards, we once asked it, 'Is Richie ever going to be in a famous band?’ and it didn’t say ‘Priest’ but it might have said ‘JP’, which wouldn’t have made much sense at the time.

"When I first started playing I was in a covers band and we did all the standards. When you're a guitar player, you're always trying to write interesting stuff, showing off a bit. The covers band showed me that some of the simplest stuff gets the biggest reaction, like Hi-Ho Silver Lining by JEFF BECK. Amazing guitar player, obviously, but also just a great simple pop song. When you’re serving your 10,000 hours in a covers band, you're also distilling a lot of information about how songs are created.

"I then joined a band called Dirty Deeds with Tony Newton, who now plays in KK’s Priest. I did one album with them under the name DEEDS and there was some good stuff on there, songs like Valley Of The Kings. It was how I first met Steve Harris (who produced the album) and Lauren. It opened doors to a lot of things really. Not only Priest, but amazing opportunities like arranging music for CHRISTOPHER LEE’s metal album Charlemagne: The Omens of Death.

"It had these huge moments like the single Let Legend Mark Me As The King. His team sent the stuff, which was orchestra based, but they wanted it arranged for a heavy metal band. I sent them four or five tracks and Christopher said that he wanted it more metal, so I redid them. I didn’t get to play on the record because I got the call from Priest, but it was a joy to work with him and get to meet a legend like Christopher Lee.”

Elegant Weapons' new album Evolution is out now via Exciter Records. Judas Priest play London Hammersmith on September 21

“I very much connect to shadow and I think he’s more light – that’s why we work,” Kat laughs. Their differences – and shared instincts – are what made the whole thing click. The Californian band’s titanic sound gives Kat space to channel everything from breakups to self-examination with relentless energy.

“We always say a really great song is one that makes you feel happy and sad at the same time,” Kat says. “We always have this rule: it can’t be bad-sad all the time. We really want to empower people… even if a song’s context is darker, we’re always asking, ‘What does the listener need to feel from this?’”

For Holy Wars, that means dragging those darker instincts into the open through Kat’s near-whispers and full-throated howls, matched by Nick's body-blow riffs.

“I care more about my words than even about my singing ability,” she says. “It's always from a place of reflection and pain, loss, grieving, anger, jealousy – I'm not inspired when I'm happy!”

But that doesn’t stop Kat from hoping for brighter days. “I do feel like at some point we're going to be like, ‘Now what? I’ve said it all. What do I say now?’ Maybe I'll have to do an anonymous project to really exercise if I even have that ability to write a fun song."

Few bands hit this hard emotionally and make it sound this big, balancing bruising riffs and electro-tinged textures with a human core. That balance peaks on their latest outing, Shadow Work / Light Work. After her sister’s death in 2024, the follow-up to 2022’s Eat It Up Spit It Out became what Kat calls “a metamorphosis for not just myself, but for us as a project." But while devastation may have shaped Holy Wars, they'll never be defined by it.

Shadow Work / Light Work is out now via Pale Chord

Can you remember the first Ozric Tentacles gig?

It was at Stonehenge Free Festival in 1983. I had just left school. I bumped into a load of people and they said, “We’re going to this festival. We’re gonna hire a generator. Bring your amp and guitar and we’ll see what happens.” So we went down there and set our camp up, made a little fire, got the generator on and chugging away. After half an hour I looked up and there were 100 people there. Half an hour later there were 500. I thought, “Blimey, we’ve got a gig going on here.” Someone came up to me and said, “What’s the name of the band?” And I just said, “Well, Ozric Tentacles is what it’s called today. I don’t know what it’s gonna be called tomorrow.”

Were these freeform jams?

We didn’t really have any tunes at that point; we were very used to jamming. It’s kind of where the whole thing came from: freeform, just for the enjoyment of the moment. I remember Joie [Hinton] set up his keyboards and said, “What do you want me to do?” I just said, “Make some swishing noises.” So off he went – and it was brilliant. All those synthesised textures we were hearing in our minds were suddenly right there.

After that you started writing tracks and making cassettes. You became a little cottage industry, didn’t you?

Yeah. It was literally a question of getting enough tunes together and buying a pack of 20 cassettes and copying one by one, photocopying the covers and folding them up and putting them in a box. They were £2.50 each.

The first gig I went to with those, I crouched down at the end of the stage after the gig and said, “Anybody want a tape?” And they went within a few seconds. Every week became taken up with copying and making cassettes for the gig at the weekend.

To what extent are Ozric Tentacles a band rather than Ed Wynne and friends?

I’m kind of at the controls, I’m the filter it all goes through. It always has been a little bit like that. It was me sitting in my little home studio, a little bit like what I do every day anyway, but then there’s a floating body of people who came and went. We were all involved in it but it wasn’t like a solid line-up of a band. Whoever happened to be there at the time got on the track.

Some of those musicians have guested on Space For The Earth. How did that come about?

I’ve got their phone numbers so I just give them a ring! It was nice. I wish there could’ve been more involvement with those guys. John [Egan]’s on one track, Joie’s on one track. If I’d been able to have them here in my studio there would’ve been more of a general band feeling. In a way these old members have their track. The one with John Egan is lovely, actually. It turned out to be very different to what I expected. He gave it a certain Celtic flavour. John’s from Ireland so he definitely has that in his blood. He was almost apologetic. I gave him the track and he phoned me up and said, “It’s coming out a little celtic here. Is that okay?” And I went, “Of course it is. I live in Scotland, you’re from Ireland. Why not?” It’s nice to have that feeling. I’ve not had so much of that on Ozric albums before.

World music in general has always been integral to your sound. Is there any particular culture’s music you feel more drawn to?

I go through phases. When I was younger I used to love Indian music then I heard a bit too much of that; so now it’s there for when I need it. I like to add a little piece of this and that. We used to call it ‘ethnological forgery’ – pretending we were these people playing amazing ethnic music when in fact it’s just synthesisers or whatever.

Last year you made a solo album that was very well received. What made you want to do Ozrics again?

The solo album was something I’d been wanting to do for a long time. Not that it turned out that much different to Ozrics really but I enjoyed doing my own album with my own ideas. I don’t have to see what everybody thinks. It was good for that but then I just suddenly felt I wanted to get back and do another Ozrics album.

How did the new one come about?

The idea before the Covid lockdown was that we would get together and do a proper album with loads of us in the studio jumping about, enthusing mutually and all that but then this lockdown happened so therefore it came out as a slightly different thing. It was still good but I do miss being able to sit in the studio with somebody and say, “Is this a good idea or not? What do you think I should do here?” So I was kind of back to my own devices really.

The idea with an Ozric album was to get back into the band mentality a little bit; then suddenly with lockdown you’re not allowed to see anybody – you have to sit and do it on your own. It was almost like I was doing another solo album, but as much as I could I was getting involved with other people from earlier versions of the band.

Your first ever solo gigs were opening for Gong, who have been a huge influence on you – so how was it?

It was really nice. I was nervous, I hadn’t met any of that particular incarnation of Gong before. I’d seen various weird photos of them so you always imagine they’re really weird people. Instantly after I said hello it was absolutely fine. These are lovely people. Of course they are ’cos it’s Gong! They have this lovely philosophy about them. I felt very safe from the moment we started talking. Mutual respect and a really good feeling. Every morning we’d stumble into the venue and we’re all very happy to see each other, full of good energy. I’ve never experienced anything like it.

You’re remastering a lot of the back catalogue. Was it a weird feeling revisiting those albums?

Extraordinary. I expected to be thinking, “I’ll go anywhere that needs tarting up and I’ll EQ or top it or whatever,” but when I put it on and started listening it was like opening a photograph album. Each song was a moment in time, a week’s worth of time. I’d put them on and suddenly I could remember the situation of sitting in the studio, what was on the walls and what was going on at the time, who was around. It’s really like a little diary for me, these tunes. It’s extraordinary. I hear a little blip in the corner of the music and I remember, "Oh yeah, that was when someone came and switched the light on at the wrong moment.”

What has the feedback been like?

People seem to like them. I’m really happy about that. It’s my first foray into the remastering world and people really do seem to have noticed that I’ve done something because often I imagine people remastering doesn’t make that much difference. I’m happy people notice. I spend a couple or three days on each one to get it right.

As you revisited them did you find you had a personal favourite?

Looking through the entire catalogue I would say the ones that stand out for me are Sliding Gliding Worlds [1993] and I also really like Pungent Effulgent [1989] because that was our first excursion into the real world of finally people taking us seriously. Slightly. For me they all have their amazing stories. It’s more to do with the feeling of the time and what was going on rather than the actual music.

Is there anything you would change about those albums?

When I listen back to some of them I often find they’re way too quick, the tempo is too fast, especially Paper Monkeys [2011], which was good fun at the time but listening back to it it’s cruising along. We try to play it live and it’s really exhausting stuff. Sometimes in the studio I tend to speed things up to keep the excitement going for my own personal interest so I’ve got to remember other people are hearing
it for the first time.

Lost In The Sky from Paper Monkeys became a live favourite, didn’t it?

Live, it always freaked me out, because the bassline when it came in was so strong. I was really happy with the chords at the beginning of that one. That was written underground in a house in America that I lived in. I was in a basement with a huge fish pond in the corner of the room so the whole thing was this slightly damp atmosphere and slightly fishy-smelling studio so Lost In The Sky was me trying to escape that.

Where do the bizarre song titles come from?

Titles have always been a problem for me. That’s probably why they’re so weird. I use Cubase to write and if you come up with a new little ditty and want to save it the first thing it asks you for is a name so before the track’s written you have to come up with something. Often these become the title.

The last album, Technicians Of The Sacred was a double album. Space For The Earth is half its length. Was that a conscious reaction or just how it fell out into Cubase?

The thing with double albums is it’s like making two album – it’s twice the work. Incredibly hard. I forgot that I felt that with Erpland [1990] and then three-quarters of the way through Technicians Of The Sacred I suddenly thought: “I’ve got this huge pile of music to do.” It’s a lot of work to make a double album consistently make sense. It was nice to make a little album again, explore a little deeper and not scrimp over the details. Again, a good aspect of the lockdown was that I had time to explore with nobody hassling me about anything else, so I was just completely in that world.

Jurassic Shift was nearly a UK Top 10 album in 1993, peaking at 11. What was that time like?

It felt great! It was a really good feeling. Very exciting. For instance I’d be with our bass player Zia [Geelani] at some party and these young kids put on Jurassic Shift. Zia said, “Look at these kids. They don’t know we’re here and they don’t know what this is but look they’re all jumping about to it and loving it.” It was really nice that it was that available.

Jurassic Shift caused a stir because of its hemp packaging. Who came up with that idea?

It was through a friend of mine called Pete Messenger. He told me he was making hemp-based products and I said, “We’ve got an album coming up. What would it take to make everything out of hemp?” He got back to us a couple of weeks later and said he’d found out how to import a load of hemp from Europe. He arranged this whole truckload of marijuana on behalf of Ozric Tentacles to be imported into the country. He found a mill that used to make hemp paper, but they didn’t have the same blade to cut the stuff up with.

So he ordered a new blade to be manufactured and installed into this old hemp factory, got the machines chugging away again and managed to make this lovely paper and brought a sample round. We had a look at printing on it and it was perfect and there you go. We had our hemp thing. Because of that the Hash Marihuana & Hemp Museum in Amsterdam have a copy of our CD on the wall [with a plaque stating], “Here’s the first CD made with hemp paper.” Great! We’re in a museum!

Did chart success present new opportunities to the band?

A lot of bands at that point would say, “Okay, we’ve got to this point with our own record label” [Dovetail Records at the time] and tried to jump onto a major label. For some reason we didn’t do that. I don’t know if that was a good or a bad thing. Maybe it’s a good thing because we kept our individuality and slight humility. Maybe if it’d gone ballistic we wouldn’t still be doing it now. Who knows? Things fall into my lap and I just have to take them on board. The way the world seems to swerve, I try not to resist too much. Keeps me slightly sane.

You played in front of thousands at that time at Reading and Glastonbury. How was that?

We played the NME stage one year [Glastonbury, 1993]. That was incredible. Ridiculously huge. A sea of people to the horizon. Glastonbury was crazy because I got there half an hour before the gig and I was at the wrong side of the backstage area so I had to worm my way to the front, rattle on the fence and shout, “Let me in! I’ve got a gig.” They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, mate. Sure.” Thankfully I saw somebody I knew and got onstage in time. It was looking dodgy for a second.

In 1994, Joie Hinton and drummer Merv Pepler left to concentrate on Eat Static. Was there ever a point when you thought the band can’t continue?

When Joie and Merv left it wasn’t possible for us to split up because we had an American tour two weeks after that. It wasn’t a question of whether that was the end of the band. It was like, “Oh my God, we’ve got to find a bloody keyboardist.” Luckily enough we found a perfect replacement so we got away with that. I’ve never thought to end Ozric Tentacles, except perhaps after Technicians Of The Sacred, where I really needed to get out.

It could’ve gone either way at that point so I did a solo album as a thing to say, “Look, I can do this with or without a band.” With the Covid situation again I was wondering what’s gonna come at the end of this. We’re all still wondering a bit about that but I think Ozric Tentacles has become my identity and it’s probably a little late to try and alter that too much at this point.

How have you managed to stay so prolific for nearly 40 years?

Pretty much all I do is make music or gig music. I’ve nothing else to do so I’m working on a conveyer belt of spacey tunes.

"Show business’s obsession with beauty and sexualization to boost sales horrifies me," the fan states, before asking Amy: "Is there even the slightest chance for an unattractive woman to be a rock singer?"

Amy's reply is typically thoughtful and heartfelt, Evanescence's leader noting that the fan's question made her "feel sad". "First of all, I would hope that whoever told you that you are ugly is not anyone you would call a friend," she replies. "Don’t think of yourself that way and don’t listen to those people. They’re probably just jealous. Beauty is the deep stuff: being an artist, making music. That’s where the gold is, and beauty comes out through the inside, so focus on the inside and making something great for people to experience. Selling your product and being an Instagram star is not the important part. Anybody can make great music if it’s in your soul: that’s the most beautiful thing about you."

Elsewhere in the interview, Amy also suggests she might well still be making music into her 60s. "I turn 45 in December, and 44 definitely doesn’t feel like I’d imagined – it’s better," she says. "Turning 60 is only 15 years away, which doesn’t feel that long. I don’t know if we’ll be touring hard then, but they say use it or lose it, so I’m not ruling it out. It gives you so much life to be able to bring people together and share music, so it breaks my heart to imagine that we can’t do that any more for whatever reason. I’d have to be still making music or creating in some way. It doesn’t make sense to stop."

Evanescence certainly show no sign of stopping right now. Following the release of new album Sanctuary in June, the band will hit the UK and Europe for an arena tour next month, before chalking up dates in the US, Malaysia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

“The idea for Eihwar imposed itself on us,” Asrunn tells us later, wolf skull still sat atop her head. They remain in character throughout our conversation, the latest in a line of lore-building artists to invade the metal world. We are told that they aren’t merely two human musicians, but ancient Norse spirits that have possessed human musicians. “We do not choose our incarnations,” Asrunn points out. “In a way, we do not choose the missions we are meant to fulfil."

So what’s Eihwar’s mission, then?

“Doing a fair amount of reckless things,” growls Mark through his helmet. “Laughing loudly, headbanging until we nearly break a vertebra and pushing back our deepest fears together.”

So far, so mysterious. Of course, this is 2026; nobody stays truly mysterious in metal, and if you’re gagging to find out Asrunn and Mark’s real back stories, ‘tis but a Google away. But where’s the fun in that? Here are some facts they’re happy to share: Eihwar was formed in France in 2023, dropping an eight-minute banger called The Forge onto streaming services that blew up in Nordic folk circles.

A smattering of tracks followed before a debut album landed the next year, titled Viking War Trance - the perfect moniker for their riotous mix of jaunty folk metal and pulsating dance music, all wrapped in Norse mythology and world-building. Imagine Heilung and Carpenter Brut dancing around a campfire together and you’re someway there.

Since that first album dropped, Eihwar’s reputation has grown apace - shows at landmark Euro fests like Midgardsblot and Bloodstock have sparked elation, curiosity and not a little cynicism, some stewards of the European trad-folk movement questioning whether the duo are truly enveloped in the Norse universe their characters inhabit, or simply hiding in it to ride a cheap gimmick.

When Hammer asks whether they’ve personally experienced any shittiness from the scene, however, they shake their heads in surprise.

“Not at all,” insists Mark. “We have shared the stage with many bands and had some remarkable encounters. We were very honoured to be invited to play at Midgardsblot, a festival that brings together the folk scene in Europe. Every new meeting with musicians from the folk scene in real life has been a pleasure so far.”

It’s all led to this year’s Hugrheim album, Eihwar’s second and a full-hearted continuation of the brilliantly fun vibes of their debut. This one comes wrapped in a thick but digestible concept: Hugrheim is the hidden tenth world of Yggdrasil, the cosmic, world-linking tree at the centre of the Viking universe (if you’re well educated in Viking mythology or have watched Loki season 2, you’ll be well up to speed). Put simply: the album is here to tell its story.

“We wanted to speak about the world we come from,” Mark explains. “Hugrheim is a world in constant flux, a world shaped by the mind. Our emotional states manifest into reality. Our deepest fears can take the form of monsters, while our greatest hopes can paint rainbows across the sky.”

Alright, let’s cut the mythical mumbo-jumbo for a second and talk logistics: Eihwar’s set-up as a two-piece means they employ a backing track on stage to help with some of the extra instrumentation. Do they plan to add more members to the band to take up the slack?

“Our music requires an electronic setup,” Mark says, much more matter-of-factly. “Over time, our performance may include external contributors, but always in service of scenography, theatrical elements and lighting. There will never be an orchestra with a tagelharpa in every key on stage. If we continue to grow, we have many ideas to create highly inventive stage productions; we are not yet building a Daft Punk-style pyramid, but who knows, maybe one day.”

You don’t see Daft Punk get dropped as a reference point very often around here, but that speaks to what a unique proposition Eihwar are. Part metal gig, part forest rave, part ritual, they’re currently packing one of the most idiosyncratic live shows in our world, and at this rate, those shows are only going to get bigger.

“We devote 100% of our energy to connecting with the audience and creating a festive and joyful moment,” says Mark. “That is where the authenticity and sincerity of our approach truly lie. We also try not to take ourselves too seriously. We are to Vikings what the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are to turtles, and that’s just how it should be.”

So what’s the endgame? What does Eihwar hope for their future while they grace this world with their presence?

“That it lasts as long as possible,” Asrunn says sagely. She pauses before adding with a smirk: “and that our human hosts don’t die too soon to enjoy it!”

Hugrheim is out now via Season Of Mist

When did music stop being a hobby and become a vocation for you?

I was busking for a living for quite a while back then. Some of the subways were fantastic for creating echo, especially the one in South Kensington that used to connect the museums [it’s still there! – Sub Ed]. It was a huge long tunnel and I used to practice lots of songs down there, then I’d do them at home with my echo unit. And I used to daydream, as one does, about how nice it would be to get a band together.

So what was the impetus for Hawkwind?

I used to practice at home in Putney, with my friend John Harrison, who I’d met when I was out busking and who used to play bass with Joe Loss’ band. Another friend, lead guitar player Mick Slattery, joined us and we’d rehearse in our front room and annoy the neighbours. Then we put an advert in the Melody Maker for a drummer, which is how we got Terry Ollis.

On a few occasions I didn’t bother turning up at the early Hawkwind gigs, because I earned more money busking at cinema queues in the West End. Eventually, our manager Doug Smith gave me this long lecture: “Look, you’ve got to make up your mind: Are you going to play in a band or be a busker all your life?”

Given your blues background, how come Hawkwind took a totally different direction to most of your peers?

I worked in a cartoon studio for a while, where we did lots of TV commercials and soundtracks for musique concrète. We used to make huge tape loops on Revoxes and around door handles. It was interesting work and I was able to experiment with a lot of weird sounds. So it was a combination of that and John and I mucking around with a Revox in our back room. We’d get Sonny Terry’s harmonica going backwards on a big loop, then play guitar over it and really get the echo going.

On stage as Hawkwind we could play 10- or 15-minute numbers, because that was the age where you could be as avant-garde as you liked. We had Dik Mik doing his oscillators, John would just hold the bassline forever and we’d chug away. We’d get slagged off for only using three chords. Or even being one-chord wonders. But you could experiment with one chord for half an hour and still make it interesting. Can, who actually toured with us in the early 70s, used to do the same sort of thing.

What’s your enduring memory of Hawkwind’s first gig in August 1969, when you were billed as Group X at All Saints Hall in Notting Hill?

I can vaguely remember it at all! We just had this one huge strobe light that flashed on and off. Most everybody down there was on LSD anyway. In those days you used to drop acid, freak out and run around the place.

What was your first acid experience like?

It was all right, actually. Me and Mick Slattery were at the flat of Pete Meaden, who used to be The Who’s manager, somewhere near Willesden. Pete had a really good record collection, with 60s stuff like Sopwith Camel, and it was nice music to drop acid to. He also had some really good books on art, which I remember going through. When you looked at Turner’s paintings on LSD, it was a revelation. They were all moving. You could see spirits in the winds coming up with the ghost ship in the estuary.

When Hawkwind began performing at full volume with light shows and effects, was it a purely confrontational idea?

On the sleeve of our first album [1970’s Hawkwind] it basically said that our aim was to freak people out without them needing to take acid. But after a while, corruption sets in. At the beginning, taking LSD and organic mescaline was like a religious experience, because it was something really important and you had to be careful what you were doing. Then, as people got more blasé, they became drunk on acid and would take speed with it, or get stoned and so on. People just pushed themselves to see how far they could go on different drugs. Sometimes people took these things and went mad.

Were there times when you were close to madness yourself?

Yeah, absolutely. You can only do these things for so long. Eventually you think, “Fuck, I’ve got to be really careful here.” We were lucky in that we were around in an era where you could get pure LSD. Loads of people took it and lots of artistic things happened in this country as a probable result.

Did you feel as though you were Hawkwind’s captain from the get-go?

In the early days there were a lot of captains in Hawkwind. It was really a band of eccentric individuals. Bob Calvert was a great writer and poet. I know he was up and down, but when he was on form he was fantastic. Hawkwind had a really good rhythm section in Simon King and Lemmy, then we had [Nik] Turner’s antics of jumping around. And having Del Dettmar and Dik Mik meant that we were really quite revolutionary in the electronics field. You could freak people out just with the volume of deep, throbbing EMS synthesizers, with Dik Mik going through his oscillators and the light show pulsating away, courtesy of John Smeeton [aka Liquid Len].

1975 seemed to be a watershed of sorts for Hawkwind: Lemmy was fired, Bob Calvert rejoined and you had a change of record company and management…

After Lemmy was sacked we brought in Paul Rudolph on bass, who we’d known from when we played gigs with the Pink Fairies. Paul was a really nice guy and we got on well, but I suddenly became really insecure in my guitar playing. The others wanted to go more into the funk side of things, whereas I was still into the spacey stuff. And my confidence suffered as a result. Tony Howard, who was also Marc Bolan’s manager, started looking after us and they sacked me from the band.

Bob Calvert phoned me up: “Look, we’ve just had a meeting in London and they’ve sacked you. I don’t agree with this, so I think we’ve got to have another meeting.” I went up to London and we all met in Tony’s office. Basically it was Turner – I mean, Turner had got rid of Lemmy and it was me next – Alan Powell, Paul Rudolph and Simon King, I believe, who wanted to go into funkier music. Bob didn’t want to do that and said he wanted to carry on doing space rock.

So how did you get your own way?

Simon House [keyboards/violin] was on my side as well and that’s when we decided to get rid of the others instead. We’d signed with Charisma and they all got paid off, though I don’t know how much. But they were out of the picture.

Three years later though, you decided to jack it all in after a miserable Hawkwind tour of America. What exactly happened?

That was when Bob Calvert was suffering. He was really depressed and was going to have to go into a sanitorium when he got back home. It was a low for us all and I’d already sold my guitar by then. I remember watching [bassist] Adrian Shaw from my hotel room in San Francisco, walking down through Chinatown, just looking totally despondent. I didn’t see him for years after that. Touring really does wear you down. But once I got back home, back to sanctuary as it were, I started thinking about getting things together again and was a bit more positive. We got Tim Blake in the band, plus Simon King and all that lot, and did Live Seventy Nine, which was quite a successful record.

The studio follow-up, which was 1980’s Levitation, suggested that you were on a creative roll…

We’d signed up with Bronze Records by then, with our old manager, Doug Smith. Doug had Motörhead, Girlschool and us. When it came to do Levitation our drummer wasn’t very well, which is when Marion Lloyd-Langton, [guitarist] Huw’s wife, suggested we bring in Ginger Baker. She worked in Ginger’s management company and phoned him up. We were all really nervous, to say the least, when he came down to the studio. But off he went and he ended up being in the band for a year and a half.

And how was Ginger?

People always used to say what a miserable old cunt he was, but I always got on all right with him. So did Kris [Tait, Brock’s wife], though their dogs used to fight each other. She actually hit Ginger over the head with a pool cue one time. Kris has quite a temper on her and she’d had some kind of confrontation with Ginger. Looking back at it, he’d been owed so much money by so many people over the years that it was enough to make anybody really pissed off. He was very embittered and grumpy.

I was still busking when Eric Clapton was playing with Ginger and Jack Bruce in Cream. Eric had a flat just off Notting Hill Gate and I used to pop round and see him for a cup of tea when I’d finished for the day. I’d seen Ginger play at Eel Pie Island a few times, then I’d gone to Middle Earth and seen him in Graham Bond’s band. So I couldn’t help thinking how strange it was that Ginger ended up playing with us.

Post-Ginger, Stonehenge became synonymous with Hawkwind for a while. Did it feel like the band’s spiritual home?

It was the magical place, which it still is of course. We used to play there as regularly as we could, for free, when we weren’t touring. When we did the big number there in 1984 I remember the sun coming up in the distance on this lovely golden dawn and all the druids coming down in their robes. Ken Barlow [actor William Roache] was among them and we were all going, “Ken Barlooow!” using this drone, like a meditation. Harvey [Bainbridge] was just playing this one note on his keyboard and the druids could obviously hear us.

What happened with the all-star Hawkwind project that was proposed fairly recently?

There was this supergroup thing that came up two and a half years ago, which I refused to do. And it’s cost us dearly. It’s an American company – the guy who runs it is a millionaire and he wanted me to do all these recordings. His idea was to use Hawkwind to get people like Paul Kantner involved. The line-up would’ve been spectacular. He wanted some of the old psychedelic giants in the States to come together to do an album with me and the band. Then I found out he wasn’t going to use any of the band and was going to basically manipulate the Hawkwind name and use session musicians. And I said no, because these were my mates.

Lemmy was asked too, but refused to do it. It’s a hard story to tell you, because it’s ongoing as we speak, but our American tour was cancelled because of it all and there’s a certain ex-member that he utilises. This is who’s behind it all, this stupid old cunt who I wish would just die.

I’m guessing you’re talking about Nik Turner here. This is probably a stupid question, but can you foresee a time when you two will make up?

Never, ever. He has done untold damage to this band. He’s an absolute idiot with what he’s done. When he went over to America he was playing in pubs and using the Hawkwind name. It’s all linked to our webpage and people assume it’s us. It’s actually really ruined the band’s credibility in America.

In light of the recent demise of people like Lemmy, David Bowie and Keith Emerson, do you become more conscious of your own mortality?

It does actually make you think. I remember my mum and dad, years ago, having a telephone book and there were lots of crossings-out where their friends had died. It’s the same with me now – there are only two of my really old mates who are still alive. But you don’t dwell on it.

Aside from that legal business, what’s it like being the keeper of Hawkwind’s flame in 2016?

It’s quite fun at the moment. We’re enjoying ourselves and we’ve got a happy band. This line-up has been together for nearly 10 years now and it’s exciting, musically. Do I have regrets about any of it? Not really. Hawkwind have had loads of ups and downs, but generally it’s been fun. I’m lucky in that I’ve ended up doing something that I really like doing, which is what most people want from their lives. What more do I need?

Robert Lamm has no doubts at all about Chicago’s musical pedigree. “We are a progressive rock band, and always have been,” he says confidently. “There’s nothing I like more than going into a record store and finding our back catalogue filed in the prog section, alongside greats such as Yes and Genesis.”

The keyboard player/vocalist, who co-founded the band in 1967 under the name The Big Thing, dismisses the notion that Chicago should be defined by a string of soft rock hits like If You Leave Me Now and Hard Habit To Break.

“They are part of our repertoire, but to suggest this defines what Chicago are all about is like claiming that Owner Of A Lonely Heart is the real Yes, or that Land Of Confusion tells you everything about Genesis. We have always felt blessed enough to try anything at any time. There’s a freedom to our music that probably comes from the era in which we started. Never in our career have we been pressurised to do something in a certain way.”

The band members all met at university in the Illinois area and started off as a covers act. Back then, they performed the Top 40 hits of the era – but they were never content to just mimic the originals. Instead, they’d create their own extended arrangements, which would stretch them as musicians. Eventually, this inspired them to start thinking about how they might write their own material.

“Chicago always take me back to what I recall as the sunshine ’70s,” says Mostly Autumn guitarist Bryan Josh. “I remember first being aware of them when I heard the song If You Leave Me Now. That would have been around 1976. To me, the sound the band had was so unique, and even now it’s most definitely timeless. The fact they could be as accepted for their prog tracks as for the mainstream hits says a lot for their ability to be convincing on so many levels.”

In 1968, they became the Chicago Transit Authority and, having moved to Los Angeles, signed to Columbia. “Our manager, James William Guercio, persuaded the label to sign us,” remembers Lamm. “He was very much our Svengali, and was also the band’s producer. He acted as the buffer between us as musicians and the record company so we never had to worry about the business end of things.

”All we had to do was write and record. We were artists. And somehow, Guercio got Columbia to agree to release our debut album [1969’s Chicago Transit Authority] as a double – which was almost unheard of for any artist making their first album at the time!”

The record was a Top 20 success, going on to sell more than a million copies, setting the pattern for a career that has seen the band surpass the 100 million sales mark. “We were fortunate that the first record captured the integrity and potential of a young band who were all about celebrating our talent. We had never had any aspirations to be rock stars. What we wanted to do was show off every aspect of what we could do as artists. We never held back on anything. The aim was always to express ourselves.”

The band underwent another name change when the real Chicago Transit Authority legally objected, so they became Chicago just in time for the release of Chicago II in 1970. Another double album, this took them into the Top 5 in the US and made Number Six in the UK, cementing the band’s reputation as one of the most impressive young names on the scene. And as their success grew, so they were strongly drawn not to the more mainstream areas of music, but to those artists who were emerging from the British prog scene.

“We felt connected to the likes of Yes, Genesis and King Crimson. But I have to concede, we were also intimidated by them, because what they were doing was far beyond anything we could imagine. But we were also somewhat inspired by Yes and Crimson. They gave us a template from which to start and it’s because of their influence to some extent that we became confident about writing and recording very lengthy tracks.”

An interest in state-of-the-art studio technology also gave the band the opportunity to enhance their sounds to their maximum potential. However, Lamm is also aware that they occasionally teetered on the edge of becoming self-indulgent, and that was brought into sharp focus in 1974 with the release of the chart‑topping Chicago VII.

“We’d gotten heavily into jazz by this time,” he admits. “And, if anything, we had too much musical freedom to play with. We were in serious danger of being pretentious, although thankfully it never got that far. But what we ended up with was another double album, with a combination of jazz pieces and also more commercial material. I suppose you could say that songs like If You Leave Me Now [which was a Number One hit in 1976 on both sides of the Atlantic] was an antidote to the more experimental musical ambitions we had.”

The band were almost derailed in 1978 when guitarist Terry Kath died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound – it was accidental, and there was never any question of suicide. The timing couldn’t have been more significant because it happened just a short while after Chicago had split with Guercio. Those changes marked the start of what was to become their most successful period.

“We embraced the times – but we always did it in a way that never compromised what Chicago had always stood for,” Lamm says. Essentially, we remained a prog rock band at heart, but what the soft rock hits did in the ’80s was allow us to carry on pushing the envelope on our albums. So, we might have had a big hit with something like You’re The Inspiration in 1984 [Number Three in the States and Number 14 in Britain], but if you listen to the album it comes from, Chicago 17, what you’ll hear is more challenging music.

”We weren’t just going for FM radio or MTV popularity, but like Genesis and Yes, we understood that if we gave the record company a hit single or two, then they’d leave us alone to be more creative on the rest of the album. It’s a policy that has served us well down the years – and the eclectic nature of Chicago has been left intact.”

Just how determined the band have always been to resist imposed record label demands came to light when they made Stone Of Sisyphus in 1993. “We recorded it on our own terms for Warner Brothers,” recalls Lamm. “Peter Wolf, our producer, encouraged us to be as adventurous and daring as we wanted. The idea was to forget entirely about trying to go for radio airplay and get fully back in touch with our progressive roots.

“When we finished it, the initial response from the label was positive. But then they changed their minds and wouldn’t release the album as it stood. We wouldn’t change anything on the record, so it was shelved.”

Although a few tracks did eventually emerge, it wasn’t until 2008 that the full album finally came out, under the title Chicago XXXII: Stone Of Sisyphus. The title track tells the story of a mythical king whose punishment for deceitfulness is to eternally push a boulder to the top of a hill, only to watch it roll back down to the bottom.

In some ways, this reflected the fact that Chicago were having to resist the temptations of going for the easy option of hit singles, merely to keep their record company on their side and off their back.

“We were never interested in coming up with hit songs for their own sake,” says Lamm. “They happened, of course, but not because we wanted to go in that direction. We’ve kept pushing ourselves and taking on board musical and technological changes. Even in our most successful periods, we have never sought the approval of the tastemakers, or those who choose radio playlists. We’ve had pressure applied to do more ballads, for instance, but have never done any album where that type of song was dominant.”

In a career that has seen them release 23 studio albums, Chicago have had more chart success in the US than any other American band apart from The Beach Boys. They’ve had five Number One albums over there, as well as 21 Top 10 singles. And yet this is a band who appear to be ignored when it comes to acknowledgment of their influence on the prog scene.

Lamm that now feels things are slowly changing as they begin to attract a younger audience. “There appears to be a new reverence for Chicago and what we stand for. It seems a lot of prog fans have re-examined our music, which has been great for us. Of course, we have a lot of hardcore fans who’ve stuck with us for years and they’ve always understood that the big singles were never what we were about.

”But in more recent years, we have attracted fans who are a lot younger yet in tune with progressive music. Sometimes I look out at our audience and am amazed to see people who must be less than half my age! They don’t care when our music was made.”

Lamm’s interests aren’t just in the music that was made during prog’s glory years – he’s also very enthusiastic about the younger bands who’ve made their mark on the scene more recently. “Those who’ve emerged from the ’90s onwards are technically so much better than we are, but I love that. There are some very gifted musicians on the progressive scene and I love discovering new talents. I’m always on the hunt for exciting bands.”

At this point, Lamm enthusiastically asks Prog to recommend some younger artists he should be listening to. And, having been given a shortlist, just a day or two later he gets back in touch.

“I enjoy hearing fresh tunes and extended compositions, rather than just songs; the music does have a connection with early Chicago, in that sense. A lot of the best new sounds demand patience and perseverance from the listener, which is really positive. It’s a treat to hear bands like TesseracT, Transatlantic, Coshish, No-Man, Bigelf…”

Lamm, one of four original members still in Chicago, believes the prevailing sense of prog rock that’s encouraged and pursued by these fresh bands has fired the veterans to move forward artistically.

“We’ve opened our horizons on the new album, XXXVI: Now. We’re in touch again with the prog ideals which got us going in the first place. A lot of this has come from the younger elements in the genre. We aren’t trying to compete with them, but do relate to what they’re doing.”

Chicago – pioneers who are still committed to learning.

The Russian group – now based in Florida – have long been dogged by controversy. Alex has previously owned up to having tattoos which have been associated with white supremacism – a Black Sun and Othala Rune – though he denied he ever got them for political reasons, and had the Black Sun tattoo covered up. He has also acknowledged other past associations with the far right that have emerged in recent years.

Here's what he had to say on it all when we interviewed him. The first question is from one of our readers, the rest are from Metal Hammer directly.

Do you think you’ll ever beat the Nazi allegations?

“No, because people try to hate me and find any reason to hate me. Which is fine. No matter what I say, no matter how I say [it]... I get used to it. It is the internet. I never get hate in real life - this is a very interesting thing. Every time I read about myself and my band on the internet, it is very different to real life.

"At festivals like Bloodstock, in real life, I get nothing but respect from the other bands, other artists, from people in general. They tell me that the internet is not real life and of course, I understand that and I understand why people hate me. They have read something about me on the internet, and they have made up this image of me which is not real. So, probably, it will stick with me forever.”

The reason that it's brought up the most is because of the tattoos

“Yes, I understand that. I have had to come to terms with that and I am paying the price now. I am paying the price for the stupid decision to get the black sun tattoo and hanging out with the right-wing guys [when I was younger].

"They were not even Nazis, they were just right-wing guys, but we used these fucking symbols in Russia to, like, look more tough, and that was our culture. I don’t know. I understand the hate, I really do. I am paying the price.”

So would you do the same thing again if you could go back?

“Listen: if I went back, I would not get any of those tattoos because my mindset [has] changed a lot. I don’t understand why I got that tattoo [in the first place]. But you have to understand that all of this *gestures to his body* has built who I am, has built me as a character, for good and for bad, I am just a human being. I make mistakes as well.

"People call me a Nazi and say that I don’t deserve to live, but I just hung around with these right wing guys. I didn’t kill anybody, I didn’t stab anybody, I didn’t bully anybody, I just made some stupid mistakes, and I am not a Nazi. I never was a racist or any of this horrible stuff.

"People just hate me, and yes, I wish it wasn’t like that, I regret that I have made people feel like that about me. But at the same time, I didn’t do any horrible stuff to anyone else. I did horrible stuff to myself; I took drugs and I almost died from my drug addiction, but I never beat anyone on the streets because of who they are, that they are another colour or from another country.

"I never killed anyone or bullied anyone. Never! I don’t want to live my life full of regrets, but I do regret that there have been times when I have been wrong, you know what I mean?”

There have been other controversies. In a now-deleted 2023 Instagram post titled 4 Rules Of Real Man, Alex said: "a real man eats woman pussy, he likes”, which saw him accused of homophobia. Alex posted a response, stating: "If you don’t like that I’m a straight man and have traditional family values, please unfollow me! I don’t give a shit who are you and if you suck dicks balls ass or pussy it’s not my fucking deal I don’t want to know that. That’s your personal fucking stuff."

An additional comment stating that he hates "propaganda in any form, especially when trying to brainwash children" drew accusations of transphobia, with some outlets connecting the "brainwash children" line to common anti-trans rhetoric. We also addressed those incidents with Alex himself.

There are also accusations of homophobia and anti-trans rhetoric that have been aimed at you

“I don’t get the hate. I posted once on my social media about children being brainwashed, but I don’t like, in general, young people being brainwashed by religious stuff and by military stuff. I do not mind if you are gay or trans, that is not my business; that is your business and I support your lifestyle.

"I was talking about how I didn’t like, as a parent, my child going to school and being force-fed religious education or be[ing] told about the ‘glorious military’. Right now in Russia, a lot of kids, like 9-year-old kids, 8-year-olds, they’re getting pushed so much military stuff...I don’t like it!

"I think it’s bad, the war [with Ukraine] is bad, in general. I understand that history shows us that war is part of human nature, I get it, but I don’t want to be involved in that and I don’t want my child to be told that war is good and that he needs to be patriotic and die for your country and that you owe your country. No, no, no! This is my child and I want to educate him morally myself. This was what I was saying, and it became the LGBTQ+ people saying that I was homophobic. But I’m not. It’s funny, because in Russia there is this mentality where they are very homophobic, a lot of Russian people, and I actually grew up hearing some of that in my family.

"I remember when I was 16, 17 years old, I was sitting with some of my family at breakfast and they were discussing that they had a problem with some gay people in a club and members of my family said, ‘Fuck these guys, they are gay, they are disgusting!’ I said, ‘Hold on, what would you say if I turned around and told you I was gay?’ I was told that I would not be a part of this family. What?! I was so angry, I told them I was ashamed that they said that... and then people call me homophobic!

"I have a critical mindset. I ask myself, before I judge something or somebody, a lot of questions. But these people [online] are not asking themselves any questions; they see something and, bang, they fucking believe in it or create some image. That is their business. It’s very funny; sometimes in my surrounding I see homophobic people in this music scene, and the LGBTQ+ community say, ‘Wow! This is a sick band!’ but they are literally homophobic! Not all the members, but some of them. I don’t know...it’s stupid.”

If you’ve truly been misrepresented about all of these things then that must hurt you, deep down?

“I don’t know, it is something I’ve had to get used to. I don’t mind. I can’t let it bother me.”

Following Slaughter To Prevail's Bloodstock set, Alex posted a video of the band's performance, seemingly addressing those who have accused the band of transphobia and claiming to have heard rumours of apparent protests and boycotts of their set.

Text accompanying the post read: "I apologize to the trans community for the fact that we played Bloodstock. It was completely sold out and people actually enjoyed our performance."

The post prompted fierce debate in the comments, with some demanding the singer apologise to the trans community for real. Eventually, a fan pointed out that although he was not necessarily trying to be hateful, Alex's posts could be used to cyber-bully vulnerable individuals.

"I never think that way, actually," he admitted in a video post soon after. "I act that way cause I can defend myself...a lot of people might get bullied because of my posts or how I act and a lot of people might attack them and I don't want that. I don't want it at all and I didn't think about that."

He then deleted the original post. You can read Metal Hammer's review of Slaughter To Prevail's Bloodstock headline set here.

The Move’s records are so exciting because one can feel that things were changing quickly and lots of ideas were coming through. How did it feel to you at the time?

The Move were always a great band to play in as you always had total freedom to play exactly what you wanted. No one said, “Hey, keep it simple.” I could do whatever I liked. The album I like most is Shazam [1969]. It’s an eclectic mix alright, and by the time you get to Message From The Country [1970], you’ve even got some country and western in there.

You had some pretty heavyweight management in Tony Secunda and Don Arden. What did they add to the group?

Don Arden never really managed The Move. He was involved but he was more of an agent. Tony Secunda was a good manager, but he made mistakes; the biggest was not sending us to America in 1967–1968. I think we would have done well. We only did one tour there in 1969.

The other one was issuing that libellous postcard [a cartoon of PM Harold Wilson in bed with his secretary Marcia Williams] with Flowers In The Rain, which gave us front page coverage but lost us the royalties, including Roy’s songwriting royalties [Wilson was awarded them in the libel case], which he’s still fighting to this day to get back. So Tony did make mistakes, but he was a great ideas man.

We’d turned up in London looking like The Who, really, with mod gear, and he turned that round completely, and put us in gangster suits and really cool-looking clothes, and hired a great photographer called Bobby Davidson. He gave us an image. And smashing TVs onstage was another idea of Tony’s – destroying the one-eyed monster in the living room.

The Move played on the famous 1967 package tour with Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Amen Corner, The Nice and Eire Apparent. Do you have any particular memories of that?

It was two shows a night in theatres. The opening act were Pink Floyd and they got to play two songs – their two hits, See Emily Play and Arnold Layne. Pink Floyd were difficult; they kept themselves to themselves. Nick Mason was fine, but drummers always speak to each other. I remember Syd Barrett being a bit weird. He seemed out of it most of the time. I don’t think he was speaking to the others much.

But everyone else was really friendly. Amen Corner asked Roy Wood to write them a song, which he did – Hello Susie – and it became a big hit. Hendrix, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell were great guys and we got on very well. The Move closed the first half – we played about half an hour – and Hendrix closed the second half. There was no way you would want to follow Hendrix onstage.

What was it like seeing Roy Wood become one of the best UK songwriters of the 60s?

We were playing the Marquee to sell-out crowds every Thursday night and it was a great show; they were queuing around the block to see it, but it was all covers. We had record companies wanting to sign us, but Tony said, “If we get a record deal, you guys have got to write some original songs.”

None of us were songwriters, including Roy, but he was the closest thing we’d got to one, so Tony said, “Here’s a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a mic – get writing.” And he would come up with these extraordinary songs.

He couldn’t churn them out, but he could write a good song in a couple of weeks. When he came up with a new song, everyone wanted to sing it, including Roy. Trevor and Ace would also say they’d like to sing it and Carl said, “I’m the lead singer – I should sing it.”

So that’s why when you listen to I Can Hear The Grass Grow, you can hear three different lead singers. Someone would sing the verse, someone would sing the chorus, someone else would sing the middle eight. I did bass vocals on a lot of the records as well.

Electric Light Orchestra formed while The Move were still going. Was it always the plan to run the two groups simultaneously?

The Move were signed to EMI Harvest when we did what turned out to be the last ever single, California Man [1972], which was a massive hit. So EMI were saying, “We’ve got this hit band and you want to do this thing called Electric Light Orchestra?” They weren’t very keen on the idea. The recording costs were involved in the first ELO album were made from an advance we got for The Move. So they did coexist for a little while.

Is it true that ELO were thought of as a conceptual group in which you would expand on the arrangement ideas of Beatles songs like I Am The Walrus?

Jeff, myself and Roy were huge Beatles fans and we loved Strawberry Fields and I Am The Walrus. We were attempting to do something like that, but on stage. The first album, The Electric Light Orchestra, took forever to record; Roy played all the cello parts and it was just overdubbing and overdubbing!

We did one British tour with ELO and then went to Italy, and it was a bit of a mess as we were trying to amplify violins and cellos and we didn’t really know how to do it. Then we came back; and for a couple of weeks neither Jeff nor myself had heard from Roy.

Don Arden, who was managing us by then, said, “He’s left and taken some of the guys with him. He’s formed this band called Wizzard. Do you want to carry on with this Electric Light Orchestra idea or go back to being The Move?” Jeff said, “We’ll carry on as ELO.” We got a couple of proper cellists in, so that made a hell of a difference.

Aged nine, you went to Juilliard School Of Music Pre-College Division. Could you have become a concert pianist?

It’s quite possible, yeah. The Juilliard training was so intense, whenever they spoke of music other than classical it was drummed into us that the artists responsible were lower-class citizens. I was almost brainwashed by that to the point that, when I discovered progressive rock via Emerson, Lake & Palmer album Tarkus, I didn’t know what to do with it – it was so alien to me.

When did Dream Theater appear on your radar?

Around the time they had Kevin Moore on keyboards with Awake [1994]. I thought: “Wow, they have the virtuoso thing going on. They play prog but they also have a feel for metal, and everything is so clean.” The fusion of those elements was so cool.

But you declined their first invitation to join the band that year, preferring instead to accept a part-time role with Dixie Dregs.

Dream Theater called and offered an audition, which I did. I played one show with them at an event called the Foundations Forum; but at the same time I was approached to do something with the Dregs. While I made up my mind I did a tour with the Dregs. At that time my wife and I had a small child and being with the Dregs just seemed better suited to my life.

I had said ‘no’ to Dream Theater, but I welcomed the call inviting me to play with John and Mike in Liquid Tension Experiment; it had felt like my only opportunity to do so. That was exciting. Tony Levin is a brilliant musician who came from another world to those guys, so I was the “in between guy.”Thinking about it now, that’s almost my role in Dream Theater – to keep things balanced.

How did you bring your own personality to the role?

The fact that we got along together so well was a very good start, but when I came into the group there were parameters to sort out. What stylistic elements from my world would be allowed into theirs? I had to learn and adjust to that. What I had to offer was my interest in orchestration. That changed the whole sonic picture. I was never about playing one sound. At the start that to them was like, “Ew!”

Sure, they were excited about my compositional ideas and my playing – John Petrucci really needed a partner to inspire and keep up with him – but at first my desire to push those buttons made them a little nervous.

You joined just prior to the recording of Metropolis Part 2: Scenes From A Memory. Do you agree with fans who rate it among Dream Theater’s career peaks?

Yeah – and of course that was such an exciting time. When I agreed to join them I had no idea of the life change it would bring. I had never travelled the world. They had a lifestyle that I’d only seen from a distance. Suddenly the doors were blasted open.

How long did it take to feel like you had complete acceptance?

Because of the experience with Liquid Tension it happened pretty much right away. They made me a full-time member and we went straight to work.

You stated that Dream Theater fuse metal and prog, but it’s done almost like some kind of seesaw, managing to balance the two elements.

The other guys are influenced by Iron Maiden and Metallica, plus various prog things such as Yes and Queensrÿche. But I come from a different place. For me, first and foremost it’s classical music, followed by Emerson, Lake & Palmer, King Crimson, Gentle Giant and Pink Floyd.

What would be the most extreme metal you would listen to?

Well, I also play some guitar and I’m into AC/DC and Judas Priest. As a kid, while I was still figuring out my musical identity, I loved Black Sabbath’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Being in this band taught me a lot about metal because early on we covered full albums by Iron Maiden [The Number Of The Beast] and Metallica [Master Of Puppets], so I had to learn how to play the second guitar parts on the keyboard.

There have been times when I’ve taken the band something that I consider to be a really heavy riff and they’ve given me a sideways look and said, “That sounds like Billy Joel to us!” As a keyboard player I have to be very careful how I present my ideas.

Which classical record would you recommend to somebody who believes it’s a stuffy form of music?

One of my favourite composers is Prokofiev, so if I’d point them towards one of his piano concertos. I’m also a fan of Bach, who not everyone can relate to; but if they picked up a record of Glenn Gould playing Bach I think they’d find that exciting.

This wasn’t the first time two different bands had used the same name, and it wouldn’t be the last, but it’s the only time identically named bands have shared the same bill. These days, the night Slayer went head-to-head with Slayer at the Villa Fortuna has passed into legend as 80s metal’s ultimate Battle Of The Bands, a fight for the name – and the soul – of Slayer. After the dust settled, there was a clear winner: the LA Slayer stood victorious, ready to consign their Texan rivals to obscurity and write their own name in the history books. Except what really happened is a little more complicated.

“There were all sorts of rumours and stories - that we’d got a cease-and-desist letter, that this was a battle for the Slayer name,” Don Van Stavern, bassist with the San Antonio version of Slayer, tells Classic Rock. “None of which was true. But it was a crazy gig.”

The teenage Van Stavern formed his version of Slayer with 15-year-old drummer Dave McClain in 1981. The name was a shortened version of Dragonslayer – ironically, exactly same thing the other Slayer called themselves at first.

“We played backyard parties, community colleges, even this indoor mini-golf place,” Dave McClain tells Classic Rock. “There’s really early footage of us playing For The Future by Raven, and Angel Witch’s Dr Phibes and Angel Of Death, which is kind of ironic given Slayer had a song called Angel Of Death later.”

By early 1983, the line-up consisted of Van Stavern, McClain, guitarists Bob Catlin and Art Villareal, plus singer Steve Cooper. “He was the Rob Halford of San Antonio, because he sang super-high,” says McClain of Cooper. “He was older than the rest of us – he was 22, 23. He seemed like a grandpa to us.”

Texas was a hotbed of metal at the time. Houston had Helstar and Austin had future prog-metal trailblazers Watchtower, though Van Stavern says his band were bigger than both. They were also the first of the three to put out a record, namely 1983’s Prepare To Die EP, six tracks of unpolished but energetic early 80s power metal released via local label Rainforest Records. It was around that time that they heard about another band calling themselves Slayer, 1300 miles away in California.

Van Stavern: “We got a call: ‘Hey, do you guys know there’s another Slayer in LA, and they’re about to put out an album too?’ We were totally unfamiliar with them. At first, we thought, ‘Well, there can be two Slayers – they’re the LA Slayer, we’re the SA Slayer. Then it started getting a little weird. They called us and said, ‘Hey, we need to do something about this.’ We said, ‘We came out first.’ And they said, ‘Well, we’ve been recording for a year.’”

Some low-level back and forth between the bands followed, though Van Stavern denies his Slayer were ever sent a cease-and-desist letter by the other Slayer’s label, Metal Blade, telling them to stop using the name (in an email to Classic Rock, Metal Blade founder Brian Slagel confirms that no cease-and-desist letter was ever sent). Still, Prepare To Die would ultimately be overshadowed by the LA Slayer’s debut album, Show No Mercy.

“Metal Blade had better distribution, so we kind of started getting squashed,” says Van Stavern. “But we were like, ‘Well, we wanna keep going.’”

Except it didn’t quite play out like that. The Prepare To Die EP had done well enough for the San Antonio Slayer to go into the studio in early 1984 to record a full-length album, Go For The Throat (hotshot guitarist Ron Jarzombek had replaced Art Villareal the previous year).

There was just one problem. Between starting the album and finishing it, Van Stavern, McClain and Steve Cooper had begun jamming with Mark Reale, guitarist with 80s metal hotshots Riot. There was talk that the pair would join a new band Reale was putting together, named Narita.

“The other guys from Slayer were saying, ‘What’s going on? Are we gonna continue this?’” says Van Stavern. “We were, like, ‘We wanna jam with Mark, see how this goes.’ So Slayer was kind of put on hiatus.”

With the band out of action for the foreseeable future, Rainforest Records saw no point in releasing Go For The Throat and shelved it. And that was that for San Antonio’s Slayer. Or at least it was until the Fall of 1984, when a local promoter friend approached them with a proposition. He was booking a show at the the Villa Fontana theatre by the Los Angeles Slayer – and he wanted the San Antonio Slayer to get back together to play.

“He said, ‘How about Slayer with special guests Slayer?’” says Van Stavern. “We were like, ‘Wow, that would be crazy.’ We figured it was a good idea – we were all in metal together.”

“When Show No Mercy came out, we were, like, ‘OK, cool, whatever,’” says McClain “Then when the Haunting The Chapel EP came out [in August 1984], we were, like, ‘Whoah, this is sick.’ We’d drive around in our friend’s car like Beavis & Butt-head, with the windows down, just cranking the EP.”

A friend in San Antonio made a flyer for the show. Like a home-made boxing poster, it featured the names of the two bands and their respective hometowns (“Los Angeles, CA” and “San Antonio, TX”) under the none-more-thrash slogan “1000 mph or death!”

“They played Austin the night before we were playing with them, so we went down to hang out and say hello,” says Dave McClain. “They weren’t dicks, but we went, ‘Hi, we’re in the other Slayer’, and they were, [nonchalantly], ‘Uh, OK, cool…’” (Things couldn’t have been that tense – Don Van Stavern recalls introducing the Californian band).

The day of the San Antonio show, the LA Slayer turned up at La Villa Fortuna in drummer Dave Lombardo’s Trans-Am, with their equipment in a trailer hooked to the back. “I remember them making fun of us cos we had my mom’s Cadillac with a U-Haul on it,” says McClain.

Despite the piss-taking, the local Slayer helped the out-of-towners bring their equipment into the venue. “We shared a dressing room backstage,” says Van Stavern. “We were hanging out with them. The only one that didn’t talk a lot was [guitarist] Kerry King. The rest of the guys were cool.”

The gig had sold out, partly on novelty factor but mostly on the strength of the bill. The LA Slayer had a growing underground buzz around them, while the SA Slayer were genuine hometown heroes, even if they’d been out of action for the past few months.

“It was a sold-out show, there were kids literally hanging off the balcony,” says Van Stavern. “It was a big deal.”

A couple of local bands, Syrus and Militia, opened up the show before the San Antonio Slayer came on. “We went out there and said, ‘Let’s play the heaviest show we can play, the best show we can play,’” says Van Stavern. “When you’re playing a show like that, you’re gonna give it your all. Plus we had the hometown advantage, so all our people were going nuts.”

“The show was crazy,” says McClain. “It was mayhem - there was stage diving, screaming, everything. We felt like we owned the town.”

The other Slayer were no slackers when it came to serving up a spectacle of their own. “They had a great reaction too,” says Van Stavern. “But it was a different style – power metal against thrash metal.”

Amid the heat and flailing bodies, any potential rivalry between the namesake bands failed to materialise. “We hung out after, maybe even helped them pack up,” says McClain. “I think Lombardo may have even taken off with a couple of my cymbal stands. I’ve never asked him about it.”

And what of the whole ‘Battle Of The Bands’ angle? It wasn’t even a consideration, according to Don Van Stavern. “The whole ‘versus’ thing came out afterwards, about how it was a contest for the name. It was nothing like that. It wasn’t a battle for the name - we were already on our way out.”

That much is true. The San Antonio version of Slayer played one more show before going their separate ways. Van Stavern reconnected with Mark Reale and helped get a relaunched version of Riot off the ground; the bassist is on his third stint with the band, now rechristened Riot V, with new album Mean Streets out on February 16, 2024 (Reale died in 2012). McClain is currently on his second run with Arizona thrashers Sacred Reich, with a 23-year stretch in groove metallers Machine Head in between (he crossed paths with the other Slayer many times over the years, but says he’s never brought up the San Antonio show). Guitarist Ron Jarzombek went on to join Watchtower, while Bob Catlin stayed active in the Texas metal scene. Singer Steve Cooper passed away in 2006 at the age of 47.

Go For The Throat, the debut album they recorded and shelved in 1984, was finally released in 1988. It was credited to S.A. Slayer. “Some guy put it out independently,” says Van Stavern. “We just said, Put ‘S.A.’ in front of it so they know it’s not the other Slayer. But the original artwork just said ‘Slayer’.”

That album would become a cult favourite among underground metal afficionados. “I get people coming up to me all the time and asking me to sign it,” says McClain.

Van Stavern and McClain briefly regrouped with Catlin, Jarzombek and ex-Watchtower singer Jason McMaster in 2022 to re-record a couple of old songs, though they have yet to be released. When Classic Rock speaks to Van Stavern at the end of 2023, he says there has been interest in a potential full reunion from festivals. “It’s not out of the question to see the band reform again and go out with a bang,” says the bassist. “The way we should have gone out first time around.”

There’s one more amusing wrinkle in the story. On August 15, 2018, the LA Slayer played San Antonio as part of their farewell tour. Frontman Tom Araya took to the stage that night wearing a T-shirt featuring the original ‘Slayer vs Slayer’ flyer – a sweet nod to their shared history.

“Am I jealous of the other Slayer? That’s a no-brainer,” says Van Stavern with a laugh. “Even though I’m in Riot and the other guys have gone on to do other things, I’d love to have had their career.”

For an artist who’s lived many lives – prodigy, teen idol, guitar hero, global superstar, forgotten man, comeback kid, survivor – Frampton wears it all lightly. Sitting in a sunlit room in his house, with trimmed white beard, wearing a blue denim work shirt and a Late Show With Stephen Colbert baseball cap, he looks fit and happy.

He’s surrounded by guitars of all shapes and sizes and framed family photos, and on a couch just behind him is his beloved black goldendoodle named Bigsby. He’s a service dog who has helped Frampton navigate his inclusion body myositis, a degenerative muscle disorder he’s been living with for the past seven years.

Defying the odds – and diagnosis – Frampton has continued to tour, and this spring he returned with the aptly titled Carry The Light, his first album of new material in more than a decade. “Carry the light means learning from our elders and learning from our own past,” Frampton says. Which is an ideal segue into him joining Classic Rock to reflect on various pieces of wisdom he’s picked up over the decades.

A medical diagnosis doesn’t necessarily seal your fate

A few years ago, I had a progression in my IBM that was making me feel as if I might not be able to physically play any more. After the finale tour in 2024, we went straight into the studio and recorded three albums - two blues albums and an instrumental album. Because I wanted to keep playing as much as I could. But then I realised that if we went out for shorter times, I could actually do some touring again. And it was, and still is, okay! I fully believe that playing music, writing music, loving music, all the joy that comes from that, has helped keep me young. I’m very lucky to have been born this way, with a lust for music that never ends.

A dog is man’s best friend – and teacher

There are all these clips online of Tibetan monks sitting with their dogs. In one, the monk says: “In the west, you call dogs your pets. We call dogs our teachers.” Dogs live in the present moment. They don’t dwell in the past or worry about the future. They offer gratitude and unconditional love without expectation. Good lessons to learn.

It takes time to admit father knows best

My dad was a stickler for good posture. He always used to say to me: “If you hunch over your guitar, you’re going to get stuck like that. Sit upright, son!” He’d been a lieutenant in the army, so posture was important. I would look at him and roll my eyes. Then when I was in my early forties, and I’m starting to notice I’m slightly bent over, I thought: “Dad, I hate you, you were right [laughs].” So I started working out and paying attention to my posture.

Self-belief and self-doubt are two sides of the same coin

I never think I’m good enough, and that’s why I push myself to become better all the time. But I also know how good I am, in that same regard. I’ve been knocked down so many times it’s ridiculous. But I believe in the old saying: ‘What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.’ That’s my nature, my makeup. I’m pugnacious. I don’t care what they say about me. I get up, move on and get back into my own thing. I’ve always been a believer that I can write a better song, play a better solo. But I never thought I was as good as I should be, in the same breath.

Imitate your heroes

When I was eight, I wanted to be Hank Marvin. I got some horn-rimmed sunglasses and knocked the glass out. I wore them everywhere, just like Hank. I don’t know what it was, but he had this incredible sound on his Stratocaster through his Vox AC-30 amp, and it was just the right thing at the right time for an eight-year-old. It absolutely set me on my path. Years later, Hank and I recorded together. We’re still great email buddies to this day. And I can still play every song by The Shadows note for note!

Be careful what you wish for

Being chased and having your clothes ripped off by girls is all very exciting, but it gets old pretty quickly. All that ‘Face of 1968’ stuff felt terrible, because in The Herd we’d been playing blues and jazzy stuff and had a serious following. And, as I was to experience later in life, a teenybopper vibe in the band can rid you of your credibility. My guitar was now slung behind my back most of the time. I probably was enjoying it at the time, but being screamed at by girls didn’t mean anything once I realised that they weren’t even listening to the music.

Keep moving forward

If I had stayed in Humble Pie, various things could’ve happened. I could have become very ill, for one. Honestly, I’m not sure how I would have been able to handle it going forward. I don’t know how long it would have lasted, even if I’d have stayed, because unfortunately drugs and drink were playing a much bigger part than I had seen before. That was one reason why I left. But it was more motivated by musical differences, and me wanting to pursue other directions and sounds.

Being an opening act teaches you how to be a headliner

As a solo act, I opened for everybody. I’d play my twenty minutes, go back to the dressing room, have a quick sip of something, then stand on the side of the stage and watch every move all these other bands did – what they played, what they said, what worked, what didn’t work. I learned how to steal the best stuff from the best bands [laughs]. Peter Wolf of the J Geils Band, Ozzy, Ray Davies… they all taught me so much in how to deal with an audience, how to build a set-list. When you start, you have your music. But there’s so much else involved in building a career and touring. For me, being an opener was like going to college.

Good input, good output

The song Buried Treasure on the new album is a tribute to Tom Petty. It was named after his Sirius XM radio show. Once a week, Tom would go to this tiny studio and bring an hour’s worth of music from his personal collection of albums, CDs, singles, this rare and out-of-print stuff. I went to class every day listening to this station, because his musical library up here, mentally, is off the charts! The amount of different music he loved is still with me every time I play.

The seventies were better for not having social media

People didn’t upset other people so readily back then, because normally they were either talking to each other on the phone, or over the fence in the backyard. Now they’re behind a keyboard being rude, and trolling each other. I remember when the internet first started, David Bowie was asked what he thought about it, and he said: “It will have a lot of good. But there’s going to be so much bad, and it’s only going to get worse.” He was right.

Too much advice can be a bad thing

I absolutely did not want to record I’m In You [fifth album, in 1977]. I knew that you’re only as good as your last record. I wish I had taken my time. But I had to sift through everyone’s agenda. I was twenty-six years old. My brain hadn’t finished growing. And I started making bad decisions, by going along with what everybody thought. “You’ve got the biggest album ever, so you want to follow it up as quickly as you can, otherwise people will forget you!” I could’ve waited three or four years. Other artists have.

Don’t underestimate the power of a good curry

I love a good Indian. It always makes me feel better. I don’t know why exactly. But a good curry really does appeal to me. And obviously, being born in England, I’ve had my fair share of ultimate Indian meals.

Don't overthink guitar solos

Some of my favourite solos have been because I didn’t think about them at all. My mind wasn’t working, but my heart and soul were. You get to the end of the solo and say: “Let me listen to that. What did I just play?” And that’s when I know I’ve done a good solo - when I get to the end of something, and I feel really good, but I can’t remember what I just played.

Many times people come up to me after a show and say: “On Do You Feel Like We Do, you didn’t play the same talkbox solo as on the record.” And I say: “Well, the day before we recorded the live album, I didn’t play the same solo. And the day after, I didn’t play it either.”

Ironing clothes used to help me relax before a show

I think it was that zen thing of a repetitive activity relaxing your mind. Also, I had read that Eric Clapton would iron before a show, so I thought I’d try it. I’m fairly fastidious about having no wrinkles in shirts, so it would always be the shirt I was ironing. Later on I graduated to a steamer [laughs].

Stand up for what you believe in politically

It’s your responsibility, as a human being. It just happens that when musicians take a stand, other people get jealous of the reach we might have and how our words might affect more people than theirs. And that’s when they say: “Shut up and play.” But in our current situation in America, I feel the obligation to speak out. I want to help, for my granddaughter’s sake. I think if we stay silent, democracy will die in that silence. But we’re starting to make a lot of noise, thank God.

The best advice I never understood

My mum used to say: “What is to be, will be sure to come true.” I don’t know what it means, but I’ve always lived by that [laughs].

Carry The Light is out now via UMC

Turn Of The Century

From Going For The One (1977)

We went through a real vortex to find a way of presenting that song the way it is now, and it’s so magical. It was really deep, the music had to work. It draws on the soft side of Yes, like And You And I and Wonderous Stories, and it was astounding.

Jon had written lyrics about a sculptor [Roan] and so there was a furthering of the connection in there. It was really interesting project, and that song really did feel like a project. Turn Of The Century is central to Going For The One.

Siberian Khatru

From Close To The Edge (1972)

Well, I can’t choose the title track because that’s got so much in it! But …Khatru’s got a lot of elements that I think are really archetypal of the band at that time. Over the years when we were working on material we could have looked back and ask, “What would we have done with this in the days of Close To The Edge?” Maybe sometimes we didn’t ask that question enough.

Tempus Fugit

From Drama (1980)

My mind flashes to that album. I remember us playing Tempus Fugit before we actually met Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, but they added to that immensely. Trevor wrote all the words, as far as I remember, and Geoff helped orchestrate it, and Chris Squire, Alan White and I invented an awful lot of the structure of the song.

But the dynamic way we pulled it off, the speed was frightening. Songs often speed up on stage, but we always agree to play this one slower. There was a real drive to keep Yes going and Trevor and Geoff gave us a way to do it with relative ease. The direction was great on that album.

South Side Of The Sky

From Fragile (1971)

Ask me about Yes, and I’m only looking at the 70s. Not that I dislike the albums we made after that – some of them are very good. But there was a wonderful innocence about the 70s albums. South Side Of The Sky is like Starship Trooper in that it has three different sections, and three different senses of development.

It kind of rocks, and then it doesn’t. Then it’s light, partly down to the influences on the others – groups like the Fifth Dimension. It wasn’t what I brought to the party, but it’s a nice section.

For the guitar solo section at the end we weren’t content with a Leslie speaker so Mickey Tait – who went on to be a big sound and lighting guy – was spinning a microphone around his head to get that whooshing live sound. I can see him now with this microphone! There was a lot of fun experimentation.

The Revealing Science Of God (Dance Of The Dawn)

From Tales From Topographic Oceans (1973)

Topographic Oceans was such a challenge – the construction, the rehearsal, then the studio. Jon and I were pushing this project along; the others were saying, ‘Are you sure? A double album and this is the first track?’ It needed Jon and me to say, ‘No no, it’s going to work!’ Side One and Four Ritual (Nous Sommes Du Soleil) would be so playable now, like an album in themselves.

Those two sum up the project – the beginning and the end – and I choose the beginning. The Revealing Science Of God is about where you put yourself: if you put yourself where people are saying, ‘Wait, I’m not sure about this,’ it might actually be a good thing. Then after the record came out the press slagged it, and Rick left. But then, everybody loved it…

Ian Anderson is a hale-looking 78, and Jethro Tull, the band he formed in London in 1967, are fast approaching their diamond anniversary, but neither show any signs of slowing down. Tull are on a late-career hot streak, having released three new studio albums in the last four years, not to mention their ongoing reissues campaign, which has just reached 1984’s divisive but vivid Under Wraps.

When we speak, Anderson is on a day during from the band’s latest tour. He’s in good spirits, despite recently fracturing a rib going up some stone steps a week previously. “I’m struggling a little to do two hours onstage with this,” he says. “So please don’t try to make me laugh with these questions.”

No promises there, given that this is a slightly different interview from the ones he’s used to. We’ve thrown the floor open to a host of friends, collaborators and admirers who’ve known him or followed his long and illustrious career.

“I’m curious to know if the Prime Minister or Donald Trump is on the list,” he says. Sadly not – but there’s plenty of other stuff to chew on.

Rick Wakeman: What instrument do you tend to use when composing? Does it ever start with flute ideas?

There have been times in the last 15 to 20 years when it actually began with a monophonic line played on the flute. However, the acoustic guitar is the source of, I suppose, 90 per cent of what I have ever written.

I admire Rick’s capacity for a more academic approach to writing complex music. If you play keyboards like Rick Wakeman, you have the world at your fingertips – all 10 of them. If you play guitar like Ian Anderson, you have, at most, about three and a half.

Hugh Cornwell (ex Stranglers): When the Sex Pistols appeared on TV and their subsequent meteoric success happened, did you feel a seismic moment in rock music was happening, or was it just another phase in its history?

I saw the whole thing as being somewhat inevitable. The MC5 was punk to me, then along came the Ramones. And then it crept into the world of British music in the mid 70s. It became interesting when The Stranglers came along, because they had a real musicality. They seemed like a bunch of old hippies who got a little angry at not being successful and became ‘punk,’ for want of a better term.

I do remember Joey Ramone coming up to me at one point to ask for an autograph. He was a bit bashful: “It’s not for me, it’s for my mother.”

Gavin Esler (TV presenter): Do you think teenagers now are missing out on the long-form creativity of albums in favour of the rapid turnover and immediacy of streaming? Also, what’s the hottest variety of chilli you’ve managed to grow in England?

The short-form has always been there. Much of the great pop and rock’n’roll music that inspired me before I began to play rarely lasted more than three minutes. Elvis Presley singing Jailhouse Rock and Heartbreak Hotel; Johnny Kidd & The Pirates’ Shakin’ All Over was perfect. Much of the early output of The Beatles thrived on being short, punchy and to the point.

However, musicians can always do what they want. The opportunity for musicians to be developmental and expand on their ideas always exists. They just might not get paid very much for it.

As for chillis, I’ve grown most of the hot chilli peppers available over the years. They all have to be grown indoors because they require specific conditions.

My taste for them came from the mother of a drummer called Ritchie Dharma, who briefly played with [Tull precursor] The John Evan Band. His mum had cooked lunch – some genuine Indian home cooking – and the two of them decided to play a joke on us by souping up an egg curry to incendiary levels. The rest of the band looked like their heads were turning into tomatoes about to burst. I, on the other hand, thought, “I like this!” That was the start of my love for Indian food.

Derek Shulman (ex Gentle Giant): Who have you met in the worlds of acting, politics and so on, who were fans of your band – people you’d never imagined?

There are a couple of Labour politicians who have been big Jethro Tull fans, which surprised me because they aren’t people you would associate with pop or rock music, let alone being fans. There have been some American folk from the world of movies as well, though I can’t remember any of their names.

There have been a few unlikely musicians – none more so than John Lydon. He once came over to me at an event. He’d obviously had a few beers, but he was being completely over the top, saying how much he loved the Aqualung album and that particular song.

Anna Phoebe (Ava Waves): When and where do the madly creative ideas on how to shape a performance come to you – scuba diving outfits, phones ringing?

Many of those early ideas, particularly with Thick As A Brick, came in quite an organic way from other band members. We shared the same sense of humour, which went from The Goons to Monty Python. It was that slightly surreal, strange thing that made people stop and go, “What did I just see?”

There were things that, in true Spinal Tap fashion, were a step too far. We opened one US tour in Buffalo, upstate New York. At some point during the intro tape, five giant white fluffy rabbits would come onstage and start dancing around. Each rabbit would unzip the rabbit suit in front of him and we, the band, would jump out, grab our guitars and start playing live.

Predictably, three of those zips jammed and the band members had to be cut free with the kind of knives you can’t take on airplanes any more. It was just so unbelievably embarrassing. I don’t think the rabbits ever got a second shot after being slashed open.

Billy Sherwood (Yes): I was proud to produce you on the version of The Thin Ice on the Back Against The Wall tribute album to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, on which you sang lead vocals and played flute. Do you have any recollections as to why you chose that track?

If I choose a particular song to play, I’m probably going to have a number of parameters. Number one: what’s the easiest thing to do? Number two: practically speaking, what’s something that I can learn and perform fairly quickly?

I have to feel that the instrument isn’t too intrusive or too unlikely to add to the musical arrangement. I don’t want to mess it up just because I was asked to play on it. And I think it has to be a positive contribution that’s slightly out of my comfort zone, because that presents a challenge, which makes it more interesting to do.

Carl Palmer: Why did you never learn to drive?

I don’t drive because, in the words of my wife, I am not temperamentally suited to driving a motor vehicle. I’m quite a big fan of F1, but that doesn’t make me want to go and get on the road in a Kia or whatever practical car people drive. It just doesn’t fill me with any kind of interest at all.

If I were to have a nice, shiny, smart, expensive, fast sports car, I’d be afraid to take it on the road, and certainly afraid to leave it in the Waitrose car park because someone might get a little twitchy or jealous and scratch it.

Dave Pegg (Fairport Convention, ex Tull): Any government would benefit from your organisational prowess. Do you regret not getting involved in politics? And is the anal intruder we purchased at Frankfurt airport still making the odd appearance during concerts?

I’ve been interested in politics since the 70s, but I don’t want to bring it into the songs that I write and I don’t really want to bring it into my public life in any way. In terms of my organisational style, that goes back to the years when Terry Ellis and Chris Wright decided to form a record label – Chrysalis – around Jethro Tull.

I’ve always been a hands-on person. To me, it’s important to understand how record contracts are put together. Besides, I’m too mean to pay for lawyers anyway.

Prog: And the anal intruder?

That was from Dr Müller’s sex shop in Frankfurt airport, when Dave was a member of Jethro Tull. He pulled this thing out that looked like a big rubber drumstick – it was all kind of wobbly and strange – and it was in a pack with a label saying ‘anal intruder’.

We used to lower it down on a fishing line over the head of our drummer, Doane Perry, in the middle of his drum solo. Every night he would throw it away in a wastebasket at the back of the stage, thinking he’d never see it again, only for it to reappear the next night.

It still exists. I have a photograph of Scott Hammond, our drummer today, discovering the anal intruder in some old drum case.

Steve Hackett: What attracted you to playing the flute?

Portability and not wanting to drag a guitar around. If you want to keep life simple, it makes sense not to have a guitar or, even worse, a tuba or a cello.

I suppose I was also a failed guitar player, at least in my own mind. I was nowhere near the standard of Steve Hackett, even then, or Jimmy Page, Ritchie Blackmore or Jeff Beck. I decided it was better to be a big fish in a small pool and find an instrument that other people weren’t using in the context of blues and rock music. It certainly got us noticed in the early days.

Fish: You once told me that retirement was not an option because becoming a dedicated whisky drinker wasn’t deemed attractive enough. But given the current state of the music industry, the financial pressures of gigs and touring, and the demand for extensive social media promotions to sell tickets, would you ever consider returning to salmon farming?

No, I wouldn’t, for many reasons. Mostly they have to do with the hard-nosed commerciality of it and also due to environmental matters, but because it’s too demanding to be responsible for 400 people working in the fish farms and factories while simultaneously gallivanting around being a musician.

I did recently ask my son James – my agent and co-manager – when we were in Edinburgh, if Fish wanted to come to our show, and the answer was, “No, I think he’s on an island somewhere north of Skye with some sheep.”

Fish is a fine man, a very intuitive and creative writer, but I know he has had difficult relationships with the whole machinery of the industry throughout his professional life. I suppose I just got to grips with it earlier on and accepted it for what it was.

As for whisky, he probably wouldn’t like to hear that I gave updrinking alcohol many months ago – I’m now a connoisseur of zero-alcohol beers from many different countries.

Tim Bowness: What do you feel is the most misunderstood and underrated of all your releases?

Under Wraps, on the grounds that it didn’t quite click at the time for Jethro Tull to be experimenting with the early days of sampling synthesis and pre-computerised drum machines. It has to be said that the only thing on Under Wraps not played in real time by real people is the drum machine. The rest of it was done just like we make every other album.

It was still a bunch of Jethro Tull songs, whatever they are; they just happened to have more emphasis on keyboards and a bit more of that slightly irritating drum machine sound we had at the time. I hope there’ll be people who’ll revisit that album and say, “Hey, this wasn’t so bad after all.”

Tree Stewart (The Emerald Dawn): How did the incredible baton twirling with your flute come about? Have you ever dropped it or hit an audience or band member?

Certainly not deliberately. It came about out of nothing other than recklessness. I started twirling them around like a baton, throwing them in the air and catching them most of the time. However, there were occasions when twirling that the head joint sailed off into the audience. These days I could be facing a half-million-pound lawsuit for a piece of a flute landing on somebody’s head, but happily, it never seemed to cause an injury that I’m aware of.

I suppose if somebody did get a bit of a dent on the head, they probably thought, “Hey, it’s Ian Anderson’s flute,” and waited another 20 or 30 years for eBay to come about.

Andy Glass (Solstice): How have you coped with the attention you’ve received as the face of a hugely successful band, particularly through the 70s and 80s?

Really, just by keeping myself to myself. I don’t socialise; I don’t hang out with musicians. I don’t hang out with anybody much, really. I escape into my own little world of solitude: travelling alone, eating alone, and sitting backstage quietly alone. I just try to keep things in a comfortable balance.

It’s my temperament; I would probably be the same if I were an astronaut. I wouldn’t be hanging out with the guys drinking Russian vodka on the space station. I’d probably just be sitting in a corner reading an Agatha Christie novel.

Neal Morse: You wrote Thick As A Brick as a kind of parody of prog concept albums. Were you surprised at how well-received it was around the world? Are you still surprised by its longevity?

I’m always surprised when anything I do is well-received at any time – in the past, the present, or probably the future. Thick As A Brick did well because it was so unusual. It was rather surreal, an album of not just complicated but detailed music, both lyrically and musically.

I guess it just caught people at the right time when Jethro Tull was in the ascendancy, particularly in the USA. We were in there at a point where it was possible to make a mark, and for that mark not to necessarily fade too badly over time.

John Mitchell (Asia, Arena, Lonely Robot): Having been brought up by an English mum and a Scottish dad and having moved to Blackpool aged 12, do you identify more as English or Scottish? And what do you think are the defining characteristics – if any – of each of those nationalities?

Well, I identify, really, as being British. I also identify as being European, since the genealogy of both my parents probably goes back to northwestern Europe. It’s traditional that we take our nationality from our father, but I’ve always thought of myself as being a product of the union.

That’s a union in the sense of the mating of two individuals of the opposite sex, but also a union in terms of the traditions of Scotland and England. I desperately hope that doesn’t get overturned in the near-future, now that the ugly question of Scottish independence has raised its head again. I, for one, will be very sad if that comes about.

I’ve always felt that Scotland and England have so much in common. They have shared so much on the battlefield, and in terms of commerce, industry, science and technology. Why break up a good thing?

Roy Harper: I used to hear it said that you only left Blackpool because I did. Is there any truth in that? And have you still got the codpiece you toured Aqualung with?

When I was at art school, I was aware of this legendary person from the Blackpool area who’d become a folk singer and gone to London to seek his fortune, and his name was Roy Harper. In that sense, he was a sort of talisman. He was something you could hold up and say, “Well, he did this just all by himself; he went there.” So in a way, it’s partly true that he served as an example.

As for the codpiece, I don’t have any of that clobber any more, basically any nice bits of kit that I had. Mysteriously, I noticed the dustbin man at a previous address wearing some of my old clothes. My wife refuses to this day to admit that she threw them out.

Geoff Downes (Yes, Asia): Years ago I asked you to contribute to a charity remake of Smoke On The Water. You called me from your farm in Scotland and said, “How the hell can you incorporate a flute into that song?” Have you worked out how to do it yet?

That track is ian example of how something can be so much of a guitar-driven piece with such a classic guitar riff that it feels like the flute would be intrusive. However, I did in fact play Smoke On The Water on a big German television show with Jon Lord and some other musicians in the house band.

Of course, I played the riff and played something vaguely solo-like. So yep, I’ve been there and done it – but unfortunately not for you, Geoff.

Mikael Akerfeldt (Opeth): You took one of my favourite bands of all time, Carmen, on tour in North America. What did you think of them? Why did you decide to approach their bassist John Glascock to join Tull? And is it true you gave one US crowd a bollocking for not treating them well?

Carmen were a support band, I think, in 1975, who were offered up by our agent to potentially be a little different from the support bands we usually had. They were flamenco-based and included dancing from two members of the band. I don’t know how well it really went down with the audience, but we were impressed with the band as a whole.

John was the Englishman in a band of Americans, and Latino-Americans, in at least one case. He was an easy fit for Jethro Tull when Jeffrey Hammond decided to leave. John had indicated that Carmen was coming to an end anyway due to a lack of success, so he was very happy to find a new job.

I’m not sure if I ever gave a US crowd a ticking-off for not being nice to Carmen, but there may have been occasions where I did so for support bands that got a rough ride from audiences who were impatient for us to get onstage. I can think of a few bands that didn’t do well with the audience back in those days in the USA, particularly where audiences were a little blunt in presenting their feelings.

Robin Armstrong (Cosmograf): What keeps you interested in writing new albums after all this time?

I think there’s a degree of desperation as you get older, knowing that this isn’t for ever and that time is running out. Practically speaking, you do well to capitalise on any creative thoughts you have while you’re still capable of translating them into music you can perform on record and, to some degree, onstage too.

So it’s desperation, if you like: don’t let time go by and then find it’s too late to do these things.

Roine Stolt (The Flower Kings): In the early days, was there an intention to be different in terms of sound, look and the clothes you wore?

As was the case with bands then, there was a self-consciousness about the way you appeared onstage and your choice of clothing. My own clothing was a little eccentric and a bit silly around the time of Thick As A Brick, A Passion Play and War Child. I guess we all tried to dress up a little bit.

But at the time, it seemed practical because I would get very active onstage and become very hot and sweaty. I needed a layer of clothing that I could easily wash in a basin in a hotel room every couple of days. That was part of the reason for wearing a thin silk shirt and tights. I would wash my tights and my blue stage shirt in the hotel sink.

Lynsey Ward (Exploring Birdsong): Do you have a favourite place in the world where you feel especially inspired to write songs?

Back in the late 60s and early 70s, my favourite place in the world to write songs was a Holiday Inn bedroom, because I had my guitar with me. Chances are, when I got home after a long tour, I just didn’t really feel musically motivated. I saw hotel rooms as a quiet haven where, while the others might be out doing whatever they did on a day off, I could stay in my room and write a song or two.

These days initial ideas can come anytime, anywhere: sitting on a train, in a dressing room, or sitting in my office. Quite often they come during the night when I wake up with a sudden thought that might be a good idea for a song.

Ultimately, I don’t really think where I write songs is that important. The important bit is when you have an idea and develop it. I tend to choose a place at home, which is a quiet space. I have one in the house that I live in. I’m not telling you where it is in case you come to my house and discover me.

Mike Holmes (IQ): How did it feel to have your music featured in the Prog Proms at the Albert Hall?

I was asked to go along and play a couple of songs with the orchestra. Unfortunately I was somewhere else – in Italy, Spain or somewhere. I wish I’d known ahead of time because I’d have quite liked to have done that; it would have been an interesting experience.

Is it an honour? It’s an honour to be standing at the side of the stage waiting to go on, seeing a bunch of folks around the corner looking for their money’s worth. I never take it for granted. I’m the luckiest guy I know in being fortunate enough to do this.

Tony Iommi has never been a man to use his private life to foster celebrity status. While others have invited the world to invade their privacy in search of ephemeral fame, the Black Sabbath guitarist has always refused to talk about such matters. All that has changed with his autobiography, Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven And Hell With Black Sabbath, in which he has revealed a lot more about himself than ever before.

“I can’t say I am very comfortable with telling everyone what’s gone on in my life outside of music,” he says. “But I knew that if I was to do this book, that side of things had to be faced.”

Many who know him will be surprised that Iommi has chosen to do the book at all. Often reticent when faced with being in the spotlight offstage, the quietly spoken metal hero has never given the impression he’s keen to write his memoirs. But, having made the choice, the result is very much a reflection of the man: frank, honest, funny, entertaining, upbeat.

For Iommi, one of the biggest problems was that much of his life with Sabbath was so well documented there was hardly anything more to say. Which makes the other side of his story – the hitherto unrevealed private section – even more fascinating. For instance, the fact that he is an only child.

“I can’t say how that affected me compared to those who had brothers or sisters. Well, there was a time when my parents took in this guy. He was our lodger, but slept in the same room as me. I hated the situation. Suddenly, I wasn’t the centre of attention. It seemed to me I was being sidelined for someone who wasn’t even family.”

He looks a little tense as he talks about his upbringing and the way it affected him. But that’s part of the learning curve. Once you’ve gone public with this information, you have to expect to be probed about it.

“My paternal grandfather had money, although that didn’t mean my father did. In fact, we really didn’t have much. The first house we lived was OK, but when we moved to a shop in Aston, I hated it. The carpet and lino were wearing badly, and my room was just so small. There were boxes all over it, which cut the size down even further. It was a horrible time. And the area was also bad. Lots of gang problems.”

Yet it’s this very grimness that many believe helped to turn Birmingham into the home of metal. It’s something of which Iommi is fully aware. In fact, he recalls vividly what it was like to be a young, aspiring musician in the city.

“It was very different type of community to, say, London. But we didn’t all know each other, despite playing in the same venues all the time. Sabbath knew Robert Plant and John Bonham from Led Zeppelin. They were local lads and John was in a different band every week, or so it seemed. He ended up being the best man at my first wedding. But the attitude in Birmingham at the time was that if you were in a band, then you stuck with them. You didn’t go off and play with others – that was seen as being disloyal. Today, everybody seems to have side-projects and plays with anyone. But in the late 1960s, if you were in a band, then that’s where you belonged. It was like a gang mentality, and you never changed gang membership!”

This sense of belonging together gave a lot of the local acts a feeling of camaraderie, something that perhaps helped to keep the city apart from other areas of the country where the loyalty factor was overridden by the demand for success. And Iommi still remembers Sabbath’s first ever London gig with a shudder.

“We played the Speakeasy, and we just felt out of place. Everyone looked so posh compared to us, and we really didn’t belong there at all. It took us ages to come to terms with London.”

It wasn’t only in the capital where Iommi had a sense of unease. If he turned to his family, he’d have his musical aspirations derided.

“Everyone – my parents, cousins, the whole family – kept telling me I needed to get a proper job and stop wasting my time. Well, I did have a job in a factory, but I was committed to being a professional musician.”

However, attitudes weren’t totally cut and dried. Iommi’s mother, in particular, actually played a role in helping the band.

“My dad liked Ozzy a lot, and thought he was really funny – which he was. But it was my mum who helped us out. She’d put up the money for us to hire a van for a gig. But then an hour later, she’d be going on at me. ‘When are you getting a proper job?’ she’d say like everyone else. It confused me, so much, the switch from being supportive to suddenly being the opposite.

“My mum came to a few gigs in the early days. But she thought we were too loud!”

Attitudes changed in the Iommi family when the first Black Sabbath album came out.

“Oh, that’s when everyone was suddenly proud of me and what I’d done,” smirks the guitarist. “Members of the family would go round telling everyone that they were my cousin, uncle or whatever.”

It wasn’t just his family who failed to take Black Sabbath seriously. The band were shunned by the city of Birmingham for years.

“We were ignored for so long. That’s why it means so much that the city council gave their approval recently for the Home Of Metal exhibition, which celebrates what Birmingham has done for metal. Recognition at last.

“Up until this happened, we were ignored, and we’ve always not only been proud to be from here, we’ve also actively supported what’s going on. We’ve never made any big fuss about it, but Sabbath have donated money to hospitals for beds and much-needed machines, and to other local charities. The thing is, we did it without looking for publicity.

“I do remember a while ago when someone suggested the council erect a statue of us. It was covered on the local TV news, and afterwards two women said on air (adopts a sneering voice), ‘They want to put up a statue to them?’ So, I’m glad for the acceptance now.”

No rock autobiography would be complete without drug stories. And Iommi doesn’t hold back about the excesses he and the rest of Sabbath enjoyed during the hedonistic 1970s. But he’s also prepared now to talk about how hypocritical he was in the mid-1980s.

“When Glenn Hughes was in Sabbath (for the 1986 album Seventh Star), he was having major drug problems. In the end we had to get rid of him because of it. He was doing so much coke. By then I was off the stuff, although I’ll admit I did have the occasional line. So I was guilty of having a go at Glenn about his problems, while sneaking off to have a little myself!”

Iommi reveals that, for him, breaking the drug habit wasn’t as tough as it was for others.

“I’ve always been lucky in that I can stop doing something when I want. I did it with coke, also drinking and smoking, I just quit them. Sure, I did have the very occasional lapse, but I’ve not done even that for years. What happened was that when I lived in LA, coke was so easily available that it became very natural. You didn’t have to go too far to get any. But when I moved back to England, it was so much harder to find. And that encouraged me to quit.

“My second wife, Melinda, was always good at spotting when I’d been doing drugs. It didn’t matter how much I’d lie and deny it, all she’d say is, ‘I can tell when you’ve been doing it!’”

Iommi has three ex-wives (he’s now married to Maria Sjöholm, who is described in the book as the love of his life), and the guitarist admits writing about those relationships meant he had to re-examine what went wrong with them.

“It would have been so easy just to have laid the blame on the ex-wives – and so wrong. I was at fault in my own way each time. So I had to be totally honest and tell it like it was, not like I wished it had been. I did cheat with other women, and there were other things that led to the break-up of each marriage. But that was one of the hard things with this book – opening up my private life the way it had to be done.”

Iommi also had to expose his innermost emotions over the death last year of Ronnie James Dio. And, sitting here even now talking about that painful moment clearly upsets him.

“It was the first time I’d seen a current bandmate die. We lost Ray Gillen [Sabbath singer in the mid-80s], but that was several years after he left the band. It was such a shock. Geezer was in LA with him all the time, but I was over here. One day, Geezer called and said that Ronnie’d taken a turn for the worst. I said I’d fly straight out, but he said, ‘You might not want to see the way he looks now.’ But before I could arrange to go out, he died.

“The thing is we were all getting on so well in Heaven & Hell. The problems we had in Sabbath when Ronnie was in the band were down to egos clashing, and we’d grown out of that. I’d learnt not to react when Ronnie blew up. You let it go and it passed. Before, I’d have a go back at him when he was in a mood, so things got worse.

“One of things about the funeral that sticks in my mind was seeing Ronnie’s body in the coffin. They’d done a very good job in hiding what the illness had done to him physically.”

As with anyone writing their life story, Iommi faced the publishers’ axe when it came to content. He had to cut out a lot of material, but he doesn’t feel that the book’s been compromised.

“I’d written a lot about my friends, but it was all very boring. Who wants to read about how I go out for dinner with them? It isn’t the sort of riveting stuff you expect from a book like this!

“I’ve had a lot of people ask me if I’ve written about them. I had Bev Bevan [an old friend of Iommi, who was briefly in Sabbath during the early 80s and appears on The Eternal Idol album as a guest] asking me the other day. I told him what I tell everyone: buy a copy and find out!”

Now it’s written, he certainly won’t be at a loose end, with plenty planned and rumoured. There are persistent reports of an original Black Sabbath reunion for a tour and possibly a new studio album. But the guitarist is far too wily to give anything away on this front.

“There are always stories. The Birmingham Mail took comments I’d made off the record and printed them as if it confirmed we were back together. I was indulging in speculation with a journalist I thought I could trust. Right now there’s nothing to say on the subject.”

But on stronger ground, Iommi is getting involved with the movie world. He’s signed up to compose the music for three films.

“It’s a deal with Mike Fleiss. He produced The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and Hostel. The first film will be a horror movie. Will I have a part in it? Absolutely not!”

For Tony Iommi the future stretches out as an exciting challenge.

“I’ve always had a positive attitude to life. Whenever I’ve been knocked back, I get up and start again. I did it when I lost the tips of two fingers in an industrial accident when I was 17. Doctors told me that I had no hope of playing guitar again. I refused to accept that. When I heard what Django Reinhardt, the jazz guitarist did with just two fingers it inspired me to find a way to carry on and become a musician. After that anything was – and is – possible!”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 224, September 2011. Tomy Iommi’s new solo album, From The Dark, is out on October 23 via BMG.

'I've got a new record coming out next year, new solo album," he confirms (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). "It's kind of standalone. There's one song that has a bit of something to do with Mandrake. The album is heavy as shit."

Explaining why he didn't simply want to churn out a Mandrake Part 2, Bruce continues: "I try to not repeat - not because it's bad. You want to move on and put different nuances on things. It's like, I would say, if you have an amazing girlfriend and you start thinking, 'Yeah, I'm getting a little bit bored'...just turn the lights down and turn it a different way, and you see a side that you think, 'Oh, my God, she's absolutely incredible.' Just the red light there or the green or whatever, and you see the same person in a different day, in a different light.

"Music is something which you try not to stick too much of a format," he continues. "I'm within a particular style, for sure. But I try and vary it as much as I can."

The Mandrake Project marked Bruce's first solo album in almost 20 years following 2005's Tyranny Of Souls, meaning that he's operating at a relatively prolific pace as a solo artist right now. That's on top of Iron Maiden's ongoing Run For Your Lives world tour, which finished up its latest European leg at a spectacular show at Knebworth in the UK last month, with North American, South and Central American, Asian and Australasian dates still due to take place across the rest of the year.

“I’ve no intention of going and doing a Pink Floyd record or a Pink Floyd tour again.” Words from the mouth of David Gilmour that won’t come as a massive surprise to fans, but are still likely to be met by a sinking of many hearts in Progland. Earlier in 2019, the guitarist also announced he was selling around 120 of his own guitars to raise money for charity, a collection that includes the legendary Black Strat that was used on all Floyd albums from 1970 to the mid-80s, and again at the Live 8 reunion; the equally legendary 0001 Strat; and Gilmour’s 1955 Les Paul Goldtop that was used on both The Wall and A Momentary Lapse Of Reason.

One can understand a certain frisson of fear creeping through the Floyd/Gilmour fanbase. What on earth is going on, Mr Gilmour? Does selling so many guitars equate to an announcement of retirement for a man whose guitar tone has coloured the lives of millions of music fans the world over?

Christies, the auction house reselling the Gilmour collection, said his guitar solos were “both lyrical and layered with color, and immediately identifiable to critics and pop music fans as readily as the brushstrokes of Monet’s water lilies are to art historians.” For many (Prog’s editor, for example), the solo in Comfortably Numb remains the finest moment of the finest song on the finest album ever.

“There’s a purpose to what’s going on here,” Gilmour says. “We’re selling the guitars – it'll do good. I could do without one or two guitars here and there; one or two guitars that I use less. I think, ‘Just do it. Get it done.’ If I find that I need something, I'll hunt down the person that bought it and buy it back, or I'll buy another one that’s almost identical. The second option's much more likely.”

Gilmour is, of course, no stranger to grandiose charitable gestures. In 2003 he sold his £3.6 million house in London's Little Venice to Earl Spencer, brother of the late Princess Diana, and gave the proceeds to the homeless charity Crisis, for whom he acts as a vice president. He once donated £25,000 to the Save The Rhino foundation at the behest of Douglas Adams, in return for the author’s invention of album title The Division Bell.

And yet there’s something inherently more personal about a guitar collection: instruments through which this mercurial musician has coloured some of the rock world’s most memorable moments – moments of personal triumph even, in the ongoing battle for the heart of Pink Floyd. Even if Gilmour’s words hint at a continuation of making music, there seems something horribly definite about selling so many of the things that connect him to music lovers the world over.

“These are instruments that have served me very well,” he says. “They have given me music, I’ve loved them, but now it’s time for them to go off and be part of someone else’s musical life. I’m hoping they’ll inspire music in other people. And selling them will hopefully give a fair bit of cash to a number of charities which are in deep need of that cash right at this moment.”

Let’s start with the Black Strat. How old is this instrument?

The Black Strat – my main tool of the trade for the last... God knows how long. I believe it was made in 1969 and I bought it at Manny’s in 48th Street New York in 1970. And it’s been on most Pink Floyd recordings from then up into the 80s, when I put it out to pasture for a while. But then I brought it back again and it’s still the guitar I play more than any other.

Manny’s was fantastic; a brilliant shop. The guy who ran it was called Henry, not Manny. He was a great guy; he would troop off to a back room and dig out a guitar and say, ‘Try this!’ We mostly got new guitars from Manny’s; he had the pick of the crop.

Have you always been that person in the shop gazing out across the various instruments, unable to stop yourself getting another one?

Quite a bit, yes. In Cambridge when I was a teenager and there was no way I could afford a Fender of any sort, there was a music shop called Ken Stevens; I used to spend a lot of time in it. It was a miniature shop – one of those ones where it was only half the width of a usual shopfront, probably only seven or eight foot wide. But there were guitars all the way down both sides, and there was a Stratocaster hanging in there for years, which we sometimes persuaded the guy in the shop to let us touch and play a tune or two on. But I could never afford it.

When you’re in a music shop, when you’re testing out a guitar, what do you play? People will go into guitar shops and test guitars by playing your stuff!

I haven’t been into a guitar shop for quite a while – it’s not the way it works any more. My people talk to their people and the guitars come and you play them and put them back in the box and send them away. There are places in England where they have a range of beautiful old guitars that you can go and see and play and buy. One is an acoustic place I’m going to go to quite soon, with a bit of luck, in Kent.

The first Floyd material the Black Strat appeared on is Meddle – the album many see as the template for the Floyd that would come after that point. So this guitar comes in at the same time. Did it feel like that?

It didn’t feel like that guitar had created that change, no; that would be being a little sparing of the truth. But it became my main guitar, the one I used pretty much on everything, unless there was a reason to want a different sound. So that’s definitely on Meddle, it’s on Dark Side Of The Moon, Comfortably Numb. The four notes at the beginning of Shine On You Crazy Diamond popped out of this very guitar [he plays a short part on it], because it was there and in my hands! What can you say? It’s definitely earned its keep.

If you look at the composite bits it’s probably only worth a couple of grand, but it’s got this status that you’re now using for a good cause. You wouldn’t call it a particularly iconic historical instrument, would you – apart from your association?

No, it’s a 1969 Fender Stratocaster, of which thousands and thousands were made. The actual lump of wood that the body is made out of wasn’t always the same type of wood – some are made of alder, some are made of other things. Sometimes you get a bit of wood that’s really light, sometimes you get a bit of wood that’s really heavy. They’re all different. If you pick one up without plugging it in and play it and it feels and sounds great, then it’s gonna sound great amplified, too. This one happened to be in the right place at the right time.

When you retired it, it hung on the wall of the Hard Rock Café in Dallas. Of course, it’s nice that people can see it – but did it grate you a bit thinking, “It’s not being played?”

I have a duality about it, about my affection for it, my teenage lust to have a Fender Stratocaster, and then having one and thinking, “Well you know, it’s a tool of my trade; it’s just a guitar. Get another one, what’s the difference?” And I did get the red one, which has EMG pickups on it, which are battery-powered – it doesn’t react to all the gear, hums and buzzes. Throughout our early time touring, one of the biggest problems was hums and buzzes that the guitar picked up, single coil particularly.

That’s why humbucker pickups are called humbuckers, because they buck that hum. Single coils pick up everything. You’re constantly moving the guitar around two inches, pointing it this way and having to play whole songs that are pointing a certain angle, because if you’re doing it three inches that way, this hum would come up.

Every time you turn on an effects pedal that hum is magnified by 20. And with all those light rigs and stuff that we toured with, it was a constant battle. Our guys would be there in the daytime setting up the gear and they would spend hours trying to pinpoint everything that could make a hum or a buzz and get rid of it, but it was a nightmare. Getting these different electronic pickups got rid of all that in a second, so it made touring life for them and for me much easier.

Did you ever have that Spinal Tap moment where you picked up a local radio station or something?

Yeah! And taxis – people asking for a taxi, they’d come straight through the guitar.

There’s a mythology around a strap that you’ve used on that guitar, more recently on your last tour. Is the myth true?

The myth? Well, my lovely wife Polly Samson bought me, as a present, a Jimi Hendrix strap, that you can see. The strap that he’s wearing at a lot of his later shows, at the Isle Of Wight in 1970 – which I helped mix the sound for. Not a lot of people know that. From the side of the stage on WEM Audiomasters with Charlie Watkins.

What do you recall from that gig?

I went down and I was camping in a tent, just being a punter, and I went backstage where our main roadie, Peter Watts, was trying to deal with all the mayhem with Charlie Watkins of WEM. They were very nervous; they were going to have to mix Hendrix’s sound. I did some mixing stuff in those days and they said, ‘Help! Help!’ so I did.

Did you chat to Hendrix much?

Not then. I had met him previous to that, once. I didn’t know him.

Let’s talk about the acoustics next – we’ll do the Martins. You’ve always had a love for acoustic music, for folk music and early blues. Was the love for acoustic guitars there before you fell in love with electric guitars?

Most people are going to start off on an acoustic guitar. I started off on a nylon-strung acoustic and then graduated to an archtop guitar with F-holes. My background in music is very, very mixed, very broad; I’m a Jack of all trades. I loved acoustic music, I loved folk music, I loved acoustic blues music. Lead Belly was a favourite of mine. Lead Belly had a 12-string; I had a 12-string when I was a teenager, about 19, for a while.

I’ve racked my memory to try and remember what happened to the guitars I had at that time. In some cases I can only imagine that, when I wanted to get another guitar, I had to sell that one to raise the funds. Anyway, I had a 12-string back then and I did very much like Lead Belly’s playing. And a guy called Erik Darling I was very keen on who played 12-string – I had a bit of stuff from him.

So, the two Martins… I bought one from a friend in England. Dunno why he wanted to sell it, but I wanted a 12-string and I didn’t have one at that time so I got this one. Sounds nice! [He plays the start of Wish You Were Here]. So that fell out of this guitar in the control room of Number 3 at Abbey Road in ’75. The people around me picked up on it, and so evolved Wish You Were Here.

There’s a bit of mythology around various cables being taken out of studios and run into cars, and run back again and put through car radios. What’s the start of that track, the sound of that guitar?

The track was supposed to be imitating the sound of a car radio, music being played coming out of a radio, supposedly into someone’s bed sitting room; and the guy in the room joins in and starts playing those melody lines over the top. We did actually run a microphone out into my car in the car park at the front of Abbey Road. I just twiddled with the dial. We recorded some stuff of twiddling with the dial and the changing of stations and used a bit of it on Wish You Were Here.

These strange things happen – it’s the weirdest synchronicity that you get, those strange voices saying weird things and then moving to a different bit. We did it again on The Wall album, exactly the same thing (‘Surprise surprise surprise’). You know you’re gonna get something fantastic. Nowadays, of course, you press a button to change channels between stations. I don’t think it would quite work these days, but in those days you just turned the thing and it gradually went from one into the next one.

Is it true that that guitar was stolen but then later returned to you?

Yeah. I lived out in the countryside somewhere and I had a little studio room. My brother had a band and he was in there rehearsing quite a bit, and these guitars were in that studio room. It was locked and everything; and one night it got broken into and some guitars went. It turned out to be one of the musicians who was in my brother’s band at the time – a temporary musician, very temporary in this case – had half-inched them.

They were put into a studio in Surrey, owned by Nigel Gray. He recognised the guitar and called us. He said, “I’ve got a sneaking suspicion there are some guitars here that might not belong to the person who brought them here.” We got most of them back. There were a couple that I never got back, one of which was a three-pickup black Les Paul with humbuckers on it, which I’d loved after seeing it on the cover of a Smokey Robinson and The Miracles record. And a Gibson Les Paul TV model, a little blond thing with double cutaways, that I didn’t get back either.

Who do you think is going to buy these guitars?

I hope someone who genuinely wants to play them and have some fun with them and maybe create something with them is going to buy them. But I don’t really believe that’s going to happen. They should be looked after; they should be played and passed on at the appropriate moment – which is now for me.

Have you had many people enquiring? You know, friends or fellow collectors going, “Could you...? How much...?”

I’ve told people about the instruments, but I haven’t had people enquiring with a view to buying them, really. The sort of people I know aren’t going to be the ones who want to buy these things.

What guitar are we going to end with?

This is a white Fender Stratocaster, made in 1954 with sort of gold bits on it. It had gold tuning pegs, but they don’t seem to be on it any more. Gold scratch plate, gold plate on the back with 0001 on it; I’ve had it since 1978. It was made by a friend of Leo Fender’s called Rex Gallion. He was the guy who suggested the scalloping out of the Stratocaster body and the shaping of it so that it would better fit someone’s frame as they were playing it.

I don’t know what his frame was like – maybe a bit like mine. It was a very good idea. Leo Fender gave him this guitar in around ’54, ’55. It’s a very, very beautiful instrument – but he was a Gibson man, it turns out, and so he didn’t really play it very much at all and eventually sold it, I believe, in order to buy a tape recorder. It was then in the window of a store somewhere in California and it was bought by a guy to give to his son for Christmas when he was 12. The years went by, mysterious things happened; and in ’78, I got it. And here it is. It is actually as good a Strat as I’ve ever played. Beautiful.

For me, there has been no real improvement in the making of the electric guitar since this was made in 1954. I would be as happy to play this electric guitar as any other electric guitar, out of all the other ones I’ve looked at and been asked to try over the years. How do you improve on perfection?

Do they have names?

Pardon?

Have you given them names, your guitars?

No.

Because it’s reasonably common for musicians to name, be it a Lucille or whatever.

I’ve never quite done that.

Why not?

Tools of the trade, mate! I guess I have a different form of romanticism.

Has anyone ever tried to steal that one? Does it travel under lock and key? Does it get its own plane seat?

Well, it doesn’t really travel. It moves from this studio to a studio in another house or something; not great distances. It usually just gets chucked in the boot of the car. There’s no massive security around it, no more than any other guitar. I’m lucky – it hasn’t been filched yet.

Do you ever lend these guitars to anyone? Does anyone ever go, “Do you think we could borrow 0001?”

I don’t know if I’ve lent the 0001 guitar out. I’ve lent all sorts of other guitars out to friends. They give them back.

I sense there is a dichotomy here... How are you going to feel when you’re in the auction house and you see these instruments in front of you and you see the money being bid?

Obviously there’s going to be a dual feeling from a little bit of loss but a huge sense of relief, in that I don’t have to think about what’s going to happen to them in the future. I’ve had my time with them. I’m finding new friends now and they can move on, and they’ll do an enormous amount of good. I don’t think it’s something I’m going to have to struggle with in a major way. I don’t think I’m going to have to see my shrink for weeks and months and years to deal with this.

Finally, what’s next aside from this auction? Are your eyes set on a new musical horizon?

I write bits of music. I work. I haven’t done much lately. Other things in my life are tidying up a little bit, one might say, at the moment. Clear space is coming up to me. I’ll be getting into this studio we’re sitting in at the moment and listening to the hundreds of little bits of demos that I’ve got, and developing them; seeing where they go and seeing if I get my appetite back to start recording a proper album and doing all the stuff that goes with it.

Entering into that, for me, is about a four-year project – the writing, the refining, the recording. The marketing of an album and doing a tour, preparing for rehearsals, getting the musicians, all that shit, takes a lot of time. I usually find at the end that it’s taken me about four years to do the whole thing, so it’s a commitment which I have as yet to make. But we’ll probably get there.

During the auction at Christies in New York, the Martin acoustic, with an expected sale price of $20,000, went for $1,095,000; the white Strat, expected at $150,000, went for $1,815,000; and the Black Strat, also expected to raise $150,000, became a record-setting transaction at $3,975,000.

Change was in the air in the wider music world. The hegemony of the guitar – for so long the weapon of choice for rock bands – was under threat from the technological advances made in the realm of electronic music. Synthesisers were moving in from the sidelines to become the pre-eminent instrument of the era.

Rush themselves weren’t immune to this new trend – certainly not singer/ bassist Geddy Lee, a self-professed “synth geek” who had been incorporating synthesisers into the band’s music since 1977’s A Farewell To Kings. But for Alex Lifeson, Subdivisions marked the point where the balance between guitars and synths tipped in the wrong direction.

“I was sitting there thinking: ‘I can’t hear guitar,’” says Lifeson, recalling the mixing process. “I’m a very easy-going guy, but I thought: ‘This is not right.’ So I pushed that fader up. I do remember Terry [Brown, producer] turning to me and smiling, and reaching over and pulling it back down. I could barely hear my guitar on that mix, and that just screams ‘wrong’ to me.”

By Rush’s normally equable standards, this kind of passive-aggressive tussle was a blow-out of the highest magnitude. But Subdivisions certainly did feel like a departure. As the compact, synth-heavy opening track on Signals, it ushered in a new era for these former progressive rock heavyweights, one that would bring them more in line with contemporary bands such as The Police or Ultravox than with their 70s prog peers.

The signs had been there on Rush’s previous album, 1981’s Moving Pictures, which expertly blended Lifeson’s guitar with Lee’s increasingly prominent keyboards. The two musicians had the wind in their sails from the success of that record when they began writing songs for the follow-up between legs of the Moving Pictures tour.

“Sound-check was the best opportunity for us to throw some ideas around,” says Lifeson. “We would play a couple of songs in full, but we would also do a little bit of writing. I’m sure there are ancient cassettes somewhere with snippets of ideas that ended up on all our records.”

Subdivisions emerged from the trio’s jam sessions, driven by Lee’s throbbing synth pulse. The band reconvened with Terry Brown in Le Studio in late 1981 to work on the live album Exit… Stage Left, and it was there that Peart began working the song’s lyrics, which revolved around suburban alienation and the nature of being an outsider – a subject that was close to home for three men who had grown up in the suburbs of Toronto. ‘In the high school halls, in the shopping malls, conform or be cast out,’ ran Peart’s lyrics, his critique of the push for uniformity amplified

“[It was] an exploration of the background from which all of us (and probably most of our audience) had sprung,” the drummer later wrote in his diary. “One afternoon as I was idly polishing my car, Alex and Ged returned from working at the little studio, set up a portable cassette player right there in the driveway, and played me the musical ideas they had come up with for it.”

Subdivisions would be given an early airing on the final leg of the Moving Pictures tour in the UK and America in late 1981. Bootleg recordings show that it was pretty much fully formed even then, albeit with Lifeson’s guitar much more prominent than it is on the finished studio recording. Rush returned to Le Studio in the early summer of 1981 to work on Signals. It was there that a shift in the track’s sound occurred, with Lee’s synths pushed to the forefront at the expense of Lifeson’s guitar

“Ged’s obsession with synthesisers had a lot to do with this change in direction, plus the desire to go with a stripped down guitar component,” Terry Brown says now. “The band were also listening to The Police and Ultravox, to name just two of their influences at the time.”

Lifeson’s annoyance over the vanishing levels of guitar on Subdivisions subsided, although it never completely dissipated. “It’s a strong song, it’s just the mix that I didn’t like,” he says. “I guess I just fought for my guitar rights for years after that.”

Despite his reservations, Subdivisions was released in October 1982 as the second single from Signals. It was accompanied by a striking video shot in and around the suburbs of Toronto that captured the dislocation and ennui of suburban teenage life (the kid who appears in the video was first-time actor Dave Glover, a student at L’Amoreaux Collegiate Institute, which was used as a location in the video).

“The video was really memorable,” says Lifeson. “And Neil’s lyrics really struck a chord with people, especially people who grew up in the suburbs like we did.”

But Subdivisions and Signals marked a shift in Rush’s career – and not necessarily a good one, in the eyes of their fans. Their subsequent 80s albums followed the same, keyboards-forward path, although they hit a more even balance between guitars and synths. Still, Signals remains the most divisive album in Rush’s back catalogue, even if attitudes towards it have mellowed in the years since it was released. But ultimately, both the record and Subdivisions itself embody progressive rock’s boundary-pushing spirit just as much as earlier Rush albums 2112 or Moving Pictures had.

“I guess you could stay where you are and do the same thing over and over and over again, but that’s not the kind of band we are,” says Lifeson. “Progress is important to us. We always need to go somewhere else. We always wanted to evolve.”

Ask a musician what the highlight of their recent tour might have been, and the answers will range from positive crowd reaction to new material, or a hospitality rider that included a decent feed as much as libation, to perhaps wifi that worked or just good old camaraderie on the tour bus.

For Dave Brock, linchpin of the venerable space rock institution that is Hawkwind, it’s all of these things and more – not least as the six-date tour he completed in support of 36th album, Stories From Time And Space, very nearly didn’t happen.

“It was quite hard going because prior to that, I had just come out of hospital,” recalls Brock as he talks to Prog from his farmhouse in Devon. “I got Covid in February and I was really ill. It affects your breathing a lot and, you know, singing and all that was difficult. It knocked my heart out of sync, so I had to go to hospital. I’ve had all the checks.”

Much like the stoic generation of which he’s a member, 82-year-old Brock isn’t one to dwell on what might have been or what he had to go through to get match fit, so we’ll draw a veil over his recuperation. Instead, he’s more interested in how the tour developed and how his enforced hospitalisation actually brought out the best in his bandmates – guitarist-singer Magnus Martin, keyboardist Tim ‘Thighpaulsandra’ Lewis, bassist Doug Mackinnon and longtime drummer Richard Chadwick.

“I started getting better as I went along,” Brock reassures. “The band had been rehearsing without me for all of March. And because they didn’t know if I was going to be able to do it or not, they’d been practising all their vocals. The good thing was, all of them can sing. Some of them say they can’t, but they really can. So, when I came back, we had really good backing vocals!”

Not only is Brock pleased with the way the tour went, he’s also thrilled by the reaction the new material has been receiving. Rarely looking in the rear-view mirror, it’s precisely this attitude that’s ensured the continuation of Hawkwind’s late-period purple patch that began with the eerily prescient The Machine Stops in 2016.

And with Stories From Time And Space, the band have consolidated their strengths – melodies that burrow their way into the brain, insistent riffs, instrumental workouts, all driven by the allegory of science fiction – to keep moving ahead. It gives them the opportunity to bend their new songs this way and that, helping them take their place in the band’s ever-increasing pantheon.

“I’d hate to just constantly play the old numbers,” stresses Brock. “We do lots of new numbers, and the more you play them, the more they change and the more interesting they become. Some of the stuff started off at maybe about four minutes. And now you can play it for about eight or 10 because it’s got more interesting. People feel more comfortable with it and we can go off on tangents.” He adds: “You’ve got to get the balance. You can’t just rely on your old material, because the music is going forward.”

Hawkwind’s sonic attack, along with their fabled and gloriously intense light show, is also pulling through a new generation of fans in its slipstream – a fact that tickles Dave Brock pink. “We do actually get quite a few young fans, and that’s a good thing,” he says with no little pride. “We’ve got a really good fanbase, and they actually travel around. A lot of them come every night and a lot of them bring their families and kids on tour. It’s really good fun!”

Crucially, even after 55 years of playing and recording, they still manage the high-wire balancing act that has entertainment on one side and something to say on the other. A visceral and occasionally disorientating experience that’s left its mark on scenes as disparate as psychedelia and rave, Hawkwind are mindful not to churn it out for the sake of it.

“What you’re doing is you’re entertaining people,” reasons Brock. “The objective of music is an escapism for people to enjoy themselves. We’ve got a really good laser light show; we’ve got a really good back projection. The guys who do all our stuff want it to be a wonderful show. And so the audience come along wanting to be taken off on a big trip. That’s what musicians want to do: they want to entertain people and make it a wonderful experience. And if you perform really well, they’ll go, ‘Wow! That was a really fantastic evening!’ That’s what you do it for.”

Underpinning that entertainment is Hawkwind’s central and long-standing opposition to the mainstream. This is the continuation of a journey that began more than half a century ago in the urban squalor of Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill, and honed to perfection as the de facto house band of the free-festival ‘freak’ scene of the 70s and 80s. Their abhorrence of the political elite and the institutions that keep them there beats at the heart of their oeuvre.

“The same things occur,” says Brock with a sigh. “You know, doing The Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear In Smoke): ‘Sick of politicians, harassment and laws/All we do is get screwed up by other people’s flaws.’ The words mean the same thing as they did many years ago. You do songs about situations and you think, ‘Crikey – 50 years on and nothing’s really changed.’ Unfortunately, it’s getting worse.”

Warming to the theme, Brock continues, “You know We Took The Wrong Step Years Ago? That was influenced by Rachel Carson, who wrote a book in the 60s called Silent Spring; she actually wrote all about pollution. And now you look at the amount of sewage and dumping that’s going on in the rivers. Years and years ago, we used to go swimming down where we live here and we all became ill. We all thought we had flu, but it was the bloody water!

“We found out that there was a slurry pit about a mile down the river, which was leaking into the river. Eventually, the farmer got fined £5,000 for leaking his slurry into the river and polluting the river and all the fish died. This is happening on a huge scale now. The water companies are more interested in making money instead of investing.”

Turning his ire to the ill-fated HS2 project, he continues, “I mean, look at the stupid railway system. Do we really need to spend all this money on a high- speed train going to Birmingham? Billions and billions of pounds wasted and all those people who have lost their homes because of it; it’s all wasted time. We have no control, I don’t think, anymore. So we write songs about it.”

Despite the passing of the years, Brock insists that he’s still making music for the same reasons that he always has – though the causes may have changed over the years, Hawkwind are here to highlight them as they continually struggle against oppression and fighting for the possibility of an alternative society.

“We were younger when we were doing the free festivals; as you get older you slow down a bit,” he says. “But we do lots of stuff constantly for animal charities to bring attention to what’s going on – like dogs being kidnapped and having ransoms demanded for them. A dog to a family of people with kids is part of that family, and they’re living entities. I mean, there’s so much going on all around the world; you try and bring attention to certain things.”

So, while Hawkwind’s commitment to an alternative way of life is as solid as ever, their use of psychedelic substances as a means of composing music and fuel for their belief system and lifestyle has long been shelved. “At our age in life?” chuckles Brock. “I think when you’re younger, you can accommodate these things. You don’t have to take them forever. Once you’ve opened the doors of perception, you can see what’s going on, and therefore you don’t have to take drugs anymore because you’ve got the ideas.” He adds sagely: “And remember the saying – ‘a little is always better than too much.’”

The only chemistry that interests Brock at this stage is the one that exists between the band’s principal players. Not for them the internecine fighting and drug and alcohol problems that blighted previous formations – it’s all about the joy of making music as a coherent and focused unit. “It’s a nice line-up at the moment,” he says proudly. “We all get on and we don’t have any arguments. We work on things as a group because that’s what a band’s supposed to be: a unit of people coming together.

“Richard’s been our drummer now for nearly 40 years. Doug’s a really good bass player; and when you’ve got a really solid rhythm section, you can go off into different areas. Tim is really good on the synths and Magnus can double up on the keyboards and the guitar. And, like I say, now everybody comes to the fore and can sing. And to think they tried not to do it for so long!”

But what of the work in progress with famed dance and electronics producer William Orbit? As revealed last year, Hawkwind have begun recording their next album, though Orbit’s production commitment to the project hasn’t been as exclusive as might have been desired.

“He’s in Jamaica recording a reggae artist who is in prison,” laughs Brock. “He wanted me to do some synthesiser on that. I think that’s what he’s up to. I’ve got a lot of his stuff that he sent me, and he’s got some of ours. He’s quite busy at the moment.”

He chuckles again, revelling in the time and space he’s afforded himself. “We have just come back from touring, so who knows what’s gonna happen next?” And with that, Dave Brock looks ahead to the future once more.

As far as I’m concerned, Cardiacs were the greatest band that ever walked the Earth. The perfect combination of prog indulgence and complexity, punk energy and subversion and sublime pop melodies, the band completely changed the way I thought about music. And, like virtually Cardiacs fans, I cherish them more than any other band I’ve ever heard.

The obscenely talented Kavus Torabi joined Cardiacs on guitar in 2003 and remained a member until bandleader Tim Smith suffered a heart attack and stroke in June 2008 and the band’s activities fizzled to a distinctly tragic halt. I spoke to Torabi about five of my favourite songs and asked him whether they conjured up any specific memories.

Is This The Life

The best-known Cardiacs song of them all, Is This The Life was a permanent fixture in the band’s set lists for over two decades. It was famously played on Radio 1 by an only slightly bewildered Steve Wright and was as close to a hit single as the band ever got. You can find it on both 1984’s cassette-only release The Seaside (since released on CD but fairly hard to track down) and the classic 1988 album A Little Man And A House And The Whole World Window.

Torabi: The first time I heard it was as part of A Little Man And A House. It had just come out; I’d never heard of the band before and a friend of mine lent it to me and said, ‘You’ve got to hear this!’ At the time it didn’t strike me as being particularly different to the other tunes on the album. It was just part of the whole thing.

Obviously it’s the one that really gets to you, because it’s so catchy and amazing. Later, speaking to friends and trying to get them into Cardiacs, there’d be people who only liked that one. So I realised that this one that the straights can get! I used to love playing it live. It had one of the few bits where we’d get to improvise. Some nights it would just be magical.

You’d think that someone would’ve come up with that chord progression before, wouldn’t you? It dates as far back as 1979, but I’m surprised that no one had thought of it before that. No one could ever have come up with most of the Cardiacs songs – Tim was the only person who could’ve written them. Is This The Life is just beautiful.

R.E.S.

Another track from A Little Man And A House, R.E.S. is a glorious example of Tim Smith’s ability to combine razor-sharp pop melodies with sinister, nursery rhyme insanity and mind-bending, prog-fuelled intricacy. Madder than a lorry full of boxes of frogs but still oddly beautiful, it almost certainly – as Kavus explains – feature the greatest guitar solo of all time.

Torabi: When I had to learn how to play that song, it helped that I’d known it since 1988 and it was just wired into my DNA. It was a case of having to remember where to put my fingers. I just knew all the funny timings without having to think about it.

I once said to Tim that I thought it was the greatest guitar solo of all time and he said ‘Oh, it’s a bit too Canterbury-ish for me…!’ It’s an incredible solo. It sounds corny, but I remember getting that record home in 1988 and playing it. My friend had already told me that he was sure I’d like it, and I loved the funny photocopied album cover with the big flower on it.

I remember getting through side one and thinking ‘This is really, really good!’ but when the guitar solo in R.E.S. came in, they’d become my favourite band – before I’d got to the end of side two.

Jibber And Twitch

First released on The Seaside in 1984, this early Cardiacs classic is another dizzying eruption of crazed musical ideas, insidious hooks and twinkly-eyed macabre. Shortly after joining the band in 2003, Kavus had to learn Jibber And Twitch, along with a ludicrous number of other songs from the band’s early years, for three shows in London – captured on The Special Garage Concerts Volumes I and II albums.

Torabi: Learning those songs was a really interesting experience! I found out a lot about myself during those couple of months. I knew two thirds of the songs because they were on The Seaside and Archive Cardiacs, but there were bits I’d never heard before. There was so much to learn – about 35 songs including the encores – but Tim’s attitude was, ‘You know what to do, just get on with it!’

He gave me and Bob Leith, who also wasn’t around in the early days, a free rein to do what we wanted with the songs. The weird thing about that is that I’ve never been one of those people who works out other people’s songs. It was the first time I’d ever really sat down and committed to learning such a big body of stuff. I really liked it! It became my life. I’d go to work each day and then come home and spend two or three hours learning it all. I’d learn maybe one new tune each night and then run through the rest of what I’d learned previously, until three or four weeks before the gigs I was just coming in and running through both sets.

It takes up so much of your brain – it was like revising for an exam. Even two weeks after those gigs I’d forgotten how to play half those tunes. We had a party afterwards and it felt like my mind was slowly coming back to me.

Dirty Boy

In 1996, Cardiacs released a double album entitled Sing To God. An audacious and ambitious 90 minutes of pure Tim Smith genius, it’s an album that encapsulates the overwhelming magic and majesty of the band’s sound, with a wonderfully vivid and powerful production they never quite equalled on their other recordings. The greatest song on an album full of great songs, Dirty Boy is nine minutes of dark, monumental and lavish psychedelia. There’s nothing else quite like it.

Torabi: “The funny thing with Dirty Boy was… I remember when I was a kid, maybe 10 or 11, and into rock music, and you’d always hear older people talking about how Stairway To Heaven was the best song ever written. It had an alluring title, but I wasn’t really into Led Zeppelin at the time; I was into Maiden and stuff.

I started to imagine what this song must be like, but when I heard it a couple of years later – and I do really like Zeppelin now – I was so disappointed! I thought, ‘Is that all it is? Is this supposed to be the greatest song ever?’ Let’s face it, it’s not even the best Led Zeppelin song!

So when I heard Dirty Boy it sounded like what I imagined Stairway To Heaven would be like. Surely it’s the greatest psychedelic rock song ever recorded, by a long way! It was great to do live, but one of the hardest to play because of the amount of chords.

Tim’s attitude to some of the punky songs was that if you fucked them up it didn’t matter, because ‘It’s fuckin’ punk, isn’t it?’ But with Dirty Boy you were not allowed to play even one chord wrong; and there are so many, going from major to minor and then back.

It was so hard to learn, but you really owe it to that song to play it properly because it’s so amazing. It makes you want to believe in God! It makes the whole God thing seem plausible!

Ditzy Scene

Recorded shortly before the last Cardiacs tour before Tim became ill, Ditzy Scene was the first song to be committed to tape by the Kavus-era line-up. It was released as a limited-edition single by Org Records and offers a tantalising glimpse of what the band’s proposed next album, tentatively known as LSD, might have had in store. Vocals aside, Smith had recorded most of the album when he fell foul of ill health but, as yet, the songs remain hidden in some magical dusty vault somewhere.

Torabi: I wrote the words for that song! It was weird one to record, because we felt a bit pressured to get it recorded before the tour. I’m not mad on the mix of it, so the plan would’ve been to remix it for the LSD album that never happened.

I love the tune. It was the first thing we did with that new line-up and it was a new thing. When we started recording it was like, ‘Fucking hell… here we go!’ When those girl vocals came in at the start, going ‘Aaah aaah,’ it was a real goosebump moment and I thought, ‘Okay, we’ve really got something here…’ It’s just brilliant.

We only played it right maybe once or twice on that tour. It was so frustrating! It became one of things when so much pressure is put on and it just makes matters worse. That intro was so hard to play – we’d have to completely concentrate for it. Once you got lost it was all over, particularly doing stuff with tapes. You had to be in with the tape, so the minute you dropped a beat we had to stop.

We did it right in Leeds – I remember that, because when we did it Mel Woods threw a tambourine into the audience! After the gig I remember Tim saying, ‘I hope that wasn’t one of the good tambourines…!’

And if you want to point the finger at someone for Jillette's "fuck list", then Fuck Capitalism.

“I was indoctrinated by American corporations as part of an orchestrated plan to move us into rock ‘n’ roll," Jillette told me in 2014. "They came up with The Monkees when I was 12, and that came on TV, and I bought their records and then The Monkees led me directly to the Mothers of Invention, who were on their TV show, and Jimi Hendrix, who opened for The Monkees, which led me to [Bob]Dylan. By the time I was 14 or 15 I was listening to Zappa, Velvet Underground, Dylan, Captain Beefheart, etc,. And that was all from The Monkees being on TV.”

Growing up in Greenfield, Massachusetts, the teenage Jillette wasn't holding his breath for any major rock bands to pull into his "little dead factory town", but, like the protagonist in a Bruce Springsteen song, his world would open up when he was old enough to drive.

"All that a driver’s license meant to me was the freedom to be able to see rock ‘n’ roll," he explained. "When I first got a driver’s license, within a week, I drove 100 miles to Boston to see the Mothers of Invention. I drove up to Boston to see people like Chuck Berry, Jethro Tull, The Faces… but the life-changing one was seeing the Mothers: that 1973 tour when I was a child was one of the finest rock tours ever.”

By then, Jillette was playing music with local bands, first as a drummer, then as a bassist: "I basically loved rock 'n' roll so of course I wanted to play as well as listen." The arrival of punk rock proved to be another liberating watershed moment for the New Englander.

"I was a fan of Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers first, then the Ramones," he recalled. "And then a friend of mine who lived in England called me one day played Anarchy In The UK over the phone to me and said, ‘You have to find the Sex Pistols’, so the very first day that the Sex Pistols released anything in the US I had a copy. Teller and I actually had tickets to see the Sex Pistols in Atlanta on their very first US tour, but we got a show that night so we couldn’t go: shows were rare enough back then that we had to take every one we got, and so we had to miss the Pistols.

"From there I went to The Clash and Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe and that whole Stiff records set. And of course the Velvet Underground, who didn’t have to change their mould much to fit with the punks."

"I was pretty into that New York rock 'n' roll scene. I was good friends with the Ramones, I was very, very good friends with Lou Reed, I went out with Debbie Harry for years."

In her 2019 autobiography Face It, Harry credits Jillette with inventing (and patenting) an "orgasmatron" hot tub called the 'Jill-Jet' during their time together, but that's a whole other story, so let's not dwell. Harry also guests on two songs on Tattoo Of Blood, the alt. rock album that Jillette released under the name The Captain Howdy in 1994 on Shimmy Disc, the New York indie label founded by US underground legend Kramer.

“We just started hanging out in that world," Jillette told me. "And then through Kramer I got into the whole Gwar, Butthole Surfers, Residents, alternative/noise/avant garde punk stuff. There were some very odd evenings back then. I’d finish up my show on Broadway and then hop in a limo and go downtown to CBGBs and play bass with Half Japanese or Mareen Tucker or Lou Reed, I’d be the bass player in punk bands while I was appearing on Broadway."

The title track of the musician's 1994 album was written by, and features, one of Jillette's biggest musical heroes, and dearest friends, Lou Reed. Jillette was once the president of the Lou Reed Fan Club, a position he reluctantly resigned from when he and Teller became stars on Broadway. One night, as the pair began their show, they looked into the audience and saw Reed, and were so overwhelmed that they both "completely froze... could not function", Jillette revealed in a 1997 interview.

"After the show, Lou came up and said, 'This isn’t a magic show, this is rock and roll'," Jillette recalled. "And I, of course, being a cool New York suave man of six foot six and 20, 35 pounds, began crying, which really impressed Lou.

"Lou said, You know, we should hang out. And it took me about six months to get up the nerve to actually actually call him. After hanging out with Lou a little bit, Lou finally said, 'You know, you you’ve really got to calm down if we’re going to be friends'."

While Reed wrote the title track of Captain Howdy's Tattoo Of Blood, the song was actually inspired by Jillette.

"Basically I’d got a tattoo without ink, which makes it hurt more and makes it bleed more, and Lou thought that was a really great idea," Jillette explained. "The theory was all pain and no gain! I was at a biker convention, for Harley’s 90th anniversary, and all these biker guys were getting tattoos. And I said, ‘Well, my relationships never last more than two or three years, so I’ll get a tattoo without ink.’ So I basically just let the tattoo guy scrawl on me without ink to create all these bloody scars all over me. Lou thought that was very, very cool.”

Jillette continued his rock 'n' roll adventures into his sixties, with his occasional group, the No God Band, the mischievous, maverick spirit that has infused his 'day job' very much intact.

“We tend to play one benefit show a year," he explained, "for the James Randi Educational Foundation, and we get a couple of thousand people to come, and play for free but ask if people will donate to the charity and we make $30,000 or $40,000 each time. It’s basic dirty rock ‘n’ roll, no barriers are being pushed at all, but there’s a lot of blasphemy and a lot of sex. I don’t think you ever really get more than two lines without a mention of either blasphemy or sex.”

These days Peter Gabriel is a slaphead out of necessity. Or, as he puts it, due to “the absence of follicles”. But back in 1978, when having a shaven head at best marked you out as part of the boot-boy skinhead culture and at worst identified you as a Nazi sympathiser, Gabriel took a razor to his mop out of choice.

The fact that he would stand on stage clutching a pink teddy bear while singing Me And My Teddy Bear added to the whole incongruous image. “That was actually the first song I ever performed in front of an audience,” Gabriel told Classic Rock in 2014. “The contrast was deliberate. You want to believe that packaging isn’t the main priority for making initial decisions about people, but sadly it is. So by changing the packaging I was hoping to change the perception.”

And did you? “To an extent. I think it worked in America but in England I don’t think I’ve ever outgrown that middle-class, ex-progressive rock persona.”

Strange but true. Most people’s first acquaintance with Peter Gabriel dates back to the mid-80s and the Sledgehammer video that brought a touch of class to the rapidly expanding MTV channel and dropped him right into the laps of a new generation. And yet 29 years after he walked away from his original prog-rock persona in Genesis, the ghost still lingers.

It’s not too hard to establish some kind of link between the middle-aged chap walking around upside down on stage singing Downside Up on his latest tour and the same bloke stuck inside a fox’s head wearing a long red dress back in 1972 singing Watcher Of The Skies.

The connection is Peter Gabriel’s sense of the dramatic. It’s what got him hooked on rock music back in the mid-60s when he was a pupil at the stuffy, class-ridden Charterhouse public school where rock’n’roll was considered subversive. (If you want to sample the flavour, try Lindsay Anderson’s 1969 movie, If – Gabriel auditioned for a part, although he didn’t get it.)

Gabriel isn’t normally one to get reflective about his career. Not when there are Bonobo apes to interact with. Not when the internet is transforming the music industry, giving artists the opportunity to take more control of their work. (When he suggested a couple of decades ago that people would soon be accessing music via the telephone he was laughed at.) Not when there’s an award-winning stage designer finding a way of enabling you to walk upside down on stage and an award-winning director to film you doing it.

But sitting in a cosy corner of the Covent Garden Hotel restaurant, Gabriel is allowing himself to wallow in a little nostalgia.

Gabriel’s formative rock’n’roll experiences outside the gates of Charterhouse – frequently illicit, which only added to the thrill – were Otis Redding and The Nice. “I got to see Otis Redding in 1967 at the Ram Jam Club in Brixton. It was a bit of a moment for me,” he recalls proudly.

“I’ve never really been a technical singer as such, or a musician. I’m someone who goes for the feel of something and tries to build pictures. And hearing the voice and the emotion of Otis Redding was just beyond words.

“I saw The Nice several times as well. I always thought The Nice got branded by ELP in some ways. There was a time when Jimi Hendrix wanted to join The Nice, and nowadays people might look back and wonder why, but if you saw The Nice they were exciting both musically and in terms of showmanship, which I think was part of the appeal to Hendrix.

“When we [Genesis] wrote The Knife, that was very much inspired by [Genesis keyboardist] Tony Banks’s and my enthusiasm for The Nice. Terrible name, though. But then words were never Keith Emerson’s strong point,” he adds.

But that was a couple of years down the line. Back inside the Charterhouse gates, simply forming a band was regarded as an act of rebellion against the establishment, regardless of how whimsical the early efforts of Gabriel, Banks and their school mates Michael Rutherford and Anthony Phillips actually were.

Their early band names – The Anon, the Garden Wall – are testament to their diffidence, although musically they were well-organised from the start. Gabriel had suggested they call themselves Gabriel’s Angels, which could have laid him open to Keith Emerson-style criticism, but the others were not impressed.

In fact they were given the name Genesis by Charterhouse old boy Jonathan King, who was the first to spot their potential. He’d had a hit in 1965 with Everyone’s Gone To The Moon and it wasn’t as if they had many other contacts in the music business, so they sent him a tape. King recorded their first album in ’68, From Genesis To Revelation on the Decca label, which almost nobody bought.

But they knew they could do better, and once they’d wriggled out of King’s clutches they took themselves off to a country cottage just outside Dorking where they spent six months eating, sleeping and rehearsing. Apart from taking afternoon walks they never left the place. As Mike Rutherford later observed: “We were far too intense to enjoy ourselves.”

It meant that by the time they started to play gigs they had a carefully prepared show. But at this point Gabriel became aware that he was the only one standing up on stage. “And the others had absolutely no understanding of the stress that it put on me,” he recalls. “Because I was the one who was actually having to sell it at gigs.

“And it was a lot of pressure,” he continues, “because there were audiences that weren’t the least bit interested in what we had to offer. What’s more, we had all these 12-string guitars that had to be retuned between each number. They’d be sitting there in silence, tuning up, and I’d be trying to speed it up because I could feel the energy from the audience just dissipating. That’s when I started, out of desperation, telling stories.”

Gabriel’s monologues soon became a feature of Genesis gigs as the band built up pockets of support in places like Aylesbury, Godalming and Bath. But progress was painfully slow. Despite package tours with Lindisfarne and Van der Graaf Generator – Genesis’s labelmates at their new home on Charisma – the band’s Trespass (1970) and Nursery Cryme (1971) albums sold pitifully few copies.

“We were plodders,” Gabriel admits. “I remember, after we’d been going for two or three years, talking with this guy who said he was forming a band called Curved Air. And within about three months they’d shot past us into the charts. We were quite depressed that they could do far more in a shorter space of time than we could.”

But then Genesis had very little in common with their rock’n’roll peers. While other bands would head down to the fish and chip shop or the pub after setting up their gear at a venue, the Genesis chaps would get out their lunch boxes and chow down on their egg-and-cress sandwiches.

Sex and drugs were not a prime motivation for their rock’n’roll, either. “We had read about those things,” Gabriel observes. And as for the drugs: “I had the odd experience with hash cigarettes and walked around with the giggles or threw up. It wasn’t doing it for me. Part of it was that I had a very vivid imagination and I didn’t really want to lose control.”

Genesis were even different from other prog-rock bands. They took a democratic, collective approach to their music, and there were no wanton displays of instrumental flamboyance. “It was much more a composer’s approach rather than a player’s approach,” Gabriel agrees. “Some of the other bands were better players than us but didn’t have the same approach that we did. Tony and Steven [Hackett] would have their moments but they were all within the group context.”

Another problem for Gabriel was that while his vocals provided much of the songs’ foreplay, the climaxes were often instrumentally driven, leaving him standing around, useless and frustrated. “The most I could do was to bang a tambourine. Actually, I should have been utilised on a keyboard or some other instrument, but that was all down to politics within the band.”

For all the musical drama Genesis could conjure up, it wasn’t until they developed a visual element that they started getting recognition. Gabriel had tinkered with eyeliner and shaving a wedge out of the hair above his forehead. Then he donned his wife’s (he got married in 1971) Ossie Clark designer dress (“It was a struggle getting into it”) and a fox’s head for a show in Dublin in October 1972.

“Back then Ireland was not the hippest country in Europe,” Gabriel says, with understatement, “and there was a palpable sense of shock as I walked out on stage. I thought the dressing up was fun, but the rest of the band were pretty uncomfortable about it. There was a lot of heavy discussion about whether I should be doing this sort of stuff. But I’m an obstinate bugger, particularly when people don’t want me to do something.”

Just as the others jealously guarded their instrumental domains, Gabriel protected his wardrobe. “When we started the Supper’s Ready tour I didn’t show the band any of the visual things I’d planned. I thought: ‘If these masks come up for band discussion they won’t go with it.’ I knew it would work, but I was going to have to do it furtively.

“I brought them along to the rehearsals on the day of the show. And I think the others realised at that point that they couldn’t stop me because it was too close to the show and it would really rock the boat. Fortunately the audience reacted well and I got away with it, although it was a close-run thing.”

The masks included a geometrically enhanced cardboard box, and a faintly ridiculous flower ensemble with Gabriel’s head framed by petals. With the addition of a white muslin curtain behind the band, lit by ultra-violet lights, the audience now had something to focus on apart from their own shoes.

Through 1973 and 1974 Genesis developed a cult following. They had already become big in Belgium and Italy, and their new musical tales of mystery and imagination on the Foxtrot and Selling England By The Pound albums proved particularly popular in the industrial towns and cities of northern England. They even almost had a Top 20 hit with I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe), but it stalled at No.21. And when they started touring America, their strongest areas were the blue-collar cities of the US Midwest and Canada.

“I think some of them were trying to escape from their backgrounds, and we had a romanticism that cut through to people,” Gabriel explains. “We were much more Harry Potter than The Terminator. The critical thing for me was how much feeling we were able to put out, and I think there was a real emotion getting through at our gigs.”

Emboldened by the band’s success, Gabriel’s stage outfits became more elaborate. On a couple of occasions he was even hoisted into the air on a wire to sing The Musical Box.

He also started getting more possessive over the lyrics, which caused ructions with the others who felt that words were part of the ‘group thing’. Gabriel didn’t help himself by being late with the lyrics. So it was with some reluctance that the rest of the band allowed Gabriel to write the lyrics for their conceptual tour de force The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, even though it was his concept.

“I insisted, although there were two songs in which the others got involved because they didn’t want it to be a hundred per cent. And I think that really was the reason, although they would probably give you other reasons. But I did put a copyright on the little story I wrote on the sleeve, jumbled as it is, because while I was an equal contributor on the musical ideas I knew that I was doing a lot of this work in addition. It was pure ego.”

Ego – or the flattering of it – also had a part to play in the episode that nearly wrecked Genesis during the recording of The Lamb… The Exorcist director William Friedkin had read an earlier surreal story by Gabriel on the sleeve of their Live album, and got in touch about writing a script. Already behind with The Lamb… lyrics, Gabriel asked the group for time off. When they refused, he quit. Matters were resolved only when their management warned Friedkin that he was breaking up the group. Friedkin backed off, and Peter sheepishly returned.

More traumatic was the birth of Gabriel’s first daughter, who after a complicated birth was in intensive care. “We were recording in deep Wales,” he recalls, “and my daughter was between life and death in Paddington. So there was this five-hour drive to visit my wife and daughter. It was absolutely exhausting.

“The rest of the band were sympathetic but they couldn’t understand. The Band had always been The Boss and our duty. Our life was our work, and any kind of life outside this all-consuming entity, whether private or professional, was something the others found pretty threatening.”

His daughter survived (and in the mid-noughties made a movie of her dad on tour), The Lamb… was completed after round-the-clock mixing sessions, tours were booked, and a new show conceived and prepared. But Gabriel’s perspective had changed irrevocably. Four dates into their US tour in late 1974 he told the band he was leaving, although it was another six months before he could extricate himself.

“Our manager was booking tours 18 months ahead, which is normal business practice, but I was just feeling the whole weight of commitment and thinking, when is life going to happen? Is it all just tours and records? I wanted to stop every now and again and have time with my family. But you couldn’t because it was fucking up the band.

“And the irony was that I had all that really strongly when I said I wanted to leave, because we hadn’t paid off our debt and things were really beginning to take off and now I was fucking it up for them. So the reason I stayed with the band for a European tour was guilt.

“And the thing that was hardest for me was that I had agreed that in order to give the band a chance to build a new identity I wouldn’t say anything for another six months. And I felt like a fraud. I was performing in front of all these people and I couldn’t say anything. But strangely enough I was more confident that they would do all right without me than they were.”

But the press and public didn’t see it that way. When news finally leaked out and Gabriel wrote a “convoluted letter” to the press, Genesis found themselves reading their own obituaries while everyone speculated on Gabriel’s next move.

Except that there was no next move. “It was time out rather than time off,” he explains. “After I left Genesis I wanted to be outside the music business. At first I was just growing vegetables and looking after the baby. I also looked at this commune that I was actually quite serious about joining. They’d put together different elements of spiritual traditions, and they auditioned prospective members with psychological testing and stuff like that. It was quite a weird experiment. Even weirder, it was called Genesis!

“But the more I was without music, the more I realised I still loved it and I wanted to get back. And they said: ‘If you do go back, we can all decide when you should go.’ And I thought, hang on a minute.”

Having rejected Genesis for a second time, Gabriel got back into the swing of writing songs. But who to play with? Apart from his old band, he hadn’t really hung around many musicians, although he had got to know Robert Fripp, the leader of King Crimson, and a London-based American keyboard player called Larry Fast. For Gabriel the prospect of forming a band was daunting.

He ended up going to Canada to work with Bob Ezrin, on the face of it a strange choice. Ezrin had made his name producing Alice Cooper and had recently worked with Lou Reed and Kiss.

“One of the attractions of Bob was that he seemed really good at organising people, and it was nice to feel that some of that pressure was not going to be on my shoulders,” Gabriel explains.

“I was very nervous doing the first sessions with him so I took my little English contingent with me, and he introduced me to these other musicians, one of whom was Tony Levin, who has been my bass player ever since.

“Bob helped enormously. He’s very talented. We still work together on projects. But at that time he was also a bit of a coke-inspired control freak. And that would manifest itself in various ways. There was one particular occasion when a beautiful guitar solo from Robert [Fripp] was erased and we didn’t quite know why. And that created tension.

“Then there were the sessions for Here Comes The Flood, when I wasn’t sure about the drum part so I wanted it isolated so I could erase it if necessary. But when I listened back the drums had been mixed in with the orchestra, and there was no way I could get rid of it. There were several moments like that. But we found a way through, and I think there are bits of that album [the first Peter Gabriel] that are really good and focused. There’s just a few bits where it goes off the rails.”

By now it was 1977 and, as Gabriel had predicted, Genesis had already risen, phoenix-like, and were more commercially successful than ever. Suddenly it was ‘Peter who?’ Thank goodness, then, for Solsbury Hill which gave Gabriel a Top 20 hit and the exposure he needed to launch his solo career. “That was something Bob Ezrin kept pushing me to finish. He’s very good at motivating people to get on with writing.”

His first tour that year put further distance between him and his former band – no dramatics, no costumes, just a simple but effective light show. “I was definitely trying not to play Genesis songs, although I did do Back In New York City [from The Lamb…]. And there were a couple of covers – Marvin Gaye’s Ain’t That Peculiar and The Kinks’ All Day & All Of The Night – which were outside the prog-rock background I was associated with.”

He had also been thinking about the barrier between the performer and the audience, and “how much more interesting it could be if you tried to break through that”. The newly developed radio microphone gave him the first chance: he’d disappear off stage during the introduction to Waiting For The Big One and reappear at the back of the stalls or the balcony before making his way back to the stage through the audience.

“You couldn’t pre-programme the show if there was a physical interaction with the audience,” he explains. “They could determine how long you were out there. It certainly added a sense of alive-ness to the show. Because I was putting myself in a place that was potentially vulnerable. And things like trust start to come into play.” Later on he would take that a big step – or fall – further.

Having put clear daylight between himself and Genesis – and had a hit single as well – Gabriel now had to decide which way to go on the next album.

“I was worried about getting drawn back into the pop thing. So the second album was a deliberate attempt to go somewhere else, and I asked Robert Fripp to produce it. He said: ‘That’s a wonderful idea. We’ll do the whole thing in six weeks. No pussyfooting around.’ I thought that sounded exciting and I decided to go for it.

“But what I learnt was that I don’t do good work in a hurry. I may get moments of things, but not a proper body of work. The songs weren’t as good as they could have been, the lyrics weren’t as good as they could have been, the arrangements certainly weren’t as good as they could have been, and the sounds weren’t as good as they could have been.

“It took until the next record to find out what I was as a solo artist, or could be. That was in the framework of feeling more settled with the band, and having the great team of [producer] Steve Lillywhite and [engineer] Hugh Padgham.”

The framework for that third album also included an odd rule: no cymbals. “I’d been thinking about the things I didn’t like on rock records,” Gabriel explains, “and one of the things was cymbals splashing around all over the place. They take up an incredible amount of space in the higher sound frequencies. And if you take them out you give yourself a whole country to explore.

“So I said no cymbals. And that meant that the drummers – mainly Jerry Marotta but also Phil Collins and Morris Pert – couldn’t do what they normally do. Suddenly they had to think differently. And that affected the spine of the piece, the rhythm. And everything else.”

Out of that quest for new and different drum sounds came the gated reverb, an effect that engineer Padgham had tried out on an XTC album shortly before. “He was playing with it in the studio, and I got quite excited and asked him to turn it right up. I remember saying: ‘This is going to revolutionise drum sounds.’ I wanted to do a track that was entirely based around that sound. And that track was Intruder. Phil was playing on that track and he got excited by it too.

“It’s a minor thing, but when people listen to that song and say: ‘You took that Phil Collins [In The Air Tonight] drum sound,’ that niggles me.”

That sound gave Gabriel’s third album a potent, if ominous, sound that ran from the opening Intruder through to the closing anthem Biko. Even the poppy Games Without Frontiers had menacing undertones. It was all too much for Atlantic Records in America, who decided to pass on the record. “Apparently after they heard Lead A Normal Life they asked my manager whether I’d been in a mental institution,” Gabriel says. “The head of A&R, John Kalodner, kept wanting me to sound more like the Doobie Brothers, who were very popular at the time.”

The album – his third to, confusingly, be titled simply Peter Gabriel – turned out to be his most successful so far in both the US and the UK, justifying his barbed comment about Atlantic’s “short-sighted and bigoted attitude”.

But it worked. Sledgehammer was a worldwide hit – No.1 in America – and the So album topped the UK charts and spent three weeks at No.2 in the US. Finally, Gabriel was a star and, having kept the music business at arm’s length for 20 years, suddenly he went high-profile, turning up at awards shows.

“I’d avoided all of that stuff and had a very pure, Stalinist line against the business, but I did embrace the selling of my music at this point, and I didn’t really feel much the worse for it. I didn’t feel that the angle of bending over had exceeded my natural comfort zone,” he adds with a smile.

The This Way Up date schedule included all but one of the So songs, and expanded the light and space concepts from the previous tour. This time Gabriel used mobile lighting cranes, which were at their most effective when they crowded round him while he sang Mercy Street. And the rousing duet with Youssou N’Dour on In Your Eyes was an inspired piece of world music alchemy.

Gabriel was reaching a new audience, drawn in by the videos and his media profile. “It was a pop audience that I hadn’t had before. And I’m afraid some of the cult followers were not very happy to share with the casual viewers,” he recalls.

“And then, just as everything was beginning to wind down, the album got another boost from the Say Anything movie, with John Cusack holding up a radio playing In Your Eyes as a Valentine’s Day offering for his girlfriend. You never quite know when these external events are going to help or hinder you.”

Typically, Gabriel managed to dissipate much of his new-found rock-star status by taking six years for the follow-up, Us. Admittedly there was another soundtrack (Passion) and a compilation (Shaking The Tree) in between, but he acknowledges an almost wilful intent: “I have tended to follow a successful album with a less successful album. I think I’ve protected myself with obscurity whenever I was threatened with success.”

On stage Gabriel, who had now gone skinhead, continued his walkabouts, sometimes ‘surfing’ the audience on a piece of plywood which was carried along by four strong roadies acting as pall-bearers. When he occasionally fell off, the audience, far from ripping him to shreds in a frenzy, helped him back on to the board. From that developed the idea of deliberately falling backwards into the audience from the lip of the stage.

“I’d done those hippy psychological games, falling backwards and trusting people to catch you, so I thought I’d do that on stage and hope that they caught me. When you go forwards that’s one thing, but when you go backwards it’s another completely. For the most part I got caught. But early on, in San Francisco, they thought: ‘This must be part of the act. We’d better move away.’ And that hurt!”

Even when they caught him the audience were not always reverential. “I was debagged on a regular basis. And in Chicago I barely held on to my underpants. I clambered back on stage holding my belly in as best I could. Later on I saw an REM video where Michael Stipe dives into the audience and I thought: ‘Damn, I should have done the video while I was ahead.’”

Gabriel’s stage-diving antics began on the mysteriously named Tour Of China 1984 – it was only 1980 at the time. “Well, there was this big thing about who would be the first rock act to play China. I knew I wasn’t going to be the first, but I thought I might as well do the merchandise. And 1984 always struck me as a scary year ever since I read the book.”

The closest Gabriel actually got to China was when the Tianjin Song & Dance Ensemble performed at the first WOMAD Festival in 1981, which he was heavily involved in. That event is now seen as the catalyst for the burgeoning world music scene, but at the time it bankrupted Gabriel and exposed him to a few unpleasant realities. Genesis bailed him out with a benefit show the following year.

“People were saying: ‘Who is this fat cat watching us suffer?’ when in fact the debt was far more money than I had to my name. It was extraordinary to see what happened when it all went bankrupt. I got death threats, and the liquidators actually forged a signature of one of the WOMAD directors so they could get their cut of the Genesis benefit concert.”

The Genesis reunion concert at Milton Keynes the following year paid off the debts, but Gabriel emphasised the one-off nature of the reunion by entering and leaving the stage in a coffin.

His own enthusiasm for world music was evident from the opening track of his fourth Peter Gabriel album (titled Security in America), The Rhythm Of The Heat. “I’d been working with this Ghanaian drum band, Ekome, in Bristol, and that’s where the final section of that song came from. Getting that change of rhythm down was incredibly exciting – one of those moments when you think: ‘Nailed it!’ A great feeling.”

The unrelenting intensity of Gabriel’s fourth album – musically even the hook-laden single Shock The Monkey was like a coiled spring – scuppered its chances of being his breakthrough album. “It wasn’t a big seller,” Gabriel confirms. “Some of the hardcore fans think it’s the best record but others thought it was too wacky. Maybe that’s because I was taking a bigger role in the production.”

The complex and sometimes impenetrable videos didn’t help, either. But live the musicians had developed into a cohesive, energetic unit that attacked the songs’ dynamics with a cavalcade of synthesised rhythms and loops. The stage was sparse, the lights white and bright, and ‘the dive’ took on an almost religious significance. David Bowie was so impressed that he took Gabriel along with him on the North American leg of his Serious Moonlight ‘comeback’ tour in 1983.

Gabriel began work on the next album the following year, but got waylaid by soundtrack projects for Birdy, Against All Odds and Gremlins, not to mention domestic strife and temporary separation from his family. But when So finally emerged in May 1986 it was emphatically a case of right record, right time.

“It exceeded all our expectations, in terms of making music as well as commercially,” Gabriel admits. “I had hooked up with Daniel Lanois, who co-produced the album with me, and all the elements were fitting together. But then it’s always easier to look back in hindsight. I mean, even though Sledgehammer felt strong and the groove was great it didn’t feel like a big hit record. People go: ‘You must have known it was the commercial track,’ but it wasn’t until we started doing the video that we got a feeling about it.”

The Sledgehammer video was when Gabriel’s complicated ideas were made accessible. “I think it was looking forwards and backwards at the same time,” he muses. “People think it was done with a lot of computer effects, but it fact it was old-fashioned animation techniques. It was a slow, tortuous process. And the day I spent surrounded by stale fish that had been under the bright lights the day before was not a sensual experience I want to repeat.”

Us may have sold only around half of what So did, but it probably wouldn’t have sold much more even if it had come out four years earlier. Where So was direct and accessible, Us was pristine but introspective. The cult following had their man back again. “I didn’t feel the production caught the energy sometimes, but I felt good about the songs,” Gabriel reflects.

The accompanying Secret World tour was an ambitious leap into the unknown. It was the brainchild of acclaimed designer Robert Lepage, who, Gabriel says, “creates theatre for people who go to the cinema. It was not just about words and performance, it had what I call a high moisture content – a mysterious environment, if you like – and I wanted to see if we could incorporate that into our show.”

Set in the round, the set had two stages with a walkway between. “There was the male square stage and the female round stage, and obviously some random stereotyping in that sense,” Gabriel explains. “But having two places to go, the feeling of playing two stages, was quite different from the usual show where everybody’s pointing the same way and the energy is going in the same direction.”

But despite the show’s complexity there were no dazzling affects to wow the audience. “A lot of acts were in the ‘weapons race’ back then: how many lights you can have, that sort of thing,” Gabriel says. “We went out with about a tenth of the weapons of some of these bands, but we were trying to use them in a more interesting way. I think it’s an important distinction; it’s not all about quantity.”

Some of it was about choreography, though, given Lepage’s theatrical background, and some of the band had to learn to skip in unison. But skip they did as the Secret World tour traversed the globe for most of 1993 and 1994, visiting countries off rock’n’roll’s beaten track like India, Egypt, Chile and Venezuela.

The six-year gap between So and Us paled in comparison to the 10-year wait for Up, which eventually arrived in September 2002. “It’s a bookends record,” according to a 50-something Gabriel in 2004, “looking more at the beginning and end of life than the middle.”

Songs about death (I Grieve) and childhood fears (Darkness) may not be obvious rock’n’roll subject matter, although they are broken up by some thunderous metallic beats and rhythms, as well as the life-affirming More Than This and a caustic satire on reality TV (The Barry Williams Show).

“To begin with, Up got some really bad reviews,” he admits. “Rolling Stone gave me a stinker, which was quite disappointing because I felt I’d worked bloody hard at it and it has some of my best work. It’s taken a while, but recently I’ve had musicians come up to me and say it’s my best record. Which is some consolation.”

And if they didn’t like the record, the critics have been effusive about the latest Still Growing Up tour. Last time, Lepage and Gabriel spread out horizontally, this time they’ve gone upwards. “We decided to try and create levels and variations vertically, so that you end up effectively with a heaven stage and an earth stage and a means of moving things – and people – up and down.”

Which is how Gabriel and his daughter Melanie come to be walking upside down on the underside of heaven, singing Downside Up (from Gabriel’s OVO Millennium Dome show).

“Actually I was dreading that,” Gabriel confesses. “While Robert and I were working on the idea someone had actually fallen. And my daughter was going to be asked to do this, so I wanted to make doubly sure it was safe. The first time she did it live I was very emotional. I was wanting to be protective and supportive but at the same time I just wanted to sit back and enjoy it.”

The Still Growing Up tour does have some gadgets to impress the audience: the Zorg ball, a huge, transparent hamster wheel inside which Gabriel walks while singing Growing Up. His original intention was to walk out over the heads of the audience in a novel departure from his earlier stage diving. “But it was pointed out to me that the combined weight of the ball and my not inconsiderable weight might flatten some smaller members of the audience.” There’s also the jacket of lights that he wears for Sledgehammer, and the bike he rides around the stage while singing Solsbury Hill.

“One of the things I enjoy most is brainstorming with interesting people,” Gabriel says, “and doing a very visual tour gives me the chance to do that. The big production stuff is something I‘ve always enjoyed, right from the early days of Genesis.”

In a wardrobe of his there probably still lurks a red dress and a fox’s head.

“Ozzy’s legacy isn’t fading,” says the singer’s wife and manager, Sharon Osbourne, in an interview in the brand new issue of Metal Hammer. “I cannot tell you how blown away we’ve all been with the love that has been shown for him.”

Sharon confirms that 2027 will see the return of Ozzfest, the travelling festival that helped change the course of metal in the late 1990s and early 2000s – and she also added that it would be held at Villa Park in Birmingham, the venue for Ozzy’s swansong, the star-packed Back To The Beginning gig, which took place on July 5, 2025.

“It’s going to be at Villa Park again,” says Sharon. “Whether it’ll be two nights [in Birmingham], that’s up for the fans to tell me.”

At the time of going to press, no date or festival headliners had been announced. “Of course we’re speaking to people,” she says. “I can’t let that out yet, but it’ll be soon.”

Speaking to her son Jack on The Osbournes Podcast in March, Sharon said that she hoped to bring Ozzfest to the US for two dates.

“We want to hear from everyone where we should go in America,” she told Jack. “We’ve got to find a lot of young, new talent, because that’s what your dad would want.”

There are also plans to revisit Back To The Beginning itself. A much-rumoured film of the show will finally be released, featuring appearances from all the bands who played, from Metallica and Guns N’ Roses to Black Sabbath and Ozzy himself.

“It’s coming. It will be out this year,” Sharon promises. “The most precious thing that people can give you is their time, and they all took time out of their summer to come and do this show. Everybody deserves to be seen and heard.”

More contentious is the upcoming AI avatar of Ozzy. The Osbournes have teamed up with tech companies Hyperreal and Proto Hologram to create a digital version of the singer that fans can talk to and interact with.

“You can ask [the digital] Ozzy anything, and he will answer you in his own voice – and the answers will be what Ozzy would have said,” Sharon said at the Licensing Expo 2026 in Las Vegas in May. “People can talk to him and he will talk back.”

While specific details and locations are still under wraps, the avatar will reportedly appear via interactive touchscreens. The news has prompted pushback from some fans.

“I’ve seen such shit online about it being a ‘money grab’,” Sharon tells Hammer. “Why would I need to do that? It’s not as if I’m using Ozzy to sell fucking weedkiller or beer. Ozzy loved the idea. We’ve been talking about it for 10 years. Ozzy has this great body of work that took a lifetime to do – why shouldn’t he still be seen? Why should we have to watch the same videos over and over again, when there’s technology available that means we don’t have to? If you don’t like it, don’t go see it. I’m not at people’s houses with a fucking gun, going, ‘Give me your money!’”

Less controversial is the long-gestating Ozzy biopic, which Sharon says is moving forwards after years in development hell.

“We’re now on our second writer because we had somebody else write three different drafts, and we felt that it wasn’t Ozzy’s voice,” says Sharon. “We feel that this new guy has got Ozzy’s voice, and we’re ready to send [the script] out to directors. When I used to see people get up at the Oscars and say, ‘I’ve been working on this movie for 20 years, and we finally got it made!’ I’d think, ‘Bullshit.’ But it’s true. It’s not like making a record, believe you me. Working with the writers and the directors is a whole fucking lifetime commitment to get a movie done.”

Elsewhere, the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery has recently extended Working Class Hero, its exhibition dedicated to Ozzy, until September 27. The gothic black throne used by Ozzy at Back To The Beginning was added to the exhibition at the start of July to mark the anniversary of the show. Sadly, a campaign to rename Birmingham Airport after Ozzy has so far been unsuccessful, despite almost 78,000 people signing a petition.

“Birmingham has always been embarrassed about its heavy metal heritage - and that’s unacceptable,” the campaign’s organiser, Dan Hudson, told Hammer in January.

Still, Sharon says her plans to honour her husband’s legacy will be a fitting tribute to the Prince Of Darkness.

“He’s the guy that came from nothing, had nothing, and made it – and he never, ever forgot who he was or where he came from,” she says. “He never tried to be anything other than what he was – a genuine guy, fucking out of his mind, beautifully insane. He was just one in a million.”

The new issue of Metal Hammer is onsale now. Order it here and have it delivered straight to your door.

Speaking in a new interview in The Sunday Times, the former Genesis drummer and solo superstar says that he was hospitalised and put on life support after his organs began to fail.

“[There] were some decisions to be made about ‘Do we keep Phil on life support?’ kind of thing,” Collins says. “My kidneys were packing up, my organs were just seizing up. People were coming to say goodbye. But I don’t remember them coming, I didn’t have no idea this was going on. They were all worried that they wouldn’t see me again. It could all have gone so terribly wrong.”

Collins gave up alcohol after being hospitalised with acute pancreatitis in 2012, writing in his 2016 autobiography, Not Dead Yet, that his drinking “nearly killed me”. But by 2023, he had fallen off the wagon. “I’d have wine when I woke up,” he tells The Sunday Times. “That was what I’d want for breakfast, a glass of wine.”

The drummer was hospitalised once again at the end of 2023, eventually ending up in intensive care, where doctors feared that he wouldn’t survive. He stayed in hospital for seven months. “I was very lucky to have come out of that. Needless to say, I haven’t had a drink since,” says Collins, who suffers from nerve damage that has left him unable to drum, as well as Type 2 diabetes and kidney issues.

In the same interview, Collins reveals that he and Paul McCartney have recently healed a rift that dates back to 2016.

According to Collins, McCartney took issue with an interview in which he said the ex-Beatle was always condescending towards him. Collins says McCartney emailed him at the time, “saying, ‘I’m a bit disappointed, blah blah’… it kind of left a bad taste in my mouth and obviously left a bad taste in his.”

Collins says that the two men made up after McCartney called him to say he would donate memorabilia to a charity auction that Collins was working on. McCartney bought up the decade-old interview and, according to the former Genesis man, the pair talked it through.

“And I wish I hadn’t said it, although it did happen. But we’ve made up, he’s happy about the fact that we discussed it, and I’m happy we discussed it, so it was just really lovely that it’s gone full circle now.”

Collins joined Genesis as drummer in 1970 before taking over singing duties after original frontman Peter Gabriel left in 1975. He launched a parallel solo career with 1981’s Face Value, soon to be reissued as an expanded, four-LP vinyl box set.

He retired from music in 2011 after suffering various health problems, but returned to touring as a solo artist in 2017 and, four years later, with the reunited Genesis. He retired for the second and final time in 2022, at the end of the latter’s farewell tour.

Collins is due to be inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame as solo artist in November 2026.

Their 2004 album, Once, turned them into superstars, but just a year later she was publicly sacked by the band in an open letter – a drama that rocked the metal scene. Since then, she’s built a successful solo career exploring metal and classical music, survived a stroke, and has just released the heaviest album of her career, Frisson Noir. Now she looks back on what life’s taught her.

KNOW WHAT YOU WANT

“When I left school, I got into the Sibelius Academy, the only university academy that we had in Finland. I was focused on becoming a professional opera singer at the time. I knew that, no matter what, I would fight my way to work in music; it was my only serious passion. I left my little village of 500 inhabitants for music, against the odds. Music was the only real thing that made me happy and confident in myself.”

LISTEN TO YOUR MUM

“A long time ago, my mother said to me that there is no way fame can change you. Keep your feet on the ground, reach for the clouds, but do not go there in your head. My mother was a very clever woman. When it started to go really fast with Nightwish, I told my brothers, ‘If you see me changing, punch me.’”

SOMETIMES YOU’VE JUST GOT TO TAKE THE LEAP

“We supported Iron Maiden [at Mystic Festival in Poland] in 2005. My strategy has always been to focus on the performance. I didn’t want to think about who I was performing for, I needed to get the best out of the situation. I didn’t remember hearing that the show sucked. I didn’t remember hearing, ‘Who is that bitch? What is she doing?’ So it must have gone pretty well.”

THERE’S NO RULEBOOK IN METAL

“It’s been seven years since my last metal album. My new one, Frisson Noir, is absolutely heavy. When it comes to my live performances, I have a really heavy band and they create this wall of sound, which I love very much. But on the records, I’ve been missing that.

On the new album, Blaze Forever was a song that, when I wrote it, I told my guitar player, ‘OK, this riff needs to be really heavy.’ The Eternal Return is also a really heavy track, then I broke down the heaviness with the middle eight, which is completely from the other world, with a classical cello. This is who I am. I’m not afraid of breaking the rules when it comes to music.”

FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHTS

“It’s very sad how everything ended up [with Nightwish], but the thing that I would have done differently is, I probably should have put them through hell. I had all my rights, there were contracts, and they would have been in deep shit for a long time if I had done that, according to my rights, but I didn’t. I just decided to move on and leave.”

YOU’RE NOT PARANOID IF THEY ARE OUT TO GET YOU

“What followed was their really great planning, how they wanted to destroy me publicly. That was something I never expected. It was nasty.”

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE JUST GOTTA GET AWAY

“It was an insane period [after the split], and in a small country like Finland, my face was covering the tabloids for three weeks or so. I left my home country. I had to. I went down to Buenos Aires.

It was tough, because it affected so many more people than just me. It affected my family, my friends. Everybody was destroyed. It took me a long time to gain trust in people again. But luckily, I have amazing relationships and a long-lasting marriage with my husband. My family, my friends were there for me in that very hard period.”

SOME BRIDGES CAN STILL BE MENDED… BUT NOT ALL

“I was one of the invited singers in [Finnish Christmas] production Raskasta Joulua. Marko [Hietala, former Nightwish bandmate] was also one of the singers. We hadn’t met each other, seen each other, or heard anything about each other in 12 years. He called in all the production – a huge production – and apologised to me in front of everybody. He apologised to me, he apologised to my husband. It was a ‘wow’ moment for me; he’s absolutely not the same person. We talk a lot about the past, and we call each other. He calls me when he needs advice; it’s a completely different scenario. He is the only person from my time in Nightwish I could work with again.”

SPEAK UP

“I’m still struggling with the fact that when it comes to something I don’t like, [I need to,] you know, say it out loud. I might say, ‘You better do this differently’ or, ‘Could you please do this differently?’ But it’s still a struggle for me to speak up.”

…AND DON’T LET ANYBODY BULLY YOU

“In my solo career, nobody has bullied me. My latest single, I Don’t Care, talks about it – that I don’t let anybody direct me anymore. Since I started to build my own career, people have tried to make me do things differently, but I’ve always fought my way through. I’ve collaborated, but never let anybody say, ‘OK, you should do it like this.’”

HITTING 40 GAVE ME A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON LIFE

“When I started, I was very innocent, not aware of anything. I’ve changed. When you hit the number 40, you start forgiving yourself. You live more in the moment by understanding the environment and the people you are with. You know there is a different depth in the world, which is beautiful. You live and learn.”

CORPORATE GIGS ARE WEIRD

“This one private event happened in Russia, in Sochi, many years ago. They wanted me to perform a half-hour set at a big corporate gig. They built a really small stage that we barely fit on with our gear, and there was a huge catwalk in front.

They have these gorgeous women there, these supermodels, two metres tall. These ladies came around on the edges of the catwalk where I’m performing, and they start throwing me rose petals. I am playing heavy metal music, and the ladies are throwing me rose petals. I felt so shit. It was humiliating. Nevertheless, we played for 30 minutes. People loved it, and we left."

HAVING A STROKE CHANGED ME

“It’s unbelievable that we continue to do things that are hurting us, and we wait until something bad happens. They didn’t find any reason for the stroke. It was just stress. I made some changes. I learned [Japanese healing technique] reiki, and I went to therapy sessions. I have also shortened my touring periods. I need to. I don’t want to tour that much, it’s too stressful. It’s hard being a mother and an artist. The travelling part is hard, but physically being a singer is too. It’s healthy for everybody, though. My crew loves to go back home after 2.5 weeks of being on the road.”

MUSIC HAS SAVED ME IN MY DARKEST MOMENTS

“A few months after my stroke, I needed to start writing the lyrics for my new album. The songs were written, and the music was down. I had the blank paper and didn’t know how to start, and the music saved me. In that moment, I found my courage and my confidence. When I finished the lyrics, I was a wreck. But it gave me the satisfaction, the knowledge, the awareness – I’m alive. I mean, alive, and it was a beautiful feeling.”

YOU NEVER RUN OUT OF THINGS TO ACHIEVE

“I would love to find out if I’m capable of writing a score for a movie, or sing in an opera. I was asked [the latter] in the past, but I never had time. Time has been my biggest enemy, seriously. I have huge respect for the professionals in the field, I’m far away from being good at singing opera these days. I should take serious time off and only focus on that.”

IT’S WHAT I’M KNOWN FOR, BUT I DON’T CONSIDER MYSELF AN OPERA SINGER

“My singing teacher would probably kill me straight away. I never worked professionally in classical music. My whole education was geared towards chamber music – it’s different from opera. I still maintain that I did a classical album, and I hope to work on another one, but I’m a lead singer. ”

Frisson Noir is out now via Earmusic.

That was certainly the case around the time of their second album, Iowa, if producer Ross Robinson is to be believed. Speaking to Metal Hammer in a brand new interview just ahead of the album’s 25th anniversary, Robinson looks back on the internal and external pressures surrounding the band as they worked on the follow-up to their game-changing 1999 debut – and how they were even talking about splitting at one point.

“I did get a complaint from Paul [Gray, bassist] or maybe Joey [Jordison, drummer] at one point before we recorded, where they were like, ‘We’re just not getting along. We’re gonna break up,’” says Ross. “So I flew out to them. Corey [Taylor, frontman] took me out and was showing me Stone Sour stuff. It was like, ‘Erm, this is cool… but it’s not Slipknot.’”

Robinson puts the tensions down to the intensity of being the most talked-about new band in metal. “That transition from having this vision from nothing, to it becoming so extreme as far as success and everything goes… Nobody goes to school for it, there’s no education for how to deal with everybody suddenly kissing your butt no matter what you do or say,” he says. “Girls that would never have looked at you, suddenly paying you all this attention… it’s very confusing. It was tough on these innocent Beavises!”

Robinson also recalled singer Taylor rolling around naked on the floor and cutting himself with glass during sessions. “He had to strip his soul all the way. I do remember seeing him naked a lot. We’d get all woo-woo around the lyrics, go deep into the meaning and the tone of everything, so I’d have chills by the time I hit record.”

Read the full interview with Ross Robinson about the making of Iowa in the brand new issue of Metal Hammer, onsale now. Order it online and have it delivered straight to your door.

When Bruce Dickinson rejoined Maiden in 1999, Blaze continued on alone, first with his solo venture Blaze, and then also with a resurrected Wolfsbane intermittently from 2007 onwards. We put him to the torch with your questions.

Do you plan to ever tour the US again?
Ok_imfc, Instagram

“It’s really challenging for smaller artists. I’m an independent artist; I’ve got lots of fans in the US, but they all live so far apart it’s impossible to get them all together for a gig. It’s actually so much easier to go to Canada, so I might end up there first.”

Which cut X Factor song do you wish had made it onto the album?
Unchained_Colours, Instagram

“Justice Of The Peace. We did the three B-sides from The X Factor when we did the anniversary tour, and once we got them polished up, Justice… was really cool. Those three songs, it would’ve been great to have more time to mix them and put them on the record. It went so well, we might bring it back on my October tour.”

How do you look after yourself with such a busy schedule?
Daniel Armstrong, Facebook

“I don’t – I had a heart attack! Touring is unhealthy, and that’s even without booze and drugs, because there is erratic sleep and long travels sitting in a van. But how I’ve got to where I am is that I’m straight-edge. I think about my health a lot. It’s been seven years since I stopped drinking completely.”

Hammer: What made you quit?

“Mental health – I’ve always had problems. When I was diagnosed with depression 25 years ago, I didn’t even know what it was. I’d heard of it, but I didn’t realise you could get medication for it. I’d already stopped drinking on show days or the day before a show, but when I was off tour I slipped back into the habit of drinking – doing things you shouldn’t, like drinking alone, so I decided to stay stopped. Anyone who thinks they might have a problem, I urge you to try quitting and give it six months. I've been seven years [sober] on June 19, and the people who I know who’ve been on this journey… we’d never go back.”

Which songs on [2000 solo Blaze album] Silicon Messiah did you originally write for Brave New World?
Kilian Alpert, Facebook

“Born As A Stranger and A Ghost In The Machine. I’d read the book Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, and that was it. I was very interested in what was happening with artificial intelligence and was very interested in what [American computer scientist and author] Ray Kurzweil was saying about it. Those two ideas, especially Born As A Stranger, were the first things I tried with musicians when I was putting the band together. I might do one of those at Eddfest, actually.”

Would you ever write a daily column called Blaze Daily?
Mark Enschrøde, Facebook

“My problem is that I suffer from laziness. Doing something on a daily basis, that feels like actual work! I’ve got enough with my two radio shows, recording them every week. That’s plenty for me, man! Once a month, I might do something; I’d probably call it ‘Cooking With Blaze’ and it’d be stuff like my signature dish, fish finger curry. There are variations of that – my sausage and mushroom curry is also worthy of a mention.”

Wolfsbane’s [1990 track] Kathy Wilson is an under-appreciated masterpiece. Did you write any more sci-fi-themed tunes at the time?
Outshined1969, Instagram

“No, it was a one-off. We love science fiction, especially that 50s thing where it’s the paranoia for Communism and its all a metaphor for what was happening. We loved doing that album [All Hell’s Breaking Loose Down At Little Kathy Wilson’s Place], but we felt cheated in a way. We never had a Kathy Wilson tour. It sounds like sour grapes, but we did the Iron Maiden support tour and everything went really well, but because of how our deal was structured, the record company never gave us our own tour afterwards. That’s why we think the album didn’t get to where it should have."

What new metal bands are you digging these days? Bobthrash, Instagram

“I’m loving Green Lung and Wytch Hazel. There’s a few actually – Monster Truck aren’t new, but they’re new to me. Jayler and Tailgunner, too. Things are going to change over the next three years, and these bands are going to come into their own. If all of them can make a great studio album, I think it’ll push them to be the next wave.”

If the Maiden offer hadn’t existed, would you have stayed in Wolfsbane?
Horia Argintaru, Facebook

“I don’t know. That’s a challenging question. We were very loyal to each other, but the horrible reality was that we’d been dropped by the label and had no record deal. Our manager said, ‘Lads, you’ve got nothing.’ Grunge was coming up and we refused to become like that, because we were proud of the music we were making on The White Album [1994’s Wolfsbane], which we’re actually remastering. I don’t think we could’ve carried on much longer. I had no plans at that point to do anything solo – that only came after Maiden.”

Will Maiden ever release a DVD/live album of your era?
Anders Bogelöv, Facebook

“No, there’s very little footage of that era. I’ve moved something like six times since then, so most of what I’d kept has just disappeared or got lost. If you look at [2003 DVD set] Visions Of The Beast, I’ve got six songs on there. That’s probably as close as we’re going to get. Actually, what we do have is Chile. I’m famous for losing my temper there…”

Hammer: Tell us more…

“There were six people spitting at the band. Because of diseases, everybody was cautious and had to stand at the back. Maiden had never played there – they’d been banned by the church. But [in 1996], after Bon Jovi, Metallica, Black Sabbath… all the big bands had come, the greatest metal band of them all was going to Chile. So you can imagine the expectation, and these guys were ruining it for everyone.

But the Chilean equivalent of the BBC set up in the theatre and filmed that whole gig without permission. Because the police there were wearing guns and it was all a bit edgy, nobody felt like we could say, ‘You can’t film this.’ So I think there is one full gig. It went pretty well and I sounded good – meltdown aside!”

Are you still writing a book around the Infinite Entanglement Trilogy?
Saanichman, Instagram

“Yep! I hit a problem with my laptop and arthritis in one of my fingers, but I spoke to someone who writes books and they explained how to use dictation. So when I come back from the next big break – probably end of next year – I’ll finish it up. I’ve got about a third done.”

Would you record with Maiden again, given the chance?
Rated.R_metalhead, Instagram

“We’ve never had any animosity. One of the things that Bruce and Paul Di’Anno didn’t have was, they’d not seen Maiden as a fan. I saw them at Birmingham Odeon three times on three different tours. I’d got every studio album. Walking into it, I hoped it would last, but I knew if it ever ended I’d be tagged an ex-member of Iron Maiden. Which, as a fan… great! Iron Maiden are as important culturally as Star Wars.”

Hammer: And if they asked?

“If there was a project where they’d want the two voices, I’d be absolutely fine. Why would I be against that?! It’d be fun! My dream was to do a gig where Paul, Bruce and me could share a stage. For fans, it’d be absolute madness. At the same time, if I wrote something where I thought, ‘This could do with Bruce’, I’d ask him, same as anybody else!”

Do you still have something to prove?
Jordan R.A. Mills, Facebook

“As an artist, there are things I want to do. With [2024 solo album] Circle Of Stone, I felt I really managed to express a lot of the passion and darkness, using my voice in a way that I hadn’t before. But I’ve done it all: had a Top 10 single, played around the world, done gigs in stadiums and arenas. I’m living my dream of being a professional heavy metal singer: I don’t have to prove anything.”

Blaze's UK tour starts on October 1.

Jimi Hendrix

We shared a house in Holland Park – Pat [PP] Arnold’s house – and he gave me a basset hound called Snoopy that used to shit everywhere. Pat said: “Either the dog goes or you two go”. So Jimi said: “Why don’t I go and you keep my dog? I’ve got to move on anyway”. He was quite quiet as a flatmate: Quaaluded-up all the time. And spliffed. Very laid back. He’d just sit back and play right-handed or left-handed guitar – that ambidextrousness blew my mind.

If I try to play left-handed it’s like giving a child a guitar. We used to get out the acoustics and swap blues licks, sometimes for him to warm-up before a show. He always said: “I don’t like my voice”. And I’d say: “Don’t worry, your guitar playing takes care of that.” He was a very sweet man. I remember him walking out of Ronnie Scott’s on the night he died. He had his arm around a girl and I shouted after him: “Oi, Jimi, say goodnight!” I was in tears when I found out the next day. I couldn’t believe it.

Ronnie Lane

He was a lovely boy, until he took the gypsy route and moved to some remote farm in Wales with his best friend’s girl. It always used to be Ronnie and Sue Lane, always together with their dog Molly. Then one day he came round and said: “I’m leaving Sue. And I’m also leaving the group.” And I went: “What? Nice joke!”

We always used to say that we were leaving during group arguments, it would dispel any bad vibes in the room and we’d all have a laugh. But he said: “No, I really am leaving the group”. That was the last I saw of him, and then his health went down. The MS [Multiple Sclerosis] got progressively worse. We did our best for him, Rod and I investigated snake venom treatment, pressure tanks, but after a while there was very little we could do.

Rod Stewart

Last time I saw Rod he was so lovely to me. He gave me and my girlfriend a wonderful evening. We had dinner with his family at his Celtic House in Hollywood. It’s very Hollywood, with effigies in the garden, columns, water-spouting fountains.

It’s a really over-the-top mansion, just like you would imagine. Rod likes to show his wealth, with his collection of Pre-Raphaelite-type paintings. He often says to me: “Is that one alright? Did I buy the right painting?” And I go: “Rod, buy whatever you want, you know what you like.

Jeff Beck

He used to be incredibly shy when were in The Jeff Beck Group, as was Rod. If there was another guitar player like BB King or Albert King on the bill he’d go: “No, I can’t go on,” and he’d disappear because he’d think he wasn’t good enough. Rod would be like: “I’m gonna sing behind the amps, I’m too shy,” and I’d say: “Why don’t you just come out and enjoy yourselves?”

That’s how it developed with The Faces – we got rid of all the nerves. Everything was a risk, some risks came off and some didn’t and the audience picked up on that looseness and raggedness. There’s still a bit of that with The Faces. You can’t polish a turd – unless you wait for it to go hard.

Keith Richards

He’s not happy unless he’s working with the Stones, nor is Charlie [Watts, Stones drummer] really… nor is Mick and nor am I. But it’s a matter of getting all those energies directed at the same thing at the same time. The next thing will be a group meeting, probably before Christmas, and we’ll decide whether to record, or do live, or both. See how everybody’s doing.

When I first took Keith home he was high, and crashed out on my dad’s couch in the living room. So my dad come down at seven in the morning, opens the curtains and Keith went: [bellows] “Fuck off!” And my dad came straight back with “Nobody swears in my house!” and ordered him out. Keith had a tremendous amount of respect for my dad after that.

Bob Dylan

Working with Bob can be hard for most people, but not for me, because I know that he doesn’t know what’s coming next, so it’s easy to fit in with his meanderings. You have to follow him into various oxbow lakes. That’s the way he thinks – it ends up going in a straight line, but takes various deviations along the way.

Often a song that he’s thinking one way will come out in a totally different way, which is evident when you see him live. You’ll be saying: “Was that Blowing In The Wind or All Along The Watchtower?”

Axl Rose & Slash

Guns N’ Roses and the Stones did a few shows together on the Bridges To Babylon tour and that’s when I got to know them. They were really sweet guys, but they all knew they were too high to carry on at that rate. Axl used to call me aside at parties and he’d go out on the balcony and say: “Please help me with my relationship problems”.

So I told him: “First of all you’ve got to get some fucking coherency.” It was funny giving him advice ’cos at the time I was out of it as well. Slash was always a constant. I didn’t notice any difference between when he was high and when he was straight. He’s a lot more clear these days, but he was always a gentleman whether he was using or not.

John Belushi

He always used to try to get off with my ex-wife, Jo. He used to propose to her when I was asleep. I’d say: “John, I can hear you, you fat git. If you weren’t so fat and ugly you might stand a chance.” Like all comedians he was really pathetic, and he had a low tolerance to alcohol and drugs.

Dan Aykroyd used to always put him in my care when he came to Hollywood. He used to drop him off at my house and say: “I know he’s safe now, I can go off and leave him.” Then he’d go off and do his stuff. The only time he didn’t do that was when he died. John booked himself into the Chateau Marmont. He dearly wanted to be a rock star.

Keith Moon

Moony used to come up and jam with us when we were in The Birds. I always used to say to him: “Keith, you’re only supposed to take one Valium, not the whole jumbo bottle.” He used to do that with uppers and downers, take the whole lot. He gave me my first Mandrax when they first came out – when they were really powerful. He said: “Take two of these.”

We were in the Speakeasy. I had my Jaguar XK150 outside and I was with my first wife, Chrissie, and my manager, Billy Gaff. We’d already had a few whiskies, so although he gave me two I only took one. It kicked in before I got to the bottom of the stairs, so by the time I got to my car I was well gone. I ended up driving straight over Marble Arch and straight over Hyde Park without going round. I ended up in a mews with just enough room to get the car in and no one could get out.

We had to get out of the roof. After that I don’t remember anything. I was sick. I don’t know how I got home, so not a great recommendation from Moony. He used to lead me astray, but my mum used to think he was a gentleman. He used to put a smoking jacket and cravat on and serve her brandy and she would say: “What a polite gentleman that Keith Moon is.”

Pete Townshend

I first met Pete, who is still a neighbour of mine, back in the old Ealing Club days when The Who first had I Can’t Explain in the charts. I was in The Birds and they were going: “We’re number one!” And we were going: “Fuck off back to Acton!” We were so jealous.

The High Numbers were brilliant, and the early Who, especially at the Marquee, were incredible. They’re still great today, but there was nothing quite so electric as the original line-up.

Eric Clapton

He’s always very suspicious of me, but he takes me under his wing. He’s very pleased that I am clean and serene, but he just doubts that I can keep it up. I used to go every week to the Crawdaddy in Richmond to see Eric with the Yardbirds. The first time I was ever invited up on stage there was when [Yardbirds singer] Keith Relf was ill. They said: “Are there any harmonica players in the audience?” and all my friends pushed me up.

So I did I’m A Man and all their raving stuff, and they said: “Get that red Indian back… Cleopatra,” because my hair was always like this. “Get him back on stage.” That was my claim to fame. I’d played with the Yardbirds. I was always the youngster in them days, the newcomer. But it’s great, I’m still the youngest one.

Ronnie O’Sullivan

A very sweet, very mysterious person… and his own worst enemy – a bit like all those snooker players. One minute you see them all the time, then you can’t find them for love nor money. Ronnie’s like that at the moment. He’s got the constant fight with the alcohol and drugs – like we all seem to have – all of us, musicians, snooker players, artists, writers… Any of the creative sports.

Ronnie’s checked me into recovery a few times and he’s said: “Take my room, it’s the good room. I came out and won the world championship after I was in here.” He’s been really helpful in my recovery.

Mick Jagger

Mick has been so supportive, I can’t tell you. It really surprised me because I thought he would have given up the ghost on me by now, but he’s getting stronger with his commitment of support. He’s saying: “Well done, Ronnie… I need at least one and a half guitar players I can rely on.”

And now he’s got two full-blooded ones, so he’s very happy. What he wants to see is me showing the strength not to fall off the wagon and possibly messing up, because he needs me as a really concrete support, like Charlie, when he puts on his show. And he’s got it. I’m ready any time.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 151, October 2010

This year at both Universal Orlando and Universal Studios Hollywood, Ozzy Osbourne will have his own special haunted house attraction as a tribute to the Prince Of Darkness.

Lora Sauls – assistant director of creative development and show direction for art, design and entertainment at Universal Orlando – talks us through what to expect.

Tell us about the new Ozzy Osbourne house at Halloween Horror Nights.

Ozzy Osbourne: Prince Of Darkness. That’s been a very special project. Our senior show director, Charles Gray, is a huge Ozzy Osbourne fan. He was in a rock band in the 80s. Charles had long hair, sang very similarly to Ozzy Osbourne. So he’s a huge fan. So when we were brought the opportunity to honour Ozzy and celebrate his most famous albums and all those album covers… and that’s what the house is based on, the ideas of all those album covers.

So you’re going into a very Gothic church or temple-like [structure], you’re going to see above you the Ozzy Osbourne symbol, Ozzy is there with all of his cloaked minions or followers. There’s vision pools that you’re seeing some of his concerts and you're seeing him on stage in, and then you go into the dungeons and you’re seeing him in the dungeon – Patient Number 9, if you will.

Then what I love is you're going to see an oversized bat eat the head off of a human. Role reversal in such a good way. You're going into the cemetery and seeing Ozzy as the werewolf. You’re gonna see the Crazy Train and get on the Crazy Train with Ozzy as the conductor of the Crazy Train.

And you end with Ozzy on his throne from his very last concert. We got the assets of that throne, so you're going to see the Prince Of Darkness on his throne with his dragon beside him. I love the dancing demons – female dancing demons that are very 80s-inspired, they’re amazing – that are kind of leading up to that throne. Then there’s a very special final scare in that scene. So we think there’s going to be a lot of people that have an emotional connection to this house. It is an absolutely gorgeous house. It checks all the gothic, horror box off for us. It is beautiful.

Did the process for the house begin after he passed?

It was. Last year's Halloween Horror Nights, one of the final weeks in Hollywood [October 2025]. Jack Osbourne went to the Hollywood event, and he talked to John Murdy [Creative Director of Halloween Horror Nights Hollywood] about wanting to do something with HHN again. Because John did an Ozzy house many, many, many years ago [Black Sabbath: 13-3D in 2013]. So he had that relationship with them. We meet with John three or four times a week – so we're constantly in communication with John Murdy on the West Coast – and he brought that to us and we're like, ‘Yes, definitely, we'd love to do that.’

So both coasts got on a teams meeting with Jack, and we were like, ‘We definitely want to do it. We want to do it on both coasts.’ Jack was very jazzed about that. He was so jazzed that he’s like, ‘Can we do different houses on both coasts?’ So honestly, the Ozzy Osbourne: Prince Of Darkness house on both coasts are the most different of all of our IP houses.

Now, there are some similarities. You’re gonna get on the Crazy Train in both houses and you’re going to see some similarities. But he was the one that really was like, ‘I would love to see two different takes.’ He even had a joke for the Orlando team. He's like, ‘Why don't you use the [Hogwarts] train and just turn that into the Crazy Train?’ And we're like, ‘We can't do that. But hey, you know, good idea…’ But no, he was very jazzed.

Honestly, it's been an honour – every week we are on a teams meeting with Sharon Osborne and she is approving everything herself. Which is so cool. It is so cool. And she’s so jazzed about it.

Have the Osbourne’s walked through the set builds yet?

Not yet. I don’t think they're coming to Orlando yet, but we’re taking some of their team through it in a couple weeks. But we’re really hopeful that we get either Jack or Sharon or both at both openings because Orlando opens a week before Hollywood. So you can feasibly do both. So we’re very hopeful that they'll come our way to Universal Orlando for our opening.

We did hear that they were going to put the billboard in Hollywood near their Hollywood home. They were so jazzed by that. I don’t know where their Hollywood home is, but they said two streets and Sharon’s like, “Oh, that's perfect. That's so close to home.” She was so delighted about where they were placing that billboard.

The Ozzy Osbourne: Prince Of Darkness haunted houses open on August 28 at Universal Orlando Resort and September 3 at Universal Studios Hollywood

Across six decades, Emerson tore down barriers between genres, redefined the image of the keyboard player through his wild onstage performances, and played a pivotal role in the meteoric rise of progressive rock from small British clubs like The Marquee to massive American arena tours.

In 20203 Prog presented 15 tracks from across his catalogue along with commentary from artists who were influenced by them.

1. The Diamond Hard Blue Apples Of The Moon

From The Nice’s The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack, 1968 (Bonus Track)

Ian Anderson, Jethro Tull: “I first heard ...Apples Of The Moon at the Marquee Club in the early months of 1968 when The Nice and Tull were regular resident bands. With the benefit of that original repertoire, The Nice stood out from the usual blues band peers with more complex songs and music arrangements that ushered in the beginnings of progressive rock.

“...Apples Of The Moon is typical of early Nice, and even the later ELP, in drawing upon classical fanfare-like elements. The rhythmic drumming of Blinky Davison in this song inspired the drum part to the early Tull tune A Song For Jeffrey.

“The adventurous and energetic organ playing of Keith Emerson was a sight to behold and given credibility by his obvious pianistic musical skills and academic training. The vocals of Lee Jackson, Blinky Davison’s drumming and Davy O’List’s unusual non-blues guitar style were a great encouragement to me in the months to come to gradually replace the blues-based early Tull with a more original and eclectic mix of musical inspiration.”

2. Rondo

From The Nice’s The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack, 1968

Derek Shulman, Gentle Giant: “I had always loved Keith’s playing in The Nice. It was a complete surprise that they could reinterpret this unusual Dave Brubeck Quartet 9/8 signature classic into a 4/4 rock track and still retain its appeal. This was always something Keith was able to do superbly throughout his musical career with both ELP and his solo works.

“The Dave Brubeck Quartet were, in a sense, a jazz precursor to artists like Frank Zappa, ELP, Crimson and, of course, Gentle Giant. Unusual time signatures and improvisation while still retaining musical accessibility. The Nice were able to pare down Blue Rondo À La Turk to Rondo and still be The Nice.

“Performance-wise, Keith was one of the first keyboard players to actually stand and play brilliantly. He understood that just sitting behind a Hammond organ could be a hindrance to being an entertainer as well as a musician. He was able to use his skills to make the keyboards his foil in the same way that Jimi Hendrix used his guitar. A very rare achievement for a keyboardist.”

3. America

The Nice single, 1968

This explosive arrangement of a showpiece tune from West Side Story was controversial from the start, intended as a critique of violence in the United States following the murders of JFK and Martin Luther King. Then when the band burned a painting of the American flag onstage at the Royal Albert Hall, with the US ambassador in the audience no less, their notoriety was assured.

Tree Stewart, The Emerald Dawn: “I had organ lessons from age 8 to 18 and I thought the organ was a deeply uncool instrument to play. If only I had been shown Keith Emerson when I was young!

“America is a special track for me for many reasons. I was involved in youth theatre when I was a teenager, and I was in the play West Side Story. I was one of the singers and dancers in America so to hear a band take the track and turn it into a political statement with insane theatrics on the organ was a total revelation.

“The theatrics of the live versions of this track also stand out to me. I am a circus and physical theatre performer and teacher by profession, so to see someone jump over their keyboard and swing it about while still managing to play really well is truly incredible.”

4. Intermezzo From The Karelia Suite

From The Nice’s Ars Longa Vita Brevis, 1968

By their second album, The Nice had shrunk from a quartet to a trio, following the departure of guitarist Davy O’List. Emerson was fearlessly exploring the possibilities of melding rock with classical and jazz – the dawn of progressive rock was at hand.

Geoff Downes, Asia, Yes, DBA: “Keith’s treatment of classical music was totally unique. In particular, his early work from The Nice laid the foundations for his incredible career. My favourite album from that period was Ars Longa Vita Brevis, and his interpretation of the Intermezzo from Sibelius’ Karelia Suite really stood out for me.

“It became his signature style in many ways – laying down the main classical theme, and then heading off into his wonderful world of intricate blues and jazzy extemporisation. A true genius.”

5. For Example

The Nice’s Nice, 1969

Mike Keneally: “I’d read about The Nice in Hit Parader magazine, but somehow hadn’t found any of the records, until I was around 11 and I saw a Columbia Special Products repackaging of their third album, simply entitled Nice, with a strange-looking orange cover.

“I found it really thrilling that the song just kept going and going and going – it felt like a gift, a really generous one, and Keith’s organ and piano playing is so on point throughout. For a song essentially based on a blues structure, I was amazed at how many styles were visited during the course of the piece – it’s really adventurous! And there’s horns playing all of a sudden!

“This music also sported a sense of humour that seemed more whimsical than ELP’s usual state of grandeur, and somehow kinder than ELP’s occasional comedy pieces. Keith’s composing and playing imprinted on me hard at that time, and the influence remains – every time I play a sequence of fourths on a keyboard, I can feel him hovering nearby.”

6. Hang On To A Dream

From The Nice’s Nice, 1969

Stephen W Tayler: “The piano immediately caught my attention – the playing and the sound – the strange aspect of the voice, and then the choir! What was I listening to? And then it developed into the whole middle jazz section with that truly spontaneous piano performance.

“It felt like one of the first times for me that such a track became a real journey through changes of style and mood, arriving at a wonderful enigmatic conclusion. It’s a cover of a Tim Hardin song, but a totally unique interpretation with a strange arrangement, great playing, and some very unusual and creative sound treatments.

“Keith and this track encouraged me to be much looser with my approach to music in general, and taught me that elements of bravery, improvisation and experimentation are crucial for great record making. The live version on the Enigma album is much longer and even more crazy!”

7. The Three Fates: Clotho/Lachesis/Atropos

From ELP’s Emerson, Lake & Palmer, 1970

Jo Quail: “I was blessed with an inspiring piano teacher who introduced us to The Three Fates, but at that time I wasn’t familiar with the term ‘prog’; I classed this as ‘contemporary classical,’ and difficult listening at that. It’s only with the grace of years that I have come to truly appreciate Clotho, and my awe of this particular work deepens as my own creativity broadens.

“There are many aspects of Clotho that I return to and that inspire me; to put them broadly, it’s the creative wildness of the composition, the recurring powerful motif of the bass and stacked parallel chords, the surprising change of texture/organ stop and the respite therein, and the cadence points that give weight to the storms that precede them. In the frame of (insane!) chromatic harmony and complex technical virtuosity, Clotho stands alone as the paragon of this realm.”

8. Knife-Edge

From ELP’s Emerson, Lake & Palmer, 1970

Kit Watkins, Happy The Man: “Knife-Edge had a particularly dark and edgy quality that got to me. The organ was the main attraction though, since I was always salivating over distorted Hammond sounds through Leslie speakers, especially the way Emerson voiced his parts. No tremolo!

“Emerson was one of my early influences, especially because of how he merged rock and classical music. Pictures At An Exhibition was a favourite in that regard, but his technique was just so stunning and the music so evocative that I found the mix to be irresistible.”

9. The Barbarian

From ELP‘s Emerson, Lake & Palmer, 1970

Roine Stolt, The Flower Kings: “I remember hearing ELP’s debut album in 1970. A friend of mine had the LP and we listened to it frequently, trying to understand the sounds ELP could make. I liked all of it, the skilful and powerful keyboards and the great fuzz bass sound and voice of Greg Lake on that album and Palmer’s drum frenzy – somewhere in between jazz, classical and Black Sabbath.

“I was aware of Keith already from The Nice but I think the combo of this trio floored me and their more avant-garde meets classical and jazz was just so fresh. Keith’s organ sounds set the standard for many others that came later, including Eddie Jobson, and surely Wakeman and Banks had their ears open.

“Keith was also a phenomenal pianist and pioneering Moog player – and a great showman. One of a kind.”

10. Third Movement, Pathetique

From The Nice’s Elegy, 1971

Rick Pilkington, The Blackheart Orchestra: “When I bought a second-hand copy of Elegy as a 13-year-old guitarist, I had no idea what effect it would have on me. What would I want with an album of organ music?

“Elegy is full of musical energy and ideas. It’s a loaded gun that would pay homage to the past while firing rockets of possibilities into the future. Every note bursting with the 25-year-old Emerson’s overflowing musical virtuosity but all the time walking a tightrope between conformity and outright musical anarchy.

“His recreation of Tchaikovsky’s Third Movement, Pathetique may not be everyone’s favourite Emerson moment but to me it illustrates the crazy, beautiful genius that could hardly contain the music in his young head and hands. It’s a magnificent multicoloured musical explosion...

“In my opinion, The Nice were a starter course – maybe even more tasty than the main course that was soon to follow.”

11. Bitches Crystal

From ELP’s Tarkus, 1971

Nick Beggs: “At about the age of 13 I first heard this track. I thought the whole Tarkus album was great and it was on heavy rotation at my Thursday evening record club where my mates used to bring their vinyl for a spin.

“Looking at it now, it seems strange because it’s just under four minutes, but packs so much into that time. It could have been a single, but Radio 1 would never have played it; the irregular metre makes it spiky. I love the dynamism of the track and the power of the trio churning up the road like a juggernaut.

“Keith’s virtuosity always amazed me. Like so many others who were beguiled by his prowess, I’m sure he’s influenced me on countless levels both conscious and unconsciously.

“’Never a dull moment’ is a cliché, but it’s true. He took every opportunity to expand the harmonic possibilities of a performance but there’s also a very economical use of tasteful single-note signature sounds thrown in as affective motifs on this track.”

12. Promenade / The Gnome

From ELP’s Pictures At An Exhibition, 1971

Theo Travis, Soft Machine: “I think the composition and melody are very strong and memorable. But Keith Emerson is majestic, the way he plays the organ so well – plus he uses other interesting synthesiser sounds that sound like early music and then science fiction, like music of the future. He really was ahead of his time and had not just skill but such authority about his playing.

“Mussorgsky is a great composer and this is a fine work, so that aspect of the composition is already taken care of; but I love the way ELP totally own it. They add their own thing and reinvent the piece with flair, style and confidence. The arrangement is really clever, showcasing each individual performer – and when they play together they use the instrumentation imaginatively and to the max.

“They were such great performers too. It’s thrilling watching an old Keith Emerson performance, playing the organ upside down while having it lie over him and using knives to wedge down specific keys. He took the Hendrix thing and translated it to keyboards. Very exciting!

“This performance on Pictures At An Exhibition – the playing, the atmosphere and the fact that it was so in tune with the times – contribute hugely to its magic.”

13. Nut Rocker

From ELP’s Pictures At An Exhibition, 1971

Nut Rocker was an arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s march from The Nutcracker that topped the UK singles chart in 1962 for B Bumble And The Stingers, before ELP adopted it into their live repertoire.

Rick Wakeman: “It was the summer of 1962 and I heard it in Woolworths in Exmouth, Devon, and I used up all my holiday money to buy the single – thus forgoing an ice cream for a day. The piece was well arranged and well played by B Bumble And The Stingers, although they were session musicians. As soon as I got home from holidaying in Exmouth with my parents, I learnt it – it was just great fun to play. In later years I wanted very much to record it, but Keith beat me to it.

“Although Keith was far more jazz-orientated than I was, and I think the best at the way he fused jazz into the various genres of music he played, we both had a lot of the same influences, such as Jimmy Smith, and we both liked fun pieces. Hence, Hoedown and Nut Rocker, both tremendous stage pieces and so well-suited to Keith’s flamboyance.”

14. Trilogy

From ELP’s Trilogy, 1972

Mike Stobbie, ex Pallas: “Keith was trailblazing and giving all the guitar soloists a run for their money. Trilogy is a keyboardist’s dream; it shows off Keith’s phenomenally beautiful virtuosity and his playing is second to none. Simply irresistible to listen to and I love playing it – it’s stuck with me for decades.

“The song part itself has a very rich and powerful melody with Greg’s wonderful voice and the beautiful classical piano playing at the beginning draws you in until it erupts into total excitement. To shoot off into that Moog synthesiser section over complicated rhythms followed by jazz-influenced distorted Hammond organ... well, it has everything I could ever want.”

15. The Endless Enigma

From ELP’s Trilogy, 1972

Jonathan Edwards, Panic Room, Luna Rossa, Three Colours Dark: “The Endless Enigma has all of the elements that make ELP’s music so compelling: Keith’s lyrical and virtuoso piano playing, particularly in the Bach-influenced Fugue that breaks up the two sections of the piece; the Hammond work that goes from delicate to muscular as the music demands driving the song forward; and the innovative Moog playing that features both in solo lines and as layered textures to produce synthesised fanfares in the end section.

“But what’s striking here too is that, contrary to common opinion, it’s never showy or complex for the sake of it. Every keyboard phrase, bass line or drum fill is there to support the music. For all his showmanship, Keith was first and foremost a composer and a musician, making music for the head and the heart.”

The first music I remember hearing

As a teenager I worked weekends at my parents’ shop in a small town north of Toronto, and on the drive there the radio was always on. I remember Motown music playing – My Girl by The Temptations – and me drumming along on the dashboard, as we’ve all done in our lives.

The first song I performed live

When I was 14 I auditioned for a band at a local high-school gym, and sang As Tears Go By – the Stones version of that song. I wasn’t very Jagger-esque, I had a much sweeter soprano voice.

The greatest album of all time

The Who –Who’s Next. That album embodies all the best things about rock’n’roll – great songwriting, great playing. Almost every tune is a classic.

The singer

Jon Anderson had such a clear, beautiful voice that could be rock when it needed to be and soulful when it needed to be. As a young aspiring musician, I wanted to sing like that.

The guitar hero

I was always a big fan of Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, but to me Jeff Beck had an extra-special something that makes him inimitable. His sound is so original and so moving. He remains a god of guitar.

And of course I have many bass heroes, but Jack Bruce was my biggest influence. He was the first bass player I saw on stage that just wailed and was able to fill in the blanks in his three-piece band. I saw Cream in 1969 at Massey Hall in Toronto. That show was magical.

The songwriter

Pete Townshend. Hands-down the greatest writer of rock songs. Won’t Get Fooled Again, Behind Blue Eyes, Tommy… on and on and on. He was equally adept at writing beautiful melodies and hard rock. The full body of The Who, if you examine it against other artists in rock, I think you’d be hard pressed to find anybody as consistently brilliant as him.

The best live band I'ver seen

Jethro Tull at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. I think it was on the Thick As A Brick tour. The show began with the house lights on and a bunch of people in overalls sweeping the stage. Gradually there were fewer people sweeping, and then, all of a sudden, one of them would pick up an instrument, and next thing you know it’s the guys from Tull launching into the show.

For me that was the first band that combined incredible musicianship with complex songwriting, and they were funny. That influenced me a lot in the later years of Rush – that attitude of taking your music seriously but not taking yourself seriously

The anthem

It’s got to be Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who. Maybe the greatest power chords ever recorded. Who invented the power chord? Probably Pete.

My biggest disappointment

Emerson, Lake & Palmer had a famously disappointing album, Love Beach. I was a huge ELP fan, but that one really furrowed my brow.

The most underrated band of all time

The Tragically Hip, from Canada, had huge, godlike stature at home but nowhere else. They had this perfect blend of simple, twin-guitar rock’n’roll and very evocative, thought-provoking lyrics

The best record I've made

I would say Clockwork Angels. It has that combination of songwriting and performance, all the things that go into a great record.

The worst record I've made

Immediately Caress Of Steel comes to mind. But I’ve met so many fans who love that record. And I think Presto disappointed a lot of fans. The songwriting was a little flat.

My guilty pleasure

Back in the day, I loved Simon And Garfunkel. For a rocker, that wasn’t very cool.

My Saturday night party song

Do I really seem like the Saturday-night party kind of guy? Jeez. But if I’m having a couple of glasses of wine with some friends I’ll play early Beatles – Paperback Writer, or anything off Rubber Soul or Revolver.

My 'in the mood for love' song

I’d pick a little cocktail jazz, something by Bill Evans. That’s my current obsession. I’m trying to understand the depth of his catalogue.

The song that makes me cry

And You And I by Yes is so beautiful, especially when I listen to it now. The combination of nostalgia and pure sonic beauty is pretty moving.

The song I want played at my funeral

Why would I give a shit about that? They can play whatever the hell they want! Or maybe I’d have them play some Derek And Clive. The shock and horror of it would be fantastic.

These are the words that Rick Wright sings on the song Wearing The Inside Out, the one track on 1994’s The Division Bell that features Wright’s lead vocals (the first time he’d even sung a lead Pink Floyd vocal since Time in 1973), a song many immediately associated with the mental travails of assimilating himself back into both public life and the Pink Floyd fold following years of discourse with Roger Waters. Even if the lyrics were penned by ex-Slapp Happy keyboard player Anthony Moore, who would later work with Wright on his 1996 album Broken China, most suspected they remained at heart, semi-autobiographical in nature for Wright, who alone wrote the music for the sombre tune.

In Mark Blake’s Pigs Might Fly book, he claims that one Pink Floyd insider had noted that Moore “had to climb inside Rick’s head and get the words out”, whilst The Division Bell producer Bob Ezrin noted, “There’s a lot of emotional honesty there. Fans pick up on the sad, vulnerable side to Rick.”

For a band so reticent in wearing their heart on their sleeve, the song itself is almost searing in its openness. And yet for Wright, a man whose dextrous keyboard sounds really had informed the Pink Floyd sound since 1967’s The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, and who had more to gain in personal terms, it was an act of catharsis.

I interviewed Wright in early 2000, being summoned to his Kensington mews flat for an audience on the back of a Pink Floyd cover story I’d written for Classic Rock surrounding the release of that year’s Is There Anybody Out There - The Wall live double set. Interviews had duly been set up with Roger Waters (honest, slightly paranoid), David Gilmour (gruff, tetchy) and Nick Mason (cheery, avuncular), but the request to speak to Wright, who of course had been famously sacked from the band during the making of The Wall (albeit sacked very much behind public closed doors until fans picked up on credits on that and the subsequent The Final Cut album), were met with a reluctant “he’s somewhere in France”.

This clearly angered the keyboard player, who was determined to have his say. “Rick wants to talk to you,” I was told when I received the initial phone call, and duly set forth to speak to the man. I found an initially angry, but quietly intense, seemingly private and passionate musician eager to have his say and at least set the record straight over some issues that had arisen in the feature. Most of it, of course, centred around the fact that Waters had been the band member to instigate the firing of Wright. Rick Wright then performed with Pink Floyd as a hired hand on The Wall tour prompting Nick Mason to note, “As a salaried performer he was the only one of us to make money from the shows. The remaining three of us shared our losses”.

Agreeing that Waters would come up with “the big idea” in later years, Wright maintained it was largely he and Gilmour who would come up with much of the music.

“There has always been friction between me and Roger, right from the beginning,” he told me, possibly referring to a time when the band members were at Regents Street Polytechnic and he’d refused to give Waters a cigarette – the pedantic Wright not liking how Waters would rip off the pack’s cellophane wrapping. “Personality wise, we just didn’t get on.” As Waters’ own role within Pink Floyd became more dictatorial in the late 70s, the “quiet and introverted” Wright (as Mason has referred to him) became more and more the whipping boy. Even his gradual rehabilitation back into the Floyd fold in the late 80s and early 90s (shrouded as it was in legal wrangles that sadly overshadowed his musical input – at least on 1987’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason) saw Wright agitated by the continued sniping asides of his former tormentor.

In retaliation to Waters’ suggestion in that Classic Rock piece that Wright had talked to him backstage at a Waters solo show in 1999 after he’d “had a couple” and then bad-mouthed the bassist, Wright was quite indignant: “I think, ‘Why do you have to say these things, Roger?’. It was difficult for both of us backstage. I hadn’t seen him for 18, 19 years. I went backstage, I shook his hand and said, ‘How are you?’ And we both felt awkward. And that was it. There was no great meaningful conversation. I’m at the point where all this bullshit should stop.”

The bullshit stopped when Pink Floyd with Roger Waters appeared at 2005’s Live 8 show in London’s Hyde Park, although by this time, the main sticking point was Waters’ soured relationship with Floyd’s current leader Gilmour. Although no more new Pink Floyd music would be forthcoming until the release of The Endless River, Wright would work on Gilmour’s 2006 solo album On An Island and tour with his old band mate.

Even Roger Waters offered the hand of friendship, asking Wright to join him and Mason on his Dark Side Of The Moon Live Tour, although Wright turned it down to work on his own music. Wright last performed with Mason and Gilmour in 2007 at the Syd Barrett tribute The Madcap’s Last Laugh at London’s Barbican, where he sang lead vocals on Arnold Layne, fittingly, the song that had started it all for the band.

Rick Wright died of cancer on 15 September 2008, aged 65. Naturally, his fellow band members spoke movingly of him. “Rick was the sound that knitted it all together,” noted Mason. “I wish there had been more,” added Waters of the chance to perform with Wright one more time at Live 8, adding, “It’s hard to overstate his musical voice in Pink Floyd.”

Perhaps fittingly, the final voice should be David Gilmour’s. For it is he who reactivated what he once told me was the “big old beast” Pink Floyd for one final fling. The Endless River might be deemed their swansong, but at its heart everyone knows it is the band’s tribute to their fallen comrade.

“I wish we could have all been great buddies and carried on,” Wright told me back in 2000. Eight years later, Gilmour would say, “He was my partner and friend”, adding perhaps more succinctly: “Like Rick I don’t find it easy to express my feelings in words, but I loved him and will miss him enormously.”

“We shout and argue like everyone else,” are the words you hear from Gilmour at the start of The Endless River, highlighting the fact that maybe, like many bands, Pink Floyd were not always the best of friends. But The Endless River itself is proof enough that at the end of the day, Gilmour’s final words of love and friendship do ring true.

For three years between 1969 and 1971, Creedence Clearwater Revival were the hottest band in America. While the rest of the rock scene tripped through the turn of the decade wearing hallucinogenic glasses and rolling back musical boundaries wherever they found them, Creedence went in the opposite direction.

Led by writer, singer and lead guitarist John Fogerty, they headed back to the roots of rockabilly and rhythm & blues. Their songs, which conjured up the musical spirit of the American South, were simple, concise, hard-driving, evocative and catchy. The critics dubbed the band swamp rockers; in fact they’d never seen a bayou. They’d never even been out of their native California.

Creedence were not fashionable but they were hugely popular. They were hardly out of the charts, racking up 10 million-selling singles. Astonishingly, they never had a No.1 hit in America although they had plenty around the rest of the world, including the UK with Bad Moon Rising. To complete their saturation coverage they also churned out six Top 10 albums, half of them in a single year. Beyond that, Fogerty’s songs struck a chord with those concerned with the effect America’s war in Vietnam at that time was having on the country, let alone what effect it might be having on the Vietnamese.

John Fogerty broke up Creedence Clearwater Revival in 1972. Over the next 20 years he released three solo albums and had three Top 20 hits. But he was repeatedly involved in increasingly acrimonious lawsuits with Fantasy Records and its owner Saul Zaentz. And with a couple of exceptions he refused to play Creedence songs on stage.

In 1993 Creedence Clearwater Revival were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug ‘Cosmo’ Clifford were in attendance (guitarist and brother Tom Fogerty had died in 1990), but John Fogerty refused to let them play. When he performed instead with a band that included Bruce Springsteen and Robbie Robertson, Clifford and Cook got up and walked out.

It was a sour Revival revival, and according to Doug Clifford just one more example of Fogerty “cutting off his nose to spite his face. I loved John like a brother. I still do. But I don’t like what he’s done to me, to Stu, to Tom’s widow, to his kids from his first marriage and, above all, what he’s done to himself.”

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s reign was brief and intense, but it was the culmination of 10 years of playing together.

Clifford can still remember meeting John Fogerty for the first time in the music room at their Junior High School in El Cerrito, a dormitory town on the other side of the bay from San Francisco: “There was this shy kid playing Fats Domino on the piano. So I went up to him and said: ‘That’s authentic Fats.’ He said: ‘Yeah. What do you play?’ I said: ‘Drums. Do you want to form a band?’ He said: ‘Yeah, but actually I play guitar’.” They were both 14 years old.

They started out with Clifford’s friend Cook on piano; he switched to bass around the time they hooked up with John’s brother Tom, who was four years older.

“We were fledglings,” says Clifford, “but Tom already had the vision of a career and making records.” When they watched a TV programme about how a small independent label had an unexpected instrumental hit, they were interested to discover that the label, Fantasy, was just down the road in Berkeley.

They hastily recorded an instrumental demo of their own and took it to Fantasy, which specialised in jazz records. The label asked if the band had a singer, because they were interested in signing a rock’n’roll band. No problem. Except that when they saw a copy of their first single they discovered their name had been changed from The Blue Velvets to The Golliwogs.

“We were shocked, particularly when we found out what it meant,” says Cook. “But we had to go with it because that was the name on the record label.”

At this point the band’s style was heavily influenced by British bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and particularly Them.

It was around this time that John Fogerty started writing songs, initially along with his brother Tom and then on his own as his style came together. That gave them a distinctive sound of their own and they decided to pursue it.

“Tom was great about it,” says Clifford. “He was the ultimate team player. It took a lot of fortitude, particularly as he was the older brother and leader of the band, to give it up for his younger brother.”

After a temporary halt while Clifford and John Fogerty found ingenious ways to avoid the draft for the Vietnam war, they decided to go full-time in late 1967. They also renamed the band Creedence (“after a friend of Tom’s”) Clearwater (“from a beer commercial”) Revival (“a statement of intent”).

“We considered ourselves pretty professional already,” says Cook. “We had a real work ethic about the band. We rehearsed every day in a shed in Doug’s garden.” The shed was nicknamed Cosmo’s Factory.

They launched the band by re-releasing The Golliwogs’ last single, Porterville, with a new label stuck on the record.

The group eventually got their break with an edited version of Dale Hawkins’s Susie Q that spread by airplay and only just missed the Top 10. Radio stations in the US were looking for snappy commercial rock to counteract the rising tide of mind-expanding music whose spiritual home was just 20 miles across the San Francisco Bay.

But to Creedence – living in California’s answer to Woking – it was a world away. They mostly had wives or steady girlfriends, and spent the fabled summer of love in 1967 ploughing away on the local circuit. The hippies’ heaven in Haight Ashbury was as alien to them as it was to their parents. “We’d been brought up on Top 40 radio, where the song was the thing, not the guitar solo,” says Cook. “You told the story and then you were done. And that was John’s real skill, to be able to write songs like that.”

Nevertheless, it was still a thrill to play their first gig at the legendary San Francisco Fillmore in the summer of ’68, supporting Paul Butterfield and Steppenwolf. “We played four nights and got 16 encores,” recalls Cook proudly. “The hippies loved it because they could dance to it.”

What Cook calls “the great gush” started in March 1969 when Proud Mary (from their second album, Bayou Country) became the first of five No.2 hits, with the riff rolling as powerfully as the big wheel kept on turning. Radio was primed for the band, and John Fogerty had found his songwriting range – plus the voice to match.

“We just went in and did it,” says Cook. “It felt automatic. It was just how we played together. We’d learned the songs thoroughly. There wasn’t anybody else in the studio pulling strings, just the four of us.”

Two months later they did it again with Bad Moon Rising. They didn’t object to the ‘swamp rock’ tag either. “That was okay,” says Clifford. “At least it meant people cared enough to make up labels. We used to chuckle about it, particularly when people thought we came from Louisiana.”

The band spent a lot of that summer playing big festivals: the Newport ’69 Pop Festival with Hendrix and The Byrds, in front of 150,000; the Denver Pop Festival with Jimi Hendrix and The Mothers Of Invention; the Atlanta Pop Festival with Led Zeppelin and Joe Cocker in front of 120,000; and the defining festival of them all, Woodstock.

Green River was their third No.2 single on the trot, in August 1969, and the album of the same name finally gave them a No.1 record in America a month later. By the end of the year they’d had more hits with Down On The Corner and Fortunate Son and were storming up the album charts again with their fourth album, Willy & The Poor Boys. It was a feverish pace.

“John was convinced that if we weren’t in the charts the public would forget about us,” says Clifford. “So after we’d recorded three singles – that’s six tracks – we’d go into the studio and record four more tracks to make up an album. That put a tremendous amount of pressure on John, but he was able to do it.”

Musically John Fogerty was going from strength to strength. But behind the scenes things were beginning to fracture. Clifford and Cook maintain that the problems began with John’s insistence on managing the band as well as writing, singing, playing and producing. “John was brilliant at all the musical things, but he had no experience at managing, particularly at the level we were involved at,” says Clifford. “It was a critical mistake, and ultimately it broke up the band.”

Creedence had signed the usual slavery deal for an unknown band, but Fantasy were now prepared to re-negotiate. John Fogerty had also signed a separate publishing contract with Fantasy. “I think that John believed he would get his songs back after his three- year deal, but this was not the case,” says Cook. “He was simply free to sign a new contract or set up his own publishing company.”

Clifford and Cook claim that Saul Zaentz made promises to Fogerty and the rest of the band that he subsequently reneged on, but their involvement with even the band’s contract was strictly limited. “We were not allowed to go to meetings. And John wouldn’t communicate with us afterwards. Once it started to go sour he dealt with it on a very personal level, and that resulted in a shut-down.”

According to Cook and Clifford, the band were offered a deal that would have given them 10 per cent of Fantasy Records – effectively 10 per cent of themselves, as they were the only the only chart act on the label. “John said it was nearer one per cent, but I don’t think he understood about stock options and stuff,” says Clifford. “And he was doing it all himself. He didn’t seem to be taking advice from anyone. There were lawyers, but they could only deal with what he communicated to them so that wasn’t much help.

“We could all see that it was driving him nuts. We were there as bandmates, and with ideas to try and help him out of this log-jam, but he just got more and more withdrawn, as if we were attacking him. It was very frustrating.

“I suggested that we should go out on a world tour for a year and work on a couple of albums’ worth of songs along the way, meanwhile we’d get a team of professionals to come in and sort out the mess with Fantasy. Then we could come back with a new deal and hopefully resolve John’s songwriting deal. But John said people would forget us. I felt that a world tour would keep us in the public eye.”

When Fogerty threatened to bring in the notorious Allen Klein – who was busy making mincemeat of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones (and their labels) – the others backed off in horror.

They did a tour of Europe in spring 1970, playing London’s Royal Albert Hall with Booker T & The MGs. And the hits kept rolling in: Travellin’ Band, Who’ll Stop The Rain, Up Around The Bend, Lookin’ Out My Back Door. Their fifth album, Cosmo’s Factory, spent nine weeks at No.1.

But contract negotiations with Fantasy had come to a standstill. And now there was another problem looming: “Tom had graciously stepped aside to let John try his new way with the band that turned out to be so successful,” explains Cook. “But now he wanted to be more involved musically. He felt that it wouldn’t hurt the band if he got to sing a song on the album. My attitude was: ‘Let’s see if Tom can contribute something. Let’s not pre-judge it and just say no.’ But John wasn’t going to give him any room.”

This situation deteriorated. Clifford says Tom threatened to quit several times during 1970, and that he and Cook would go round and talk him out of it. In February 1971, just after the release of their Pendulum album, Tom Fogerty made good his threat.

Creedence continued as a trio. They toured Europe again, and Australia and Japan. But Cook describes that year as “pretty miserable”. And within the business people were increasingly aware that all was not well with the band. The rest of the world found out in May 1972 when they released the Mardis Gras album. The songs were divided equally between Fogerty, Clifford and Cook. For Clifford and Cook it was the first songwriting credits they had had. And it showed.

Read any account of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s story and they all state unequivocally that Fogerty bowed to pressure from Clifford and Cook for an equal writing share on the Mardis Gras album. Those accounts then invariably follow that up with an excoriating attack on the album.

Clifford and Cook completely deny this version of events: “It was the complete opposite to that,” Cook says. “Tom may have wanted to contribute songs, but Doug and I never wanted to. But John told us – this was in the limousine after the last gig of a tour before we’re having a break – that we would each do a third of the songs on the next album. And he would not be singing on our songs because his voice was ‘a unique instrument’. He didn’t even play guitar on them.

“I said: ‘That’s not what we want. And Creedence fans are not going to understand this.’ And he said: ‘If we don’t do it this way, then I’m going to quit right now.’ He knew we couldn’t do anything without him, and in retrospect we should have finished then, but at the time we didn’t want the band to break up. Artistically that was a mistake, but we felt we were trying to save the band.”

They couldn’t save it for long, though. In October 1972, five months after the Mardis Gras album (which still reached No.12), John Fogerty disbanded Creedence Clearwater Revival, publicly citing Mardis Gras as a reason. “He came round to my house and told me: ‘I’m quitting’,” says Cook. And I said: ‘At this point so am I. I’ve had enough.’”

Clifford and Cook were released from their contracts with Fantasy (the contracts that had never been renegotiated). Fogerty was not released from his contract. His next album, the following year, was called John Fogerty/The Blue Ridge Rangers. There were no Blue Ridge Rangers – Fogerty sang and played everything on this collection of country covers. It was good but it wasn’t what John Fogerty fans were expecting and country fans were still redneck enough to be suspicious of anyone who had questioned the Vietnam war.

Still, he had a Top 20 hit with his version of Jamablaya (On The Bayou). But Fogerty claimed that Fantasy did not promote the record properly, and demanded to be released from his contract. Fantasy said no. The contract still had eight albums to run. Fogerty refused to record any more songs, so Fantasy sued him for breach of contract.

Fogerty’s hit pedigree was bound to attract other record companies, and eventually David Geffen’s Asylum label secured the North American rights to Fogerty’s next album for $1million dollars, leaving Fantasy with the rest of the world. Fogerty managed to get out of his publishing contract by forfeiting all rights to the songs he’d written so far.

His self-titled solo album came out in 1975, and was Creedence Clearwater Revival without the band – quite literally. The critics loved it but the public was less enthusiastic. The album never charted, although Fogerty did manage a Top 30 single with the opening track, Rockin’ All Over The World. But it did nothing in Britain. And even Status Quo were in two minds before they recorded it a couple of years later.

Fogerty threw himself into another album, but even though he was now free from his Fantasy publishing contract the loss of his Creedence songs gnawed away at him.

One week before Hoodoo was due for release, Fogerty withdrew the album. Asylum – who had already had their fingers burned with the previous album – had told him it was below standard. Fogerty closed down for the next 10 years.

Clifford and Cook, meanwhile, had dusted themselves down and found employment with Doug Sahm, whose style suited them perfectly. Clifford produced Sahm’s Groover’s Paradise album in 1974. They then joined the Don Harrison Band for three albums in 1876/77. And Cook produced legendary acid casualty and leader of the 13th Floor Elevators Roky Erickson, taking him out of the mental asylum on a daily basis and recording him as his medication wore off and before the resulting weirdness took hold.

Tom Fogerty had also been releasing solo albums on Fantasy but only the first had come within 20 places of the Top 100. If Fantasy were concerned about what had happened to the goose that had laid their (one and only) golden egg they tried not to let it show. Any time anybody there had a spare half hour they’d compile another Creedence collection. Their care and devotion to the Creedence legend was evident from the 1981 live album The Royal Albert Hall Concert, which was actually recorded at the Oakland Almeida County Coliseum.

There were two Creedence Clearwater Revival reunions during this time. The first was at Tom Fogerty’s wedding in 1980 – “It was a short set, and there was no doubt that Tom was still consumed by bitterness,” says Cook. The second was at the El Cerrito High School Reunion for the Class of ’63 (without Tom) when they took over, unannounced, from the house band – “It felt and sounded great. And I thought John might be getting over his bitterness, but I was wrong”.

The others were included in the bitterness because they were continuing to deal with Fantasy. “We were dealing with Fantasy,” confirms Clifford. We were auditing them repeatedly. And we were trying to get a better deal. They still had all our records.”

In the mid-80s Fogerty was lured out of retirement – this time by Warners – and delivered what is regarded as his strongest solo album, Centerfield, which went to No.1. But despite this triumphant return he was still able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Two of the tracks on the album were Zanz Kan’t Dance and Mr Greed. The video for the former featured a clay animation of a little guy singing: ‘Zanz kan’t dance but he’ll steal your money/Watch out boy he’ll rob you blind’ while a large naked pig proceeded to pick- pocket the audience. There was no video for Mr Greed, but the sentiments were similar.

Fearing they would be sued, Warners told Fogerty to remove the tracks. Fogerty refused, and indemnified Warners instead. He then found himself facing a $140 million defamation lawsuit from Saul Zaentz. Scarcely had he wriggled out of that by changing the song title to Vanz Kan’t Dance than Fantasy sued him, claiming that the album’s first single, The Old Man Down The Road (not published by Fantasy), plagiarised an earlier Creedence song, Run Through The Jungle (published by Fantasy). Fogerty was being sued for plagiarising himself.

It was a bizarre scenario and Fogerty found himself in the witness box with his guitar, demonstrating to the jury how two songs by the same writer could sound the same and yet be different. He managed to convince them, but it took 10 years to retrieve his legal costs of $400,000.

Tom Fogerty died in 1990 of respiratory failure, the feud with his brother unresolved. Clifford and Cook thought they might be able to resolve their feud when Creedence Clearwater Revival were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 1993. They were invited to the ceremony and told they would be playing in the all-star jam. But when Clifford turned up and asked which was his drum kit he was told by a stagehand that they weren’t playing at all, and that John had been rehearsing with Robbie Robertson and Bruce Springsteen and the house band for the past month.

In 1995 Clifford and Cook set up Creedence Clearwater Revisited, initially with The Cars’ Elliot Easton on guitar. But Fogerty issued an injunction over the name, and for a while they went out as Stu Cook and Doug ‘Cosmo’ Clifford Present Cosmo’s Factory – An Evening With Creedence.

“You could scarcely fit it on a ticket,” says Cook.

“John maintained that the trademark could only be controlled by unanimous decision. We said it was a majority, and the court saw it that way. In the end we settled for money, which didn’t seem to be about saving the name or preserving the honour of his creations.”

They could in fact use the name Creedcence Clearwater Revival if they wished, but “we chose not to out of respect for the original band and to avoid unnecessary confusion with our fans,” Cook says.

Fogerty has preserved the honour of his creations mainly by not playing them. He claimed he was prevented from doing so, although that didn’t seem to prevent anyone else from playing them. When he finally played a bunch of Creedence songs at a benefit show for Vietnam veterans in 1987 it was a newsworthy event.

Since 1995 Fogerty has included Creedence songs in his concerts, and signs began to appear that he might be resolving his feud with himself. In 2004 Saul Zaentz sold Fantasy Records to Concord Records, and the following year John Fogerty re-signed to Fantasy Records, thus reuniting himself with himself.

Concord president Glenn Barros stated: “John would like to own his songs, and unfortunately we can’t do that because we just paid a lot of money for them.” But Barros did restored the songwriting royalties that Fogerty gave away back in the 70s.

“That was a wonderful first step,” responded Fogerty.

Concord also released a collection called The Long Road Home, which was the first time Creedence songs and Fogerty solo songs had appeared on the same CD. Fogerty was involved in compiling the album, so it’s perhaps not surprising that among the 25 tracks were The Old Man Down The Road and Run Through The Jungle. The good news for Concord was that Vanz Kan’t Dance and Mr Greed were conspicuous by their absence.

And, in early 2023, Fogerty finally got what he'd battled for for half a century. He bought a majority stake in the rights to the Creedence catalogue from Concord, gaining control of his own work once more.

"This is something I thought would never be a possibility," he tweeted. "After 50 years, I am finally reunited with my songs."

This original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock #89, published in February 2006.

“In my life I’ve had chunks where I’ve been into one type of music predominantly, and then it’s changed and I don’t listen to that any more. That’s happened three or four times. It seems very fickle, but it was a journey. And along the way I always listened to whatever pop songs were knocking about just for curiosity, which when I was a kid were comedy and novelty songs. They were silly but they showed me how to write songs, which I went on to do quite a lot.

But my first more serious listening made me a jazz fan. This was the era of the trad revival in Britain; all these Dixieland line-ups – a trumpet player, trombone and very often a washboard and a banjo. That format was unchanged until Humphrey Lyttleton brought a saxophone player in, and it was like Bob Dylan’s Judas moment. The problem with trad was it didn’t matter how young the band were, they all looked like they were 60, so when I heard skiffle – particularly Lonnie Donegan - there was a more personal, youthful element, and it felt more like a group than a ‘band’.

But the next change that happened was compounded by the jazz society at my school in Birmingham. Up to when I went to university, I only really bought jazz records. I saw Duke Ellington and Count Basie at the Hippodrome, and Chris Barber was bringing over interesting people like Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Salli Terri.

Chris and Humph had an ear for these things, saying, “Look, the music is still changing”. So I shifted over with them. I can visualise my room at college because it looks very similar to every room I’ve ever had – there’s at least one wall covered in album sleeves. At that time it would have been Miles Davis, Roland Kirk and Charles Mingus. Cambridge ’63 was a lively place. And when I went to gigs I took my friends with me – John Cleese, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman, the whole bunch.

By 1964 we were all living in New York. We started off with our Cambridge Footlights Revue [Cambridge Circus] on Broadway and then ended up in a club in Greenwich Village. We got to see many legends of jazz at the time – Mingus and Coltrane, Bill Evans. I made a great friend, a singer called Sheila Jordan, who is absolutely superb. She’s the singer’s singer and yet she sounds more modern than anybody at the same age of 84, 85. She was connected to musicians in our house band. A couple of the piano players we had, who the all-white union had provided, really weren’t cutting it very well. We had a word with the club owner. [Impression] “I can get you a better player than that.” I’d go in there that night – the band had changed colour, and improved. “Is that Ray Bryant?” “Yeah, that’s right.” I’d bought this man’s albums. But he also used to do a bit of jamming and sing new songs after the show.

Up ’til the mid-60s, 99 per cent of what I’d bought would be jazz records. But I was getting sick to death of the basic jazz 4/4 feel. I hankered for a rock feel, and obviously some younger musicians felt that way themselves, notably Gary Burton. Gary was a whizzkid vibes player since about 18, 19 – and he’d been playing with Stan Getz and big names like that. He formed a quartet that featured electric guitar where he was using distortion, not just blues-playing. Larry Coryell and Pat Metheny played with him for a long time and also Jerry Hahn, who was one of my favourites. Gary looked the part because he used to wear those cowboy jackets with fringes all over the place – you would have thought that would get caught up in your xylophone really, wouldn’t you? Part of the skill was keeping the fringes out of it. This new sound covered most of the records
I bought during the 70s; we called it jazz rock.

The band that knocked me over, almost literally, was the Mahavishnu Orchestra. I remember seeing them at the Rainbow Theatre. I couldn’t sing you the note, I couldn’t tell you the chord but the guys all came onstage, stood there for a moment, and they went into this thing, it wasn’t just volume, it felt like the whole audience had been thrown backwards. Phenomenal musicians, and exactly what I wanted – jazz virtuosity with a real visceral, rock feel. Another act that had this was Chick Corea’s Return To Forever, who started off rather gentle and then got less so. They had a touch of prog about them with titles like Romantic Warrior. They were pretty amazing and I saw them a lot. At this time I also discovered Charles Lloyd. He certainly had a connection to flower power with albums like Love-In, and he played Monterey and wore beads and stuff like that. He was moving into a rock sensibility, especially through his keyboard player Keith Jarrett.

So I didn’t listen to homegrown stuff as I worshipped the Americans. I mingled with some musos, but we weren’t talking Yes, we were talking Weather Report and Zappa. And then Graeme Garden and Tim and I started The Goodies.

We knew we wanted the show to be individual; we knew we wanted music but I resigned myself to the idea that it would all get drowned out by sound effects. We were told we could afford to have a real band, so I decided on doing a track a week in the style of bands I liked. I needed an arranger so I got Mike Gibbs, a very respected man and most British jazz musicians had been in his band at some point, such as Jack Bruce or Dave MacCrae from Matching Mole and Nucleus. I’ll name-drop now; I met Mike at a party at John Dankworth and Cleo Laine’s in 1969.
He was a very mild-mannered man. I said, I really love your compositions, don’t suppose you’d fancy doing music for a comedy series on the BBC? And he said, I’d love to!

The first job was modelled on Crosby, Stills & Nash, and it was abundantly clear were weren’t going to get those harmonies from Tim and Graeme! Mike was a great arranger, and when he stepped down Dave MacCrae took over for the next 10 years. The band line-up would include a host of people from the jazz rock world like John Marshall from Soft Machine, BJ Cole, Chris Spedding… there are hours of unedited tapes out there somewhere.

Musos and comedy fit together perfectly. It was so strange to find myself on a Soft Machine album. On Six, there’s a track called Stanley Stamp’s Gibbon Album. It was taken from a line in the radio panel show I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. When I saw it said ‘For BO’ I said, ‘Is this a joke?’. They said, no, it’s for you. Mike Ratledge was a big I’m Sorry… fan. Things like that don’t happen every day, it’s a rather nice memento of the time.”

Ask Rick Wakeman if there’s some underlying psychological reason for the opulence, the grandeur, the sheer spectacle of his infamous live shows, and he’ll offer up a blokey shrug.

“Not really, I just like grandiose. I’ve loved the idea of telling stories with music since I was about eight, when my father introduced me to Prokofiev’s Peter And The Wolf, but over the years, I got bored going to concerts. The music was great, but I came to the conclusion that a concert should be a multi-purpose entertainment.”

There have been plenty of other artists who went the extra mile: Pink Floyd and The Wall; David Bowie and the Glass Spider; AC/DC and Rosie. Still, when it comes to the multi-sensory assault-and-battery of eyes, ears and brains – not to mention a flag planted deep in your memory banks, for good or bad – nothing has comes close to Wakeman’s epics. “Dad doesn’t do things by halves,” agrees son Adam Wakeman, a note of baffled endearment in his voice.

That’s the only understatement you’ll find in this piece. The truth is, Wakeman does things by multiples: whether that’s wives, knights, ice-dancers, dinosaurs, cameramen or choirboys. To this prog rock ringmaster, the industry-standard format of four blokes in jeans plugging away on a bare stage is anathema. “How boring would that be?” he grins.

Even in the Yes years, hints of grandiosity were there if you squinted, with a caped Wakeman presiding over his paddock of synths. But it wasn’t until 1973, when his solo career left the blocks with The Six Wives Of Henry VIII, that he took a first stab at the huge-time. In an unprecedented move by a British rock star, Wakeman requested to perform Henry at its spiritual home of Hampton Court Palace, and was duly turned down (“The idea of having a rock concert there was tantamount to treason,” he notes). For a less tenacious visionary, that might well have been that. Wakeman, however, was just getting started.

In retrospect, the only thing that was small about 1974’s Journey To The Centre Of The Earth was the project’s beginnings. The band for Wakeman’s second solo album had met in inauspicious circumstances, at a boozer in Buckinghamshire where a gang of mid-table session men played low-key jams on Sunday nights. “Rick just turned up one night in his white Rolls and said, ‘Can I sit in?’” recalls bassist Roger Newell. “That’s how it all started”.

Wakeman’s grand entrance was a telling sign of the direction Journey was headed. With a full orchestra, choir and narrator integral to the music, the payroll was deemed too costly and sprawling to fit in a studio, so recording moved instead to the Royal Festival Hall, for twin concerts on January 18, 1974, where crowds of 3,000 watched the London Symphony Orchestra and English Chamber Choir super-size Wakeman’s musical vision. Even then, financing the spectacle required Wakeman to flog his cars and remortgage his house – soon to become a familiar theme.

“I remember Rick coming into our dressing room at the Royal Festival Hall,” says Newell. “And he was obviously nervous, bless him, because this was the first thing completely under his name. And the road crew had put up a dartboard, so we’re like, ‘Well, do you want to throw a few darts…?’”

“Despite Rick’s rather lofty abilities,” adds drummer Barney James, “there were several what you’d describe as basic, blokey factors.”

“Then we went out onstage,” continues Newell, “and there’s Steve Howe in the audience, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Ringo, McCartney with Linda, politicians, Peter Sellers with Britt Ekland, and God knows who else. Just faces everywhere. That was when we all went, ‘Blimey, this is serious’. I think it’s only then that it really hit us.”

“I did realise then that I was into playing with the big boys, and the high budgets,” recalls James. “We all had to follow Rick into his dreams.”

The Royal Festival Hall gave Wakeman a taste for the epic, and from there, Journey rolled across the planet, choir and strings attached: a whirlwind of logistics and luxuries that fairly haemorrhaged cash. “It didn’t make me stressed at all,” Wakeman insists. “Back then, you toured to ‘advertise’ your music. You sold records off the back of these tours. I always knew that Journey as a tour would lose money, but I also believed it’d help sell the albums, which it did, and it undoubtedly sold far more than it would have if I hadn’t toured.”

He shrugs: “Journey was recorded with an orchestra and choir, so that’s what I toured with. I never believed in short-changing people, and still don’t.”

That went for the band, too. “For the Journey tour, we used to travel in Clark Gable’s Cadillac,” beams Newell, “which had been refurbished by Rolls Royce. We had a TV in there, and two bars, just for the band. Wherever we went, we were always picked up from home and chauffeur-driven. When we went to the States, the band travelled in their own plane, and the orchestra flew in the plane as well. Most of them were coke fiends. They were nuts!”

The Journey tour reached critical mass with a show at the Crystal Palace Bowl in July 1974, complete with inflatable dinosaurs, and the grand finale of Wakeman collapsing over his synths, suffering the first of his heart attacks. Did it feel like time to pare things back, perhaps? “Not at all,” he replies.

No kidding. As vast as Journey was, it’s but a pub gig in an upstairs room next to Wakeman’s most opulent hour. Ask the average progger about 1975’s The Myths And Legends Of King Arthur And The Knights Of The Round Table, and chances are, they’ll cite the shows before the album. “My dad says that people come up to him in the street, and they remember the show on ice, because it was just so ridiculous,” says Adam. “Brilliantly ridiculous: that’s what I mean. You know, it was just such a bizarre thing to do.”

The band had been incorporating the Arthur material into concerts for some time, but by May 1975 Wakeman was eager to play a dedicated concert in Britain, on a lofty scale, putting enough bums on seats to satisfy promoter Harvey Goldsmith (“Harvey Goldmine, we used to call him,” says Newell). Wakeman’s management pushed for the Royal Albert Hall; the keyboardist insisted on three nights at Wembley Arena. There was just one minor detail.

“The ice was an accident,” admits Wakeman, “because the time I wanted to do the Arthur shows was just before the Ice Follies were going to play Wembley and the ice rink was in place. I said it wouldn’t be a problem.”

“So it was this weird situation,” recalls Newell. “They said, ‘Well, look, if you’re going to do Arthur, it’s going to have to be on ice.’ So at that point, Rick just said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’ We were all going, ‘Well, it sounds stupid… but why not?’ I mean, it’s a giggle. Those shows were a lot of fun.”

The bean-counters at A&M, too, were surprisingly laissez-faire – no doubt because Wakeman had staked his own cash. “I don’t think they cared as long as I sold records and made them money,” he says. “A lot of the people who worked at A&M loved what I did and were tremendously supportive. My accountant thought I was completely mad, and the management did shake their heads on more than one occasion. But there were so many exciting possibilities back then, and I grabbed them with both hands. I wasn’t being told what to do by record companies and management at the time. You had freedom to do what you wanted – and so I did.”

And how. Wakeman and his six-piece band were just one cog in this son et lumière spectacular. “If I recall,” he calculates, “there were around 72 in the orchestra, 64 in the English Chamber Choir and 16 in the bass choir. I recall 60-plus ice skaters and a crew of 50. I had a tremendous choreographer who worked with the skaters, who’d come from all over the world. I learned very quickly that it was like a giant jigsaw puzzle putting these extravaganzas together, and the secret was to get the right people involved, who could visualise the finished article the same way you could.”

“Arthur was just this crazy show,” smiles Adam, “with loads of people dressed up as horses, and knights, and shit like that. Back in the 70s, putting on a show and doing it on ice wasn’t practical and wasn’t really feasible, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, he wanted to do it – so they did it.”

“The funniest thing,” continues Newell, “is that Rick said, ‘Look, there’s gonna be a lot of girls skating round while we’re playing: what should they wear?’ Of course, we’re young guys, so we say, ‘stockings and suspenders’. And that’s what they wore for one of the numbers! I don’t recall stockings and suspenders coming into Arthurian legend, but, hey, it does now!”

Despite one ignominious incident when his cape got trapped in an elevated synth (“I was left hanging in mid-air!”), Wakeman admits he was surprised that such a complex show functioned at all, let alone that he enjoyed the Wembley dates. His band have their own take on it: “Absolute fucking chaos!” says James of the first night. “There were two elements that made it difficult. First, we had to condense the length of the concert. Then we had a French TV company come in, and they wanted pure, white, bright light. We had a complete white-out. All our faces were bleached, and we couldn’t see anything. I saw occasional glimpses of ice dancers crashing into each other. We got rather a bad press on that one.”

“We knew our stuff backwards and it’s just as well,” notes Newell, “because the sound was bouncing about. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Thank God for monitors, because without them we’d be stuffed. But the thing I remember most about the ice shows – and you see this when they show it on the BBC – is they used a lot of dry ice, and because it was so bloody cold in there, it rose. There’s one bit where you can’t see me at all. I’m in a cloud!”

Reviews were mixed. “It never worried me what the media thought,” reflects Wakeman. “It’s always nice to get good reviews, but it’s just someone’s personal opinion at the end of the day. The public seemed to enjoy it as much as I did, and that’s all that matters. The critics who call the Arthur shows my ‘grand folly’ – good for them. They remember it, though. I’d love a couple of pounds for everyone who’s claimed to have been at one of those three shows. A total of 27,000 saw the three shows… but I reckon there’s about 127,000 claiming they were there.”

True enough: the Wembley shows sold out, but it wasn’t enough to turn a profit. Tales of Wakeman’s subsequent bankruptcy are exaggerated, but only slightly. “At the end of the day,” he insists, “Arthur made a profit if you lump everything into the same pot. Financially, everything I do puts me in jeopardy, as I play the blackjack doubling-up game all the time. I invest what I earned from the previous project into the next one, and so on, until unfortunately the inevitable happens and you lose, and then you’re back to square one. I’ve had a few square-one starts in my career, but that’s life.”

“Alright, so Arthur lost money,” says Adam, “but you know, people don’t think about the fact that he was selling a lot of records at the time, which subsidised doing the show. For him, back then, it wasn’t really about making money, it was about doing the things that he wanted to do and making every show more outrageous than the last.”

Still, that was the 70s. Post-Arthur, you might suppose the lesson was learned, the itch scratched. Post-punk, you might think Wakeman wouldn’t attempt anything so grandiose again. You’d be wrong. Fast-forward to 2009 – 36 years after Hampton Court first rebuffed him – and word finally came through that Wakeman had scored the gig that got away, scheduling two performances of The Six Wives Of Henry VIII, in its entirety, that May.

“The biggest headache originally was just convincing Hampton Court to let him have it there,” explains Adam, who played second keys for both shows. “There was this constant back-and-forward, for years, of Hampton Court saying, ‘No, we’re not having that here’. Finally, they agreed. So that was the first hurdle, I think, for him. As for the logistical side, all those practical parts of putting a show on are completely do-able; it’s just down to getting the money together, getting the right people, and making sure there’s somebody you can trust with the staging, lighting, all those technical things.”

But they couldn’t control the credit crunch. “It was a tough time to do something like that,” admits Wakeman. “The recession was biting hard, and had it not been for the fact it was Henry’s anniversary, we’d definitely have postponed until the climate was better. But sometimes, timing rules.”

As it did in the 70s, Wakeman’s schoolboy-in-a-sweetshop mentality kicked in, and he began throwing personnel at a concert that took in 95 musicians (not least the English Chamber Choir and Scott Ellaway’s Orchestra Europa), eight cameramen, the Seraphim troupe of fanfare trumpeters, innumerable backroom boys, and blustery narration from Brian Blessed. “I got to see him back to how he was,” explains Adam, “in control of a really big show. It was always his dream to do those again, like in the 70s: the Journeys and Arthurs. And it was such a lovely thing to see him… I don’t want to say ‘back to glory’, but back to something that meant more than a standard show in a theatre. That’s where his strengths are, as a sort of chief in charge of people.”

Even so, Wakeman’s fantasy show was fraught with potential mishap. “At every event, there are always eleventh-hour disasters,” says Adam. “And one of the problems as well is that Rick is quite a controlling person when it comes to getting things right – which is how you need to be, otherwise things get taken out of your control. I could see the frustrations and the stress that came along with putting on a show like that.

“We actually only got the final run-through with the orchestra and the whole production on the afternoon of the first show,” he adds. “The stage had a big stairway that took Rick up to a big pipe-organ thing. He walked up the steps, and they rolled into the middle of the stage. This thing weighed about three-quarters of a ton, and when they pushed it back, it rolled over the power cables and audio cables that went to his keyboards. So when Rick got up there and went to start Jane Seymour, there was no sound. He came over to me and said, ‘If that happens tonight, you’re going to have to play Jane Seymour’. So it was like, ‘Erm, right, OK, I’ll just have a quick check on how the start of that one goes…’”

On the nights, both shows were triumphant, even if a possibly-refreshed Blessed went wildly off script, forcing Eagle Rock to cut the swear-words to avoid a ‘PG’ rating for the DVD. “I was really high up on a riser, about 10 feet above Dad,” recalls Adam, “so I had the best view looking down, and I could see everything. It was brilliant. It was such a great spot. If that show had been at the O2 or somewhere, it would still have been great, but it was so special because of the location, and I think everybody fed off it. Both days, it was such a special event.

“You know, with the Six Wives, I always loved that album as a kid, and I’ve played a few of the songs with my dad over the years when we’ve toured together. But the thing I really liked about that show was we got to play the album as it was intended. So that was a real special moment for me, getting to play the album in its entirety, and as it was written, or as close to that as possible.”

A critical success, a father-and-son bonding experience, a great night out… But perhaps more than any of these, Henry at Hampton Court was a symbolic return to live majesty for Wakeman, at a time when grandiosity was a foreign concept on the withering music scene. “It’s a great shame,” sighs Wakeman, of the age in which a half-hour set at the Camden Barfly constitutes a rock concert. “But the [big] shows are still there to be done.”

“I know that one of the things that frustrates my dad as an artist and as a musician,” picks up Adam, “is that people play things too safe nowadays, and they have done for such a long time. It’s complete role-reversal of how things were in the 70s, with people now touring just to maintain an income, so they can make records that don’t make money. Which is, unfortunately, the way things are. It’s just evolution.”

The question is: how does Wakeman evolve from here? After all, the Hampton Court dream is fulfilled, his bank balance is back on an even keel, the industry is unrecognisable… have we seen the last of his wonderful extravaganzas?

Don’t count on it. “You’re always looking to try something new,” Wakeman concludes, “and that’s always difficult, although I never really use that word – I think ‘challenging’ sums it up more. The shows will keep coming until the last nail in the coffin lid has been banged in!”