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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canadian prog rockers Saga have announced their first UK live show for 20 years.

The band will play Shepherd's Bush Empire on Friday, September 10, 2027, as part of their 1977-2027 The Generations Tour to celebrate the band's 50th anniversary with further dates around Europe.

"We are all absolutely thrilled to be at this historic venue, and we simply must see you all there," the band say.

The current line-up of Saga features long-standing frontman Michael Sadler, guitarist Ian Crichton and keyboardist Jim Gilmour, who are joined by drummer Mike Thorne and bassist Mike Borkosky. Original bassist Jim Crichton has been a non-touring band member since 2019.

The September 10 show is billed as the band's only UK show. Saga last played the UK in 2006 at a poorly promoted and attended show at London's The Garage venue, although the audience on the night did include Iron Maiden's Steve Harris and Nicko McBrain, who are both big fans of the band.

Tickets for the London show go on sale at 11am UK time, Friday, July 10, and will be available from here.

Metallica are such an institution that, for one whole weekend, they’re bending London to their will. As well as headlining the former Olympic Stadium twice to a combined 160,000 people, the Grammy-gobbling megastars are screening their concert films in cinemas across town, running a pop-up shop on Old Street and donating thousands of pounds to local disadvantaged students. They’re even hosting a blood drive where fans can exchange their plasma for possible goodies.

As if metal’s best-selling band taking over the capital weren’t big enough, they’ve also brought two of the scene’s most exciting bands for night one. KNOCKED LOOSE’s chest-kicking hardcore was refined in Kentucky basements, so it’s easy to imagine a half-empty stadium swallowing much of their oomph. But, the five-piece thrive in the expanse. Frontman Bryan Garris strides around the circular stage while six moshpits swirl: a record no one else this evening will touch.

GOJIRA’s hour nearly steals the show. Inspired by Morbid Angel as much as Meshuggah, the Frenchmen are progressive but never pretentious. The Cell and Backbone use technical parts to build disgusting riffs, whereas newer cuts Born For One Thing and Amazonia flaunt their developing melodic prowess. The band covered revolutionary song Ah! Ça ira! at 2024’s Paris Olympics opening ceremony, and they relive that mainstream moment, rejoined by opera singer Marina Viotti. The Gift Of Guilt may end things with anguished lyrics, but this set was an unencumbered victory.

“Die! Die! Die!” chant tens of thousands of people. Only at a METALLICA show can that be a sign of enjoyment. London Stadium is instantly absorbed as the Californians unload Creeping Death, and after fellow oldie Harvester Of Sorrow keeps the energy high, singer/guitarist James Hetfield takes to the mic with supreme gratitude, calling the amped-up masses “family”. We’re subsequently treated to Holier Than Thou and Of Wolf And Man: two deep cuts from 1991’s chart-busting Black Album.

The momentum stumbles during recent songs Lux Æterna and If Darkness Had A Son, which have yet to reach fan-favourite status, before falling flat on its face when bassist Rob Trujillo and guitarist Kirk Hammett jam near-unrecognisable renditions of Ian Dury’s Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll and The Clash’s Guns Of Brixton. Sweeping ballad Fade To Black course-corrects, however, and from there the lineup truly locks in. Everything is performed with surgical precision, not to mention an enthusiasm which belies the fact they’ve been doing this for 45 years now. The members explore every corner of their 360 setup (literally – Lars Ulrich has four different drum kits at his disposal) and Trujillo surfs a makeshift board through the VIP ‘snake pit’.

The final 45 minutes offer a string of spectacles. Phone lights pierce the darkness during Nothing Else Matters, then stomper Sad But True rattles the stands. Hardwired is aired for the first time all tour, Fuel brings the fire, and gigantic blow-up balls drop for Seek & Destroy. Master Of Puppets concludes without the bells and whistles but remains a display of neoclassical magnificence, as magical now as it was in 1986.

Even though Metallica’s first night at their last European stop wasn’t quite perfect, it reiterated that when the kings of metal knuckle down, they deserve their crowns. Being gigantic isn’t the same as being good, yet this was unquestionably both. And we’re only halfway done…

Metallica setlist: London Stadium – July 3, 2026

1. Creeping Death
2. Harvester Of Sorrow
3. Holier Than Thou
4. Of Wolf And Man
5. Lux Æterna
6. If Darkness Had A Son
7. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll / Guns Of Brixton (Ian Dury and The Clash covers; Kirk and Rob only)
8. Fade To Black
9. Cyanide
10. Orion
11. Nothing Else Matters
12. Sad But True
13. Hardwired
14. Fuel
15. Seek & Destroy
16. Master Of Puppets

Ex-Metallica bassist Jason Newsted covered Bob Seger’s Turn The Page with his Chophouse Band as their North American tour kicked off on Wednesday (July 1).

The group, where Newsted handles vocals and guitar, performed the 1972 track as part of a covers-heavy set at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Massachusetts. They also played tracks by Neil Young, Blue Öyster Cult, John Baez and more.

No Metallica original made the cut, but according to setlist wiki setlist.fm, the band jammed the bridge of Creeping Death during a musical rendition of Mark Twain’s poem The War Prayer. Turn The Page was also famously covered by Metallica during Newsted’s time in the band, making the tracklisting of 1998 covers project Garage, Inc..

Watch footage of Newsted’s live take below.

Newsted joined Metallica in late 1986 – shortly after the death of the band’s previous bassist Cliff Burton in a bus accident, aged 24 – and stayed in the lineup until early 2001. He played on four studio albums of original material, including 1991’s blockbuster Metallica, which made the metal giants a household name and has sold upwards of 30 million copies worldwide.

Newsted quit Metallica due to mounting personal and creative tensions within the group. He initially attributed the exit to “private and personal reasons and the physical damage I have done to myself over the years while playing the music that I love”.

In subsequent interviews, he elaborated that he was banned from pursuing outside musical projects by singer/guitarist James Hetfield.

During a 2001 Playboy interview, Hetfield reasoned, “When someone does a side project, it takes away from the strength of Metallica … Where would it end? Does he start touring with it? Does he sell shirts? Is it his band?”

But, two years later, the frontman admitted that he had been “choking” his longtime bass player.

“We were brothers,” he reflected, “and I was trying so hard to keep that that I was choking Jason … That’s how I was taught to control things: through intimidation and rage.”

In May, Newsted revealed that substance addiction also contributed to his departure.

He told YouTuber Dean Delray: “The reason I left Metallica is because I was a horrible addict. I was way up against myself, and if I didn’t get some kind of help, I was going to die. And so I just said, ‘You guys, can I have a minute? Please give me a minute.’ And they said, ‘No.’”

He also revealed that he had recently undergone treatment for throat cancer and been given the all-clear by doctors.

“May 8 of 2025, I underwent a procedure for throat cancer,” he remembered. “And so they took a bunch of shit outta here and then they went in with lasers this way and took a bunch of shit out. So the cavern inside my head is different than it was, but we got it early.”

The Chophouse Band, named after Newsted’s personal recording studio in San Francisco, will continue their North American tour at Mickey’s Black Box in Lititz, Pennsylvania tonight (July 3). From July 9, the band will support Blackberry Smoke on a string of US shows.

Meanwhile, Metallica are gearing up to play the last two shows of their three-year-long M72 world tour in London, UK tonight and on Sunday, July 5.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The summer music festival season is in full swing, with live events happening all over the world featuring some of the biggest bands around. But, as you’ll be well aware, there’s no Glastonbury this year with the Worthy Farm festival having a fallow year, with the plan for it to return in 2027.

With the weather finally sorting itself out, have you thought about creating your own festival experience at home to fill the gap?

You and your friends can avoid the inevitable downpours, the massive queues at the bar, the pricy food, the late nights and the hassle of pitching a tent when you’d much rather be seeing live music.

I’ve picked out several products that can help transform your living room, bedroom or patio into a mini-festival site - and with the BBC currently showing highlights and a selection of live sets from the 2025 festival including The Prodigy’s blistering performance, alongside classic performances such as Radiohead from 1997 and The Cure from 2019 via the BBC iPlayer, it’s a great time to add some festival joy to the summer.

If you want a bit more inspiration when creating your Glastonbury at home experience, how about setting up a food and drink station, complete with bowls of snacks, plastic glasses and an ice bucket in the hall? You could even replace the bean bags I mentioned above with camping chairs - although it might now be quite as comfy.

Give your guests a running order for the day ahead - and plan in times for games of Hitster, giant jenga and food breaks for pizza delivery. You could even get some VIP lanyards printed, allowing "exclusive access" to your living room and fit some blackout curtains to create a night vibe for the whole day.

And if you think the noise might upset your neighbours, invite them round to join in!

Doom metal bills don't come bigger than this. Hell, doom gigs don't come much bigger than this: Acid Bath's first-ever UK show in a sold out 2,600-capacity Manchester Academy with homegrown heroes Conan and Green Lung - who'll headline this same venue later this year - in support. It's massive, it's exciting and it's a miracle it's even happening.

When Acid Bath broke up in 1997 following the tragic death of bassist Audie Pitre, they were lucky if they could play to more than 10 people, guitarist Sammy Duet telling Hammer last year that "While we were together, nobody really gave a shit." But in their absence, the fondness grew.

Which brings us to Manchester Academy, on the hottest day of the year, watching the hottest reunion in metal right now. The room's already a furnace when Conan take to the stage, the Liverpudlian brutes issuing some ungodly force that takes New Orleans sludge metal and drags it so far and deep it ends up suffocating under a tonne of lumpen riffs.

Next up are UK doom darlings Green Lung. New tunes Evil In This House and Necropolitan Line have the kind of killer hooks and swaggering riffs that could make them into a real breakout band, while the likes of Mountain Church, Let The Devil In and One For Sorrow are already well-worn anthems.

Before Acid Bath arrive, Black Sabbath's genre-defining eponymous track plays over the PA, and there doesn't seem to be a soul in the house who isn't singing along. It sets a tone, and as the bonus poem tones ominously overhead casting vivid, violent images with just a few lines of apocalyptic poetry. Then all hell breaks loose.

Opening with Tranquilized, the Manchester Academy greets Acid Bath with an orgiastic frenzy as the floor explodes with moshers, dancers and crowdsurfers while cups fly overhead offering sweet - if all too small - relief from the clammy press. This is doom set through a psychedelic prism and enough ecstasy and performance enhancers to get Hugh Heffner bouncing back from the grave.

Even the slow, brutal drag of a song like Bleed Me An Ocean becomes a euphoric sing-along, fans singing along with such fervour you'd think someone was handing out hymn sheets at the door. There's no corny patter, no insistence on "give us a circle". The crowd hardly needs encouragement to lose their minds, and the band play with a brooding intensity befitting their status as long-lost legends, vocalist Dax Riggs channelling Jim Morrison via Jim Jones.

At just over an hour, Acid Bath leave the crowd wanting more - inevitably. Some of their biggest 'hits' - Scream Of The Butterfly, Cassie Eats Cockroaches - are left out. But the mix of bad-trip psych, end-of-life blues and guttural sludge is just too potent not to love, and when the crowd belt out "Dying felt so goddamn good today" from Paegan Love Song, there's a sense of overwhelming gratitude that Acid Bath are even back at all, let alone bigger than ever. Doom metal has never felt so utterly euphoric.

Acid Bath support System Of A Down in the UK on July 13 and July 15.

Acid Bath Manchester Academy Setlist June 25 2026

1. Tranquilized
2. Bleed Me An Ocean
3. Venus Blue
4. The Bones Of Baby Dolls
5. Dead Girl
6. The Mortician's Flame
7. New Death Sensation
8. Graveflower
9. Paegan Love Song
10. The Blue

50 years, 17 albums, over 2,500 shows under their belt – Iron Maiden show no signs of stopping.

On 10-11 July, Maiden celebrate their half-century in style, with Eddfest, an Iron Maiden party in the grounds of Knebworth. To mark it, Classic Rock and Metal Hammer have teamed up with Maiden to create a killer-collectible: the official programme and museum guide!

Eddited by Iron Maiden Fan Club Edditor Alexander Milas, the programme features exclusive interviews, including founder Steve Harris looking back at over 50 years of heavy metal mayhem, plus the official guide to the Infinite Dreams Experience, the open-air Maiden Museum full of stage props and Maiden memorabilia collected over a half-century of historic tours.

There’s an all-new interview with Blaze Bayley, archive content from the pages of Metal Hammer and Classic Rock (and sister magazines like Guitarist, Guitar Player and more), a letter from Rod Smallwood, interviews with the festival’s many guests, chats with Maiden artists Alberto ‘Akirant’ Quirantes and Hervé Monjeaud, the inside story of Trooper beer and more besides.

The programme is going to become a must-have collector’s item – so get it while you can. Available at the festival or via our exclusive pre-sale on the Classic Rock and Metal Hammer online store.

PLEASE NOTE: ANY PRE-ORDERED ITEMS WILL NOT BE DELIVERED BEFORE EDDFEST IN JULY.

They are Iron Maiden. Hallowed be thy name.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pro-shot video of Linkin Park’s 100-minute headline set at Rock In Rio Lisbon is on YouTube.

The Diamond-selling nu metal giants played a 23-song set at the Portuguese festival on Sunday, June 21, as they made their way across Europe for the final dates of their ongoing From Zero world tour.

The footage captures the entire performance, which included airings of such old-school cuts as One Step Closer, Breaking The Habit, Faint, In The End, Numb and What I’ve Done alongside songs from 2024 comeback album From Zero.

The set also featured a rendition of Where’d You Go, a song by singer, multi-instrumentalist and co-founder Mike Shinoda’s solo project Fort Minor. Watch the whole thing below.

Linkin Park’s 2026 summer European tour kicked off on May 29 at 3Arena in Stockholm, Sweden and is set to wrap up at Letzigrund Stadion in Zurich, Switzerland on June 30. Along the way, the six-piece headlined Download festival in the UK on June 14; as they’re now co-fronted by Emily Armstrong, who joined in 2024, they became the first band with a female singer to close the mainstage of the Donington weekender.

The members responded to the distinction during an interview with BBC News on the day of the show.

“So, I’ll start with the fact that I don’t feel like I should be answering the question, that Emily should be answering, so I went and asked her, because she can’t be here right now,” said Shinoda.

“I asked her and she said: ‘If it wasn’t us, it would’ve just been someone else, because there are so many great female-fronted bands.’ But, she’s so grateful, she wanted you guys to know, she’s so grateful that she is the one and that she’ll remember it forever.”

Armstrong joined the band as they reactivated following a seven-year hiatus, which started shortly after the death of previous singer Chester Bennington aged 51 in July 2017. Her appointment was initially met with controversy, as fans highlighted her past ties to the Church Of Scientology and her support of convicted rapist Danny Masterson at his trial in 2020.

Armstrong responded to the concerns in a statement, saying that she does “not condone abuse or violence against women, and I empathise with the victims of these crimes”. Although she didn’t clarify whether she is or has ever been a follower of Scientology, the BBC reported that lyrics in her rock band Dead Sara hint at a rejection of the church’s teachings.

At Download, Shinoda spoke about how Armstrong came to join the band two years ago.

“Even when it was, like, choosing Emily as a singer, the top priority was, like, whoever the person is, are they somebody that we can spend a lot of time with?” he remembered.

“Do we get along, both personally and creatively? We were all just a good fit that way. Obviously, the person has to be a world-class singer, but they don’t have to be a world-class female singer. It’s just whoever’s the best singer. So, for us, all of those things connected us with Em.”

Formed in 1996 under the name Xero, Linkin Park are one of the best-selling rock bands of all time. Their 2000 debut album Hybrid Theory was certified Diamond in the United States in 2005, having sold upwards of 10 million units. They’ve also won two Grammy Awards: Hybrid Theory single Crawling won the Best Hard Rock Performance trophy in 2002 and Numb/Encore, a collaboration with rapper Jay-Z, earned them the Best Rap/Sung Collaboration prize in 2006.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new album is expected to be released in 2027.

Rival Sons: Domestic Bliss UK tour 2026

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

*support from The Blue Stones only

Find Rival Sons tickets.

Parkway Drive have announced a tour of their native Australia for August, where they’ll play their first albums Killing With A Smile (2005) and Horizons (2007) in full.

The metalcore five-piece will put on two shows each in five different cities down under, with the first night dedicated to Killing… and the second to Horizons. They also promise to play some of their greatest hits at the stops.

Support acts for the Killing Horizons tour are yet to be announced, but tickets go on sale on Thursday (June 25) at 12 midday local time. A presale for the band’s fan-club, the Parkway Nation, will take place the same day at 10am. See the full list of dates below.

Parkway recently returned to the stage at the Hammersonic and Welcome To Rockville festivals in Indonesia and the USA respectively, six months after they wrapped up their 20th-anniversary tour with a leg of European shows.

The recent performances were their first since they publicly distanced themselves from former employee Jed Gordon, brother of drummer Ben Gordon, following Jed filing a guilty plea for an underage sex offence in March.

“This happened before we were a band, however we bear moral responsibility for contracting him from 2003, on and off over the years,” the members wrote in a statement. “While he hasn’t toured with us since 2017, more recently he’s been part of our Australian online merch team.

“When the band heard about this, we terminated his contract immediately. He’s no longer involved with Parkway Drive in any capacity. This is heartbreaking on a very human scale.”

Parkway formed in Byron Bay in 2003 and quickly signed a joint deal with Sydney label Resist and prominent US hardcore label Epitaph. They still release their music through both companies.

Killing… and Horizons were produced by Adam Dutkiewicz, guitarist for US metalcore luminaries Killswitch Engage, and established the band’s presence in the Australian scene. Horizons was a particular commercial success, reaching number six on the country’s album chart. Both records are now recognised as Gold sellers by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA).

Talking to Hammer last year, singer Winston McCall explained how working with Dutkiewicz refined the band’s songwriting style.

“One of the massive things for us was the lack of clean singing; we were attached to the aggression to begin with,” he said. “Before Killing With A Smile, we were what Adam referred to as riff salad, which we referred to as risotto. We got everything and threw it together until you had enough bits and you called it a song.”

He added: “[Dutkiewicz] was like, ‘Dude, this riff is sick. Why are you only playing it for four bars? That’s the best part of the song.’”

Parkway’s last studio album, Darker Still, came out in 2022. McCall told Pełna Kulturka in November that the band hope to dedicate 2026 to writing the follow-up.

“It’s not like we have recorded an album, but focussing on making new music is literally all of the next year for us,” he said. “We said, OK, we’re not going to be touring much next year at all. It’s all going to be about creating new music.”

Parkway Drive – Killing Horizons tour dates:

• Aug 01: Perth Metro City
• Aug 02: Perth Metro City
• Aug 04: Adelaide Hindley St Music Hall
• Aug 05: Adelaide Hindley St Music Hall
• Aug 09: Melbourne Forum
• Aug 10: Melbourne Forum
• Aug 12: Sydney Enmore Theatre
• Aug 13: Sydney Enmore Theatre
• Aug 15: Brisbane Fortitude Music Hall
• Aug 16: Brisbane Fortitude Music Hall

Deep Purple frontman Ian Gillan has announced his first-ever spoken word dates. The Talking Gib'rish UK tour will commence on April 28 next year at the Bournemouth Pavilion, and come to an end on May 29 at London's Cadogan Hall.

“I am quivering with anticipation at the prospect of embarking on my first-ever public speaking engagements, The Talking Gib'rish Tour, in April/May 2027," says Gillan. "I'll be covering a lot of ground, from my early days in Hounslow to whatever might have happened on the latest world tour with my beloved Deep Purple, and maybe something funky in between.

"After 65 years on the road, there will be stories about some of the fascinating and sometimes magical events and people that I've encountered along the trail. It's going to be a blast!"

A ticket presale will kick off at 10am UK time tomorrow (24 June), with the general sale beginning on Friday at the same time. Full dates below.

Gillan's solo dates are in addition to Deep Purple's ongoing world tour, which is currently in Europe and heads to the US next month. The tour returns to Europe in late September and climaxes with a run of UK dates in November.

Deep Purple's upcoming album Splat! will be released on July 3 via earMUSIC. The album is available to pre-order now. A video for the band's latest single, Guilt Trippin', has just been released.

Deep Purple are on the cover of the new issue of Classic Rock, which is out now. Inside, they talk about the making of Splat!

Ian Gillan: Taking Gib'rish UK Tour 2027

Apr 28: Bournemouth Pavilion
Apr 29: Ipswich Corn Exchange
Apr 30: London Union Chapel
May 01: Cardiff New Theatre
May 02: Tunbridge Wells Assembly Hall Theatre
May 05: Glasgow Pavilion
May 06: York Barbican
May 07: Newcastle Tyne Theatre & Opera House
May 08: Edinburgh Queens Hall
May 09: Manchester RNCM Theatre
May 12: Leicester De Montfort Hall
May 13: Coventry Warwick Arts Centre Theatre
May 14: Birmingham Town Hall
May 15: Nottingham Albert Hall
May 16: Hayes Beck Theatre
May 19: Basingstoke The Anvil
May 20: Bath The Forum
May 21: Guildford G Live
May 22: Folkestone Leas Cliff Halls
May 23: Aylesbury Waterside Theatre
May 24: Bristol St George's
May 27: Sheffield City Hall, Memorial Hall
May 28: Liverpool Philharmonic Hall
May 29: London Cadogan Hall

Deep Purple tour dates

Jun 24: Mönchengladbach SparkassenPark, Germany
Jun 27: Coburg Open Air, Germany
Jun 28: Ulm Klosterhof Wiblingen, Germany
Jul 04: Gredos Músicos en la Naturaleza, Spain
Jul 05: Pamplona Navarra Arena, Spain
Jul 09: Málaga Starlite, Spain
Jul 10: Cádiz Tío Pepe, Spain
Jul 16: Pisa Summer Knights, Italy
Jul 17: Este Music Festival, Italy
Jul 19: München Tollwood Festival, Germany

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

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

Find Deep Purple tickets.

Iron Maiden had to play an abridged set in Paris on Monday (June 22) due to a power cut affecting the venue.

The British heavy metal legends put on a phone-free gig at La Défense Arena in the French capital and were recording footage for an upcoming concert film, but had their stagetime interrupted for approximately an hour.

As a result, the 17-song set they’ve been performing on the ongoing second European leg of their Run For Your Lives world tour was trimmed to 14 songs. The planned encore of Aces High, Fear Of The Dark and Wasted Years was dropped, as the band could not run past a strict 11:30pm venue curfew.

According to Ultimate Classic Rock, the power outage, which affected much of Paris’ Nanterre neighbourhood, occurred midway through the band’s performance of 1984 Powerslave single 2 Minutes To Midnight. Although backup generators kicked in shortly afterwards and brought the venue’s house lights back up, the show was unable to carry on until full power was restored.

Afterwards, many fans took to social media to express their frustration with the situation.

“The concert was great despite the power cut!” writes one. “However, La Défense Arena will always remain the worst venues [sic] on the Isle de France…”

“We came all the way from Romania for this show. We spent a lot of money on fucking Paris (which is expensive as we all know) just to be at this concert. We were waiting for this for so long. Fuck this,” adds another.

“The concert in Romania had terrible sound and this one was cut short. WHAT DO YOU MEAN we spent so much money to be here and it’s cut short?! It’s obviously not Maiden’s fault but oh is the frustration high!”

Although Maiden have encouraged fans at every stop of the Run For Your Lives tour to not film with their phones during the show, the Paris stop was the only gig so far where the rule was enforced. Fans had their devices placed in magnetically sealed Yondr pouches, which were kept on their person. The only way the pouches could be unsealed was by a member of security upon leaving the auditorium.

The band said that they put the rule into effect for this show to ensure “the optimal viewing experience” for fans who will watch the eventual concert film. It’s currently unknown whether Maiden still plan to release the footage despite the power cut.

Maiden’s phone-free policy mirrors the one that Ghost put into effect for two Los Angeles gigs in 2023, which were recorded for their 2024 film Rite Here, Rite Now. Talking to Hammer in 2025, singer Bruce Dickinson, who attended one of the shows, said he was a big fan of the Swedish hard rockers’ no-phone policy.

“Everybody was talking to each other like human beings!” he said. “I’m sat there, in the normal seats, and the lights are on and people are going past going, ‘Hey, it’s the guy from Iron Maiden!’ They’re waving at me. ‘Hi!’ ‘Cool, hey!’ Job done!

“Had they had a mobile phone, they would have been climbing over old-age pensioners [to take a picture]. The evidence of that was, after the show, everybody got their phones back and the backstage suddenly was like Animal House. Everybody was focussed on the show.”

The Run For Your Lives tour, which first made its way across Europe in the summer of 2025, will continue at Copenhagen’s Copenhell festival on Wednesday (June 24). This leg will wrap up with a performance at Knebworth House on July 11, when the band headline the second day of their own two-day festival, Eddfest. The Hu, The Darkness, Airbourne, The Almighty, the solo band of ex-Maiden singer Blaze Bayley and more are also on the lineup.

After the European leg ends, the band will bring the Run For Your Lives production to the Americas starting in August. Further shows in Asia and Australia are also planned. The tour will conclude with performances at K-Arena in Yokohama, Japan on November 24 and 25, after which Maiden will not take to the stage until 2028, at the earliest.

The iconic painted floorboards that graced the cover of Syd Barrett's debut solo album, The Madcap Laughs, are to go on display at The Piper in St. Leonards, near Hastings on the East Sussex coast in July as part of the venue's celebration of Barrett, who would have turned 80 this year. The venue was named in honour of Pink Floyd's 1967 debut album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.

Barrett legendarily painted the floorboards of his bedroom in Wetherby Mansions in London's Earl's Court orange and purple and they featured in Mick Rock's photoshoot that was used for the cover of 1970's The Madcap Laughs.

A full programme of gigs and talks featuring Ozric Tentacles, Bernard Butler, Twink and more will take place at the popular venue from July 4-11 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Barrett's death on July 7 on 2006.

Events include:

Syd's Last Stand: An evening with Syd Barrett biographer Rob Chapman in discussion with Tony Higgins - July 4, 7.30pm

Speech and ribbon-cutting ceremony with Jill Drower (former habitué of the UFO club, Exploding Galaxy member and film-maker) and venue owner Chris Barnett . The unveiling of the floorboards and a one-time-only chance to see the full set in place. Timed photo opportunity slots - July 5, 1.45pm

Twink plus David Catlin-Birch: Music and memories with Syd Barrett's old friend and bandmate. Ex-Pink Fairies and Pretty Things drummer - July 5, 7.30pm

Shine On You Crazy Diamond: A panel discussion and celebration with old friends, partners, family members, bandmates including: Twink, Ian Barrett, Rob Chapman and other guests. Plus a screening of Exploders - introduction from director and former UFO-er: Jill Drower - July 6, 7pm

Ozric Tentacles - July 9

Bernard Butler - July 10

Sydfest: featuring The Black Doldrums, Index For Working Music, The Embrooks, The Great Silkie, Plus DJ sets from Telegram Sam & Charlie (Toy) - July 11, 5-12pm

Get tickets.

Just what is it about Glastonbury? 55 years in and the world's most famous music festival continues to create headlines, crown new stars and produce those one-of-a-kind, you-had-to-be-there moments that get talked about for years after.

Michael Eavis' creation has survived all manner of changing trends, dramatic cultural shifts and the rise and fall of countless major music acts, evolving from more rock and folk-centred lineups to eventually embrace dance music, reggae, metal, country, hip hop and, despite the protestations of a few grumpy gatekeepers, pop.

2025's edition boasted a typically varied bill, everything from the experimental punk of Turnstile to the scabrous rap of Denzel Curry to the delirious trash-pop of Charli XCX and chaotic big beat of The Prodigy represented. Each year, the list of iconic Glasto performances only seems to get bigger. With the festival taking a well earned break this year, here are the 15 greatest Glastonbury sets of all time, so far.

The Smiths (1984)

More than a decade had passed since the birth of Glastonbury Festival, and the music scene that it represented in the early '70’s had moved on some way as we reached the mid-point of the 1980’s.

Not that these changes were particularly reflected in the line-up of the festival, with the 1984 bill featuring jazz legends Fela Kuti and Dr. John and new wave hero Elvis Costello headlining. But, halfway down the bill on the Saturday, Michael Eavis had booked a band that would give the festival the lightbulb moment it needed, leading to its refusal to stagnate ever again.

The Smiths only had one album at this point, their self-titled debut, released in February of that year, but already they were becoming cult-like, a magnet for frustrated and disaffected youth. No one quite knew what was going to happen when Morrissey and Johnny Marr led the Manchester quartet out that day, but their ten-song set seemed to be a siren for young people to appear from nowhere and turn the Pyramid Stage from a docile field of hippies into an pogoing indie disco.

By the time a triumphant Hand in Glove closed the show, a full-blown stage invasion was happening. The festival would never ignore the zeitgeist again.

Orbital (1994)

Glastonbury’s relationship with dance music wasn’t an immediately happy one. Michael Eavis has openly admitted he didn’t care for the style, and when a series of free parties started springing up on site around the time that the UK rave scene was being vilified as public enemy number one in the media, a sense of lawlessness that was the antithesis of Glastonbury’s purpose caused all manner of headaches.

But when the Criminal Justice Act bill of 1994 scandalously targeted and criminalised fans of acid house, the festival, rather than shun the genre, showed solidarity and embraced it.

Brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll, aka Orbital, were installed as NME Stage headliners that year and proceeded to perform a set that has gone down as a kind of EDM big bang for festivals the world over.

Not only was the duo's hypnotic set of euphoric beats rapturously received, it showed that dance artists could compete with the traditional guitar band set up, opening the door for The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Moby, Fatboy Slim and more to become an integral part of the festival's fabric.

Perhaps even more importantly though, the booking was a statement of political intent, one that defied the government's heavy-handed and discriminatory stance. It offered solid proof that the anti-establishment principles which gave birth to the festival were still alive and well.

Pulp (1995)

When The Stone Roses pulled out of their 1995 headline slot at the last-minute, after guitarist John Squire broke his collarbone and a shoulder blade falling off a mountain bike, Glastonbury was in urgent need of a replacement to close the Pyramid Stage on the festival's Saturday night.

On the face of it, Pulp, indie journeymen who had been plugging away for the past 15 years, and had only just begun to experience crossover success with their 1994 album His ‘n’ Hers, may have seemed like an underwhelming alternative to the mercurial Mancunians.

But the Sheffield band had a pretty huge ace up their sleeve, having just released what would become their definitive anthem; the arch pop of Common People. So big a hit was the song, that Glastonbury took a punt on the band as headliners, and Pulp repaid them with the performance of their career.

Suave, self-depreciating, charmingly geeky and yet blessed with the kind of charisma that you couldn’t take your eyes off, frontman Jarvis Cocker wonderfully conducted the crowd through his band's brilliantly odd, distinctly British, working class, guitar pop anthems. The reaction when the first notes of Common People’s disco throb begin, just after Cocker has read out his weekly shopping list by way of farewell, is spine-tingling stuff.

It elevated Pulp from cult favourites into one of the biggest bands in the country and turned Jarvis into a national treasure. One of the all-time great feel-good stories of the festival's history.

The Prodigy (1997)

Three days before The Fat Of The Land dropped and confirmed The Prodigy as one of the most significant and influential acts of the 90s, Essex's favourite firestarters rocked up to the Pyramid Stage to play one of the most explosive EDM sets ever seen at a major music festival. The first dance band to make the step up to Pyramid headliner, Liam, Keith, Maxim and their bandmates blew Glasto away with the kind of relentless, visceral energy usually more associated with the most confrontational punk and metal bands rather than anything out of the UK rave scene.

A break in the set owing to some equipment failure only heightened the sense of anticipation around the crowd when the band finally made it back onstage. By that point, Glastonbury was already an absolute mudbath, days of heavy rain in the lead up to the festival turning it into a bog as soon as punters stepped within its boundaries.

It didn't matter; The Prodigy had seas of people bouncing, moshing and dancing like maniacs, newer cuts like Smack My Bitch Up, Breathe and number one smash hit Firestarter establishing themselves not just as career-high bangers, but some of the heaviest, most essential anthems of their era. Incredibly, this incendiary set was arguably not even the most iconic Glastonbury performance of that year...

Radiohead (1997)

By 1997, BritPop had been a national obsession for a few years, and that summer's Glastonbury line-up reflected that. But, although no one knew it at the time, the rug was very much about to be pulled out from underneath the movement.

Two weeks before the festival took place, Radiohead released their third album Ok Computer. Installed as Pyramid Stage headliners on the festival's Saturday night, the Oxfordshire band put on a performance that was so good it arguably contributed to changing the entire landscape of popular music in Britain.

Rather than coming out with a bang in an attempt to immediately grab attention, Radiohead teased out the opening of their set with the slow, delicate Lucky. It seemed a risk to start a first ever festival headlining set with a song placed as track 11 on an album that came out just 12 days earlier, but it immediately marked Radiohead out as the antithesis of the zeitgeist.

From there the Glastonbury audience was held rapt, becoming hypnotised by the band ran through a set of songs that sounded completely unique, utterly advanced and totally alien. Take a look at Thom Yorke wailing along, his body flinching and juddering, trying to keep in rhythm with his band as Johnny Greenwood’s iconic solo during Paranoid Android rips out of the Pyramid Stage PA, it’s a truly transcendent moment.

Unquestionably one of the greatest sets in the history of live music, raising the bar to near impossible standards.

David Bowie (2000)

Michael Eavis once described David Bowie as one of the three greatest singers of all time, alongside Elvis and Frank Sinatra, and Bowie hadn’t rocked up at Worthy Farm since its second iteration back in 1971, so this one was always going to be a bit special.

Let's be honest, there is a more than a touch of revisionism when discussing Bowie these days; during the late '80s and into the '90s he wasn’t being lauded as a forward-thinking visionary in quite the same way as he is now, with albums from that period like Earthling and Black Tie, White Noise getting a lukewarm reaction upon their release. This performance, though, did as much as anything to re-cement Bowie’s place at the very pinnacle of popular culture, as he ran through a greatest hits set that reminded the entire world of his undoubted genius. Also, the warmth with which the veteran performer later spoke about his experiences at the festival was evidence of just how hallowed even the biggest artists considered this site to be.

Watching the set back today, the mass sing-along during Heroes, Life on Mars or Under Pressure are positively life affirming, but don’t ignore Bowie ending his set on a fantastic version of I’m Afraid of Americans, a nod to his thirst to remain relevant and never sink into the nostalgia quagmire.

Amy Winehouse (2007)

Everyone in the music industry knew that Amy Winehouse was a talent long before this performance blew her stratospheric. But Glastonbury 2007 is the moment where everyone could see that Winehouse was more than just a gifted, enigmatic vocalist; she was a true one-off, destined to be one of the finest artists that Britain has ever produced.

Less than a year earlier, her second album Back To Black had received plaudits from pretty much every corner of the music world, but as she stepped onto the Pyramid Stage for her early afternoon slot on the festival's Friday, it felt like everything that made her so special became amplified for the entire world to see.

There’s just something so brilliantly unique about Winehouse here; slim, petite but lacking the airs and graces of a typical diva singer, she wipes the mud from her shoes on her backing curtain, before shuffling on and effortlessly belting out opening track Addicted. From there on in, it’s a greatest hits set with a few covers - Sam Cooke’s Cupid, The Specials Hey Little Rich Girl and Toots & The Maytals Monkey Man - thrown in for good measure. Great as they are, though, nothing really can compete with the awe-inspiring performances of You Know I’m No Good and Rehab, the pure soul and pain that glides so effortlessly from her mouth showing an artist at the peak of her powers.

As enigmatic as any artist on this list, Winehouse only ever performed at Glastonbury once more after this. At this point she’d doubtless have been a headliner, making her 2007 peak even more of a bittersweet pill to swallow.

Jay-Z (2008)

When Oasis’ Noel Gallagher scoffed that “Glastonbury has the tradition of guitar music...I’m not having hip-hop at Glastonbury, it's wrong,” after it was announced that Jay-Z was to headline the Pyramid Stage in 2008, he might have been speaking as an out-of-touch, grumpy, old curmudgeon, but he wasn’t alone in his thinking.

Even back in 2008 the internet loved a pile on, and the purists' ire was keenly felt, with many traditionalists happily jumping onboard the outrage train. How dare Jay-Z take a place on the bill usually reserved for legendary artists such as... er...Travis and Stereophonics...? Seems silly now, doesn’t it? Because those words could not have been more emphatically rammed down the throats of the detractors, as the New York rapper provided one of the all-time iconic Glastonbury moments by walking out to one of the biggest crowds seen in years, guitar in tow, and began to giggle his way through a sarcasm-laced cover of Wonderwall, before launching into an awe-inspiring mash up of 99 Problems and AC/DC’s Back In Black. As intros go, it might just be the best ever.

From there on in Jay couldn’t fail, drawing on one of the most bullet-proof, hit-filled catalogues in modern music, and chucking in snippets of The Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up and Amy Winehouse’s Rehab just hammered home the win.

This killer set opened the door for Kanye West, Beyonce, Stormzy, Dave and others to storm the festival in later years, and make anyone who ever questioned hip-hop's place at Glastonbury again look exceedingly daft, at best.

Metallica (2014)

Save for the odd booking of alt-metal here and there over the years, Glastonbury had never truly embraced heavy metal. Which, considering the festival's reputation as the most musically eclectic on the planet, was quite the source of frustration for some metal fans. It was a huge shock, then, to see Michael and Emily Eavis go from 0 to 100 and book the biggest metal band of all time to close the Pyramid Stage in 2014.

Confusingly, this prospect caused almost as much of a stir as Jay-Z's six years prior, with endless indie no-marks and the same exhausting online commentators lining up to question the booking: as if that were not enough, an anti-hunting group of festival goers created a petition to have them removed due to James Hetfield’s extra-curricular activities. Metallica, as usual, won the day though, mocking the controversy in their set-opening video and playing a set of hard rock and thrash metal that won over even the most sceptical attendee.

In the aftermath Glastonbury would invite Motörhead to perform, and give Earache Records a stage to curate, which saw the likes of Gojira, Napalm Death, Entombed, Venom Prison and Employed To Serve added to the bill. Hard to imagine that would have happened without Metallica kicking the door down.

Dolly Parton (2014)

The day after Metallica laid waste to the Pyramid Stage a very different, but no less exciting, event took place. The long-established Sunday afternoon legends slot on the Pyramid Stage had boasted some great sets by some huge artists, with Tom Jones, Paul Simon, Neil Diamond, Dame Shirley Bassey and more overseeing mass singalongs over the years. But few, if any, pulled such a crowd, or put on such a heartwarming, good-time, fun-filled set, as country legend Dolly Parton did in 2014.

The consummate entertainer, Dolly knew exactly what was required to make the slot work, and with the gargantuan crowd eating from the palm of her hand, she turned a muddy field in Somerset into a Nashville hoedown in the most effortless way. The fact that she could just casually chuck Joelene out as the third song of the set says it all.

Some artists truly do transcend genre, and Parton is one of music's all-time great characters and songwriters. In terms of matching the energy, and reciprocal devotion garnered by that set, only Kylie Minogue’s emotional and long-awaited performance in 2019 could match an hour of Dolly at her best. It was impossible not to raise a smile.

Florence And The Machine (2015)

In 2015, Foo Fighters were due to return to Glastonbury for the first time since 1997, to headline the Pyramid Stage. Then just weeks before the show, Dave Grohl broke his leg falling onstage at a stadium show in Sweden and their entire summer tour was cancelled. Just like 20 years earlier, Glastonbury suddenly needed a new headliner, and just like 20 years previously, the artist that stepped in gave the performance of their career.

Florence And The Machine were already a sizeable outfit, having picked up a BRIT award for their 2009 debut album Lungs, but the jump from well-known, indie rock band to Glastonbury headliner is a chasm. And Florence made the jump with impressive ease, drawing from the best of all three of her albums, and throwing in a beautifully poignant cover of The Foos' Times Like These as a nod to her fallen peers, with Dave Grohl later describing her version as being “better than Foo Fighters had ever played it.” By the time the victory lap of You’ve Got the Love and Dog Days are Over came around, Florence had established herself as an all-time festival headlining act.

Stormzy (2019)

When Stormzy stepped out onto the Pyramid Stage to headline the Friday night of the 2019 festival he was 25-years-old, had one album to his name and was the first grime artist to do so. These events alone have to make his set one of the most astonishing achievements in Glastonbury’s history, but the fact that he made it such a spectacle, such a wonderful celebration of the best of black and alternative British culture and such an emotionally moving experience, cements its place amongst the all-time greats.

Beginning with a video of Jay-Z giving him advice about what to expect from the festival, which was a lovely little call-back, Stormzy walked out in a Banksy-designed, Union Jack stab vest, railed against the Tory government, then brought out members of the Black Ballet company, a full gospel choir, fellow UK grime artists Dave and Fredo and... er... Coldplay’s Chris Martin. In the process, he crowned grime as the definitive British youth culture movement of the modern era.

From an underground musical style from the streets of South London to closing the biggest music festival on Earth, Stormzy’s place at the top of the bill at Glastonbury should give hope to every young musician that the summit can be reached, no matter how stacked the odds are against you.

Foo Fighters (2023)

It might just have been the worst-kept secret in Glasto history. Within days of a mysterious band called 'The Churnups' being added to the Pyramid Stage lineup for 2023's edition, Dave Grohl posted an open letter to Foo Fighters fans that seemingly gave the game away. "Every night, when I see you singing, it makes me sing harder," he said. "When I see you screaming, It makes me scream louder. When I see your tears, it brings me to tears. And when I see your joy, it brings me joy. But, I see you... and it feels good to see you, churning-up these emotions together."

Churning-up emotions? It can't have been a coincidence. And it wasn't: around tea time on the Friday afternoon of Glastonbury 2023, Foo Fighters did indeed stroll out on stage to an ecstatic response from a huge, expectant crowd, launching into a nine-song, banger-filled set to send Worthy Farm bouncing.

It was the Foos' first appearance at Glasto since the death of Taylor Hawkins the year prior, making Dave's emotional dedication of Everlong to his drummer and dear friend all the more poignant. A relatively short set, all things considered, but it might just have been Foos' most impactful festival performance on these shores.

Elton John (2023)

There was no doubting that Elton John's final UK festival show was going to be something special, but it surely exceeded even the most optimistic of expectations. A sparkling, emotional, hits-stacked set that helped draw the curtain on Elton's touring career in style, an incredible two-hour showing broke records and set a new standard for legacy acts on the Pyramid Stage.

Not only did the set draw the biggest ever viewing figures for the BBC's Glasto coverage - peaking at 7.6 million views - but it drew the biggest live crowd the Pyramid had ever seen, a humungous, singing, swaying, dancing, flare-waving army that looked like something out of a particularly fabulous Lord Of The Rings scene. After intense rumours of appearances from Dua Lipa and Britney Spears, Elton instead largely used his time to spotlight younger artists in the form of Jacob Lusk, Stephen Sanchez and Rina Sawayama - a classy act that spoke volumes of the Rocket Man's passion for great music above all else.

From an inevitable but emotional tribute to George Michael to the welcome surprise inclusions of Pinball Wizard and Are You Ready For Love, it was a near-flawless waltz with one of the UK's very greatest songwriters. "This may be my last show ever in England and Great Britain, so I better play well and I better entertain you," a visibly moved Elton remarked at one point. That he certainly did. We may never see a Glastonbury set with quite this level of spectacle and gravitas again.

Turnstile (2025)

Hardcore punk is hardly the first genre you'd associate with Glastonbury, but then Turnstile are quite unlike any band to have ever emerged from the hardcore scene. Many would argue that Baltimore's finest had long outgrown their roots by the time they graced the Other Stage at Worthy Farm; the fizzing, technicolour shine of both 2021's Glow On and last year's Never Enough took as much influence from MGMT and The 1975 as Bad Brains or Trapped Under Ice.

And yet, their live shows remain some of the most chaotic and relentless in all of modern rock music - hell, frontman Brandon Yates became the first musician to stage dive at a Tiny Desk Concert - meaning that, as the mid-afternoon sun baked Glasto nicely on the final day of 2025's edition, it felt like something special could be about to happen.

And special it was. From the second the band skipped out on stage and the shimmering opening notes of Never Enough's title track gave way to that fat, grungy riff, Glastonbury became a city of moshing, bouncing, dancing, crowdsurfing bodies and never let up. What followed was, quite simply, one of the most energetic, electric sets to have hit the festival in recent memory, a welcome reminder that rock music is indeed alive and thriving and that it can still have a home at the world's biggest music festival.

Guns N’ Roses were the toughest support act that Iron Maiden ever had to follow, according to frontman Bruce Dickinson.

The singer makes the revelation in a new interview with Metal Hammer, saying that the Los Angeles rockers brought “angst and venom”, whereas the British metal band were in their “proggy” era, touring to promote 1988’s maximalist Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son.

“Back in the day, the toughest support act we ever had was Guns N’ Roses in America [in 1988],” Dickinson tells writer Dave Everley. “They’d just released their first album [1987’s Appetite For Destruction] and were reaching this huge wave of popularity. They were full of angst and venom, where Maiden were a bit proggy – it was around Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son.”

Faced with the same question, bassist/founder Steve Harris picks veteran Southern rockers Blackfoot, whom they performed with in 1982, around the release of Maiden’s breakthrough third album, The Number Of The Beast.

“They’re still one of the best bands that ever supported us,” the bassist continues. “I always say that it’s the support band’s job to go out and try to take the audience. They’ve got to go out, give it large, and make the main band work hard.”

He adds that it’s “sometimes hard” for bands to open for Maiden due to how “partisan” the six-piece’s fans are: “I’ve seen it a couple of times where I’ve felt sorry for the support band. They can’t bottle it. The audience can smell fear.”

When they opened for Maiden, Guns N’ Roses were en route to becoming one of the biggest bands in rock’n’roll, Appetite… having topped the US Billboard 200 chart the week it came out before being certified Platinum in the country in April 1988. At time of publication, it is now certified 18-times Platinum in the US and has gone down as one of the best-selling albums of all time.

Although GN’R were a fierce live band in the 80s, their performances have since seemingly declined. Their headline set at Download festival in Donington last weekend received a middling two-and-a-half-star review from Classic Rock.

“Those that are still here are happy to go mad for the likes of Mr Brownstone, Live And Let Die and Sweet Child O’ Mine, but many either drift away or stand looking disinterested during a dragging middle of the set,” wrote journalist Stephen Hill.

“Occasional highs such as a cover of Velvet Revolver’s Slither or the irresistible Rocket Queen stand out, but soon it all starts to feel like a slog when Guns are ruining Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, sounding like a pub band covering Sex Pistols' Black Leather or letting Slash solo for what feels like forever.”

Maiden are also currently touring (albeit to a much warmer reception from the press), as their 50th-anniversary Run For Your Lives trek continues into its second year. Theongoing European leg will end with a performance at the band’s own festival, Eddfest, at Knebworth House in Stevenage, UK on July 11. The Hu, The Darkness, Airbourne, The Almighty, the solo band of ex-Maiden singer Blaze Bayley and more will also populate the bill of the two-day event.

From August to November, Maiden will continue their tour across the Americas and in Asia and Australia. Their final shows of 2026 will be at the K-Arena in Yokohama, Japan on November 24 and 25, after which the band will not return to the stage until 2028 at the earliest.

Read the full interview with Dickinson and Harris in the new Hammer, which hits shelves on Thursday, June 25.

Lorna Shore singer Will Ramos joined Bring Me The Horizon for their performance of Antivist as the Yorkshire band headlined day one of French metal festival Hellfest on Thursday (June 18).

Ramos came out for the 10th song of frontman Oli Sykes and co.’s 15-song set as they closed the main stage at the Clisson gathering, and footage of him singing the Sempiternal cut quickly circulated via social media. Watch a clip below.

Ramos was jokingly introduced as a fan that the band had brought onstage, with Sykes telling the audience as he walked out, “Be nice to him, even if he’s shit, alright?” The Lorna Shore frontman proceeded to take lead vocals on the scream-heavy track, with Sykes handling backups.

Bring Me, formed in Sheffield in 2004, played Helfest as part of their ongoing European tour, headlining the festival for the first time after previously making appearances in 2009, 2016 and 2022. The four-day weekender continues today (Friday, June 19) with Iron Maiden at the top of the bill, before Limp Bizkit headline Saturday, June 20, and The Offspring end the event on Sunday, June 21.

Bring Me’s European tour continues on Saturday at Graspop Metal Meeting in Dessel, Belgium. They will hit the UK on July 10 and 11, playing two shows at the B.E.C. Arena in Manchester where they’ll perform their 2006 debut album, Count Your Blessings, in full to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Static Dress, Rolo Tomassi, Heriot, Dying Wish, Car Underwater and Still In Love will support.

Bring Me have re-recorded Count Your Blessings, under the title Count Your Blessings Repented, for a reissue on July 10. During a recent Metal Hammer interview, Sykes looked back on the story of the album and remembered his band being so controversial that they dropped off a festival bill for fear of being attacked once they arrived.

“We said we were sick, because there were another band there that said when we got there, they were going to shave all our hair off and beat us up. It were mental at first,” he said.

“It were that era, when people latched onto something, like, ‘We hate this band, we hate My Chemical Romance.’ It were everyone.”

The singer also recalled a 2007 show with Killswitch Engage, during which Killswitch’s fans turned their back on the supporting band.

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

Read the full interview with Sykes in the upcoming issue of Metal Hammer, which comes out on Thursday, June 25.

Meanwhile, Lorna Shore are currently gearing up to tour North America from July to August, in support of their 2025 album, I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me. In October, the deathcore darlings will start a run of shows across Asia and Australia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

True to its name, Rock For People is a festival that puts people first. As soon as you step foot on the Czech festival grounds, everything feels curated with its 50,000 punters in mind, from its eclectic palette of rock flavours to its ever-conscious commitment to sustainability. It’s the kind of mindset that instantly breeds a sense of community – and within that community, everyone feels safe to let their hair down.

At any given point, Czech crowds never seem to stop moving; whether you’re watching dreamy grunge indie-rockers Wolf Alice, nu-pop-punks South Arcade, or the legendary heavy metal grit of Iron Maiden, you’re guaranteed to lose your pal in a circle pit. And it’s bloody marvellous to see.

With that all said, these are the bands from 2026's edition that won the (long) weekend, as they happened.

Letlive

“This whole project is in the name of liberation,” Jason Aalon Butler proclaims, pausing to catch his breath after the one-two punch of Le Prologue and The Sick, Sick, 6.8 Billion. It’s 1pm, but the post-hardcore frontman has charged up the crowd – when a man rips his shirt off, bounds over and screeches squarely into your face, it quickly scares off even the mightiest of warm-festival-beer hangovers.

Dripping with sweat, Butler churns through cuts like Renegade 86’ and White America's Beautiful Black Market like an exposed wire. He’s grabbing at the drum stand, adrenaline giving him the inhuman strength to drag it halfway across the stage, backflip and treat his mic like a yo-yo. And, of course, he closes things off by climbing to the top of the stage, leaving a hanging mic behind as a souvenir.

The Plot In You

As the sound of thunder rumbles over the speakers, punters truly don’t know what storm lies ahead of them. Because, when The Plot In You take to the stage to the triumphant Divide, it’s an instant case of metalcore brilliance. The clash of metallic guitars and electronic distortion packs a punch, but frontman Landon Tewers is in a class of his own – from the heart-stopping wail of “I CAN’T FUCKING TAKE IT!” to You Get One’s eerie whispers that instantly switch to full-bodied yells, Tewers’ ability to bounce between dynamics is even more impressive in the flesh. It’s fair to say that metalcore is in very safe hands here.

Blood Incantation

With an ominous, glowing obelisk by their side, prog death metallers Blood Incantation are taking Rock For People on a riffy trip through time and space. With their faces hidden behind walls of straggly hair, the Colorado quartet embark on a journey through Metal Hammer’s favourite album of 2024, Absolute Elsewhere, treating crowds to a full playthrough of the dense, cosmic magnum opus. It’s a glorious battle of dark and light, from The Stargate [Tablet II]’s Tangerine Dream daze and clash of surreal death metal existentialism and reverberating sci-fi horror, to The Message [Tablet III]’s culminating high of Pink Floydian triumph.

Papa Roach

Yes, Jacoby Dakota Shaddix looks like he’s stuck his finger in a plug socket – but he knows how to give the people what they want. From opener Even If It Kills Me to the mega Getting Away With Murder, the nu metal frontman has the crowd eating from the palms of Papa Roach's hands. In spite of the mud pools underfoot, everyone is happy to stomp around and let their inhibitions run wild. The set also sees Papa Roach honouring their metal peers in style, welcoming letlive.’s Jason Aalon Butler out for BRAINDEAD before rumbling through their “NU! METAL! TIME! MACHINE!”, ticking off everything from Korn’s Blind to Limp Bizkit’s Break Stuff, before finishing on a high with their own nu metal megahit, Last Resort.

Limp Bizkit

“This is the Limp Bizkit karaoke party!” Fred Durst explains, pointing up at the ever-present screen of lyrics that towers behind him. There’s no prizes to be won for being able to list everything that’s “fucked up” in Hot Dog, so why not just let the drunken masses sing along? There’s no gatekeeping in the House of Durst – everyone is free to kick up some mischief and have a good time.

Of course, as the frankly massive moshpits of Fred Durst lookalikes break out, its clear that a majority of the 50,000-strong crowd know the lyrics by heart anyway. And that’s further confirmed when Durst picks out two fans for Full Nelson – with the language barrier resulting in the more lanky Fred Durst clone just screaming “WOODSTOCK 99!” in response to anything Durst asks. Yet he still knows every word of the song. Go figure.

Bring Me The Horizon

Bring Me The Horizon have been fine-tuning their video-game-like live experience for a few years now, but boy-oh-boy does it keep getting better. As their onscreen AI mascot EVE announces “Rock For People, you are all possessed”, it’s seen as a badge of honour – and the punters confirm just how ‘possessed’ they are by opening up two healthy, circling pits long before opening track DArkSide even kicks into life.

Though, there’s something that’s very different about this headline set in comparison to, say, Bring Me The Horizon’s Arena tour back in 2024. And that’s Sykes’ voice – following his work retraining his deathcore vocals to re-record the band’s debut, Count Your Blessings, his growls sound fucking phenomenal. It makes everything hit that bit sweeter, from The House Of Wolves, to the pyro-centric AmEN!, to the glitching, kawaii-metal infused Kingslayer.

While Damon Albarn is mainly known as a charismatic Britpop darling manning the helm of Blur, we’d argue that Albarn is actually the music world’s ultimate wingman. From cherrypicking the finest new voices to feature on-track to curating the African Express collective to share the most unique sounds from across the globe, he’s always keen to give other people a platform – and Gorillaz is the ultimate sign of that.

While Gorillaz’s unique blend of genre-spanning electro-art-pop is in a league of its own, it’s something Albarn is happy to detach his own ego from. Instead, tonight’s Rock For People headline set is about his cartoon alter ego, 2D – and every talented artist Albarn wants to shine a light on instead of soaking up the attention himself.

As the set kicks off with The Mountain, it perfectly sets the tone of the evening. Serving as the meditative title track from Gorillaz’s psychedelia-infused latest record, the opener bubbles with the Indian flavours that inspired the album – and he’s got the sound of bansuri flautist Ajay Prasanna’s playing wafting over the crowd like a spell. Albarn finally picks up his fuzzy-filtered microphone for the synth-sprinkled The Happy Dictator – but he remains humble, always quick to redirect attention to animated clips or welcome another collaborator onstage.

And the list of collaborators is immense. The God Of Lying sees Albarn welcoming out IDLE’s post-punk frontman Joe Talbot (rocking a very classy safari hat), who at one point gets down on his knees to serenade his collaborator. Then Albarn invites out fresher talent in the form of Kara Jackson, encouraging the 26-year-old to take centre stage for Orange County as he watches on like a proud dad.

Of course, the crowd is delighted at every turn. Whether it manic dance-pits during Delirium’s drug-trip haze or avid pogo-ing during the breezy funk of Andromeda, it’s a blessing. The party seems to spike during cuts like Damascus, with its fantastic meld of American rap and Arabic hip hop. Again, it’s a broad palette – and Albarn just grins, flashing his broken front tooth as he watches his multicultural tapestry unfold.

By the time things begin to round off, with the crowd howling back Feel Good Inc. and circling in a goofy pit for Clint Eastwood, Albarn seems thoroughly chuffed with himself. And rightly so; as he exclaims in shock at one point, “this is meant to be a rock festival!”, but his diverse, borderless world of sprawling dub, hip hop and electronica chaos can charm just about any rock or metalhead. That’s one hell of a badge of honour.

Download festival is the undisputed home of rock and metal here in the UK. Saying that, though, and with our ears still ringing as we reflect on another amazing weekend of music at Download 2026, you can’t help but notice that the festival is happily embracing more and more wildcard bookings from outside of the genre we all love; Five, Scooter and Cypress Hill this year joined the recent bookings of Vengaboys, McFly and Busted to make their debuts at Donington.

You can do one of two things with this surprisingly evolutionary step: you can act the purist, grumpily fold your arms and moan that this is not in line with what you want from Download, or, alternatively, you can do what the majority of punters did this weekend and enjoy these bookings for the fun little added extra they are.

Which is exactly what we have decided to do. So much so that we've picked our out suggestions, from least ludicrous to most ridiculous, for eight more wildcard bookings from outside of rock and metal that we’d love to see Download take a punt on.

The Cure

So maybe this isn’t too much of a stretch, really. Robert Smith’s godfathers of goth have been the inspiration for hundreds of rock and metal bands over the years; from Deftones to Paramore, Nine Inch Nails to Blink 182, your favourite band’s favourite band are The Cure. With their size and reputation, you’re almost certainly looking at a main stage headline slot, but imagine the scene as the sun descended on Castle Donington and the bleak majesty of Burn, Lullaby or A Forest filled the air. What a moment that could be.

Jack White

Again, there won’t be many people claiming that Jack White has nothing to do with rock music, so this feels like a pretty conservative pick. Still, save for a few early years with The White Stripes, Jack has tended to hang more with the indie crowd in his career. Which is a shame, particularly as his 2024 solo album No Name was the most rocking thing he has put his name to in many a year. Plus, for Donington Park, with all of its history, to have never had the riff to Seven Nation Army, arguably the biggest rock song of this Millennium, played on its grounds, feels criminal.

Ice Cube

It’s outside of rock and metal for sure but this doesn’t feel like too controversial a call. Cube and rock 'n' roll have plenty of history together, the rapper playing both the Lollapalooza and Family Values travelling festivals in the 90s alongside the likes of Korn, Ministry, Limp Bizkit, Soundgarden and more. Plus, much like Cypress Hill this year, he’s got a shed-load of crossover tunes that metalheads already love. Stick him on main in the late afternoon and it will be a good day.

Skrillex

With both Pendulum and The Prodigy making regular visits to Download over the years to represent electronic music, it is a bit of a headscratcher that Sonny Moore’s alter ego Skrillex has never played the festival. With his background in the post-hardcore scene and his work with Korn, he seems like the perfect fit for an afternoon slot to get a metal crowd lobbing glow sticks about. Also, as much as it might force you to confront the fact that you are getting really old, we’re surely very close to a dubstep nostalgia revival. When that happens, expect Skrillex to clean up at Donington.

Rick Astley

What would have been considered an absolutely absurd booking a decade ago now feels kind of possible. Astley’s career took an unexpected bump in the late 2000s with the practice of Rickrolling, but it’s when he arrived onstage with Foo Fighters to sing his big hit Never Gonna Give You Up in 2017 at the Summersonic Festival that the tide really turned. Since then, Astley’s career renaissance has seen him join Blossom’s to sing the songs of The Smiths and get a Pyramid Stage booking at Glastonbury. A massive rock fan, he regularly covers Foos, AC/DC, Queen, Biffy Clyro and other rock artists during his set. He would not only surely love to play Download, but he’d also absolutely smash it too.

Demi Lovato

Lovato is one of many post-Avril Lavigne pop artists that are happy to openly admit just how big a part rock plays in their music. 2022’s Holy Fvck album featured a very metal aesthetic, contributions from Linkin Park’s Emily Armstrong and Yungblud and was brought to life on the album's tour by Alice Cooper guitarist Nita Strauss. Get Nita back for Download, lean in on the likes of Skin Of My Teeth and Eat Me, and this would be a killer show.

So Solid Crew

If the last couple of years are anything to go by, the good people of Download don’t half love a bit of early 2000s, lairy pop nostalgia. Five smashed it in 2026, so let's go one further and book the infamous garage riot starters So Solid Crew. Back in the early 2000s they were as controversial as it got here in the UK, with pearl-clutching and outrage following them around all over the place. These days you don’t hear from them so much, but imagine the scene of Lisa Maffia, Romeo, MC Harvey and the rest charging the Dogtooth and spitting out Hater, They Don’t Know and 21 Seconds. It would be wonderful chaos.

East 17

Another one on the Five tip here. In many ways, East 17 were the original bad boy boyband, creating headlines and scaring middle England way before N-Dubz or Blazing Squad ever did. The younger demographic of Download may not know the majesty of songs like It’s Alright, Steam, House of Love or Let It Rain (although, trust us, they’re all absolute bangers), but they’ve got one song that everybody will know. Trust us: when East 17 decide to drop Stay Another Day on a sweltering June evening, Download is suddenly going to feel Christmassy. Sing it with us...STAAAAAY NOOOOWWW!!!!

23 years in and, after a truly blockbuster weekend of beautiful weather, returning legends and some of the most exciting new noises in metal, it seems Download's standing as one of the biggest and most important fixtures in rock remains very much intact. Many bands made their Download debut, while one headlined for the very first time; plenty of others showed that bigger things surely await them. Here, however, are the 10 bands that truly stole the show.

Silent Planet (Friday, Opus stage)

One of the first acts to grace the second stage this year, Silent Planet delivered a battering we still felt as we hauled ourselves home on Monday. The Californians’ EU tour has grabbed plenty of headlines – they gave away shirts in Italy to protest venue merch fees and are booked for two Ukrainian gigs – but beneath the frills, they’re a bollocks-heavy and lyrically conscious outfit. Antimatter and Collider dropped into djent riffs with such force that it made other metalcore bands who draw influence from Meshuggah sound lame in the process, while frontman Garrett Russell screamed his soul out up front. MM

Limp Bizkit (Friday, Apex stage)

The kings of swaggering nu metal bangers finally made the big step up over two decades after they had to cancel on headlining Download's first event, and Fred and the boys didn't disappoint. An all killer, no filler set ensured maximum movement across the field all night - with the sole exception of their mushy cover of The Who's Behind Blue Eyes, which still drew a ton of crowdsurfers and, courtesy of a dedication to Bizkit bassist Sam Rivers, packed a genuine emotional punch. MA Read our full Limp Bizkit review here.

Lowen (Saturday, Dogtooth stage)

One of the most unique and powerful sets of the weekend came early Saturday afternoon in the Dogtooth tent, as London-based British-Iranian metallers Lowen brought some Persian mysticism to Download for the first time. Packing massive, doomy riffs and Middle Eastern melodies sounding like they snaked their way out of the depths of the Caspian Sea, it was a sign that the UK metal underground remains an exciting, inventive place. MA Read our full Lowen review here.

Trivium (Saturday, Apex stage)

With the possible exception of Slipknot - who were already a massive deal and had played Download twice previously by the time they took their legendary headlining slot in 2009 - no band's rise is linked so closely with Download as Trivium. Their Saturday evening set was the first time they've returned to Donington and truly put on a showing that matched that iconic moment in 2005, the nostalgic swell behind classics like Pull Harder On The Strings Of Your Martyr only surpassed by the sheer quality of modern anthems like The Catastrophist and The Sin And The Sentence. Modern metal done right. MA Read our full review of Trivium here.

Elder (Saturday, Dogtooth stage)

Slow-burning psych-metal jams in a festival field, before the kind of audience who’ve shown up for Guns N’ Roses and The All-American Rejects? Sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen, yet Elder scored an unlikely win with their Saturday Dogtooth set. Taking the stage just as Trivium finished unloading hell on main, their turn was a welcome lull, pulling Download into a cosmos of immersive melodies and gradual riffs. Watching it, it was excellent, but it was even better when we closed our eyes and let the New Englanders transport us to the haziest corners of our imagination. MM

Kublai Khan TX (Sunday, Apex stage)

Kublai Khan TX’s barrel-chested hardcore was a genius booking for a crowd overcoming their Sunday-morning hangovers. Right after main-stage openers Unpeople blasted everybody awake with the loudest set of the weekend, the Texans stormed in and got them all two-stepping. Frontman Matt Honeycutt demonstrated masterful control of the still-filling field, pulling more than a few weary arses from their camping chairs. Hardcore had an incredible showing at Slam Dunk last month, and after this assured Download debut, maybe camo shorts and Sick Of It All long-sleeves will have their day once the nu metal revival blows over? MM

Bloodywood (Sunday, Apex stage)

It wasn't just the genre's OG icons bringing nu metal mania to Donington this weekend. One of the few modern artists doing something brand new with the sound brought some South Asian thunder to the main stage on Sunday, shaking off any weekend fatigue with their groovy Delhi metal ragers. Anyone not already on board with Bloodywood's brilliantly full-throttle live show would have been converted within minutes of them bouncing out on stage, with one of the funnest sets of the whole festival following. MA Read our full Bloodywood review here.

Skindred (Sunday, Dogtooth stage)

Secret sets have been an on-and-off Download tradition since Metallica appeared unannounced in 2003. So, when an unusual gap was spotted in this year’s Sunday-afternoon Dogtooth schedule, everyone from Pantera to Don Broco was rumoured to be showing up. In the end, it was ragga-metal party-starters Skindred, hot off scoring a UK number-one with April album You Got This. The tent was overflowing as Benji Webbe’s crew oversaw 25 minutes of feel-good mayhem, capped off by a hemmed-in Newport Helicopter. “Come see us at Alexandra Palace on Halloween!” Webbe urges – you got it, mate! MM

Letlive (Sunday, Avalanche stage)

Arriving with a reputation for anarchy, Letlive’s Jason Aalon Butler says the Cali punks were briefed heavily before seizing the stage. We’re not sure what rules were laid out for them, but each was probably broken. The fivesome played a hyper-spirited 40 minutes, loaded with post-hardcore ragers and principled speeches from their frontman. Guitarist Jeff Sahyoun’s mic cable has to be untangled within a couple of songs, before Butler rips his shirt open, tears his trousers, then strips to his boxers. During 27 Club, he scales the scaffolding and ignores demands over the P.A. to climb back down, even as the sound gets cut. An act of awesome, righteous rebellion. MM

Linkin Park (Sunday, Apex stage)

Linkin Park closed out the weekend with a celebratory and emotional run through their hits-stacked catalogue, and there could be no bigger seal of approval on Emily Armstrong becoming Download's first headlining frontwoman than the sheer volume with which Donington sang along with the cuts from 2024's excellent comeback album From Zero. If theres a better way to see out a festival than a packed-out field screaming its heart out to Faint, we haven't seen it. MA Read our full review of Linkin Park here.

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

Horror shorts

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

A curious sense of humour

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

Like Billy Joel singing for Queensrÿche

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

And the guitarist played on (mostly)

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

Reunion blues

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

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

There's a good chance most of the people in the Dogtooth Stage tent are hearing Decessus for the first time. This is, after all, the Chilean death metal band's first ever show in the UK. But they aren't an entirely unknown entity. Their frontwoman, Ignacia Fernández, went viral when she participated in the Miss World Chile competition, performing her snarls in front of a panel of judges (and cameras). Amazingly, she won the title and will now represent the country at this year's Miss World competition.

Which is all to say, Ignacia knows her way around a stage. Decessus isn't just a vanity project; the amalgamation of melodeath lead guitars, old school DM brutality and even progressive twists a la Jinjer sounds utterly epic in the Dogtooth, and even if the stage isn't packed out - though it's by no means empty either - there's a sense that we're seeing something special in the short but oh so satisfying set.

For all the atmospherics the band use in the studio (synths, symphonic-like elements, choirs), live they're very much content to just bludgeon the audience with some ferocious, thundering riffs and let the instruments on-stage do the talking. It sounds obvious, but given just how many bands now rely on backing tapes to replicate in-studio effects, it adds a force and energy to the set that is impossible to ignore.

From riffs that evoke the dark mysticism of Nile, to djenty-basslines that add a surprising amount of funk to the set (think Mr. Bungle jamming Hypocrisy), Decessus are a revelation.

Atop it all, Igancia exudes a quiet confidence that screams star quality, holding herself with precise, careful movements that bring to mind the likes of Gaahl or Maynard James Keenan, where rabid energy isn't what makes them so captivating. She might have been crowned Miss World Chile, but we could be seeing a future death metal queen. Closing out on the apocalyptic Deliverance, we'd like to think this won't be the last time we see Decessus on these shores.

"Who has no idea who the fuck we are?" growls Gatecreeper frontman Chase Mason as he glowers over the throng gathered at Download's Dogtooth stage to see the Arizona death metallers cause a little late afternoon chaos. "Well, you're about to find out."

If there was anyone arriving that was still left in any doubt over Gatecreeper's standing as one of the very best things in modern death metal, such concerns are blown away courtesy of one of the weekend's most exciting and relentlessly full-on performances. The boys sound absolutely colossal, Eric Wagner's buzzsaw riffs peeling out with such ferocity you're surprised the tent isn't caving in as Mason sends fans circle pitting in multiple directions.

Melding old school death metal blunt force trauma with sprinklings of hardcore grit, Gatecreeper wear their influences on their longsleeves but channel them into something fresh, 2024's brilliant Dark Superstition adding extra layers of 90s melodeath to bring the five-piece's penchant for a killer hook to the fore.

It gives standout anthems like the chugging, catchy The Black Curtain that little bit more oomph live, suggesting that should momentum build their way, Gatecreeper could comfortably produce songs that'd fill some big venues. As the swirling havoc builds beneath him, Mason remains a focused master of ceremonies, his no-bullshit energy and stoic charisma bringing to mind late, great Power Trip frontman Riley Gale, another singer who brought hardcore energy to the modern metal scene.

By the time Gatecreeper finish up, crowdsurfers are making their way over the barrier, pits are still spinning and there can be no doubt about it: Gatecreeper rule and just put on one of the best sets this stage has seen all weekend.

The sun has made a surprise guest appearance for the third day running this weekend as Indian nu metal sensations Bloodywood arrive on the Apex stage for their second ever Download appearance. Having opened the festival's main stage at its humungous twentieth anniversary edition in 2023, the Delhi crew have jumped up a few spaces this year, their enthralling mash-up of millennial metal riffage and powerful traditional Indian folk music deemed the perfect early afternoon gear change.

Turns out it's a spot-on call: the six-piece's irresistible groove sees a sunshine-drenched Donington kick up a storm, full-throttle circle pits opening up from the second they bounce on stage. Bloodywood's energy and earnest excitement is infectious, and it's nigh-on impossible to avoid damn near banging your head off as the likes of Gaddar and Aaj throw out riffs so bouncy they'd make Godzilla's knees wobble.

Jayant Bhadula and Raoul Kerr are a formidable frontman tag team, Jayant's powerful bellows the perfect foil for Raoul's gruff rapping. "We want to take you back to where it all started!" growls Raoul before Bloodywood drop a thunderous Nu Dehli, the set's highlight alongside an airing of giddy Babymetal collab Bekhauf.

On a weekend where nu metal nostalgia is running rampant - Limp Bizkit, P.O.D., Drowning Pool and Snot having already taken up prime lineup estate with Spineshank and Sunday headliners Linkin Park still to come - it's refreshing to see a band taking the spirit of that genre and moulding it into something genuinely fresh, exciting and vital.

As Raoul and Jayant skip down the Apex stage's ego ramp and Karan Katiyar's riffs send Donington dizzy one more time, Sarthak Pahwa headbanging as he smacks the shit out of his dhol 50 metres behind them, you can't help but believe Bloodywood will be making another jump up the bill the next time they play.

If anticipation levels for Linkin Park's first Download show in over a decade weren't already at fever pitch, the introduction of a countdown 10 full minutes before their set begins does the job nicely. Unlike the relatively sparse crowd that gathered for Guns N' Roses last night, there's an army forming around the Apex stage, Gen Z moshers rubbing shoulders with OG nu metal kids - many of whom have brought their own nu metal kids-in-waiting along for the occasion.

It feels like there's a lot riding on tonight. It's not just LP's first appearance at Donington in twelve years, but their first festival show on these shores since the shocking loss of Chester Bennington in 2017. Throw in the surprising fact that his replacement Emily Armstrong is about to become the first frontwoman to ever headline this festival and you have all the makings of an historic occasion.

As the countdown finally ticks down to zero and nu metal's biggest ever graduates kick into a rollocking Emptiness Machine, any memories of the divided response Emily's appointment received online are banished in an instant. Not only is she greeted with widespread cheers as she saunters up to the mic stand, but her debut LP chorus is sung back at her with all the passion and fullheartedness of any of the band's classics. Put plainly: people are here to party, and the looks on Linkin Park's faces suggest they're happy to follow suite.

An early run of that comeback banger, Lying From You and a colossal Crawling is a blinder of a way to kick things off, and while pacey newer cut Up From The Bottom doesn't quite hit the same heights, Meteora standout Somewhere I Belong kicks the singalongs right back up to ten.

The next phase of the set is a little bit of a mixed bag. The Catalyst is one of Linkin Park's most powerful mid-career anthems, but its confetti-powered climax feels like an emotional grenade thrown out just a little too early. We then get an enjoyably bouncy Burn It Down, before Mike Shinoda continues his inexplicable habit of dropping a cover from his Fort Minor project. Where'd You Go isn't a bad track, but when you're a band with one of the greatest catalogues of hits in the history of rock music, it feels like an unnecessary distraction.

Plodding 2010 alt-pop cut Waiting For The End doesn't do much to get things back on track, its lacklustre energy making a mockery of Emily asking if we've "got any pits happening here?" soon after. Luckily, From Zero rager Two Faced is on hand to spark everything back to life, Shinoda using Emily's history-making appearance as a platform to get some women-only mosh pits going.

We then get two more propulsive nu metal bops in the form of A Place For My Head and IGYEIH, Armstrong going full scorched Earth for her furious "From now on, I don't need ya!" refrain, and for a while it feels like we are very much back. One Step Closer then lands with all the force of a dropkick from a kaiju, but its climactic final drop is curtailed when Armstrong stops the set for a few minutes to make sure a fan is OK.

That pause is, of course, necessary and totally out of the band's hands, but it makes another pause immediately following the conclusion of One Step Closer feel a little dragged out, even if the shots of beaming front row fans projected onto Download's giant screens is a lovely touch.

Eventually, Armstrong and Shinoda return to the stage for an emotive piano redux of excellent Meteora b-side Lost, a boisterous Breaking The Habit and an atmospheric Overflow, but it's what follows that firmly and definitively raises this gig to greatness.

The band rattle through a flawless run of classics, the celebratory atmosphere that's been bubbling across the field all night overflowing as the skyscraper choruses of What I've Done and Numb are followed by a triumphant Heavy Is The Crown (featuring another blinder of a vocal showing from Armstrong) and a full-throttle Bleed It Out.

By the time a jaw-dropping triumvirate of Papercut, In The End and Faint takes us home, Download is a sea of waving arms, pumping fists, crowdsurfers, people on shoulders and inflatables flying about all over the place. It's a beautiful sight, testament to the enduring legacy Linkin Park have wielded across generations of rock fans, and a guarantee that the most significant Download set of 2026 will linger long in the memory for all the right reasons.

“Fuck me, it feels good to be home!” Sam Carter proclaims, pausing to bask in a well-earned moment of pride. Over the last two decades, Architects have steadily risen up through the ranks of the British metalcore scene - and Download crowds have eagerly supported their growth.

Honestly, headlining Download Festival's Apex Stage feels long overdue, but we got here eventually. And, from the off, all signs point to a thing of triumph. Under the golden glow of the late afternoon sun, pits whirl for Whiplash and Black Lungs. The area is thoroughly rammed (the jury is out as to how many stragglers have wandered over for a mid-set break from Guns N Roses), the blegh-centric smack spiking in ferocity during the “bitter and then some!” hit of Gravedigger.

But that's when things take a sour turn. It's a clash of the titans - Download Festival versus one of British metal's most renown frontmen as security seem to stop the show. A stop-start tug of war seems to ensue within Carter’s in-ears, displeasure colouring his face before he fully storms off stage. “I'm either playing or I'm not,” he says before disappearing during Blackhole.

The Apex Stage has had a few teething pains over the last few years - 2023 in particular saw people complaining about Ghost and Evanescence’s headline slots there, noting the relatively small space for such high profile acts - and murmurs are spreading that there just isn't enough room down the front for some proper moshing.

When Carter re-emerges, he's almost laughing at how ridiculous he sounds telling the crowd to calm down at a rock festival. Eventually, Blackhole’s rumble does get unleashed, but following cut Impermanence ironically seems to show the momentum isn't sticking around for long.

“We do this all over Europe all the time,” Sam sighs eventually. After a lengthy, awkward gap and another storm-off, Download's security and the singer seem to reach an agreement. But there's a crack in every grin Carter flashes for the crowd, something that undercuts his heartfelt reflection on overcoming alcoholism during Broken Mirror, or even the nod to the next-gen of metal when Landmvrks’ Florent Salfati hops out for Braindead.

Let's not mince words here: moshing’s mess of arms and elbows can, of course, be dangerous. But the chaos of this set suggests that either Architects are too big for this stage, or there's been a shortfall in proper preparation to handle high energy bands in this area of the festival. It's a damn shame to see such a beloved band being handed such a handicap during an otherwise celebratory affair.

It's around 15 minutes before Lowen are due on, and you already get the sense that this is going to be something just a little bit different. The stage is bedecked with candles, incense, plants and a traditional Persian daf drum, hinting at the burst of primal mystic power that is to come.

These British-Iranian metallers' blend of crushing, progressive doom and Middle Eastern melody has marked them out as one of UK metal's most exciting young bands, 2024's Do Not Go to War With the Demons of Mazandaran one of the best albums to emerge from the modern underground. As they walk on stage and let the riffs rip, the impact on the curious onlookers filling up the Dogtooth tent is immediate - heads are banging, smiles are spreading, energy levels are rising.

Then, a male belly dancer slinks on stage, flowing around frontwoman Nina Saeidi as she lets loose a venue-shaking howl, book in one hand and ceremonial dagger in the other. Download has existed for well over two decades now, and yet this is a performance quite unlike anything this storied festival has ever seen.

Before long, Nina's dagger has been replaced by a huge sword, the singer suddenly looking less like a metal musician and more like a vengeful war queen as she hoists it high above her head, Shem Lucas' thunderous riffs providing the perfect, battle-ready soundtrack.

And then, barely 25 minutes in, it's all already over, a short but superb set confirming what plenty in attendance already suspected, but everybody here now knows: Lowen are a special band, and it won't be long before they're playing much bigger stages than these.

There are few bands in history to have made Download their own like Trivium. Their 2005 set is one of the most legendary in metal history, a last-minute upgrade to the festival's main stage setting the scene for a coming-of-age performance that remains the benchmark for every show they've played since. It might explain the sense of urgency that colours their arrival on stage today: kicking straight into hallmark anthem Pull Harder On The Strings Of Your Martyr, frontman Matt Heafy grinning as he's damn near submerged in pyro, Trivium start in fifth gear and rarely let up.

It's not just the band's energy levels that are operating on a higher plane today: from the off, Heafy's vocals sound absolutely colossal. You'd never know that he had to consider abandoning screaming entirely after damaging his voice just over a decade ago, such is the sheer power of his scorched-earth roars today; even clean vocal-heavy bangers like Strife and The Sin And The Sentence get some added bellowing grit for good measure.

He's undoubtedly today's man of the match, but his bandmates are all similarly locked in and clearly having an absolute blast. Guitarist Corey Beaulieu beams and playfully mean-mugs as he lets all manner of millennial metal riff mana rip; Paolo Gregoletto stalks the stage like a moustachioed war general as he plucks the hell out of his bass; recently instated drummer Alex Rüdinger - a man Heafy claims Trivium courted for a decade - smashes his kit like it owes him money.

Windy conditions mean we don't get the full-throttle arena show that might have put Trivium's headliner ambitions on full display: after some early bursts of fire and steam, all the showy stuff has to be cut, meaning we don't get to see the band's epic, Eddie-esque 'Monte' mascot in all its inflated glory. Luckily, Trivs are determined to make up for it with sheer blunt force.

"There's one rule for a Trivium show," Heafy teases. "Everybody fucking moves!" Download duly obliges, waves of crowdsurfers streaming past delirious circle pits as modern metal classics like Down From The Sky, Like Light To The Flies and a storming Throes Of Perdition drop one after the other. After a career-topping run of albums over the last decade, Trivium are a band operating at the peak of their powers, and, as a rollocking In Waves creates one final moment of bedlam, it all feels like a long overdue Donington moment worthy of the set that made their name.

The legendary circus showman P.T. Barnum is credited with coining the phrase 'always leave them wanting more'. Barnum has been dead for over 130 years now, but you can bet that if he was alive to see Guns N’ Roses headline the Apex Stage on Download’s Saturday night, he’d have a few choice words for them.

Gn'R are one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time; no matter what they do, that reputation is set in stone. But here in 2026, their live shows are a patience-testing exercise. Ironically given their historic reputation for lateness, they arrive early, and for a giddy 20 minutes look every inch the legends that they are.

Welcome to the Jungle, Bad Obsession and It’s So Easy all sound incredible. Despite their vintage, they’re snarling, strutting bangers with the bite of a viper. Crucial to their success is Axl Rose; the lower-register tunes are ones that he’s able to successfully recreate, but when we get to You Could Be Mine, you can hear him straining to hit those high notes. He’s doing his best, but his struggles certainly dampen the overall impact.

Axl never really recovers from there, but it would be unfair to completely blame him for the set's problems. Firstly, there is a crowd which is arguably smaller than Trivium played in front of just prior, something that would have been unthinkable in the past, but a clear indication that Download’s audience is evolving.

Those that are still here are happy to go mad for the likes of Mr Brownstone, Live and Let Die and Sweet Child O’ Mine, but many either drift away or stand looking disinterested during a dragging middle of the set. Occasional highs such as a cover of Velvet Revolver’s Slither or the irresistible Rocket Queen stand out, but soon it all starts to feel like a slog when Guns are ruining Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, sounding like a pub band covering Sex Pistols' Black Leather or letting Slash solo for what feels like forever.

Guns N’ Roses could have shaved off an hour, crammed their slot with all killer, no filler gold and have everyone in the palm of their hand: when we get that final run of Don’t Cry, November Rain, Night Train and Paradise City it’s so good that you can almost forgive and forget those sluggish low points.

Ultimately, it all means that tonight's highs were still sky high, but this was far from a classic Guns N’ Roses show. Less would definitely have been more.

Babymetal have never had much luck at Download. Ever since their first performance at the festival in 2015 as guests for Dragonforce, they’ve somehow managed to arrive amidst massive downpours. It’s got to the point where fans have joked on Reddit about the band being cursed, and with their last performance in 2024 cut in two thanks to, you guessed it, heavy rain, you’d be hard pressed to argue.

Imagine the sheer delight, then, when Sumetal addresses the crowd with a beaming grin: “we’re so happy to be with you, with SUNSHINE!”

The next 50 minutes or so fly in giddy, joyous exuberance. There are well-honed parts of the show that by this point feel like beloved fixtures: a big dramatic intro video, the staccato blasts of BABYMETAL DEATH, and screams of zeal when the core trio of Su-Metal, Moametal and Momometal spring onto the stage.

But there’s also the sense that this is the experience Babymetal have wanted to give fans for a decade now. It’s striking just how diverse the crowd are, young kids, teenagers and old school metallers all popping up on the big screens. At the same time, it feels reflective of just how broad Babymetal's sound is.

We’re treated to the high-speed riffs and breakdowns of Poppy feature From Me To U, power metal overdrives of hyperspeed guitar on the Alissa White-Gluz-sporting Distortion and even the all-out brutality of deathcore on Slaughter To Prevail Collab Song 3.

Yet, somehow, it all works together. Even with the features relying on backing tapes (you’d need a full revolving festival lineup just to cover their set otherwise), Babymetal don’t fall into the same trap as others who use pre-recorded features – and there are many in metal now, from Bring Me The Horizon to Amon Amarth and Bloodywood – in that instead of standing around looking lost when these segments come up, Babymetal are literally always on the move, dancing, bouncing and just generally filling the stage with a sense of electric energy.

In turn, the crowd goes nuts. From bouncing along and howling back the lyrics to Pa Pa Ya!! And RATATATA (played for a second time this weekend), to headbanging and kicking off massive pits to Gimme Chocolate!! and an impressively pyro-scorched Road To Resistance, the show feels both like an overdue homecoming and a celebration of their shift from metal’s fringes to one of its most exciting and beloved acts.

With a bigger and more vocal crowd than even the headliners later today, it feels like the world is Babymetal’s for the taking. Thank the Fox God the curse has been lifted.

Rush’s triumphant Fifty Something comeback tour continues to throw up surprises – this time with the appearance of classic song in the setlist for the first time in 47 years.

The fourth night of the tour, which took place at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum on June 13, saw the band playing the title track of their classic fifth album, A Farewell To Kings - a song that was last performed back in 1979.

The changed-up setlist featured tour debuts for The Pass (originally from 1989’s Presto) and The Anarchist (from 2012’s Clockwork Angels). The band also opened the show with 1978’s Xanadu for only the second time ever – the first time being the opening night of the Fifty Something tour. They also played 2112’s 20-minute title track in full once again and welcomed Aimee Mann to the stage once more for Time Stand Still.

The band have played different sets at each of the four shows on the tour so far. As well as 2112, they also played 1981’s Moving Pictures in its entirety at third Kia Forum show, on June 11.

The tour also marks the debut of drummer Anika Nilles, who has replaced the late Neil Peart. Nilles has garnered huge acclaim for her performances so far, including a stellar version of Tom Sawyer on the opening night.

Rush setlist: Kia Forum, Los Angeles: July 13, 2026

Set 1
Xanadu
Limelight
Subdivisions
The Pass
Freewill
Bravado
The Camera Eye
The Trees
The Anarchist
The Spirit of Radio

Set 2
2112 Part I: Overture
2112 Part II: The Temples of Syrinx
2112 Part III: Discovery
2112 Part IV: Presentation
2112 Part V: Oracle: The Dream
2112 Part VI: Soliloquy
2112 Part VII: Grand Finale
Far Cry
Distant Early Warning
New World Man
Vital Signs
Time Stand Still (with Aimee Mann)
YYZ
A Farewell to Kings
The Garden
Tom Sawyer

Encore
Finding My Way

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2026

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

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2027

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

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

Find Rush tickets.

Being the first act to open a stage on the first day of a festival is a pretty underrated slot. You get a fresh, excited and expectant crowd, all looking to kick off their weekend in style.

With a chance to grab as many new fans as he can, UK alt-rapper Native James does not let his opportunity slip, turning a tent of curious Download goers into cheering fans in a breathless 20 minute set.

The first thing you notice as James struts out onstage, before a note has even been played, is that this is a man with some serious charisma. His band are a fantastic foil, throwing themselves around as they peel out trappy nu metal bangers like Hammer and opener Raise the Alarm, but you rarely can take your eyes off the man himself.

Put frankly: the guy just looks fucking cool. It might seem trite to say it, but it’s something that can’t be taught, and when he rips his shirt off and dives into the increasingly energised throng, you can’t help but imagine him being able to do the same on far bigger stages, to far more people in the not too distant future.

He even ends his set by bringing out some UK hip hop royalty, with Boy Better Know’s Frisco joining him for Never Been Scared and Professor Green arriving towards the end of an absolutely, gloriously chaotic Block. With these kind of co-signs and with the crowd chanting his name after he finishes, it seems pretty evident that Native James is going to be a major player very soon. Put it this way: he won’t be opening many bills in the future. We might have a star on our hands.

Lzzy Hale has been here before. Halestorm headlined Download’s second stage back in 2019, a beacon of full-hearted rock 'n' roll wedged within the transgressive weirdo rap of Die Antwoord and the aggy millennial metal of Slipknot. This year they’re doing much the same, offering a classic rock alternative to Cypress Hill before headliners Limp Bizkit. Only, a lot has changed in seven years.

They’ve not had the kind of immediate blow-up that a crossover single or viral hit might have afforded, but the fact is Halestorm are now an established arena band, and have racked up stadium gigs with everyone from Metallica and Iron Maiden to Black Sabbath. That experience shows.

Opener Fallen Star is punctuated with blasts of flame, while the song’s solo sees Lzzy and Joe Hottinger trade licks in front of sparking jets. Confetti blasts up for I Miss The Misery and the flames keep coming; this is Halestorm going the whole nine yards and putting on a massive spectacle worthy of a stadium. They’re not just relying on production, though, Lzzy howling for a good 30 seconds by way of introduction. The set is punchy and amped up; Love Bites (So Do I), Bitch and Freak Like Me are tackled with all the ferocity and force of a starving great white let loose on a seal colony.

It sets the tone for the set to come, the wall of Marshall stacks hinting towards the old school rock style glow-up they give every song. Lzzy puts her voice through its paces with almighty renditions of I Get Off and I Gave You Everything, while a mid-set, rocked up rendition of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance proves to be a surprise highlight, the crowd singing along gleefully.

2026 marks a big turning point for Download, with its first ever frontwoman headliner in Linkin Park’s Emily Armstrong. But with such sheer star quality and on the best form of their lives, it feels like Halestorm are lining themselves up to ascend to headliner status down the line.

Neon shellsuit fanciers Electric Callboy have become the biggest party band this side of Limp Bizkit, so it’s only right they play on the same night, bringing their arena show to even more of the masses.

The field is already packed as the Germans open with Tanzeid, the title track of their next album, turning Download into a daytime rave.

They’re packing their backdrop video of a robot playing Slayer, their techno mashup ending in Drowning Pool’s nu metal hit Bodies, multiple costume changes and all the hits. Hypa Hypa, the song that launched them into a new era of popularity in 2020, comes early in the set - a reminder that it’s still a banger and it’s not even their best song now.

The show and the fun stops during Mindreade, due to an emergency in the crowd, with Kevin and Nico apologising for not noticing sooner and making sure everyone’s okay - “We appreciate a party, but more important than a party is a life.”

Still, the party soon goes up a few levels with Elevator Operator, complete with jets of fire and showers of sparks - the character of the title introduced in mock seriousness as an “idol, like our father”. Ratatata is, predictably, a massive moment, the Babymetal part done as video recording but no less powerful. The Japanese kawaii metallers will surely play the same song on this stage tomorrow…but whose version will be better?

The band go off as if they’re done, but fans know they always close with We’ve Got The Moves. Returning with their bowl cuts and wearing white shirts and lime trousers, backed by multicoloured visuals of drinks in penis-shaped glasses with heart-shaped straws, they oblige their biggest UK audience yet, with thousands of people singing along to the “da, da da da da” refrain.

As Electric Callboy exit the stage, a tape of 2 Unlimited’s No Limits plays. It’s fitting - not just for a band who embrace techno, but for one whose potential for absurdity, partying and fame appears uncapped.

It's late afternoon on a sunny Friday in June, and about 40,000 people are losing their minds to Pendulum's synth-frenzied drum 'n' bass onslaught. This isn't Creamfields, though; it's Download, the UK's home of rock and metal, and Pendulum couldn't look more at home. It shouldn't be a surprise - this is the Aussie crew's fifth appearance at the festival, and they always go down a storm, their guitar-charged take on arena EDM more than propulsive enough to spark a fair few mosh pits.

Much like The Prodigy before them, Pendulum have shown that the rock community - so often accused of narrow-mindedness and gatekeeping - are more than happy to accept the right kind of bands as one of their own. As certified screamers like Propane Nightmares, Watercolour and Tarantula peel off one after the other, it's impossible not to get swept up in the giddy shape-throwing that consumes Donington, a beautifully worked cameo from Rou Reynolds for a beefed-up take on Enter Shikari classic Sorry You're Not A Winner the highlight of a set that barely pauses for breath.

And, a mere couple of hours later, it's the turn of another band from outside rock's remit to stake their claim on this hallowed ground: Cypress Hill, the kings of hard-hitting hip hop whose appearance here feels less like a novelty and more like something that was long overdue.

Warming the crowd up with a medley that teases everything from Metallica and Rage Against The Machine to Daft Punk, DJ Lord introduces his comrades with a flurry of scratches, Download welcoming B-Real, Sen Dog and Eric Bobo like returning heroes. A field of black-clad metalheads, emos and punks is turned into a singular bobbing, dancing mass as How I Could Just Kill A Man drops, and it never stops pulsing for the hour of excellence that follows.

Inevitably, a superbly deployed cover of Rage classic Bombtrack draws the biggest cheers of the set - those that saw DJ Lord and B-Real mix it up in Prophets Of Rage will have been nodding in approval - but hallmark classic Insane In The Brain isn't far off, and neither is a cheeky drop of House Of Pain's Jump Around to wrap things up. Rock music will always rightly dominate Download, but today has proven beyond a doubt that sometimes, a little variety can still be the spice of life.

If you're in any doubt over whether it was the right call to finally have Limp Bizkit headline Download for the first time - 23 whole years after they pulled out of topping the festival's very first edition - you need only take in the sheer number of red caps bouncing around Donington hours before the nu metal megaweights even arrive on stage.

Once they do, they waste no time - well, maybe a little, teasing Break Stuff right off the bat before Fred Durst halts proceedings to rile everyone up a bit more, guitarist Wes Borland dropping a few bars of the band's rowdy cover of Ministry's Thieves for good measure. Then Break Stuff hits for real, and it's instant bedlam; this is metal's ultimate party band, doing what they do best, in front of what is surely the biggest UK crowd they've ever played to.

Looking every inch the colourful characters that made them household names in millennial rock - Durst continuing his amusing but bizarre modern tradition of donning ridiculous wigs, Borland dolled up like some demonic Elden Ring rooster god - Jacksonville's finest dish out banger after banger, from Chocolate Starfish favourites My Generation, Hot Dog, Rollin' and Livin' It Up to deeper cuts like Gold Cobra opener Bring It Back and infectiously bullish rager Eat You Alive.

Bizkit's backdrop takes the form of a giant speaker system overlooking a collection of cassette tapes packing everything from Sepultura to Kraftwerk, a glistening LED screen at the back cranking out lyrics to each song like they aren't already coded to the DNA of just about every rock fan between the ages of 30 and 45.

And, on tonight's evidence, pretty much everyone else too; Gen X-ers are moshing with millennials while Gen Z kids are crowdsurfing past preteens on their parents' shoulders. That Bizkit are arguably as big as they've ever been is a minor miracle given how out of step they looked only a few short years into the New Millennium, but it's well deserved: they have as bulletproof a greatest hits catalogue as any band to make it big in metal, and they make a wise choice not to dip into the fun but unnecessary Nirvana and Rage Against The Machine covers that have often taken up valuable setlist space.

Not that we don't get some covers, of course. Faith goes off like a hydrogen bomb, while Behind Blue Eyes gets one of the loudest and most sincere singalongs of the whole day, hundreds of crowdsurfers going over as it reaches fever pitch only adding to the spectacle.

It's far from the only emotional motif of the day; much-missed bassist Sam Rivers gets a number of shout-outs, while some young fans getting to jump onstage to sing Full Nelson with Durst is a heartwarming touch.

It's all building to what seems like an unstoppable climax before an accident in the crowd results in a necessary but lengthy pause in the set. A fan is stretchered out, Durst looking shaken for a moment as he watches on, and for a second it seems like the show might end right there. "We could rip one more?" offers the frontman after collecting himself. Donington is in no two minds about whether to take him up on his offer, and while a second burst of Break Stuff is a leftfield way to finish up, it's ferociously effective: there isn't a soul stood still in the field as that final breakdown hits again.

Long overdue, but every bit worth the wait. Surely it won't be another two decades before Limp Bizkit headline Download again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2026

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

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2027

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

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

Find Rush tickets.

Since 2022, Mystic Festival has been housed in the confines of Gdansk Shipyard, the assortment of warehouses, train tracks and gigantic cranes lending the festival a post-Apocalyptic feel. But next year Poland's biggest metal festival is set to get even bigger, relocating to Polsat Plus Arena in Gdansk to increase capacity, making 2026 the fifth and final time we'll grace the coolest festival site we've ever seen.

There's no time for comisserating, however. Spread across four days, this year's Mystic lineup is a typically diverse affair with everything from death metal to thrash, sludge, prog and beyond.

Wednesday [June 3]

The first big discovery of the festival comes from DOLA, homegrown post-black metallers with a touch of Opeth intricacy. Nimble guitars give way to explosive, sludgy breakouts that bring to mind UK underground heroes Conjurer.

Next up are hotly tipped death metallers NECKBREAKKER. The DM wunderkinds supported Slayer last summer and chuck out nasty, hardcore-flavoured grooves like brutal candy. The stagecraft is a bit cliche bingo ("I want to see you make a circle!", though the intro "We're Neckbreakker and we're here to break your neck" is pretty great) but their relative youth makes it forgivable and the songs are killer besides.

It's not all death metal, mind. A.A. WILLIAMS is just a couple of days shy of releasing her spectacular third album Solstice, and her offering of yet more gorgeous, gothic-coded melody is a welcome change of pace for the day. Brooding and melancholic, the likes of Evaporate and Love And Pain have long established their captivating magic, and new songs Just A Shadow, Poison and Little By Little - making its live debut - happily maintain that same mystique.

ICE NINE KILLS might be the big headliner of the first night (and you can read our review here), but they aren't the only band with a bit of stagecraft at Mystic Festival 2026.

Closing out Wednesday are German anti-war troupe KANONENFIEBER. We got a glimpse at their insane live shows in January on the 70000 Tons Of Metal cruise, but closing the Desert Stage they show what they're capable of, their furious blackened death metal enhanced with blasts of pyro, billowing jets of gas and evocative WW1-era German soldier costumes.

Thursday [June 4]

You can always trust Jason Aalon Butler to bring a ruckus. LETLIVE. have barely played their first note when the singer heads out into the crowd, starting a moshpit with the (admittedly sparse, to start with at least) crowd. What ensues is one of the most electrifying performances of the weekend, a reminder of that band's brilliance that ends with Butler clambering into the scaffolding and screaming blue murder.

By the time BLOODYWOOD play the space has filled considerably. India's biggest metal sensation always prove well worth the hype, and - a bit of awkwardness aside when they stand around during Babymetal's feature on Bekhauf as it plays over the PA - their set brings an infectious sense of energy that sees huge dust clouds kicked up in the pit.

ANTHRAX have perfected festival sets. Coming on to Among The Living, they just kick out the hits with such velocity and enthusiasm that you find yourself headbanging and singing along like you've been swept up in some great thrash tsunami. There's only one variation in the set - new song For The Kids is kicked out to a politely indulgent crowd - but you just can't argue with Got The Time, I Am The Law, Caught In A Mosh et al.

By the same token, CAVALERA doing Chaos A.D. feels like an obvious slam dunk. They might be a few decades older, but Max and Iggor are still the architects behind some of the most aggressive and brilliant tunes of the 90s and the fact the crowd can't help but roar "fuck shit up!" (from GOAT-contender live album Under A Pale Grey Sky) as Refuse/Resist kicks off. What ensues is a reminder of just why the Cavaleras are considered metal royalty, pits breaking out throughout the crowd at such volume that nowhere is safe.

After a double thrashtravaganza, you'd hope MEGADETH would bring things home. Only, there's something... off about their performance. Just two weeks after being delighted at their return to furious form in the US, the journey across the Atlantic apparently sapping their powers as their performance feels toothless even with anthems like Symphony Of Destruction, Holy Wars... The Punishment Due and Sweating Bullets.

Thankfully, BLOOD INCANTATION save the night. One of the beauty's of Mystic is in just how much there is to do, and between death metal sets Thursday there's showings of All Gates Open: In Search Of Absolute Elsewhere, the documentary about the recording of the record which took Metal Hammer's album of the year in 2024. Hearing Absolute Elsewhere in full at Mystic just underscores how boundary-pushing and brilliant Blood Incantation are, a singular force who are propelling extreme metal in exciting new directions.

Friday [June 5]

If Thursday belonged to thrash, Friday is all about sludge and stoner metal. We'd probably be much happier watching EYEHATEGOD under a blazing sun, but then 'happy' rather defeats the point. The NOLA sludge legends burn through 1993's Take As Needed For Pain in full with a venomous vitriol that perfectly suits the downpours overhead, those low'n'slow rhythms so thick and harsh they're practically tar in your ears.

"I thought they brought the whole neighbourhood today!" CORROSION OF CONFORMITY's Pepper Keenan isn't wrong as he points out the sheer prevalance of NOLA bands on Friday's line-up, set to take double-duty with a set from Down later. But first, COC are here to reminder everyone that they've got a new album, and it kicks ass. New tunes Asleep On The Killing Floor, Baad Man and Gimme Some Moore sound killer, and fit in perfectly alongside the southern-fried crossover of Vote With A Bullet and Clean My Wounds.

COC aren't the only band feeling community spirit, however. Barely a month before they were due to play Mystic, BENEDICTION put out a statement that vocalist Dave Ingram had stepped away from the band. Rather than cancel, they drafted in former vocalist Dave Hunt, these days best known for his work in Anaal Nathrakh. Between DM blasts, Hunt enthuses about how touched he is that the crowd have turned up and been so excitable for the performance, undercutting the gruesomeness somewhat but giving us a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings.

It might be BLACK LABEL SOCIETY's long-overdue shot at headlining a festival, but Zakk Wylde happily shares the spotlight. Tributes to the Abbott Brothers and Ozzy Osbourne are plentiful throughout the group's performance, from the use of a Led Zep/Sabbath mash-up as their intro tape to big-screen tributes to the Abbotts (In This River) and Ozzy (Ozzy's Song) in the set that results in thousands of voices chanting "Ozzy! Ozzy! Ozzy!" The No More Tears cover is a nice touch too.

How do you end a wet and riffy day? With some techno-enhanced Vikings of course! EIHWAR sit somewhere between Perturbator and Heilung, taking the spiritualistic folk of the latter and the danceable rhythms of the former to make something totally unique and fascinating. Naturally, it's a delight.

Saturday [June 6]

There's some residual stoner in the air of Mystic come Saturday. ACID KING reopen a vortex to Sabbathdom in a trippy, fuzzy set that sees them play through 1999's Busse Woods, the returning sunshine doing nothing to diminish the pervasive air of doom.

In a country with as strong ties to Catholicism as Poland, it probably shouldn't come as too much of a surprise when we hear from a local that members of the church have been quietly protesting the gig all weekend. They're probably best steering clear of HULDER. The black metal project might hail from the US but their name - taken from a Scandinavian forest creature - is a big hint that the group take their cues from Scandinavian black metal, inverted crosses flashing overhead as the group unleash wintry tones cut with folky melodies.

From one black metal maverick to another, GAAHLS WYRD has become a springboard for the multifaceted musical talents of its titular frontman. Corpsepainted and walking with an air of spacial dominion, Gaahl is utterly captivating to behold, making great use of the indoor space in the Sabbath Stage as his voice booms and he intones like he's summoning some eldritch being from beyond the veil.

How do you follow that? Well, with one of goth metal's most formative records played in full, of course. THE GATHERING are celebrating 31 years of Mandylion by playing a set heavily dominated by that record. The second Fear The Sea hits, the band's influence on decades of goth metal is undeniable, traces of their DNA popping up everywhere from Lacuna Coil to Within Temptation. It's a fittingly grand and melancholia-steeped end to another fantastic year at Mystic, bidding farewell to the Gdansk Shipyard as the festival continues to grow and evolve. Wherever it goes next, hopefully we'll see you there!

Blind Bird tickets for Mystic Festival 2027 are on-sale now.

Download isn’t just the biggest rock and metal festival in the UK - it’s hallowed ground. A spiritual successor to the legendary Monsters of Rock, Download’s 20-plus-year history has seen it bring together the great and good of rock and metal in a veritable Who’s-Who that has made many a career.

From booking reunited legends like Faith No More, Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine to “farewell appearances” from Black Sabbath, KISS and Aerosmith, Download has made its reputation on creating one of the most exciting and vibrant rock’n’roll experiences year-in, year-out.

Even when the festival calendar was decimated in 2020, Download didn’t just survive; it thrived, returning the following year with a 10,000 capacity test event titled Download Pilot, a triumphant celebration of live music that ushered in a return to normality. With its triumphant, double-Metallica-dosing 20th anniversary celebrations following two years later, Download's place atop the UK's rock and metal festival throne remains unchallenged. With the gates for Download 2026 now officially open, here are the best sets in the festival's history...so far.

Metallica – Scuzz Stage, 2003

At the first ever Download, rumours started to circulate that Apocalyptica's slot in the middle of the day on the second stage was going to be filled by metal’s biggest band. For once an on-site rumour proved to be true: Metallica stepped out and decimated a packed tent, before heading off into the distance. It was too much to believe for some. A shell-shocked Nathan Gray of Boysetsfire, the band directly on afterwards, asked: “Did Metallica just support us?” Yeah mate, they actually did.

Trivium – Main Stage, 2005

Trivium were basically kids when they were added as the opening act of Download 2005’s Main Stage. When they looked out at the empty field at 10.58, two minutes before their set was due to start, they must have felt a felt tinge of disappointment. It was a different story as they stepped out to start playing and were greeted by the sight of thousands of metal fans careering down the hill toward them. Matt Heafy and co then played the set of their career, instantly establishing themselves as metal’s most exciting new band.

The Prodigy - Snickers Stage, 2006

Anyone bemoaning the idea of The Prodigy playing a festival like Download simply hasn't seen The Prodigy. Billed opposite a main stage-headlining Guns N' Roses still in their 'Axl-and-friends' era, dance music's most abrasive firestarters brought so many punters to the tent that people were spilling out almost as far as the eye could see. Once the band arrived on stage, the place went ballistic: mosh pits immediately opened up, crowd surfers were everywhere and people were even climbing the pillars. Prodigy would return to play the (now outdoor) second stage once more in 2009, before headlining the whole festival three years later.

Machine Head – Main Stage, 2007

It’s impossible not to think that if Machine Head had carried on the momentum of their The Blackening-era career they surely would have gone on to headline Download. In 2007 they were arguably the best band in metal, and they turned up on Download’s Main Stage in devastating form, making even Slayer (yes, that Slayer) look ordinary courtesy of a pulverising seven-song set that culminated in a staggering rendition of Davidian.

 Slipknot – Main Stage, 2009

When the bill was announced for Download in 2009, Slipknot were a controversial choice for a headliner (yes, really!). Some suggested that they had yet to earn their place at the top table, despite a decade of near-perfect live shows under their belts. We all know what happened next: Slipknot at Download 2009 was one of those rare moments when a set went into legendary status mere minutes after it finished.

The highlights are almost certainly imbedded in your brain at this point; the four-song opening missive from the band’s self-titled debut, the mass sing-a-long that opens Duality and the insane reaction from everyone present, from the front of the stage all the way to the burger vans at the back going crazy. By the time they left with a venomous Spit It Out, Slipknot had Download in the palm of their hand, where they’ve kept it ever since, the idea that they would play Donington as anything other than headliner put very much to bed.

Linkin Park – Main Stage, 2014

For fans of a certain age, Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory is a landmark album, a record that introduced an entire generation to guitar music. Fourteen years after its release the band rocked up at Download having agreed to play it in its entirety. Their set pulled in one of the largest crowds in recent memory, and gave 80,000 people an unforgettable nostalgia trip, made even more poignant with the passing of frontman Chester Bennington a few years later.

Babymetal - Main Stage, 2016

After Download's organisers initially baulked at the idea of booking the sugar-sweet kawaii-metal sensations, Babymetal snuck onto the bill for a surprise appearance in the third stage tent with Dragonforce in 2015. They went down such a storm that they were brought back properly a year later, playing outdoors to a huge crowd, with an atmosphere that grew from curious to delighted as the show went on. Even some typically horrendous English festival weather couldn't dampen the fun, consolidating Babymetal's status as Download alumni forever more.

Tool – Main Stage, 2019

The seemingly endless wait for new material and some UK live shows from music's most enigmatic and mysterious band had gone on so long that many fans believed that there was to be no return from Tool. So, the anticipation that hung in the air on the last night of Download 2019 was palpable. Maynard James Keenan and co didn’t disappoint, using the video screens for their own psychedelic images and playing a set of transcendent, ethereal post-metal, the band turned a field in Leicestershire into a religious experience.

Skindred - Main Stage, 2021

Announced at short notice and featuring a British-centric lineup, the Download Pilot event was a more intimate but desperately needed version of the festival after the pandemic had KO'd the previous year's edition. It was an event full of emotional, heartwarming moments as UK metal fans were able to frolic in a field together once more, but few summed up the weekend better than Skindred's marvellous early evening set in the Sunday evening sunshine, a thunderous Newport Helicopter putting the cherry on the cake of a historic showing.

Spiritbox - Avalanche Stage, 2022

Almost two years after they became a viral sensation with Holy Roller, Spiritbox proved the buzz wasn’t purely digital when they packed out the Avalanche Stage tent in 2022. With a howl of “Cut down the altar”, the Canadians wasted no time in showing what they were made of; gigantic riffs, scream-along anthems and one of metal’s most commanding new frontwomen in Courtney LaPlante ensuring Spiritbox first UK show was the most legendary Download debut since Trivium played the Main Stage in 2005.

Evanescence - Opus Stage, 2023

16 long years since their last appearance at Donington, Evanescence drew an astonishingly huge crowd to the Opus Stage for a stunning, career-spanning set that dished out plenty from latest album The Bitter Truth, but still threw in enough all-time classics to make sure Amy Lee and her crew drew some of the biggest singalongs of the whole weekend. If ever there was evidence needed at just how important this band were to a whole generation of rock and metal fans, this was it.

Bring Me The Horizon - Main Stage, 2023

At Download's biggest weekend ever (literally: they had four bloody days), Bring Me The Horizon finally got the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of Slipknot and Avenged Sevenfold before them in proving once and for all that they had the chops to headline the UK's biggest rock and metal festival. They seized it in style, bringing the most grandiose, retina-singeing stage show of the weekend and a career's-worth of hits, underlining their importance to both the British metal scene and to the progression of heavy music in the 21st century.

Korn - Main Stage, 2025

In a landmark year that saw Green Day finally make their Download debut and Sleep Token historically headline a major outdoor festival for the very first time, it was Download's very own house band that ultimately stole the show. Making their tenth appearance at Donington, the godfathers of nu metal showed exactly why their first headline set on the legendary ground was long overdue, courtesy of an electric, bangers-filled party of a gig that had everyone from OG millennials to Gen Z converts bouncing around like it was 1994.

Download 2026 takes place this weekend at Donington Park, England

It'll take some sort of miracle to top Rush's emotional return to the stage on Sunday night, but every new show will see a new set of equally emotional fans take their seats, determined to make their own memories and delighted that Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee have returned to the stage.

On night one, new drummer Anika Nilles quietened the ever-dwindling number of doubters with an extraordinarily well-received performance. Geddy Lee appeared triumphantly happy and sounded in fine voice. Alex Lifeson, who said as recently as 2024 that he had "no interest" in touring again, looked like he couldn't wait to start. And tribute was paid to Neil Peart, both on-screen and by Nilles, who played with a set of the late drummer's sticks resting on her riser.

On night two, another question was answered. Rumours suggested that the band had rehearsed between 35 and 40 songs for the tour, and just 24 made the setlist at the Kia Forum on Sunday. Some songs will presumably remain fixed in the set, like Tom Sawyer and Working Man, but others will come and go.

And so it proved. Night two at the Forum saw some immediate repeats, including the opening Xanadu and Aimee Mann's guest spot on Time Stand Still. Several songs were dropped, including La Villa Strangiato, Vital Signs and Natural Science.

But there were also tour debuts for The Analog Kid, Leave That Thing Alone, The Trees, Headlong Flight, the four parts of 2112 not performed on opening night, Animate, Closer To The Heart, A Passage To Bangkok, Anthem, Witch Hunt and Finding My Way. Full setlist below.

Two shows down. Only another 86 to go.

Rush setlist: Kia Forum, Los Angeles: July 9, 2026

Set 1
Xanadu
The Spirit Of Radio
The Analog Kid
Freewill
Subdivisions
Bravado
Leave That Thing Alone
The Trees
Headlong Flight
Limelight

Set 2
2112 Part I: Overture
2112 Part II: The Temples of Syrinx
2112 Part III: Discovery
2112 Part IV: Presentation
2112 Part V: Oracle: The Dream
2112 Part VI: Soliloquy
2112 Part VII: Grand Finale
Animate
Closer To The Heart
A Passage To Bangkok
Time Stand Still
YYZ
Anthem
Red Barchetta
Witch Hunt
Tom Sawyer

Encore
Finding My Way
Working Man

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2026

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

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2027

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

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

Find Rush tickets.

Mystic isn't just Poland's biggest metal festival. It's also turned out to be a proving ground for bands old and new, giving the likes of Danzig, In Flames, Sepultura and more the chance to really shine away from depressing mid-afternoon slots with a huge production and dramatic setting in Gdansk Shipyard.

No strangers to a bit of dramatic flair are Wednesday's headliners Ice Nine Kills. Megadeth aside, they're likely the biggest band on the bill, having completed a massive arena tour of Europe and the UK last year and landed songs on the soundtrack to movies including Terrifier 3, Scream 7 and Ready Or Not 2 to help them genuinely cross over into pop culture.

But this is only INK's sixth time in Poland, meaning they face something of an uphill battle. Topping a day that featured the likes of Six Feet Under, Grave and A.A. Williams, the horror-obsessed metalcore mob stand out like a sore thumb and it's obvious that even with an enthusiastic audience, the chances of a field-wide singalong are slim.

Not that it stops them from putting on one hell of a show. Vocalist Spencer Charnas is wheeled out Hannibal Lecter style for opener Meat & Greet and from there we're off to the races. There's barely a song in the INK set that doesn't come with some big production flourish. A screaming crew member is stabbed to death on Stabbing In The Dark, a dancing deadite springs across the stage for Ex-Mørtis and for more recent single The Laugh Track Spencer dresses up as a Tim Burton-era Joker while crew members chuck fake dollars into the crowd.

It's all very familiar and a bit of GWAR gore would go a long way, but that doesn't stop it being inredibly fun. Some bits fall flat - the long intro videos suck some energy out and a cover of NoFx's Linoleum would probably be better suited to a Download or Rock AM Ring crowd - but its the mark of a great band when they can win over a crowd that isn't already theirs, and the big wall of death for A Work Of Art - orchestrated by Art The Clown himself, naturally - is a sure sign that INK are doing everything right to become festival headliners in their own right.

Ice Nine Kills Setlist Mystic Festival 2026 June 3 2026

1. Meat & Greet
2. Wurst Vacation
3. Ex-Mortis
4. The Laugh Track
5. A Grave Mistake
6. Funeral Derangements
7. Linoleum
8. The Shower Scene
9. Hell Or High Slaughter
10. The Great Unknown
11. Stabbing In The Dark
12. Welcome To Horrorwood
13. Twisting The Knife
14. Hip To Be Scared
15. IT Is The End
16. The American Nightmare
17. A Work Of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've spent too much time watching YouTube footage of Rush's return to the stage at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles. As a long-term fan – one of my first live shows was on the Signals tour in May 1983, at Wembley Arena in London – it was always going to be an emotional watch. What surprised me was just how emotional it was.

The footage I've been most fascinated by frames the stage side-on, shot from the kind of seats that sell last because the view isn't the best.

"Side views kind of suck," says YouTuber Tapehead2, the man responsible. "I was actually behind Alex – so I decided to go all in on an Anika cam. She absolutely killed it!"

Mike Portnoy, a man frequently touted to fill Neil Peart's spot behind the kit, agrees. "Anika absolutely killed it in the best way imaginable," he wrote on Instagram. "I was so happy for her…nailing all of the big Neil moments with a giant smile on her face the whole time! She really is the perfect choice for this!"

There are two bits of footage I've watched again and again. The first comes during the opening Xanadu, when Nilles fumbles a stick while performing one of Peart's signature rolls around the toms. It's a terrifying moment.

Imagine. You're replacing the irreplacable. There's no way you aren't feeling the pressure. It's the first song of the first show. Barely 90 seconds in. And one of your sticks clatters into the woodwork.

"In the past, I actually had a big issue with stage fright, and I worked on it a lot," Nilles told Classic Rock earlier this year. "I’ve developed enough techniques and tools that I can rely on. And if the nerves really start to take over, I definitely know how to counteract that."

Nilles recovers in milliseconds, snapping her left hand forward to catch the errant stick without losing her place in the song. If Geddy Lee, who's standing metres away, notices anything awry, he doesn't let on. It's a swift return to business as usual, perfection snatched from the teeth of catastrophe.

The second moment comes from the set closer, Tom Sawyer, more than two hours later. Alongside YYZ, it's probably the Rush song most closely associated with Neil Peart. It's the song Portnoy calls "the greatest air drumming song of all time." Of course, I'm talking about the bit that follows Alex Lifeson's solo. That thunderous cascade around the toms. Those triplets. The flams. The genius. It's the kind of thing that shouldn't be messed with. And Nilles doesn't.

Another angle, shot from the more expensive seats, shows something else: Nilles' face, and the smile that arrives as she completes those iconic fills and realises she’s nailed the assignment. She finishes, and an enormous roar goes up. It's a moment of genuine triumph. And, it appears, there isn't a dry eye left in the house.

It's not hard to diagnose the emotion. Part of it's the space left by the missing man. Part of it's the thrill of seeing Anika Nilles filling that space so comprehensively. Part of it's the love in the room for these musicians, palpable even via shaky, occasionally unfocused footage.

But most of it's something else: the simple joy of watching Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson back onstage. Having so much fun. Playing those crazy, complicated, heroic songs, with a drummer they clearly trust and adore.

Welcome to Rush, Anika Nilles.

The embedded videos below are cued up to the moments mentioned above.

In 1987, Marillion headlined the inaugural Leysin Festival, an outdoor event held at Centre des Sports in Lesyin, an alpine resort village at the eastern end of Lake Geneva, Switzerland.

Now, nearly 40 years on, festival organisers have released their official archive film of Fish & Co.'s performance, which comprises 90 minutes of previously unseen, high-quality, pro-shot footage from the band's Clutching At Straws tour.

The Leysin film was shot two days before Sugar Mice was released as a single, and seven days before Marillion played at the outdoor stage in Loreley, St. Goarshausen, Germany, a show that was released as the Live From Loreley concert movie in late 1997, and as a live album in 2009. It features an almost identical tracklist, with just Script For A Jester's Tear and White Russians not making the Lesyin set. Full setlist below.

Clutching At Straws had been released in June 1987, and peaked at No.2 on the UK album charts – one place below Misplaced Childhood, which had been driven to the top spot by Marillion's two most successful singles, Kayleigh and Lavender. But not all was well.

"We weren’t getting on, and by the time we got to the tour, it was intolerable," Fish told Prog. "The tour bus was not a good place to be. We all sat in different positions, nobody saying anything. The gang mentality had broken up."

A year later, he was gone.

Marillion setlist: Lesyin Festival, July 11, 1987

Slainte Mhath
Assassing
Sugar Mice
Fugazi
Hotel Hobbies
Warm Wet Circles
That Time Of The Night
Kayleigh
Lavender
Bitter Suite
Heart Of Lothian
The Last Straw
Incommunicado
Market Square Heroes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Encore
By-Tor & The Snow Dog
Working Man

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2026

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

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2027

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

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

Find Rush tickets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can see the full list of live dates below.

Voyage 35 EU and UK tour dates

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

Get tickets.