Soon after he’d joined Yes, Rick Wakeman turned to the history books for his solo debut, The Six Wives Of Henry VIII. Inspired by the spouses of one of England’s most famous monarchs, the six complex instrumentals had record label execs chewing down their nails and tearing their hair out. In the wake of its 50th anniversary in 2003, Wakeman told Prog about the album that launched his solo career.

In 1973, at the age of 24, Rick Wakeman was among the biggest stars in the world of rock music. As a member of Yes – whose fifth album, Close To The Edge, had become a creative and commercial triumph – the classically-trained keyboard wizard had paid his dues as a session player, put in the hard miles on the road and stood on the precipice of superstardom.

Created against all the odds, his first solo record, The Six Wives Of Henry VIII, was the statement that made him a household name. (Let’s overlook Piano Vibrations, an eminently forgettable 10-song set made by Wakeman for Polydor in ’71 that didn’t even feature his name on the cover.)

By rights, The Six Wives Of Henry VIII shouldn’t have been such a huge success. Wakeman’s record company hated it and they had no problem telling him so. The album was certainly unique, and half a century later its six instrumental songs, each inspired by a celebrated spouse of one of England’s most fascinating monarchs, still stands the test of time. It was also the first extra-curricular statement from a member of Yes, with numerous successors of varying quality set to follow.

Having respectfully declined an offer from his friend David Bowie to become a Spider From Mars, at the time Wakeman was extremely content in what would be the first of five spells with Yes. Featuring a solo track from each band member, the group’s fourth album, Fragile, had been put together in a hurry, something that irked Wakeman – who once dismissed his submission, an instrumental reworking of the Brahms piece Symphony No.4 (newly titled as Cans And Brahms) as “dreadful” – but Close To The Edge provided the breakthrough that Rick and his bandmates both sought and deserved.

The opportunity to spread his wings further came in 1971 when Jerry Moss, then head of A&M Records, offered him a contract to make five solo albums. Wakeman relished the challenge, setting himself to work late that same year. As one of the most popular and identifiable musicians of the era, bagging the record deal would prove the easy part.

Deciding upon the subject matter would be a little more difficult. In the end, inspiration fell into Wakeman’s lap while perusing a book stand at an airport in Virginia during a tour with Yes. Written by Nancy Brysson Morrison, The Private Life Of Henry VIII had been published the better part of a decade earlier. It would prove the best few dollars ever spent by Wakeman.

“You can say that again,” he laughs. “Back then there were no Walkmans or iPods to fill the time on flights, so you’d buy a book. I like my history and that one leapt out at me. I know it sounds daft, but when I got the part where Anne Boleyn got stuck in the Tower, a melody came into my head. I always carry manuscript paper with me and I wrote it down. The deeper I got into the book, more things came to mind. I realised the story could make a great album.

“Then I started thinking: ‘Okay, this is the Tudor period, do I make it about the Tudors?’ That was too bloody obvious. I had to think a little more Dalí than that. I had to paint the surrealistic pictures that were appearing in my head. I didn’t simply want to depict those times; here was one of the greatest stories ever told.”

Wakeman promptly disappeared down the rabbit hole of Henry, the larger than life, serial-marrying adulterer who ruled England from 1509 until his death in 1547. In attempting to write about the differing characters of the King’s wives, he spent a lot of time with his head buried in books.

“Despite the one thing they had in common, these ladies were all very different in their own way,” Wakeman explains. “One of the main difficulties I faced, for instance, is that nobody knows for sure how old Catherine Howard was. At the time, a lot of births went unrecorded. She could have been anything from 17 to 20 when Henry decided to chop her up a bit.

“There was some reading between the lines,” he admits. “I know Henry was a very naughty boy, but some of the wives were, too. It was wonderfully rock’n’roll.” He began preparing the album in December 1971, though it was laid down in fits and starts the following year. “We were solidly busy with Yes; there were either two or three tours of America, plus Europe and Heaven knows where else, so during gaps in the band’s schedule I shot into the studio. In a way that helped, because each time it felt unbelievably fresh.”

With Wakeman acting as producer, sessions took place at Trident Studios, where Bowie acolyte Ken Scott handled the engineering and mix of Catherine Of Aragon; and also across London at Morgan, a regular haunt of Yes. A wide variety of musicians dropped by to perform, including his bandmates Steve Howe on guitar, Chris Squire on bass and the drumming duo of Alan White and Bill Bruford.

“Using different players and engineers also contributed to the sense of originality,” Wakeman believes. “If somebody wasn’t around, I used an alternative and it all worked out incredibly well. I really like the electric sitar as an instrument. We were in the middle of Catherine Howard and there was a gap. I thought, ‘Who does that? Ah, Dave Cousins,’ so I called him up.”

Wakeman also remembers bringing in Barry de Souza, “a great drummer who is sadly no longer with us. I had worked with him in a band called Spinning Wheel. Barry was so technically gifted. I was also bringing in friends such as percussionist Frank Ricotti. The girl backing vocalists were organised for me by Joe Brown’s wife, Vicki. Sadly, we’ve lost her too.”

The sessions also reunited Rick with his former Strawbs colleague Chas Cronk, the bassist with whom Wakeman had performed on his very first paid session, with Ike and Tina Turner. Intriguingly, Dave Wintour, who played bass on Anne Of Cleves and Catherine Parr, went on to become a longtime member of The Wurzels.

“Having friends walk in and play with me was such tremendous fun,” recalls Wakeman. “Some of it was carefully planned but other parts were left to the imaginations of those in the room.”

One song that fell into the latter category was Anne Of Cleves (spelled Ann Of Cleaves on early editions). “For the solo section, I remember being at home on the morning of the recording and realising that the only way to do it was off the cuff,” he recounts. “That meant instead of me following the guys, they’d be following me. I told them, ‘Wait ’til the solo starts and then just fire away – imagine we’re onstage.’

“We did it in one take. It was absolutely amazing, but there was a problem – it didn’t have an ending. That’s why we used the trick of bringing in a church organ to bring us out the other side.”

This being Rick Wakeman, any old church organ would not suffice. Surprisingly, the powers-that-be at St Giles-without-Cripplegate, an ancient Anglican place of worship located in the City Of London, agreed to a brief loan of their prized instrument. “Getting to have that on the album was great,” Rick enthuses. “At the time there was a feeling of... I won’t say anti-rock’n’roll coming from the Church [as an institution], but they seemed to think it was the Devil’s music. It isn’t true – that’s country and western!

“But I called Guy Protheroe from the English Chamber Choir and asked if he knew of anybody who’d actually let me in. He reckoned St Giles was a very forward-thinking place and when I rang them to ask they said, ‘Yeah, great, come along.’ So we made a suitable donation and did that. It was the old days of recording: a couple of Revoxes, mics everywhere – job done. We also did Jane Seymour and some of the others as well.

“Remember, there were no digital instruments or samples,” he continues. “The harpsichord I used on Jane Seymour was built by a wonderful guy called Thomas Goff, a friend from the Royal College Of Music. I considered it the finest harpsichord ever. It sounded fantastic on the track, but listening back, it needed something extra, which was the Minimoog part that we added. When Bill Bruford heard that song he assured me that percussion could be used on it, but not a traditional drum kit. So he added various bits to make it sound good.

“The joy of Six Wives was that everybody got to throw in their two-penn’orth [of creativity],” he smiles. “There was always a plan, but sometimes it was a loose one.”

An interesting story lurks behind the composition of Anne Boleyn. Wakeman had a recurring dream of being present at the execution in 1536. “It was such a strange experience,” he nods. “We had finished the song and Paul Tregurtha did a rough mix for me, which I played during the drive home to Gerrards Cross [in southeast England], where I was living. The car is a great place to listen to a song and I knew that something wasn’t right. It didn’t end properly.

“That night I couldn’t sleep,” he continues. “It was in the early hours that I finally dropped off, and the track was running through my head. And suddenly, there I was, at the Tower Of London. It was as vivid as a dream could be. The crowd was gathered by the gallows – I was right with them.

“I can’t say that I saw Anne’s head go into the basket, but after what had happened everyone started singing the hymn The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended. I woke up with a start and said to my then-wife: ‘I’ve got the ending of the song.’ She replied [sounding bored], ‘Oh, good.’”

Wakeman drove to Morgan Studios and played his own arrangement of the song [written by Reverend John Ellerton] on the piano. “We got Vicki and the girls in for some ‘oooohs’ in the background; they didn’t sing the actual words,” he says.

In fact, The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended wasn’t actually sung at Anne Boleyn’s execution. “The hymn wasn’t even written until quite a few years later [in 1870],” says Rick, “but I felt it was important for it to be there.”

It’s been claimed that Wakeman had wanted Catherine Of Aragon, which featured Howe and Squire, to have found a home on Fragile. He’s happy to confirm that is a “fallacy,” insisting, “It was always intended for Six Wives.”

The album was originally titled Henry VIII And His Six Wives, and Wakeman had written a song about the regent called Defender Of The Faith. “The last piece we recorded was Anne Of Cleves, I think, and then we realised that in the days of vinyl there would be no room for Defender,” he explains. “That’s what prompted the change of title.”

One of the questions he is asked most often concerns the album’s running order. People want to know why the wives weren’t presented in chronological order. “Again, that’s due to the restrictions of vinyl, and of cassette,” he explains. “The two sides needed to be as even as possible.”

As part of his stand-up act and in interviews, the musician has told the tale many times of his presentation of the finished record to the suits at A&M. However, for the purposes of the story, let’s put him back in the room once more. “Okay...” he says cautiously. So who was present at this now fabled meeting?

“Let’s see,” he replies, “there was the head of A&M’s UK company, who’s no longer with us; the lawyer from America, and Tony Burdfield and Terry O’Neill, who both worked promotion in the UK. It was in the label’s office in George Street, London. I had a reel-to-reel and two tapes and I went in very excitedly. By the time I swapped over the tapes I knew that I was pretty much in the stinky brown stuff. In these situations it can be hard to tell whether or not the staff are excited, but this time it was very obvious that they were not. They didn’t get it at all.

“There was a cocktail cabinet in the corner of the room – these were my drinking days – so I asked if I could get something. As the tracks went by, I think I pretty much cleaned the thing out. At the end, the lawyer from America asked, ‘Can I hear it with the vocals on it?’ I replied, ‘There are no vocals; it’s an instrumental keyboard album.’

“They said, ‘Nobody makes instrumental keyboard albums,’ to which I replied, ‘I’ve just done it.’ They couldn’t get their heads around it. ‘So we’ve just paid for an instrumental keyboard album?’ ‘Yep.’ And somebody said, ‘God help us.’

“Another person said, ‘We’ll be lucky to sell 20,000 copies.’ That really hurt me, because I was very proud of the album. Tony and Terry did tell me, ‘You’ve got something very different here. It’s going to be really hard to get you any press at all, but we’ll do the best we can.’”

Did anybody then suggest adding some vocals? “No. I don’t think they wanted to spend any more money. In fact, after they heard it the budget for the album cover was cut back.”

The artwork presented further problems. “Finding portraits of the wives was very difficult,” states Wakeman. “The ones you see on the cover are pretty much all there is.”

Featuring a photograph of Wakeman (wearing jeans and a pair of trainers) standing before waxworks of Henry VIII and company at Madame Tussauds, the front cover is certainly distinctive, but whoever failed to notice a wax effigy of then-US President Richard Nixon clearly visible behind a curtain in the background deserved an instant dismissal.

“The cover was originally to have been in black and white, but Mike [Doud], who did the artwork, made it a lot more sepia, which was a big improvement,” explains Wakeman.

A&M had budgeted that 12,000 copies would need to be shifted in order to break even. Not that they thought it had a hope of doing so. It begs the question of whether anybody present in the boardroom that day ever apologised for their lack of faith? “Good grief, no,” Wakeman laughs, astounded by the question. “Record companies never admit they were wrong. Are you mad?!”

When released on January 23, 1973, the gentlemen of the press mostly shared the same opinion as A&M. In a previous interview Wakeman told this writer, “We had just one decent review, and that was from an angling magazine up in Grimsby. Even Melody Maker said that the album wasn’t fit to be played in a lift. I was devastated.”

“It’s true,” Rick says now. “The best reviews that it got said simply, ‘This is an interesting album,’ but nobody really got it. And the press absolutely hated it.”

Tony Burdfield did come up with a plan of buying advertorials in the leading magazines. “Johnnie Walker interviewed me for those, and they looked like real articles, so I got to say what I wanted to,” Wakeman remembers. “That really helped.”

Two pieces of luck were around the corner. The director of the Old Grey Whistle Test happened to be in the A&M office while somebody was playing the album, and Wakeman got a spot on the show, which at that point pulled half a million viewers.

However, its BBC 2 schedule clashed with David Bailey’s controversial Andy Warhol documentary that was to be shown on ITV. Moral crusader Mary Whitehouse and TV presenter-activist Ross McWhirter had condemned it for pornographic sequences and bad language, which of course only made it even more popular.

“The entire country dashed home from the pub in time for this Warhol film – including me,” Rick chuckles, “only to find Parliament had banned it at the last minute and replaced it with some programme on gardening in Afghanistan. Whatever was on BBC 1 had already begun, so nine million people switched over to BBC 2. A month later it went into the charts at No.13, before climbing to No.7.”

By the summer Six Wives had sold 30,000 copies and was still flying out the door. It’s now gone platinum many, many times over. Effectively speaking, the album that the critics and even Wakeman’s own record label dismissed as valueless became a period piece. As time passed, along with follow-ups Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (1974) and The Myths And Legends Of King Arthur And The Knights Of The Round Table (1975), it developed into a coffee-table essential.

Wakeman insists that thoughts of leaving Yes were still some way off – “It wasn’t even in my mind because I had found an outlet for my own music that made me very happy” – but his solo popularity did create ripples within the band. He’s too much of a gentleman to say that anybody became jealous – several Yes alumni had joined him in the experiment, after all.

But he admits: “It presented problems for the band’s management. The others had a go at Brian Lane, asking, ‘Why has Rick got a solo deal and we haven’t?’ He had to explain that ‘When Rick was with Strawbs they all signed solo contracts’ and the record company had exercised the option to take it up. So Brian went to see Ahmet Ertegun [boss of Yes’ home of Atlantic], who didn’t want to rock the boat and gave them all solo deals. Hence they did their own albums and it kept the peace.”

Let’s be clear, however: when Yes went back out on the road there were no ego problems of any kind. In fact, Jon Anderson insisted Wakeman should include some of the album in his solo spot. This explains the presence of a medley of highlights on the band’s triple-live set, Yessongs. “Jon loved Catherine Howard and wanted me to play that,” stresses Wakeman today. “There were no problems over it. These were long shows – sometimes they seemed to go on from dusk to daylight.”

The sting in the tail is that despite the popularity of Wakeman’s first three solo records, he wasn’t destined to see much financial reward. “I used the money from Six Wives to make Journey,” relates Rick. “I was only getting £4,000 for each album, so the proceeds went into the next one. I used the money from Journey to do a tour in America with an orchestra and choir. The remainder of that money was used for King Arthur. I was playing a dangerous game of blackjack.

“It was always going to collapse, but that wasn’t the point,” he continues. “I wanted to do the best I could with everything. I was in control; nobody could tell me, ‘You can’t do that.’ I bloody well could, and I did. It was a wonderful era. Managers and labels don’t like it – they want to be in the driver’s seat and let you have a little bit of power. That’s where Bowie was brilliant; everything that happened came from him.”

Circa the release of Six Wives, Wakeman tried hard to play a concert at Hampton Court. To say that he was rebuffed would be putting it mildly. “I think Cardinal Wolsey [whose relationship with the regent broke down after failing to get an annulment to Henry’s marriage to Catherine Of Aragon] would’ve been more welcome than me,” he jokes. “It wasn’t even a, ‘No, you can’t do that’ – the subject simply wasn’t open for discussion.”

Wakeman had to wait 36 years to perform the album in its logical home. “And then they asked me!” he grins, aware of the irony. “Things had changed. It was the 500th anniversary of Henry’s ascension to the throne. And of course the show allowed me to include the album’s missing song, Defender Of The Faith. I rescored it in places, too, making some of the pieces longer and of course we added an orchestra too. That gave another excuse to spend more money than I had.”

On the night concerned in 2009, Wakeman also brought in his friend Brian Blessed as narrator, who then proceeded to go... shall we just say ‘off-script’ with his duties? “Ha ha ha! Brian did go mildly off script, as is his wont,” Rick chuckles. “I don’t think I had heard Catherine Howard described as ‘a right old tart’ before, but it was very funny.”

Until now Wakeman has never really disclosed that Blessed had been at the bedside of a terminally ill relative during the build-up to the performance. “I know that had he not been, Brian would have thrown himself into the lines a little more. Being honest, we only found out two days before and we didn’t have a Plan B, so his being there at all was pretty incredible.”

The success of Wakeman’s solo career eventually allowed him to quit Yes in 1974 at the age of 25. “That’s true,” he nods, “but I will be honest, even without it I’d still have left after Tales From Topographic Oceans. I’ve always had an ethical belief that music should be both give and take. Tales wasn’t where I thought Yes should be. It wasn’t until I heard Going For The One [the 1977 album that saw him re-enter the group] that I thought: ‘Ah, they’re back on track.’

“Journey had gone to No.1 [in the UK – in the States it reached No.3], which gave me security, but regardless of that I’d still have jumped.” With a massive smile he concludes, “Even though I’d spent all of the money.”

As impressive as Metallica already were when they came screeching out of the Bay Area in the early 80s, few could have possibly predicted the journey that their story would eventually take them on. From the early drama of Dave Mustaine's dismissal to the gutting tragedy of losing Cliff Burton; from the shocking change in direction as the 90s dawned and eventual rise to the very top of the heavy metal tree; through breakdowns, fights, feuds, blockbuster movies and boundary-pushing experiments, theirs is a career like no other.

With most recent LP 72 Seasons now firmly bedded into their considerable back catalogue, we decided to rank every single Metallica studio album from worst to best. In the interest of keeping things straightforward and fair, we didn't include the S&M live albums or their classic covers album Garage Inc, nor their bold but divisive Lulu experiment with Lou Reed. Here, then, is how Metallica's main discography stacks up.

11. St Anger (2003)

Is it predictable that St Anger is rock bottom of another list like this? Yup. Is it still justified? Sadly, still yup. Metallica’s most hated album is far from the complete write-off many would have you believe; Frantic and the title track still go hard, songs like Invisible Kid and cult fan fave Dirty Window could have been world class with more work and the countrified re-dub of All Within My Hands the band have experimented with in recent years shows there’s a decent little song hiding under there.

Of course, none of that can cover for compositions that feel messy and disjointed and one of the most infamously disastrous production jobs in metal history. Artistically, St Anger is an interesting chapter in Metallica’s career at least: a raw, ugly cry from a band on the edge. Musically? This just ain’t it, no matter how you try to paint it.

10. Reload (1997)

When Reload hits the mark, it does so in style. Fuel might be basic as hell, but it remains a wonderfully simple, full-throttle burst of heavy metal adrenaline; The Memory Remains packs not just one but two of Metallica’s most earwormy moments (both its iconic chorus and Marianne Faithfull’s ‘Da da da daaa da, da daaaa’ refrain); The Unforgiven II is a more than worthy sequel to its predecessor and an outstanding power ballad in its own right.

That all said, Metallica’s confidence in their leftover material at this time was just a tad too optimistic, because Load’s sequel is packing way too much filler. James Hetfield’s wonderful lyrical streak was at least still in full flow, but even he wasn’t enough to save Reload from feeling largely unnecessary.

9. Death Magnetic (2008)

Critics were delighted with Metallica’s return to more traditional heavy metal fare (and solos!) when Death Magnetic arrived five years after the spectacular misfire of St Anger. In the cold light of day, it’s undoubtedly superior to its predecessor, featuring some full-on metal bangers (That Was Just Your Life, Cyanide) and two genuinely great power ballads in The Day That Never Comes and the severely underrated The Unforgiven III. Unfortunately, Death Magnetic as a whole is held back by two pressing issues.

Firstly, while a clear improvement on St Anger, the production is poor, Lars' drums still sounding like they were recorded using kitchen utensils. Secondly, and not for the first or last time, many of the songs just go too long. The End Of The Line, All Nightmare Long and The Judas Kiss are all solid tracks pulled down by meandering riff repetition, while forgettable instrumental Suicide & Redemption feels particularly self-indulgent at a whopping ten minutes. Decent, but far from a classic.

8. Hardwired...To Self-Destruct (2016)

Hardwired…To Self-Destruct was both a refreshing reminder of Metallica’s ability to pen top-tier metal hits and frustrating further evidence of the problems that come with their now trademark lack of self-restraint. The first half of the record in particular is filled with killer material, from the pulsating thrash assault of Hardwired and Moth Into Flame to the groovy, Load-ish power of Now That We’re Dead and epic, anthemic closing moments of Halo On Fire.

The second half, however, is a big letdown, the likes of Confusion, Am I Savage, ManUNkind and Murder One largely plodding and toothless (a particular shame given the latter’s status as a tribute to the legendary Lemmy Kilmister). Luckily, Spit Out The Bone turns up right at the end to finish things on a big high. What a rager.

7. 72 Seasons (2023)

For the third time in a row, Metallica put out an album that was solid as hell and packing plenty of great moments, but a little bogged down by a lack of incisive editing and at least a couple of tracks that just didn’t quite measure up. What can’t be in any doubt, however, is that 72 Seasons is the best-sounding Metallica album in over 25 years, the likes of its rollocking title track, the triumphant Lux Æterna and majestic album-closer Inamorata sounding truly stadium-sized under the bedded-in fingers of Greg Fidelman.

Papa Het’s voice also has no right sounding this good this far into his career, the band’s talismanic frontman bellowing like a vengeful mountain god during the pounding If Darkness Had A Son. A couple of minutes snipped off here and there and a little more ambition on the musical side of things and this could have been special. As it is, 72 Seasons is still pretty damn decent.

6. Load (1996)

Throwing caution to the wind following the absurd success of The Black Album and confirming that their thrash metal days were well and truly behind them (at least for now), Load saw Metallica dip their toes into everything from grunge to alt-rock to country. The result is a deeply fascinating record that unquestionably features some of the Four Horsemen’s most boldly realised leaps of faith; both the emotional Bleeding Me and album-closing epic The Outlaw Torn remain deservedly thought of as two of the most compelling compositions of the band’s entire career.

There are missteps for sure, and it’s a little too long overall, but for many, Load remains the point where Metallica were still truly blazing their own trail and letting ambition guide their creative impulses. It also features some of Hetfield’s most impactful lyrics, his introspective self-dissection reaching a new level of insight and raw vulnerability.

5. Kill 'Em All (1983)

Metallica would become far more layered and sophisticated in their songwriting as the 80s wore on, but even four-plus decades later, there’s still something so primal and satisfying about Kill ‘Em All’s snotty, ‘fuck-you’ attitude and relentless, proto-thrash assault. Smashing together Messrs Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton and Hammett’s love of punk rock fury and NWOBHM might with the subtlety of a brick to the groin (with some not inconsiderable help from a certain Mr Mustaine), the quartet kickstarted a movement and produced one of heavy metal’s all-time great debut albums in the process.

It’s easy to overlook just how stacked with classic ‘Tallica cuts Kill ‘Em All is, too: Hit The Lights, The Four Horsemen, Motorbreath, Whiplash, Seek & Destroy…plenty of bands could release all that, call it a day and consider their career a job well done. Incredibly, Metallica were only just getting started.

4. ...And Justice For All (1988)

Depending who you ask, …Justice is for all intents and purposes the last of Metallica’s 'thrash' records, but sees the band turning their backs on the short, sharp shock stylings they had embraced with their debut in favour of the more epic fare that had become their bread-and-butter. The loss of bassist Cliff Burton can be felt keenly, not least in the controversial decision to completely flatten the mix of newcomer Jason Newsted’s contributions, but also in the subtle shifts away from more classical-leaning compositions that Burton had contributed to the band’s sound.

In its place is an almost prog-like approach to song structure, Metallica effectively crafting their own metallic symphonies with even the more straight-ahead fare of Blackened, …And Justice For All and The Frayed Ends Of Sanity having multiple movements and segments. Fans might still clamour for Justice For Jason, but …AJFA shows just how hard Metallica were fighting to reinvent themselves and push their artistry to new levels, towering ballad One awarding them a level of MTV-friendly success that few of their contemporaries have ever been able to match, certainly never surpass.

3. The Black Album (1991)

Responding to the overly-ornate compositions of their previous album, Metallica ground their sound into its essential dust on The Black Album, producing one of the best-selling records of all-time in the process. The band didn’t lose their thrash entirely – Through The Never and Holier Than Thou have the same bulldozer-through-a-China-shop power that Master Of Puppets used so excellently, while the likes of Sad But True, Enter Sandman and Wherever I May Roam deliver an enormity and instantly gratifying sound that better suited the arenas they were now playing.

Even with that, the band also found a whole new universe of depth and artistry with huge ballads like The Unforgiven and Nothing Else Matters, the latter even setting the stage for the band’s orchestral S&M thanks to some sublime arrangements by Michael Kamen. Naysayers might point to The Black Album as the point where Metallica stopped being Our Band, but therein lies the rub: Metallica were always too ambitious, too commercial and just too damn big to be satisfied with being the biggest fish in a small pond.

2. Ride The Lightning (1984)

There’s still a youthful rawness to …Lightning that captures the sparks flying between a youthful Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton and Hammett, the band already extricating themselves from their peers by sheer dint of having the finest songs and most ambitious compositions around. The album’s title-track is effectively a dry-run for the epic grandeur the band would ride so thoroughly on follow-up Master Of Puppets, while For Whom The Bell Tolls and Creeping Death awarded Metallica their first genuine arena-sized anthems.

There are also moments of respite and reflection; Fade To Black’s anti-suicide ballad might have ruffled feathers with the full-speed-or-nothin’ brigade, but the song’s beautiful composition, reflective lyrics and undeniable breakout headbangable moments showed that they had plenty to say and weren’t afraid to take chances on themselves.

1. Master Of Puppets (1986)

If you drilled down into the atomic structure of heavy metal, the genre’s evolution and its watershed moments, you’d probably find Master Of Puppets embedded at the core. Black Sabbath might have kickstarted the genre almost 16 years earlier, but Metallica codified metal with their third studio album in ways that are evident in the sheer mind-bending number of bands who have professed an undying love for the album over the subsequent decades.

Thrash gone cinematic, Master… refined and reinforced everything Metallica had done with their second album but bigger, better, harder and yes, more metal. From the delirious rampage of Battery to the tooth-gnashing militaristic blows of Disposable Heroes and careening violence of Damage Inc. to the iconic title-track, Metallica never again sounded as all-conquering as they would on Master Of Puppets, slower efforts like The Thing That Should Not Be introducing a sludgy dynamism that showed the band’s toolkit was varied.

Again wetting their beaks with ballad Welcome Home (Sanitarium), Metallica were carrying themselves away from being anybody’s back-up to instead be absolute champions in their own right. A tour with Ozzy Osbourne helped cement them as metal’s Hot New Things and even the tragedy of the crash that took bassist Cliff Burton couldn’t slow the unstoppable machine the band had set into motion by writing an album so undeniably massive and untouchable that it basically created a division between themselves and just about every other metal hopeful at that point.

A serious contender for the greatest metal album of all time, it’s no overstatement that the spirit of Master echoes in everything from Machine Head’s The Blackening to Gojira’s Magma and just about any other grandiose, epic metal effort put to tape. You can all rest easy: the Master is here.

Back in 2014, few predicted a band fronted by three Japanese teenagers in tutus and sounding like Hello Kitty fronting a death metal band in a Shinjuku arcade would go the distance. In those early days, Babymetal certainly divided Western fans. Was it metal? Was it a gimmick? What the hell were they even singing about?

Today, all those debates that raged so intensely in the beginning are completely redundant. Babymetal have gone from curiosity to genuine phenomenon, and survived the departure of founder member Yuimetal in 2018 (co-founders Su-metal and Moametal were joined by Momometal in 2023). Along the way, they’ve collaborated with everyone from Bring Me The Horizon and Bloodywood to Poppy and Spiritbox, pushing their sound in every direction imaginable.

How did they get here? For all the colour and excitement, the band’s evolution can be charted through their ever-changing music. Here, Su-metal, Moametal and Momometal talk us through the songs that built Babymetal.

Akatsuki (Babymetal, 2014)

An early sign of just how obsessed fans would become with Babymetal, this cosmic power metal ballad is lifted by prismatic keys, rampaging guitar solos and a wide-eyed, 16-year-old Su-metal belting her heart out about undying love. The live a cappella version is just as stirring.

SU-METAL: “When I first received this song, I had just started singing metal. At the time, I was giving it everything I had to keep up with the song’s intensity, and just making it through to the end was already a challenge. I would take to the stage with a strong determination – that even if my voice cracked, I would never back down.

“The lyrics – ‘Kono karadaga horobirumade, Inochiga kierumade, Mamori tsuzuketeiku (I will keep protecting you until this body perishes, until my life fades away)’ – hit me very deeply back then. And if even a little of that determination managed to reach all of you… that would make me truly happy."

What is it like singing the a cappella version?

SU-METAL: “Singing a cappella has no set answer, so it is freeing – but I would feel lonely, and I’m not sure I would enjoy that. The performance usually starts with my solo part, and the band joins in afterwards. When I sing that part, it becomes a moment of facing myself and preparing to pour all my emotions out.”

Megitsune (Babymetal, 2014)

With its thunderous drums, Japanese instrumentation, cut-throat riffs and pop melodies, Megitsune brings together all the WTF?!? elements of Babymetal’s early sound.

It was also the song that they opened their landmark 2019 Glastonbury set with.

MOAMETAL:“Wow, it has been seven years since Glastonbury festival… We performed in Japan until the 29th, which was the day before our Glastonbury set. We went to the airport right after the Japan show, hopped on a plane – and we were onstage the very next day. I remember going into the show still riding the adrenaline from the previous nights’ performances.

Even though the schedule was hectic, I was happy that we gave ourselves a shot at a festival beyond the metal scene, and that the audience enjoyed our performance. I was surprised by our own stamina! Ha ha ha!”

Gimme Chocolate!! (Babymetal, 2014)

The track that broke them worldwide, thanks to a video that went viral faster than the time it takes to snaffle a Cadbury’s Freddo. Throw in a show-stealing appearance at that year’s Sonisphere and they’ve never looked back.

SU-METAL: “We go through many rounds of recording, building the song as we go, so it’s not unusual for the lyrics to be incomplete at the demo stage. I remember recording this song while wondering, ‘What are the lyrics for that opening part – the ‘a-ta-ta-ta’ and ‘wa-ta-ta-ta’ – going to be?’

Then the choreography came together, and before I knew it, we were performing it live. I remember thinking, ‘Wait – so this is what this song is? It was complete all along?’ It genuinely caught me off guard.”

Why do you think the song became so popular?

MOAMETAL: “I don’t know. I guess everyone loves chocolate. I love it too – it tastes good!”

Road Of Resistance (Babymetal, 2014 / Metal Resistance, 2016)

Babymetal’s very own battle cry, it saw them teaming up with Dragonforce guitarists Herman Li and Sam Totman for their first international collaboration. A true anthem of defiance, especially when the flags come out during live performances.

SU-METAL: “I remember when I listened to their guitar demo, I was so excited with the intensity. I thought to myself, ‘We actually get to collaborate with musicians who perform this amazingly! They are incredibly friendly in person and we became close to them, so I hope we will have a chance to collaborate more.”

How challenging was it to learn the dance routine?

MOMOMETAL:“The intro part where we ride and gallop like we’re on a horse was pretty hard to get used to. It took me a while to figure out the right angle to make it look dynamic. And at the end, when we hold the flag and pose, I kept having trouble gripping it and would sometimes drop it.”

Karate (Metal Resistance, 2016)

A highlight of their second album, Karate bought something new to the party, stripping back the warp-speed power metal for an addictive groove and huge bass drop. Fans everywhere love the ‘fall down and get up’ choreography.

SU-METAL: “Babymetal’s music had always incorporated elements of Japanese culture, but Karate was the first time we brought Japanese culture so directly and straightforwardly into the title, lyrics and choreography.

“As we began touring overseas, more and more people started recognising and appreciating the uniqueness and originality of what we were doing. Singing this song, I kept thinking: I want to push our one-of-a-kind identity even further, and I want to represent Japan and make an even bigger impact on the world stage.”

Moametal said about the song: “Karate is a martial art based on the principle of facing yourself.” What were you facing and overcoming at the time of this song, as a member of Babymetal?

MOAMETAL: “From the very beginning, we never really had rivals in the traditional sense. We were the first to walk this path, so we’ve moved forward by battling against ourselves.

There were days when leaving Japan made us feel lonely, and days when things got so tough that we wanted to give up, but we fought through those feelings, and that’s how we’ve kept going for 16 years. We want to give ourselves a pat on the back for getting back up every single time we fall. Well done, Babymetal!”

You played the song at Wembley Arena on April 2, 2016, which was your biggest headlining show outside Japan to that point. What do you remember of the performance?

SU-METAL: “Standing on the Wembley Arena stage, watching fans from all different backgrounds come together as one through our music, breaking through the barriers of genre and language – it felt like a dream.

But I didn’t want it to end there. That day, our fans gave us the push to keep going, and made us believe that as long as we have them by our side, there are still so many incredible moments ahead waiting to be discovered.”

Syncopation (Metal Resistance, 2016)

It may have only appeared on the Japanese version of Metal Resistance, but Syncopation has become a fan favourite. The way its earwormy chorus and guitars go screeching off in all directions, there’s no way it was ever going to remain a deep cut.

MOMOMETAL: “I think the melodic speed metal intro is what hits hardest for a lot of people! The choreography is straightforward and directly matched to the music, so I think it feels incredibly satisfying to watch as a full performance!”

Distortion (Single, 2018 / Metal Galaxy, 2019)

A watershed moment for Babymetal, Distortion was released between Yuimetal stepping back from the band in late 2017 and her official departure in October 2018. Babymetal revisited it on 2019’s Metal Galaxy, with a guest vocalist, Alissa White-Gluz, then of Arch Enemy, taking it to an even heavier dimension.

SU-METAL: “With Alissa’s voice added, the range of distortion and turbulence in this song expanded dramatically. It feels like the ground is trembling – being pulled from somewhere deep beneath the surface, shaken, unsettled. With just one note, she can throw the entire song off balance and set it into distortion. I was truly in awe.”

BxMxC (Metal Galaxy, 2019)

Babymetal have never had much interest in genre boundaries, but BxMxC showed just how much they’ve continued to push their sound. It’s straight-up rap metal, with a disembodied Su-metal vocal, huge juddering drops and glitching electronics. Proof you can never predict what Babymetal will do next.

SU-METAL: “I remember struggling with this song during recording. But as we toured and performed it in front of audiences, I gradually began to let myself go, evolving with every performance. It is the song where I sing most freely, so it may continue to change and evolve even more going forward.”

Pa Pa Ya!! (Metal Galaxy, 2019)

The bouncy fourth single from Metal Galaxy, Pa Pa Ya!! was a collaboration with Thai rapper F.Hero, and the band’s first major cross-genre collaboration. Combining Kaiju-sized nu metal energy and a nectar-sweet chorus, it opened the floodgates for the band to collaborate with artists from across the musical spectrum.

MOAMETAL: “I believe the style of cross-cultural exchange that began with this song has become one of Babymetal’s greatest strengths. This collaboration was the moment we realised how naturally Babymetal connects with the music and cultures of other countries.

The idea that we can create something new by combining metal with other elements is something I am truly grateful to F.Hero for showing us. Even now, every time we visit Thailand, he welcomes us with such warmth and has become a true bridge between us and Thailand!”

Bring Me The Horizon - Kingslayer (Post Human: Survival Horror, 2020)

It’s technically a BMTH song – Babymetal were ‘sealed’ at the time – but Kingslayer is what you get if you put two of metal’s most inventive, genre-smashing bands together on one track – a top-tier cyber metal anthem that became Babymetal’s highest-charting single, reaching No.51 in the UK. Lucky you if you were there one of the few times they’ve performed it live together.

SU-METAL: “I was already a fan of Bring Me The Horizon, so I was overjoyed when the opportunity came to work with them. From the moment I received the song, I could feel that they had really thought about Babymetal while writing it – the call-and-response parts and all the little details made me so happy.

But during recording, when they asked us to sing certain parts in Japanese, I was genuinely surprised and thought, ‘Are you sure you want to bring out that much of the Babymetal side?’”

It’s your most-streamed track on Spotify. Why do you think people love it so much?

MOMOMETAL: “What makes this song so compelling is the way both of our strengths are packed in so fully. It is one of the most intense metal tracks in Babymetal’s entire catalogue. I think it struck a chord with many people, even those hearing us for the first time.”

Mirror Mirror (The Other One, 2023)

Released the day before fourth album The Other One, Mirror Mirror helped usher in a new era for Babymetal. Its video showed the band performing for an audience in Yokohama, and was the first to feature Momometal, their new permanent third member. We saw a trio marching into their future as an unstoppable united front.

SU-METAL: “The Other One is Babymetal’s first-ever concept album, created around the theme of another side of Babymetal that you never knew existed. The approach to songwriting was also different from anything we had done before – the songs were crafted based on photographs and mythology, and like a work of art, the impression it can change depending on the listener, or even change each time the same person listens to it.

It is a very deep and layered body of work. It was created with the hope that people would enjoy a side of Babymetal seen from a different angle – beyond just the bright, Kawaii and pop aspects that we are known for.”

Metali!! Feat. Tom Morello (Single, 2023 / Metal Forth, 2025)

The song that marked Momometal’s official promotion from Avenger to full-time member, ushering in Babymetal’s second ‘trio era’, as well as an early, Tom Morello-assisted teaser for their fifth album, Metal Forth.

The ex-Rage Against The Machine man turbo-charges this serotonin-rush mix of traditional Japanese elements and a massive mosh-call chorus.

MOAMETAL: “When we were making the song, we reached out to Tom Morello knowing it was a long shot. I was surprised that he had already known about Babymetal, and I was so happy that he brought his own unique style to the performance. Despite us being so much younger than him, he treated us with such respect. He has such a big heart, and that was incredibly cool!”

Ratatata feat. Electric Callboy (Metal Forth, 2025)

A surprise drop that became Babymetal’s biggest song since Gimme Chocolate!!, Ratatata is a hefty slab of EDM-meets-metalcore joy. The video shows off the girls’ sillier side, singing karaoke while Electric Callboy vocalists Kevin Ratajczak and Nico Sallach ram through walls wearing disco-ball hats. Makes sense.

SU-METAL: “Before the collaboration, we went to see their show. We enjoyed every moment of it, and it made us even more excited to work with them. Our two worlds merged perfectly. I am so satisfied with how the song turned out – it became such a happy song.”

What is your favourite memory from making the video for the song?

MOMOMETAL:“It was truly such a fun shoot, and I was constantly surprised by how warm and genuine they are as people. The scene where Kevin and Nico come bursting through the wall was also a blast.

Since there wasn’t enough production time to use computer graphics, they set off a real explosion, which honestly caught me off guard! The band members and the crew were the most amazing team, and they are truly our cherished family.”

My Queen feat. Spiritbox (Metal Forth, 2025)

Dropped as a single the day Metal Forth was released, My Queen is one of the album’s more melodic moments without sacrificing any of the fury. Su-metal lays the hooks on thick while Spiritbox vocalist Courtney LaPlante pops up midway through to inflict maximum damage over crushing djent riffs.

SU-METAL: “I always enjoy Courtney’s presence – the way her voice takes over everything around her. I also wanted to immerse myself in the world that Spiritbox create. In this song, we were able to portray both sides – the bold, queenly figure on the surface, and the anxiety churning underneath – and the image of suppressing that anxiety to push even higher. I feel like that was only possible because of her incredible ability to command her presence so effortlessly.”

What did Courtney bring to the song vocally?

MOMOMETAL: “Her screams take the excitement of this song up a gear all at once. There is something about her screams that feels like energy exploding from deep within! And true to the name My Queen, she carries herself with the presence of a true queen.”

From Me To U feat. Poppy (Metal Forth, 2025)

From Courtney to Poppy, the nu gen queen. Babymetal brought one of modern music’s most prominent innovators into this glorious clash of hyperpop energy and serrated riffs. Babymetal were ahead of the game here – Courtney and Poppy would team up with Amy Lee for their own collaboration, End Of You, later that year.

SU-METAL: “During the production, we were discussing a collaboration with Jordan Fish that would follow Kingslayer. Jordan suggested adding Poppy’s vocals. Her voice matches so well with his musical style and also with my vocal style. I can’t thank Jordan enough for introducing us.”

Are there any similarities between Poppy and Babymetal?

MOAMETAL: “Babymetal is a fusion of cute and metal, while Poppy brings together cuteness and death growls – the two of us were a perfect match! We created a song that I absolutely love!”

Poppy has sung in Japanese in her own songs. Did you have any chats with her in Japanese, or chats about Japanese culture?

MOMOMETAL: “I can feel her respect for Japan! I didn’t get to talk about Japanese culture with her, but I would love for her to try on some cute Japanese clothing – it would definitely suit her!”

Kon! Kon! Feat. Bloodywood (Metal Forth, 2025)

Japanese, English and Hindi – trilingual Bloodywood collab Kon! Kon! is a truly global anthem. The Delhi stars step squarely into Babymetal’s orbit, bringing some nu metal bounce, Bollywood and rabid rapping about yokai – supernatural Japanese spirits.

SU-METAL: “The first time I listened to the song, the image of people dancing at an Indian festival on a hot sunny day came across my mind. But when the lyrics combined with Japanese yokai culture – for example, ‘Urameshiya’ is a phrase that yokai use to cast a curse – the vibe shifts to a nighttime scene of yokai dancing around a fire deep in the forest.

We share similarities in Asian culture, so the two blend together beautifully – but the image it conjures may differ from person to person. It’s fun to let your imagination run wild, so please share with me how you received this song!”

Would Babymetal like to play in India?

MOMOMETAL: “Of course! Actually, we talked about it with Bloodywood. We got really excited talking about it. It’d be so exciting to see what would happen if we actually performed Kon! Kon! in India. We’d have to make sure our dancing is good enough to hold our own against the locals!”

Babymetal play Louder Than Life and Aftershock festivals this fall.

If 2024’s =1 represented a significant return to relevance for Deep Purple (now firmly entrenched in their Mark IX incarnation), then Splat!, their 24th studio album, confirms beyond question that they’re currently enjoying yet another golden age.

Inevitably, time’s passage has to be respected. Ian Gillan made a conscious decision to eschew screaming at the very peak of his range at 60, and in the intervening 17 years he’s cannily fine-tuned the subtler qualities of his instrument to excellent effect. Today’s Gillan is a true exemplar of refined rock vocal maturity: his rich, confident tones masterfully suggest searing passion in lieu of ripping his voice box to shreds while shattering every single spectacle lens in the front five rows.

That said, some of Purple’s more spectacular and lengthy excesses don’t entirely translate outside their pomp; the key question isn’t so much whether one could sing Child In Time in 2026 as whether one should. Technically speaking, instrumentalists customarily enjoy a far longer shelf life, and the remainder of the Purps, not least the evergreen Ian Paice, remain at the top of their game. Simon McBride continues to add a contemporary virtuoso flavour to his blessedly concise guitar work, while Roger Glover (bass) and Don Airey (keyboards) provide driving rhythmic power and ingenious melodic interest with equal unfailing aplomb.

As with Alice Cooper, the often unsung hero of latter-day Purple’s arguably unlikely return to vintage form is =1/Splat! producer Bob Ezrin, a commercial-eared past master of astute editing who’s pretty much untouchable when it comes to steering stalled rock careers out of instinctively self-indulgent cult status and into the mainstream

Where Splat! ultimately improves on =1 is that while compounding the impression of a new, improved Mark IX Purple (freshness, concision, engaging narrative lyrics seasoned with Gillan’s sometimes surrealistic wit and imagery), it’s also laced with unmistakable echoes of Mark II and III. Of Splat!’s 13 tracks there’s barely a stumble. Jessica’s Bra with its laboured titular pun is possibly a wee bit too 20th-century for its own good, but hey, who among us isn’t? Elsewhere it’s only a succession of highlights: Arrogant Boy is a compelling second cousin to Highway Star, Diablo as gloriously mad as a tree, and Splat! itself an irresistible groove.

In many ways, Splat! captures the very best Purple one could possibly expect to hear in 2026. Pretty good cover as well. They’ll go far.

Deep Purple discuss the making of Splat! in the new issue of Classic Rock.

In 2017 Roger Hodgson told Prog how it took him three years to assemble 1977 Supertramp track Fool’s Overture, which has stood the test of time as a result of its intensity and beauty – and became a mainstay of his solo career.

“The art of being an artist is to get out of the way and let something greater than our small little selves take control and run the show,” says Roger Hodgson, the man behind Supertramp classics including The Logical Song, Dreamer, Breakfast In America and Fool’s Overture.

The latter song stands as the most ambitious work in Supertramp and Hodgson’s impressive catalogue. Try Again, from their 1970 debut, might be slightly longer – but Fool’s Overture has a far grander scope and sweep, composed of three movements bound together by William Blake’s hymn Jerusalem and the voice of Winston Churchill.

“It was unlike other songs I’ve written, where I have a seed of inspiration that comes to me, and for two or three weeks I’m consumed by it; I have to play it every moment I get and it slowly becomes the completed song,” says Hodgson. “With Fool’s Overture, I had various pieces of instrumental music for a few years that I didn’t really know what to do with. Then one magical day I realised the pieces of music belong together.”

The track reveals the breadth of influences that inform Hodgson’s writing, from the classical music from his school curriculum to being a teenager and watching The Beatles conquer the world. “You talk about ‘progressive’ – they were the first progressive band,” says Hodgson of the Fab Four. “Every album was so courageous in its experimentation. They changed my life when I saw what they did for the world.”

On the classical front, he picks out Debussy and Holst as inspirations. “Holst’s The Planets – I remember listening to that whole thing many, many times thinking, ‘Wow, what a concept!’

“There’s a piece stolen from Holst on the introduction of Fool’s Overture. The Planets sowed the seeds in me for seeing albums as a whole complete journey; a listening experience.”

The song was written and recorded using an Elka Rhapsody String Machine, an early synthesiser with a distinctive sound that became a vital element in Hodgson’s creative alchemy. “I love just letting myself go into the sound of an instrument,” he says. “I just sank into it, and before I knew it there was nothing of me there. It was almost like meditating before I even knew what the word ‘meditation’ meant. That’s when magic happens.”

There’s a distinctly British flavour to the work, although its parent album, Even In The Quietest Moments, was recorded after Supertramp relocated from the UK to California. “My songwriting was always very personal,” says Hodgson. “I was born in 1950, the aftermath – the after-aura if you like – of the Second World War.

“I remember hearing Churchill when I was young. I remember singing Jerusalem at boarding school and loving it, and wondering if Jesus ever really did set foot on English shores, like the hymn spoke about.”

Hodgson’s lyrics rival Blake for grandeur, dealing with the decline of humankind in truly Biblical fashion – ‘History recalls how great the fall can be’ is the cataclysmic opening line.

“Looking at Fool’s Overture, I realised I don’t want to really put a meaning on it,” he reflects. “It really was a collage of ideas, of different historical events, and everyone gets something different out of it. I don’t want to limit it to my interpretation , because even my interpretation will change weekly.”

The track remains an integral part of Hodgson’s live sets, whether he’s playing with his own band or backed by a full orchestra as part of Night Of The Proms. “I remember when I wrote it, I dreamed of one day playing it with an orchestra – so every time I do, it’s electrifying. There’s nothing like it. It sounds just humongous!”

“Music is one of the most powerful forces in the world; you can do anything with it. I witness it every tour. I go out and play these songs, I never get tired of them and they don’t feel old. They feel very current and alive and relevant. They have a quality to them.

“I can feel the audience really has a relationship with them beyond, ‘Oh, that’s a nice song I listened to 30 years ago.’ I love to design a set that’s going to take people from how they feel when they come in the hall, unify them and take them on a journey.

“Fool’s Overture is like a journey in itself within the show, and it takes me on a journey every time. It still gives me goosebumps to this day.”

Along with Journey, Anglo-American superstars Foreigner defined early 80s AOR music thanks to 1981’s mega-selling 4 album. In 2011, the band looked back on the making of a classic.

Six months into the endless, ever-expanding time frame that was the making of Foreigner’s fourth album, producer Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange decided he needed a break.

Looking up from the mixing desk in Electric Lady Studio, located at 52 West 8th Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, he yelled at those in the control room who, like he, had just endured yet another gruelling night-shift and missed yet another sunrise.

“What the fuck are we doing here? We need to go out! We never go out! We need to go to Central Park… Let’s go buy some Frisbees!”

With the band having long left the studio, Mutt’s outburst would only have been witnessed by his close coterie of engineering staff, and a young, then-unknown keyboard player named Thomas Dolby who had recently been drafted in for the sessions.

All of them were startled, but took their cue and followed Mutt up the stairs and out on to West 8th Street, blinking in the morning sunshine. He hailed a yellow cab and ordered it to wait outside 5th Avenue’s legendary toy store FAO Schwarz while he bought a variety of Frisbees, then leapt back in the cab and instructed the driver to take them all, giggling, to Central Park. For what Dolby remembers as a truly joyous five minutes, they raced about the park, flinging the coloured plastic discs around like excited schoolchildren high on life. But, after those five minutes, the real Mutt Lange resurfaced…

“What the fuck are we doing here? We’ve got an album to make!”

With that, he led them all away, hailed another yellow cab and raced back to Electric Lady.

Foreigner’s guitarist Mick Jones hears this story for the first time when Classic Rock Presents AOR meets him in his London hotel suite during the band’s recent European tour. He might be unfamiliar with this specific tale, but recognises it immediately as indicative of what he describes as the producer’s “intense” commitment to the work. Jones recognises it, of course, because it mirrors his own, and explains why the album took so very long to make. How long?

“It took about 10 months, counting pre-production… maybe the best part of a year,” Jones shrugs, pointing out that the group’s 1977 debut LP had taken nine months, their second, 1978’s Double Vision “about six months”, and their third, 1979’s Head Games, “probably almost the same again”. So Foreigner had form in that department. But 10 months? The best part of a year?! Wasn’t that some kind of record at the time? Apparently so…

“I remember I was in a club in London and Simon Le Bon came up to me and said, ‘I hear we’re in the running for the prize for spending the most time and money in a studio!’,” grins Jones, not a little ashamed as well. “Unfortunately, we did share that distinction…”

The Frisbee excursion was not a significant factor, then, in Foreigner 4’s extended gestation. The real reason was Jones and Lange’s 100 per cent commitment to making absolutely the best record possible, and refusing to stop until they were sure they had. For both men, that meant achieving a new level of excellence in the songs.

Jones: “The songs are the basis of everything. They always were with this band. I always set out to make albums that you could listen to from beginning to end, without filler…”

The statistics for Foreigner 4 prove that all the hours, days, weeks and months in the studio, all the deadlines missed, all the budgets broken, were ultimately worth it.

The album enjoyed 10 weeks (in three spells) at No.1 in the Billboard charts, starting on August 22, 1981 and ending February 11, 1982. American sales exceeded six million. It remains the band’s best seller in the UK, reaching No.5, and earning a gold disc, while it also made No.4 in Germany. Of the six songs released as singles in the US, only the last – Luanne, in 1982 – failed to go Top 30.

Perhaps most importantly of all, 30 years later all 10 of these songs still resonate strongly.

Time and money are relative. As is failure.

A bit of context is needed. Foreigner were a success right out of the box: Stateside, their self-titled debut of 1977 sold five million copies and reached No.4. A year later, their second effort, Double Vision, made No.3 in the US – even climbing to No.32 in the UK – and shifted seven million copies. So when third album Head Games, released in 1979, stalled at No.5 on the Billboard chart and only went quintuple platinum, something was deemed to have gone wrong.

Jones: “That did start the thinking, that we needed to be positive about our identity for the fourth album. Okay, we’d beaten the jinx of the first album being a flash-in-the-pan with Double Vision being so strong, but I think on Head Games we really went into ‘excessive mode’. The drugs came into the picture a bit too much there. So we kind of had a massive hangover after that album [laughs]. I look back on it and think it wasn’t quite focused. We tried to toughen the image of the band up with Dirty White Boy and Head Games itself, but that’s where the question about where we were going originated…”

English bassist Rick Wills – who had joined the line-up for Head Games, the former Peter Frampton band/Roxy Music member having replaced New Yorker Ed Galgliardi – had a few concerns. “In some ways, after the first two Foreigner albums, Head Games was something of a departure in style and form,” he says. “It was a bit more heavy and rocky, and that didn’t go down so great with everyone. And, of course, we had that very controversial album cover…”

It featured a girl caught in the act of wiping her phone number off a gents’ toilet wall, but it was perceived by some as something more provocative. A lot of American record stores refused to rack it.

“I think we sold a lot less of that album for that reason alone,” Wills continues. “It did very well, but by Foreigner standards it was considered something of a failure. Having just come into the band I was thinking, ‘Bloody hell – this doesn’t bode well for my future!’”

Jones was thinking about the future, too, but Wills wasn’t the one who needed to worry. The guitarist and band-leader was more concerned that the demands of keyboard player Al Greenwood and ex-King Crimson multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald to be included in the songwriting process would weaken the band. Greenwood was dismissed first, McDonald followed soon after (years later, when the band reconvened in mid-2010 to rehearse some new songs, McDonald was present, but the line-up was soon pared again down to four).

Wills: “I hadn’t expected this. Mick had said to me he wanted more freedom to bring other musicians in, to experiment – especially with keyboards – because this was the era when people were beginning to do amazing things, electronically. Mick – who was never one to stand still – wanted to try these things out, because he thought that was the way forward.”

Jones: “It was a tough time, emotionally. Ian was a close friend, but Lou [Gramm, singer] and I just felt we had hit our stride writing together and we wanted to really start to maximise on that. We talked at length about it and had a fairly clear vision of where we wanted to go, so it was a question of being a bit ruthless. We felt we wanted to focus.”

One of the songs that was helping them focus was a ballad.

Wills: “Mick tended to write most of the songs on a piano, using mostly the black notes, so everything was in sharps and flats, and little bit weird when it came time to transpose them to the guitar… As I recall, it was fairly bitty at first, but the one song he did have completely finished was Waiting For A Girl Like You. The first time they played it to me, I said, ‘Well if that isn’t a hit, I don’t know what is!’”

Jones’ voice bears a tremor of emotion as he recalls the genesis of that song: “Waiting For A Girl Like You almost wrote itself. That was the first time I had a really serious emotional experience. It was overwhelming. From the moment we put down the basic track and Lou added a scratch vocal, I found it hard to be in the room without breaking down during the playbacks. It was such a strange sensation. I really got the feeling that something was coming down through me, that I was just the conduit. It was the first time I’d got in touch with what I’d heard other writers or artists talk about.”

That song would, of course, change everything – but so would the band’s choice of producer. Jones had taken both co-production and ‘musical direction’ credits on the first three albums – never less than fully involved – but was also keen to gain a respected second opinion on a song (or third, if it was one co-written with Lou Gramm). The man chosen was Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange (rhymes with “hanger”), a man known as Mutt who was the big dog in rock production at the time, having steered AC/DC to consecutive multi-platinum successes with Highway To Hell and Back In Black.

Jones, though, had been a fan of his for some time: “Mutt first caught my attention when he produced a band called City Boy, way back [Mutt produced City Boy’s first five albums, starting with 1976’s self-titled debut]. I’d been impressed by the work he’d done on that band. And he had applied to do the Head Games album, actually. He came over to New York to see me, but it was just a question of bad timing for him, so we chose Roy Thomas Baker. But Mutt was always in the back of my mind, so when he reapplied for the fourth album, that was it.”

Lange later became legendary for his painstaking, particular note-by–note work with Def Leppard, but was still a relatively unknown quantity to Jones, who insists he was unaware such methods might be used upon Foreigner.

“I knew that he was really into sound, that he was dedicated and he was very serious,” says Jones. “He really showed incredible enthusiasm.”

The first evidence of that enthusiasm came during the pre-production stage when, having heard the songs that the band felt were ready to be recorded, he asked to hear the ideas that Mick considered unfinished. It was not something the guitarist felt comfortable doing, inviting this stranger into his hitherto-private world of taped bits and pieces.

Mick says Lange “forced his way into” this private world. “It was the first time I’d ever let anybody in there,” he adds. “In some cases, he was hearing stuff I thought was embarrassing. But he wanted to hear every single thing I had, even if it was only a 10-second snippet.

“Out of that process, we put Urgent together. It began as just an instrumental passage I had, the thing that became the intro. But I didn’t know what I was going to do with that. I thought it might become some sort of weird instrumental.

“Mutt also helped put Juke Box Hero together. It was originally two separate songs. Lou had one idea called Take One Guitar, and I had the Juke Box Hero thing. Mutt helped us to gel the two…”

Mutt’s contributions are openly acknowledged, but not recognised with the co-writing credits he later received with Leppard. It seems safe to presume he was handsomely rewarded, although Mutt is never available for comment. The man who Jones, with a grin and no small degree of understatement, describes as “a bit of a recluse”, has made only one significant public statement in the last couple of decades: “I’ve always been a private person. I don’t value being in the media spotlight. I’m fortunate to be able to avoid it.”

English engineer Tony Platt, a man who worked with Mutt on a number of albums before Foreigner 4, offers a first-hand view of his methods, and insists the producer is always artist-led. “One of Mutt’s absolute talents – and it is an exceptional talent – is insisting upon getting the songs right,” Platt says. “And he wants to get the songs right before you go into the studio, so you’re starting from a very strong perspective. In fact, the Foreigner 4 album got put back a couple of times, because Mutt didn’t feel the songs were in quite the right shape. Even when I went out to theoretically begin recording, and they were still in pre-production, I ended up hanging around in New York while they were sorting out a couple of songs.

“Then we took them into the studio and started getting sounds. That would undoubtedly suggest other changes that they might want to make in the arrangement of the song, strengthening the sound. The sound can then move further forward – and at a certain moment, we take a snapshot of it and then they could say, ‘That is how it should be. That is the moment in time that this song should inhabit.’ Mutt was always very good at picking that moment, perfectly.”

History has proven Mutt’s infallible sense for what makes a hit record. But what was it like on the other side of the control room window?

Jones shrugs. “Mutt was intense. He was intensely dedicated to it, as well. We had our differences, you know. We were like two goats – stubborn – and we locked horns a few times…”

At a point that even the meticulous Platt can only recall as “late summer/early fall 1980”, recording finally began in the same studio where Head Games had been recorded: Atlantic Studios, on New York’s Upper West Side. However, it would prove to be a false dawn.

Platt: “It was a studio in which a lot of very good things had been done, but it had seen better days at that point in time. Atlantic had air-conditioning units that buzzed, and there were desks that were a little bit weird, so after about a week in there we just decided we had to go somewhere else.”

They would end up at Electric Lady, the legendary recording studio in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village that Jimi Hendrix had built in a basement he’d originally bought to turn into a nightclub. His earlier plan to make it a ‘curvaceous’ space with no right angles faltered, but as a studio it has endured. Jones had worked there in Spooky Tooth. Lange had used it for Back In Black.

Platt: “Both Mutt and I had been very happy at Electric Lady, so we decamped and went there. Studio A is a big room. It still has the murals on the wall that were done when Jimi first bought it. It’s an astonishing space. It has a lot of vibe to it.

“So we set up… We created a large area for the drums, with a big screen set up for the bass. We built a room within the room for the guitar amps. I had to get as much separation as I could, but within a rock context – because I knew a lot of stuff might be replaced. And Lou sang all his vocals in the vocal booth that was already there. It was quite a large booth – and that became his home for all the time we were there! He kept bringing things in and making himself more comfortable.”

But first things first, and that meant recording Dennis Elliott’s drums.

“Mutt had wanted to go the electronic route with the drums,” remembers Jones. “That didn’t sit well with me or with Dennis. That was a bit of a bone of contention!”

Wills: “I remember for three days Dennis was just hitting snare drums. He finally got up and said, ‘Listen man, I can fucking play drums. You can’t even get a sound!’ He was really angry [laughs].”

Jones: “Mutt also wanted to use a click track for timing, and Dennis took offence to that, as well. When he and I were working on the song Break It Up, we got so fed up that, at one point, we just said, ‘Fuck this!’ and went into the studio together. I sat at the piano, Dennis sat at the drums, and we laid down the basic track, just him and me. Then we turned round to Mutt and said, ‘Okay? Happy now?!’ We wanted to prove the point that this band could play and keep time, too.

“I guess I wanted to stay more old-school than Mutt,” Jones muses. “He was all for going ahead and using the technology that was coming up at that time – as you can hear on his Def Leppard albums, the drums there are electronic, they’re synthesised… But I didn’t want to go that route. It wouldn’t have worked for us.”

Today, Dennis Elliott – now retired from the music business and answering a new calling as a wood sculptor – seems reluctant to re-live all this, but recalls that his working life was simpler on the group’s earlier albums. “I was usually done with the drum tracks within the first two weeks, and the songs were then built upon those tracks.”

Elliott is a keen sailor, and during the sessions for Foreigner 4 he would moor his boat at a basin on the Upper West Side, where he lived with his wife Iona. The basin being a relatively short drive from Electric Lady, members of the band and Mutt would often step aboard after a day in the studio, to unwind and enjoy the views.

Elliott, who might ordinarily have expected to be hitting the ocean by this point in the sessions, recalls: “I couldn’t really go too far, and it did seem to take an eternity. Sometimes a song would go through so many changes during that time, it was necessary for me to come back in and start all over… I would stop by the studio every week or two to see what progress was being made – but on the Foreigner 4 album, they always seemed to be playing foosball!”

Sometimes known as table football on this side of the Atlantic, Platt recalls that he and Lange installed the foosball table at Electric Lady. “We bought a table and put it at the back of the studio so, at the end of the night, we’d all unwind around it. We’d get the beers or the wine out, and have a tournament.”

Wills: “Every time there was any downtime, we’d go out there and play at the foosball table. We all got good – and got ferociously competitive about it. Especially Mutt…”

Platt insists he was the foosball champion – “Somewhere I’ve got the trophy, a miniature Converse sneaker” – which Jones confirms. But, as Wills observes, “at $2,000 a day, it was quite an expensive hobby!”

According to the bassist, very little work seemed to be getting done. “It was hard to get the gist of where we were going to go with this album, because after just about every session, there would be this long conversation, between Mick and Mutt, about where we were going with the album and what was needed. If Mutt’s anything, he’s a perfectionist. He doesn’t let anything slide, won’t let anything past him unless he thinks it’s good enough. And Mick Jones is pretty similar – so boy the two of them did lock horns a few times. It was tough!”

Everyone agreed, though, on Waiting For A Girl Like You.

Wills: “That was one of the first songs we recorded – kept and done as a second take! It sounded fabulous. Everybody’s performance on it sounded great and we knew we had that in the can.”

“Waiting For A Girl Like You was Lou’s original live vocal,” says Platt. “That was one of those tracks where I remember the recording session very, very clearly. We put down a basic washy keyboard in the background, with the main track. There was some editing in between takes… And once we’d chosen the master and done all the edits, I remember sitting there till about three o’clock in the morning, and everyone was still saying, ‘Oh, play it back again, play it again!’ There was a general feeling that this was going to be the big hit…”

What no one appreciated while listening to Waiting For A Girl Like You, however, was that Gramm was not going to be able to replicate its incredible chorus live.

Jones: “In hindsight, I’d say Mutt really pushed Lou, probably past his range. I was there as well, so I have to take a bit of… I don’t know about blame, because it all worked out as we all wanted it to work out. But in hindsight, Lou did have a lot of difficulty with the pitch and the range of a couple of those songs. Juke Box Hero was another song that strained his voice to the limit.”

Wills: “Lou could sing it in the studio, but he couldn’t reproduce it live every night. We actually used to do it a semitone down from the record. We used to detune – we had separate guitars for that song. Same with Juke Box Hero. It was just too much for Lou to do. It led to some sort of mind-games going on between him and Mick about performances and stuff. That’s how the whole thing started to disintegrate later on in our careers, really, with Lou not being able to really cope with the demands.”

At the time, though, Wills reckons the singer was unfazed by most of what was going on: “He just dealt with it in Lou’s way – very quietly and subdued. Although he was very much involved in the writing side with Mick, when it came to the recording he would make suggestions, but pretty much let Mick and Mutt run the show…”

That show was gradually running around the clock. They might take the occasional day off, but recording was becoming a way of life.

Wills: “Electric Lady became our second home. We initially began sessions at midday, but three months later they’d gone on so long that we were starting at midnight.”

Like Dennis, Mick and Mutt were holed up in the city. Lou Gramm and Rick Wills were commuting from their homes in Westchester County – about 45 miles, or a 45-minute drive, from Manhattan. This was “no big deal” according to Wills, who prefered to “go back to his home and his family every night. Or whatever hour it was. Sometimes I’d get back at 6am, just as they were getting up to go to school… It was pretty bizarre!”

Their shifting schedule ultimately led to the lyrics for one of Foreigner 4’s songs. Nearby the studio, on the corner of Sixth Avenue, there was a Nathan’s Famous hot dog eaterie, as Jones recalls: “The later it got at night, the bigger the buzz got, and a lot of weird characters, some of them hookers, would appear. It was a big mixture of a lot of different characters – so that was the inspiration for opening song, Night Life.”

However, the extended studio hours were taking their toll financially.

“At the time it was considered unrealistic,” says Wills. “We’d spent over a million dollars in recording costs. There was a lot of pressure – from the record company, from the management and from ourselves. It was pretty tough. Our manager, Bud Prager, was going crazy, having to keep going to Atlantic for more and more advances, just to pay for the studio time. Because once you’ve got that far into it, you can’t turn back, and you begin to realise that you’re going to have to sell a hell of a lot of records to pay that advance back…”

Steadily, though, great tracks started to emerge, including songs like Urgent, which had barely existed when sessions first began, and was, at one point, stripped right back to Elliott’s drum track and that quirky guitar intro.

The song, however, is made by the sax solo played by the late, great Junior Walker. Jones saw Walker and his All-Stars were playing in a club nearby, so he and Wills skipped out of Electric Lady, watched three or four sets, and then invited a bemused Walker down to the studio.

Elliott and his wife made sure they were there to see the soul legend in action. “It was very amusing,” remembers Iona, “because after he played his solo once, he was very happy with it, but Mick made him play it several more times, and was trying to get him to stretch out more and more, until it became that wonderful solo.”

“It turned out that in all his career he had never done an overdub,” adds Jones. “Everything he’d ever done was live. So the first five or six takes, he was really uncomfortable. He had the headphones on, but couldn’t get used to that fact that he was overdubbing. But he did, after a while, and started playing some stuff. He explained, ‘I’ve kind of changed my style up a bit…’ and started playing this jazzy, softer type of stuff. Mutt and I were sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, no, we need the Junior Walker we know and love.’

“Mutt, bless him, went and straight-talked it to Junior: ‘This is great but we really need some of that Shotgun/Road Runner stuff.’ ‘Oh, you want the old shit? Okay!’ So he gets up, does it again and in two or three takes we’ve got it. However, it did take a tremendous amount of editing. Mutt and I spent two days chopping up little slivers of quarter-inch tape from the different takes, and then splicing it all together. We wanted it to be a classic solo, and I think that’s how it ended up…”

It’s tempting to paint Lange as the villain of the piece, but, as the Junior Walker story shows, Jones was just as much a perfectionist. Today, he concedes: “We had these moments with Mutt, but we kind of overcame it. Nothing lasted longer than the time it took to achieve what we’d set out to achieve. Gradually, things eased up with Mutt, and we really started to appreciate what we were all bringing to the party. He loosened up from his more ‘stiff’ approach.”

After three months, however, Platt had to leave. He’d stalled a prior engagement to re-mix Samson’s Shock Tactics LP, but could delay the project no longer.

Platt: “I would speak to Mutt now and then, of course. If he ever had any questions on anything I’d done, he’d just call me up. It was all recorded in 24-track analogue. Those tapes already had a lot of edits in them, so you wouldn’t want to keep playing them. The normal practice in those days was to make up a slave reel from the master reel so you could do all your overdubbing on the slave reel – then you would lock the two together when you did the mix, so you wouldn’t be degrading the sound on the master reel, by playing it over and over again. So before I left I made up all the slave reels and checked everything was right before I left.”

The other thing Platt did before leaving was recommend his replacement, Dave Wittman, the man who would carry the torch as Lange’s right-hand man to the very end of the project.

Initial sessions had seen Platt record keyboards by Peter Frampton’s Bob Mayo, sometime Lou Reed man Michael Fonfara, and Larry Fast from Peter Gabriel’s band. But Mutt and Mick wanted something more. They went after a then-unknown Englishman by the name of Thomas Dolby, who could be found busking in Paris, avoiding a UK music lawyer’s bill he couldn’t afford…

Dolby: “I got a call from a friend in England who said, ‘Somebody called Mick Jones phoned for you and said he wanted you to do a session…’. I thought this was Mick Jones of The Clash, who were one of my favourite bands at the time. I’d actually never heard of Foreigner. But when I looked into it, it turned out that they were actually very big in America!”

Lange, a partner in Zomba Publishing, had heard one of the 22 year old’s demo cassettes and liked his keyboard playing, so, in mid-January 1981, he suggested to Mick that they should check Dolby out.

“I spoke to them from Paris and they suggested I should try out for a day or two and asked, ‘When could you come over?’,” remembers Dolby, of the initial contact. “I thought very hard and said, ‘Well, tomorrow morning!’

“Mutt was really sticking his neck out in insisting that they hired me and fly me over. I was a kid who had previously thought himself lucky to have spent four hours in a recording studio. I was like a bull in a china shop – ordering up all sorts of keyboards and effects, from a list like a takeaway menu.

“They’d already put keyboards on most of the album, but they weren’t very happy with them, so they gave me a trial to see what I could do. The first track they gave me was Urgent, and they were very pleased with that so they asked if I could stick around and do the whole album.”

Mostly, Dolby’s contributions consisted of very subtle keyboard arpeggios, doubling every note Mick Jones and Rick Wills had played.

Mutt could then add yet another layer to the mix but, as Dolby explains, “he’d make it very, very quiet, so you could hardly hear it. That would just make the guitar playing sound better… I think I was on pretty much the whole album.

“Waiting For A Girl Like You was clearly the centrepiece of the album, but they were nervous about it, because they weren’t really known as a ‘ballad band’. But they were also very confident about it, and Mutt Lange, in particular, was absolutely convinced it would be the biggest hit they’d ever had. He said, ‘I really want to make this remarkable. Every time this comes on the radio, I want people to prick up their ears and know exactly what they’re listening to.’

“I was very heavily influenced by Brian Eno and his ambient stuff, and I had a style like that. This was in the days before polyphonic synths that allowed you to play chords. Back then you could only play one note at a time, but you could build up chords on a multi-track by playing long single notes and layering other notes above and below them. It would vary the sound a bit, and you’d end up with a nice mesh. So I recorded a few minutes of that, and Mutt came in and took a slice of it – maybe 25 seconds or so – and spliced it into the front of the song. And it worked rather well!

“I remember, a couple of years later, I’d be driving in middle America somewhere, listening to some AOR rock station, and this sound would come on. It was absolutely unmistakable. I felt it was quite subversive, really, to get some ambient Eno music on to American AOR radio!”

For Dolby, who to that point had “barely made a penny” as a session musician, one month’s work changed his life. “I came back from the States with an envelope full of cash, which I used to make my first album, so the proceeds from Foreigner 4 set me up. By the time Waiting For A Girl Like You came out, then suddenly I had all sorts of option for other work…”

Despite that cash – which led directly to his 1982 debut album The Golden Age Of Wireless, and early hits Windpower and She Blinded Me With Science – Dolby recalls that “they were trying not to break the bank, so I actually stayed in Mutt’s hotel suite on Central Park South. It had a pull-out settee in a second room, and I slept on that for the first week or so. I remember that Mutt would leave for the studio in the morning, before I woke up, and often wouldn’t get back until after I was asleep. The man slept, like, four hours a night! And yet he still found time to sit cross-legged on his bed, playing guitar and singing like Van Morrison. Really extraordinary. He was a very interesting man…”

By the time Dolby arrived, Foreigner had been in Electric Lady about six months but were, it would transpire, only two-thirds of the way through the process. “They would work during the day on vocals and mixing, and at night I was set free in the studio until they came back in at nine o’clock in the morning.”

Jones: “We would give him a load to do, then go out to dinner and just leave him there. Then we’d come back to hear what he’d put on…”

The painstaking work continued with some unusual distractions. Next door to Electric Lady is an art-house cinema called the 8th Street Playhouse. After a late-night showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, one of the punters had inadvertently left his seat gently smouldering. Some hours later, smoke was seen pouring out of the cinema; next door, in Electric Lady’s control room, Mick Jones could smell something burning.

“We thought at first the fire was on our side,” he remembers. However, thoughts of countless hours of work being lost were suddenly interrupted by a loud banging on the wall.

Dolby: “Suddenly members of the New York Fire Department came through the wall of the studio with axes. They were very big, beefy guys, and all I could think was that they looked like the Village People…”

Electric Lady survived the intrusion and work resumed. Soon, Dolby’s work was done and he flew home. But for Jones and Lange, pressure was building. Their time at Electric Lady was about to hit a brick wall as the next client, Hall & Oates, refused to budge again. Worse, Mutt’s booking to produce Def Leppard’s Pyromania had also been put back for the last time. Eventually, he simply had to let go of Foreigner…

Jones: “Mutt stayed absolutely as long as he could. It was gut-wrenching for him when he had to leave, but he had to… Def Leppard was already three or four months over-schedule. We’d been through this intense time together, the best part of nine months, so it really was gut-wrenching.”

With Mutt out of the studio – though still in touch on the phone, and listening to mixes couriered across the Atlantic – Jones ended up adding the final touches, mixing and sequencing with engineer Dave Wittman. This lasted around four weeks, from March through to April. With just 10 days of studio time remaining, Jones took the drastic step of taking a bed into the studio and sleeping there rather than lose focus.

Jones: “We’d got into this thing where the studio was like my den. I didn’t even go outside.”

Wills: “He was almost going mad, truly!”

Come the final seven days, Jones and Wittman reckoned they still had 10 days of work to do. With “Hall & Oates’ roadies in the corridor delivering their gear”, they were completing the final song. Meanwhile, Lange and Prager opened what was supposed to be the final mix of Foreigner 4.

Jones: “I get this call from Mutt, and he says: ‘Where are the fucking background vocals on Juke Box Hero?!’ Then my manager called up, asking the same thing: ‘Where are the background vocals?!’”

Jones admits he had removed them on purpose: “It was some ridiculous idea I’d had… I tried to explain this as a creative decision, but they both said I was crazy and insisted I put them back – at which point I realised I’d made the wrong decision, somewhere in those last 10 days of madness.

“So I go see Dave and say, ‘I think we may have fucked up, here! How can we fix it?’ He just said, ‘Don’t worry!’ and rushed back in. Juke Box Hero was so intricate that we’d used every single cable and every single piece of equipment in the studio. Dave and I had all four hands on the desk. Within two hours, he had re-established the set-up – all the equipment, the cabling, the faders, everything and remixed the whole chorus section of the song again. It was just his recall from a completely different mix. And by some miracle it fitted back in – with just a little bit of level adjustment – the choruses and the rest of the song are from two different mixing sessions. It was miraculous. And that was the very last thing we did!”

A fittingly fraught ending to the marathon process, a stroke of luck that was well deserved after all the hard work before. The band took the songs out on the road… and the rest is rock’n’roll history. Asked to reflect on Foreigner 4 today, Jones pauses thoughtfully before answering. “It was definitely the sum of what I thought we’d been building towards. When I look back on it I know it’s my favourite album. I know the process was long, gruelling and costly – costly not just financially, either. Relationships got strained during that album. Domestic situations got out of control. There was a lot of intensity involved in that. But looking back it’s the one I always say I’m probably the most proud of.”

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents AOR magazine issue 3, July 2011

David Bottrill was sitting in Maynard James Keenan’s apartment with the Tool singer’s cat on his lap when Maynard unleashed a blood-curdling scream. Except it didn’t stop. On and on it went: 5, 10, 25 seconds. Finally, after nearly half a minute, the noise stopped.

“I was sitting at the computer recording vocals, with Maynard behind me. I didn’t have a camera or a mirror, just this cat on my lap,” David recalls now. “He starts to scream, and it’s going, and it’s going… At the end, I turn around and Maynard’s on his knees, completely spent. It was the first take. Just one take, and that was it.”

It was 2000, and the pair were recording vocals for The Grudge, the song that would open Tool’s third album, Lateralus. It was a fittingly intense moment. When it finally dropped on May 15, 2001, Lateralus marked the end of a gruelling five-year period for the band, during which time they’d been pinioned by a crushing legal battle with their then-label that had left their future anything but certain.

Lateralus was a huge release of energy and emotion – a 79-minute, spiritually charged behemoth, bursting with dizzying time signatures, seismic riffs and themes of isolation, vulnerability and connection. Twenty-five years on, its impact can still be felt.

In 1997, while touring in support of their second album, 1996’s platinum-selling breakout Ænima, Tool were slapped with a lawsuit from their label, Volcano Entertainment, alleging contract violations. It was the start of a war of attrition that brought on total creative paralysis, as much a psychological battle as a legal one.

“It was a very grating period, having this ‘lawsuit fog’ hanging over us for years,” bassist Justin Chancellor explained in a 2001 interview on MTV2. “But in a way, it forced us to look inward and really solidify as a unit. We had to fight to even be allowed to create, and I think you can hear that struggle and the eventual release of it in the music. It wasn’t just about making a record anymore; it was about survival.”

By the end of 1998, agreements were drawn up and the legal drama ended, freeing the band to return to the studio, which they did with a heightened sense of purpose.

“We had a couple records under our belt and lots of touring,” guitarist Adam Jones told Revolver in 2022. “By that time, we knew our limits. We knew what stuff we could push. We were a well-oiled machine. And we knew each other. And there were things we learned about each other on that record that are pivotal to this day.”

The musical landscape had changed radically since Tool emerged at the start of the 1990s. Many of the bands they’d once shared stages with had splintered or split.

“Alice In Chains, Helmet, Soundgarden, Nirvana, and now Rage [Against The Machine],” said drummer Danny Carey in 2001. “It’s really kind of amazing that all of them are gone. It’s a strange feeling to look around and realise we’re still here. But I think that sense of being the survivors gave us a certain freedom. We didn’t feel like we had to fit into a scene anymore, because the scene didn’t really exist. We just had to answer to ourselves.”

Now more than ever, Tool were marching to their own complicated beat. At the dawn of the 2000s, progressive rock seemed like a bloated relic of a bygone age. A handful of groups – Dream Theater chief among them – were flying the flag for complex, ambitious music, but bands and the public alike seemed largely immune to prog’s charms. Why listen to old dudes in capes when you’ve got Korn and Limp Bizkit?

By contrast, Tool cast their gaze back to the progressive giants of the 70s, particularly King Crimson. Led by the exacting, innovative visionary Robert Fripp, Crimson were the architects of a disciplined, professorial strain of music that prioritised knotty polyrhythms and structural subversion over traditional riffs. With songs such as 1969’s proto-prog metal classic 21st Century Schizoid Man, they proved heavy music could be high-art, trading musical excess for a clinical, forward-thinking precision that redefined the boundaries of the genre.

“We pulled quite a bit of King Crimson into what we’re doing,” Maynard explained in 2001, adding: “I think we’ve brought in a much more vulnerable, emotional element that was missing in King Crimson. Which is good. I would hope that that’s something that they could recognise and… be the master in the corner that nods silently: ‘Very good work.’”

“Tool were one of the greatest bands to take influences from so many different styles and blend them into something completely unique,” says David Bottrill.

“I think you hear King Crimson in the songwriting structure, in the way that Adam builds his tone, and in the way Danny listened to both [King Crimson drummers] Bill Bruford and Pat Mastelotto. It’s also the Led Zeppelin influence Adam had from doing No Quarter [the 1973 Zeppelin song covered by Tool during the Ænima sessions that was eventually released in 2000]. Working on those sonics and that structure amalgamated into what Lateralus became.”

Tool began work on the follow-up to Ænima in the autumn of 2000. They took a different approach to the way they’d made the previous record: where the writing process for Ænima had seen Maynard forging melodies and lyrics alongside the music being created by Adam, Danny and Justin, this time the instrumental trio began poring through four years’ worth of riffs, melodies and ideas while Maynard more or less left them to it.

“They would have a whiteboard and go, ‘OK, well, let’s go from Riff A to B to C,’” explains David Bottrill, who had produced Ænima, and was on board once again for Lateralus.

“They would just work things around, try many different options of arrangements to see which ones felt the best.”

Maynard, for his part, spent much of 2000 on the road with his side-project A Perfect Circle while his bandmates worked. His stance, as David recalls, was one of blunt pragmatism:

“‘Look, you guys get the arrangements sorted out… send it to me when you’re closer, then I’ll work on the lyrics.’”

The songs that resulted achieved a rare balance between technicality and humanity, where the intricate musical arrangements never choked out the raw, visceral pulse at the centre of it all. Thematically, Lateralus ditched the cynical edge that had partly defined Ænima and their 1992 debut EP Opiate for a radical, wide-eyed vulnerability. Maynard framed the album as a “spiritual roadmap” designed to transform toxic energy into transcendence.

“If I have a spiritual side, it’s about trying to be as honest as I can,” he noted at the time. “The one thing that was missing from that very heady, artistic progressive rock approach was the emotional… we didn’t seem very ‘vulnerable.’”

That approach was encapsulated by The Grudge, the album’s eight-and-a-half-minute opening track and the song on which Maynard unleashes that monumental scream heard by David Bottrill and a cat.

Lyrically, it’s the singer’s warning against what he called the “lead weight” of grievances that drag the soul under. It’s seemingly loaded with both alchemical and astrological symbolism: Tool-watchers have suggested the line ‘Saturn ascends’ refers to the time it takes Saturn to orbit the sun, around 29.5 years.

Maynard has never revealed the specific significance of that line, though he did say that the track was a conscious decision to choose “the transformation of negative energy into positive energy” over the easy payoff of rage.

Musically, Lateralus dispenses with any remnants of the marginally more straightforward alt metal sound with which Tool made their name in favour of music that is complex and expansive.

Schism is defined by a coiling, serpentine bassline and a constant rotation of odd time signatures, The Patient uses restraint as a weapon, its slow burn mirroring the very process of the existential survival that birthed the record, while the transition from the ethereal Parabol into the earth-shaking Parabola remains one of heavy music’s most devastating payoffs, its tension slowly building until it has no choice but to explode with the force of a neutron bomb.

The mid-album firestorm Ticks & Leeches hits like a high-velocity exorcism, pushing Maynard to a level of vocal strain that purportedly sidelined his ability to sing for weeks. The album’s final descent is the 25-minute suite of Disposition, Reflection and Triad, which trade sheer force for a trancelike, Jungian exploration of ego-death and spiritual realignment.

Beyond the sprawling song structures, the band still left room for moments of eccentric experimentation. This manifested in the album’s atmospheric segues, most notably on the track Mantra. Though it sounds like a deep, meditative hum, Maynard later revealed to the Japanese magazine Buzz that the recording was actually a “treat” for fans: the sound of him squeezing his Siamese cat, slowed down until the animal’s protest became a cavernous, ambient pulse.

It wasn’t the only found sound to make the cut. Elsewhere, Danny Carey growled through a tube to simulate the chanting of Tibetan monks for Parabol, and the album’s closer, Faaip de Oiad, utilises a sampled 1997 radio call to Coast To Coast AM from a man claiming to be a panicked, former Area 51 employee – a paranoid interlude that tapped into “the sheer frequency of human desperation”, as described by Maynard.

But the album’s most famous Easter Egg is embedded in the album’s title track. The Fibonacci sequence is an ancient mathematical pattern in which each successive number is the sum of the two that precede it. Somehow, Tool found a way to work it into one of their songs.

“Justin brought in this amazing bass riff,” Adam recalled. “He said, ‘The first part’s in 9, the second part’s in 8 and the last part’s in 7.’ Danny was like, ‘[987] is a number of the Fibonacci. That’s really cool.’… We told Maynard, and he went, ‘Oh, my god, I’ll write my lyrics like that!’”

The singer’s vocals follow this pattern, each syllable representing a number in the series. It’s a very clever arrangement that has, over time, been wildly mythologised and over-emphasised by those hungry for esoteric secrets. Maynard himself has spent years trying to deflate that particular balloon.

“I feel like I kind of pulled a very pedestrian, sophomoric move,” he told podcaster Joe Rogan in 2017. “It’s good to let people know about [Fibonacci] but it was kind of a dick joke, in a way. I could do better.”

Intellectual dick jokes notwithstanding, the album sounded like nothing else that had come before. It was closer in spirit to Radiohead’s Kid A, released the previous year, than any contemporary metal band.

Just like Kid A – another album that refused to play by the music industry’s rules – Lateralus proved that mainstream success didn’t have to come at the expense of intelligence and vision.

Yet Tool weren’t completely exempt from having to play the game. Schism was released as a single at the start of 2001, a taste of what was to come. Even so, it was a defiant choice for radio.

“I found it very hard when we came to pick a single,” Justin told Prog magazine in 2021. “Adam and Danny immediately were like, ‘Schism is the hit, that’s the one, everybody is going to love it.’ I was honestly really on the opposite end of that. ‘Really? It’s so odd.’”

The gamble paid off, with the song’s success amplified by a disquieting stop-motion video directed by Adam that featured no footage of the band. Justin credited this to the group’s refusal to sign away their autonomy, noting that the guitarist’s background in special effects allowed them to ignore the industry’s demand for a typical rock promo.

“Nobody gets to tell us what to do at all,” Justin said. “We never felt under pressure to make a typical rock video with the band jumping around onstage.”

Nor was the album’s packaging comparable to anything their contemporaries were doing. For the artwork, they enlisted artist Alex Grey, whose anatomical, translucent illustrations – rendered in a multi-layered, clear plastic booklet – mirrored the album’s obsession with peeling back layers of the self to reveal the luminous spiritual core beneath.

“Alex has a way of visualising the things we were trying to articulate lyrically,” explained Maynard. “It’s that sense of a ‘spiritual roadmap’. When you look at the layers of the Lateralus booklet, you’re literally peeling back the physical to find the light inside. It perfectly captured the intent of the record: the idea that we are more than just these meat-suits."

When Lateralus itself landed in May 2001, it dashed any hopes or expectations for an Ænima Pt. 2. Critics were predictably split. While Metal Hammer praised its “proper serious heavyweight rock” as being on par with Led Zeppelin’s equally epic Physical Graffiti or Pink Floyd’s The Wall, chronically petulant hipster music website Pitchfork issued a baffling 1.9/10.

By that point, Tool were critic-proof anyway. This sprawling, cerebral monolith demolished the competition, debuting at No.1 on the Billboard 200 and selling a jaw-dropping 550,000 copies in its first week, beating the likes of Missy Elliott and Destiny’s Child.

In the years since its release, Lateralus has taken on a life beyond the band. Fans had proposed alternate track sequences, dived deep into the album’s vast numerical realms, and come up with some truly head-scratching theories, like the one claiming the band wrote Lateralus along to the film The Passion Of The Christ, a movie released three full years after the record.

Adam recalls first hearing about that theory from a fan email: “I wrote her back and said, ‘Cool. You figured it out.’”

The factual impossibility was beside the point. The engagement wasn’t. Within the scene, Lateralus emerged as a beacon for what prog metal could become. While some bands simply mimicked Tool’s technical quirks to infinitely lesser effect, acts such as Mastodon took the album’s spirit of ambition to forge their own conceptual paths on albums like Leviathan.

By clearing a space for atmosphere and experimentation, Tool provided a vital blueprint for the challenging music made by the likes of Gojira, The Ocean and Tesseract.

“Lateralus redefined what heavy music can be,” says David Bottrill. “There’s nobody that sounds quite like them. I can tell you, you’ve got no idea how many demos I get that are pastiches of what they do, and nobody comes close.”

Perhaps Danny Carey himself put it best: “It still makes my hair stand on end when I listen to it alone in the dark.”

US prog rockers The Mars Volta have announced that they will release a new live album, Lucro Sucio; Unfinished Business, as a digital release on September 4 and as a physical release on October 16.

The band have also shared their brand new single, Cue The Sun/Alba del Orate, which you can listen to below.

The new live album, the band's first official live release since 2005’s Scabdates, was the result of an interactive campaign which allowed the band's fans access to live recordings from their 2025 tour, featuring audio previews from multiple live recordings and a voting mechanism that allowed fans to choose which specific performances make the final cut for the album.

Lucro Sucio; Unfinished Business will be available across three distinct configurations, allowing physical collectors to choose between a Special Edition CD Digipak or a limited Edition 2LP vinyl set to be released on October 16, as well as a launch on all major streaming platforms as a digital album enhanced with Dolby Atmos spatial audio on September 4.

Pre-order Lucro Sucio; Unfinished Business.

Is The Pineapple Thief’s Bruce Soord consumed by existential angst, or has he made the most quietly powerful solo music of his career? Prog takes a walk with the Ghosts In The Park.

“It started off completely different,” says Bruce Soord. Ghosts In The Park, his fourth solo studio album, is his most personal, heartfelt record yet. The songs were conceived on tour with The Pineapple Thief while he was confronting the death of his father. Writing from a place of such profound intimacy shaped the music, transforming his original vision for the album.

“I was going to do more of an electronic-backed record,” he says. “Then, when I was on tour and it was just myself and the acoustic guitar, I realised that was the real spirit. There’s this feeling where you come up with something and you know when it’s an accurate projection of what you’re thinking and feeling; then there’s a feeling when you you’re just going through the motions. It may as well be AI – you’re just putting Lego pieces together until a song pops out.”

There’s nothing mechanical about Ghosts In The Park. Sitting in a series of hotel rooms, Soord found the sounds to match the emotions he was feeling.“That’s when I realised I could do it with the melodies of an acoustic and my voice,” he says. “The hotel room is where I found it the record.”

It was such a successful experience that the album features many of the original guitar demo performances. “I was always under the impression that I was going to go back in my studio and re-record. When I did, technically it sounded better, but it just didn’t have that hotel room magic. It sounds really pretentious, but I put the new recordings in and the song lost its soul in a way.”

Perhaps it was a case of reverse red light syndrome: the absence of the pressure to capture a perfect performance that made the hotel performances special. “I was just going along with the flow, not worrying about what’s going on the record,” he says. The result is music shaped by the geography of a tour itinerary and maps of the heart and mind.

Meet Me On The Downs was written in response to the loss of his father. “This isn’t exceptional; this is a universal experience I went through. I’m not looking for anyone to go, ‘Oh Bruce, that’s terrible’ – it’s just a normal part of life,” he says. “My father suffered from dementia and had a very long and slow decline until he died last summer; and my mother has been suffering from end-stage Alzheimer’s for goodness knows how long.

When my father eventually died, I drove to the retirement home which I’ve been going to for the last seven years. I parked outside and I thought, ‘What a strange feeling this is.’ You look up at the window and think, ‘There’s no one in there any more.’ So I sat in the car and reflected on the stillness.”

The lyrics explore that landscape of loss as Soord went into his father’s flat to begin clearing it out. “All the photo albums were scattered on the floor, so that was something I put into the lyrics. I came back from the flat, went into the studio, thinking about how I wanted to remember my father. His dementia was so extreme that he was delirious, so it got quite intense.

“I didn’t want that to be my memory, so I went to the studio, I shut my eyes, and I tried to go back as far as I could, and picked out memories of when I was four or five. The more you thought about it, the further back you could go, and that formed the second half of the song. That’s just an example of how personal the record is. That might not be everybody’s thing, but for me it was a way to make it sincere.”

Conversely, The Pineapple Thief isn’t the right vehicle for such sensitive subject matter and introspection. “With them I’m still singing about similar things in terms of relationships – love and death and all that stuff – but in a much, much broader way. The solo stuff is so much more personal; I’m basically baring everything; my soul, really.”

The Pineapple Thief and Soord’s solo releases are “completely compartmentalised” in his mind, reflecting the different experiences of working alone versus in a group. “In The Pineapple Thief, we’re always together, we’re always talking about the songs together; but when I put this record together, it’s me, on my own in my studio or in my hotel room. I unapologetically made the tracks about very, very personal things.”

He recently toured the album round small venues with TPT bassist Jon Sykes, using looper pedals to recreate the music’s layered parts. “I always had a mind to playing it live on a very intimate basis,” says Soord. “When I’m introducing the songs, it can feel like you’re having a conversation with every single person in the room.”

“I know it’s a cliché when you talk about intimate shows, but that is absolutely what it feels like. The Pineapple Thief is now this big rock show with lights, the big stage, the big, loud PA. But my solo stuff is me and Jon sat down with our instruments and that’s enough. I’ve been to some shows that have been solo or just two people in churchy venues, and I’ve come away thinking, ‘Wow, that’s one of the best shows I’ve been to!’ Sometimes you don’t need all the production. It’s just a different animal.”

Ghosts In The Park isn’t purely acoustic, boasting terrific electric guitar work in tracks like Kept Me Thinking and Pillars. “I indulged myself with some solos,” admits Soord, who names Camel’s Andy Latimer and The Alan Parsons Project’s Ian Bairnson as his six-string heroes because “they both share the ability to do melodic, hooky solos that you could sing or air guitar along to. You don’t need to widdle up and down the fretboard to come up with a good guitar solo, so I thought, ‘Let’s do that; let’s have some confidence in yourself and get the guitar out.’”

It’s also an album of rich, layered sounds and dramatic arrangements, whose grandeur belies the music’s humble hotel room origins. “I always like the drama,” says Soord, picking the title track as the song that he’s “most proud of in terms of the songwriting and arrangements.” He explains: “It gets very big and very dramatic in the silences. That’s what I’ve always enjoyed, surprising people with silence. There’s a section where it almost fades to nothing, and you’re thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’ Then all of a sudden it starts again. You can only get that kind of drama when you get that juxtaposition of intense moments and really delicate bits.”

His previous solo record, Luminescence, featured string arrangements by Andrew Skeet, but this time Soord didn’t want to go down that road, preferring an approach that he can replicate onstage. “I thought, ‘No, rather than have a string section, I’m going to have an acoustic guitar orchestra,’” he says. “The title track has sections where I’m layering – a wall of acoustic guitars – which is easy to do with a looper pedal live, so you still get that big, lush arrangement. But really, I just wanted to make the whole thing from my performance and my soul.”

All of which raises the question of what drives his urge to share such profound, personal experiences with an audience? “I still can’t really answer that,” he says. “I’m generally a very happy, positive person, but if you listen to my solo records, you probably think, ‘Goodness, is he just so wrapped up in the existential problems of being a human? is this who Bruce is all day long?’

“It’s not. I just find it very intriguing to sing about life and death and all that stuff, and try and make sense of it. It is a strange thing. It’s ridiculously personal stuff you’re sharing; it’s not like I would sit in a coffee shop and talk to people about this kind of thing. I never would.

“I’ve pondered it for many hours, and I think it’s just a cathartic thing and a way of coping with this existential issue of being a human that we all have.”

Ghosts In The Park is on sale now.

Former Supertramp co-frontman Roger Hodgson's first two solo albums, In The Eye Of The Storm and Hai Hai, have been remastered at half-speed by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios and will be reissued through Universal Records on August 21.

Following on from the recent Supertamp series of vinyl reissues, both featuring artwork faithful to the original releases.

Hodgson left Supertramp when their 1983 tour in support of the previous year's ...Famous Last Words... culminated in September, to spend more time with his family, having recently relocated from Los Angeles to Northern California. He'd recorded a solo album, Sleeping With the Enemy, prior to ...Famous Last Words..., but decided against releasing it.

He released what became his debut solo album, In The Eye Of The Storm, in 1984. Selling over two million copies, it remains his best-selling solo release. Hai Hai followed three years later, although prior to the album's release, Hodgson broke both wrists falling from a loft at his home and could not promote the album sufficiently. The album featured Land Ho, a song he and Rick Davies had written for Supertramp in 1974, but never used.

Hodgson worked with Trevor Rabin in 1990, co-writing the Yes song Walls that featured on the band's 1994 album Talk, as well as Rabin's 2003 archival release 90124, but he declined an offer to replace Jon Anderson in the band. Since then, he's released one more solo album, Open The Door in 2000 and two live releases, Rites Of Passage in 1997, which featured five previously unrecorded songs and a rare guest appearance from Supertramp's John Helliwell, and Classics Live in 2010.

Pre-order here.

In The Eye Of The Storm

Side One

1. Had A Dream (Sleeping With The Enemy)
2. In Jeopardy
3. Lovers In The Wind
4. Hooked On A Problem

Side Two
1. Give Me Love, Give Me Life
2. I'm Not Afraid
3. Only Because Of You

Hai Hai

Side One
1. Right Place
2. My Magazine
3. London
4. You Make Me Love You
5. Hai Hai

Side Two
1. Who's Afraid
2. Desert Love
3. Land Ho
4. House On The Corner
5. Puppet Dance

In 2016 Devin Townsend announced he’d started work on The Moth, a symphonic rock opera centred around sex and death. The project lay dormant for a number of years, but it’s finally out as the singer/multi-instrumentalist comes to terms with his personal life being turned upside-down. He tells Prog about the decade-long backstory and intense themes of his self-described “life’s work.”

Devin Townsend wasn’t allowed to be emotional when he was a kid. Born in Canada to a family of British and Irish immigrants, his parents forced him to maintain a proverbial stiff upper lip and keep his anger, sadness and even joy to himself. One of the few ways of letting his feelings out without being seen as uncouth was listening to musicals with his mum and dad.

“It was like, ‘You’re upset? You’re gonna wanna keep that quiet, because you’re gonna spoil dinner for everybody,’” the 53-year-old prog metal maestro remembers. “But music was a loophole. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, musicals were such a part of the lexicon of my family’s communication skills, whether we were singing the songs to each other or referencing the humour of a film.”

Townsend loved West Side Story, Jesus Christ Superstar and Paint Your Wagon, and it’s a passion that’s endured well into his adult life. His 30th (yes, 30th) album, The Moth, is rooted in the same symphonic drama as those influential films. It’s a near-80-minute, strings-loaded prog opera recorded with the 70-piece North Netherlands Orchestra and a 65-person choir, with 24 songs telling the story of a hero’s journey from birth to death. Many current and former collaborators, including guitarist extraordinaire Steve Vai and singer Anneke van Giersbergen, make appearances.

Townsend – once renowned for his ability to unload records as quickly as machine-gun fire, not just under his own name, but through such bands as extreme metal aggressors Strapping Young Lad and ambient country duo Casualties Of Cool – has referred to the project as his “life’s work,” having chipped away at it for almost a decade. “It feels like I’ve been taking a 10-year shit,” he says, “and I’m just wiping now.”

He first announced The Moth in 2016, saying it was the next thing on his to-do list after the Devin Townsend Project’s Transcendence. The following January, during a now-famous Vice interview, he said it’d be a stage show about “cocks and vaginas and death” and that he’d need $10million to get it off the ground.

The next big update didn’t come until 2024, when he revealed it would be an album and the follow-up to that year’s PowerNerd. Then, in March 2025, he played the whole thing in full for two nights only in the Dutch town of Groningen, suggesting that the release would happen sooner rather than later.

He says that, for all the delays and changes the project’s been through, it’s still the meditation on sex and mortality that he originally intended it to be. “When something comes to me it’s a 10-minute process,” he explains. “Ten years ago, I’m like, ‘It’s called The Moth and it’s about sex and death and transformation – and go!’ There’s no sense of, ‘I’m going to sit down and write this now.’ I just live; and then, as a byproduct of living, those creative moments, if they’re good, end up adhering themselves to your experiences.”

Many think about sex in positive terms: a bonding moment between two people who share a mutual attraction, or even just something that feels good. But Townsend talks about it as if it’s hideous. He calls it “a proxy for unity” and compares it to hollow things like pornography, social media and drugs, in that they’re all ways people “try and connect with something more than us.” In the liner notes of The Moth there are gross oil paintings of men with giant penises sword-fighting and someone else ejaculating into space. Prog wonders where this seemingly dark relationship comes from.

“Myself and a lot of people in my life went through formative experiences that were really traumatic,” he answers. “For me, sex from a very young age was coloured by experiences that were really difficult. Because it’s an awkward conversation a lot of times, it’s swept under the rug, but it affects our entire fucking life.”

When asked to open up about the nature of that trauma, it’s the one time in our 50-minute interview that he flat-out declines to say anything. “It’s not important to the conversation,” he says. “As opposed to me using this work as an opportunity to have public therapy, the idea is more, ‘Oh, I recognise how much it plays into my own personal development: these unaddressed traumas and unprocessed feelings.’”

Nonetheless, The Moth is clearly an autobiographical work. It has a narrative with a cast of characters, but Townsend is almost dismissive about it, beyond the fact that he wants to turn it into a book one day and that it’s a hero’s journey in the vein of writer/historian Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. More important to him right now is that it’s an allegory, the protagonist and their journey a metaphor for him processing his past experiences and how they shaped his personality.

“Is there a story? Absolutely!” he says. “Are there characters? Absolutely! Is it of any importance to the understanding or lack thereof? I don’t know. Maybe not. For me, it all served a real practical purpose: leaving home, going into the unknown, facing the demon, whatever it is; these big ‘hero’s journey’ archetype chunks. We made a wheel out of it that had 13 sections and were like, ‘This here is the quiet, this is where a war is, this is where the confrontation is, here’s the resolution’ – all these theatrical tropes that I was then able to write songs for.”

And then you connected them to your personal experiences? “Of course! But those personal experiences are what come to you after you’ve outlined it. I think, if you start with the personal experiences, you’re going to be fucked from the beginning because you’re just never going to want to do it. You’re never going to be like, ‘You know what would be a great way to spend the day today? If we just dig into trauma!’”

Every story has an inciting incident: the moment where the hero is thrust into the unknown and forced onto their quest. Townsend says that his own – which made him want to open up on The Moth – was when “everybody left.” Around the time he started PowerNerd, his son moved out to go to college.

“I was stuck in this place full of broken dreams,” he remembers, “and I had to start writing PowerNerd. That record was supposed to be a fuck-around and it ended up being an album about heartbreak. Up to the point where everything went away, I had a certain amount of creative motivation that I gleaned from tenacity – ‘I’m the guy that can get through any of this!’ Then life put me in a position where it was like, ‘I can’t handle this; it’s too much for me.’

“What was so dramatic about it was, for the first time, I felt like I couldn’t put on a brave face. I couldn’t hide behind platitudes. I couldn’t be this, ‘Well, you gotta go through what you gotta go through to get to where you’re going’ – all this fucking shit. I was just kind of like, ‘I’m fucked!’”

He recalls crying as he finished The Moth at home with only his dog Oliver for company. The album includes a love letter to his loyal pet in the form of its ambient closing track, We Don’t Deserve Dogs. “I had this dog following me around, being like, ‘I know you’re upset, I want to be with you,’” he says. “And my reaction to it was like, ‘I don’t want to be seen when I’m emotional.’ Finally, I had to surrender to the fact that this dog had no agenda. It was simple. He was like, ‘You’re sad. I’m here for you.’ Accepting love was one of the most foundational changes as a result of going through this process.”

While the liner notes contain those graphic sexual illustrations, the album cover is a picture of Townsend’s face. That’s it. After so many years of deflecting and refusing to confront his past, he explains that he’s “unafraid to be seen,” adding: “If you’re gonna be seen, you’re gonna wanna go balls-out: Thelma And Louise it over the cliff, you know? In the past, when I’ve been guilty of not committing to it, it’s been, ‘I don’t wanna be perceived as being irrational.’ But I’m just a fucking artist, dude! This is a representation of an emotion that I don’t have a vocabulary for, other than fucking ‘Grrrrrr!’ To be able to do that and be like, ‘Yes, it’s me’, that was the goal.”

As for what’s next, he has an outline of a plan, although the specifics are a mystery even to him. “After a project like The Moth, all of a sudden everyone in my professional world might be like, ‘Make more metal, fuck-face!’” he laughs. He said in 2024 that the follow-up to The Moth would be an album called Axolotl, but he reveals today that he has 10 projects on the go, and that “the one that takes pole position is going to be the one that’s most creatively compelling.” What matters far more to him right now is that he’s just made music that is true to his experiences, no deflections or platitudes in sight.

“What’s important is the truth: who you are, making peace with who you are,” he says. “These are subtle things. All they require is being able to sit with yourself and your pain, really being present with yourself in ways that are really fucking uncomfortable, because you have to be willing to see yourself as the person you are, not the person you want people to see.”

The Moth is on sale now.

On the 30th anniversary of Asia’s groundbreaking debut album, late frontman John Wetton and keyboardist Geoff Downes told Prog about the struggle to maintain their vision and the pressure that came with the LP’s unexpected success in 1982.

“Asia? You framed an Asia poster? How hard did the people at the frame store laugh when you brought this in?” It’s one of the most memorable lines in the 2005 comedy The 40 Year Old Virgin. Steve Carell, playing sexually inexperienced Andy Stitzer, is about to let a prospective girlfriend into his apartment. Seth Rogen, as his buddy Cal, is taking Andy to task over his “un-sexy” collection of video games and action figurines, topped off by the poster that came with Asia’s self- titled debut album.

The image of the mythical sea dragon was instantly recognisable to a generation who’d been teenagers in 1982 and who remembered hearing Asia’s US Top 5 hit Heat Of The Moment on constant rotation that summer. The song also featured in the movie’s soundtrack.

“It was very amusing,” laughs Asia’s keyboard player Geoff Downes 30 years later. “And it helped re-kindle interest. People remembered Heat Of The Moment and that poster. Teenagers, kids, students – they all had it on their bedroom walls. I almost find it scary that something we did back then could end up having such an impact so many years later.”

Asia’s debut represents that fleeting moment when prog rock hijacked the US pop charts. Asia comprised two escapees from Yes, Geoff Downes and guitarist Steve Howe; ex-ELP drummer Carl Palmer and bassist/ vocalist John Wetton, who’d served time in King Crimson, Family, UK and numerous others.

Released in March 1982, Asia’s first was a runaway success, spending nine weeks at Number One in the US. But it happened while the record industry was looking the other way. 1982 was the year Human League’s Don’t You Want Me and Soft Cell’s Tainted Love crossed over to the US charts. Nobody expected refugees from Yes and ELP to make hit records; least of all hit records whose imagery would seep into popular culture and become Hollywood shorthand for a never- ending adolescence.

The roots of Asia could be traced back to the mid-70s. After leaving King Crimson in 74, Wetton put together a new progressive outfit called UK. Their second album, 1979’s Danger Money, tempered its virtuosity with more commercial touches. Wetton’s songwriting was slowly evolving into the streamlined sound of Asia.

“I was even heading in that direction in Crimson with songs like Easy Money and Starless,” said Wetton says now. But the process took time. “I had a Svengali, John Kalodner,” he explains. Kalodner was an A&R executive for the newly formed Geffen Records. “When I presented UK to him he said, ‘You’re close but no cigar’.” When UK split up in 1980, Wetton spent three months in Miami with Wishbone Ash, working on their album Number The Brave “soaking up American radio and writing songs after everyone else went home.”

Back in England, Wetton recorded a low-key solo album Caught In The Crossfire, made up of pop-rock songs in a similar vein to Foreigner and Toto. Kalodner was impressed, but thought Wetton needed a band. For a time, Palmer, keyboard player Rick Wakeman and guitarist Trevor Rabin were mooted. Then, Wetton was introduced to Howe.

“Yes had just imploded at the end of the Drama tour,” explains Downes. “But Steve and I had worked up a good relationship. So I then got a call asking if I wanted to play keyboards on Steve and John’s new songs.”

Downes joined Wetton, Howe and Palmer at London’s Nomis Studios. But Kalodner’s idea for Asia included a lead vocalist. American singer Robert Fleischmann, who’d briefly fronted Journey, joined them in the studio. “But in rehearsals John [Wetton] was leading the field vocally,” says Downes. “So we said ‘No, this is good with the four of us’.” Fleischmann was sent home.

In Downes, Wetton had found the ideal songwriting partner. In 1976, while Yes were crafting the 15-minute epic Awaken on their Going For The One album, Downes had been scraping a living writing advertising jingles. Three years later he was behind The Buggles’ massive hit Video Killed The Radio Star.

“I wasn’t much younger than the rest of them,” he says. “But I was the new kid on the block, and had been involved in a different side of the music business. The others had had their fill of epic pieces. They wanted something more direct.”

What Wetton and Downes also shared was a mutual interest in English church music. “My brother is a choirmaster and church organist,” says Wetton. “That’s the music I grew up on.” “English church music was fundamental to the Asia sound,” adds Downes. “That’s where we got those anthemic chords.”

Asia signed to Geffen, and the album’s recording took place through summer and autumn 1981 at Richard Branson’s Townhouse Studios and Marcus Studios in West London. Geffen had brought in former Queen engineer Mike Stone to produce. Stone had just finished work on Journey’s Escape. “We weren’t exactly the Son Of Journey but in some ways Asia did become a British equivalent,” says Downes.

Crucially, Asia weren’t an obvious musical amalgam of Yes, Crimson and ELP. “If we’d made the album people expected us to make we’d have sold 150,000 records,” says Wetton. “That’s fine, but we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. It was always going to be a more commercial sound. ”

Asked if Howe and Palmer were as committed to Wetton and Downes’ musical vision, Geoff offers a diplomatic: “We had a united front.” “I can only speak for myself, but I was committed,” laughs Wetton. “But... okay, yes, I got shot down many times on that album: ‘Oh, it’s pop. Oh, it’s bubblegum...’”

Out of the creative tension came an album that, as Wetton puts it, “mixed prog stuff with a backbone of great pop-rock songs.” There was fiddly art-rock (Time Again), a tender ballad (Without You) and three hits- in-waiting (Heat Of The Moment, Only Time Will Tell, Sole Survivor). As a nod to the past, Asia commissioned Roger Dean to create the album artwork. “Asia wanted their cover to look as unlike Yes as possible,” Dean said in 2005.

Still, the picture that ended up hanging on the virginal Andy Stitzer’s wall wasn’t to everyone’s liking. “The president of the record company took me to one side and said, ‘Quite honestly, we find the cover a bit dark, the logo is ugly and, frankly, we don’t hear a single,’” laughs Wetton.

Incredibly, Heat Of The Moment – with its churchy keyboards and burnished chorus – was the last song recorded. And, as Wetton admits, “If you’d taken that off the album you could have taken two zeros off the record sales.”

Heat Of The Moment emerged as a single in April, climbing to Number Four on the Billboard pop charts, with the LP hitting Number One in the Billboard Top 100, and 11 in the UK. “In spring ’82, if you turned on the radio or MTV it was Heat Of The Moment,” says Wetton. “Everything else was Human League and A Flock Of Seagulls, and then we came in like a ton of bricks.”

Asia had been booked on a tour of college halls and modest-sized theatres. But as the album and single raced up the charts, they moved to bigger venues. By July, they were selling out the 18,000-seater Dallas Reunion Arena. “Suddenly we were this lauded supergroup – and everyone wanted a ticket,” says Downes. “We were the band of the summer.” Surveying the audience from behind his extensive bank of keyboards, he noticed a significant change since Yes days. “They were a lot younger and there were women,” he chuckles. “The bands we were in before attracted the beards-and-pullovers brigade.”

“Someone did a survey,” adds Wetton. “And it was exactly 50-50 men and women. We had that mass appeal – all ages. We were all in our early 30s, we still looked alright at that stage of the game. We could get away with it.”

The follow-up singles Only Time Will Tell and Sole Survivor achieved similar sales and airplay. “At one point we had six tracks in the Billboard Top 30,” marvels Wetton. “Six solid tracks for AOR radio – fucking amazing. I think only Foreigner came close to that.”

Asia ended 1982 with one of the year’s biggest selling albums. But under pressure from Geffen and their management, they went back to the studio to make the follow-up Alpha, released in August ‘83. It was too quick. Wetton: “The management wanted more of the same – like Die Hard 2.” The first single Don’t Cry was promoted by a video in which the band hammed it up in a pastiche of the recent hit movie Raiders Of The Lost Ark. At one point Howe falls down a cliff and catches fire. (Downes: “I look at it now, and think, ‘Did we really do that?’”)

Initially, the signs were good. Alpha went Top 10 in the UK and US, and Don’t Cry was another US Number One. “It was the fastest selling single to go to Number One in the fucking history of music,” says Wetton. “But two weeks later, when it dropped out, everyone goes, ‘What a shit single!’ And I get the blame.”

In a shock move, Wetton was fired two months later. The problem? “I was drinking a lot,” he sighs. “But ‘rock’n’roll star drinks’ is not headline news... Basically, I didn’t fit into their plans.” Greg Lake was brought in to play a handful of Asia shows including a televised gig at Tokyo’s Budokan in December. “Greg’s a mate. He did his job. But it would be like me joining ELP.”

Wetton returned for 1985’s Astra, but, by then, Howe had walked. The album sold poorly, and Wetton jumped ship. Downes, Wetton and Palmer reunited in 1990 (Wetton: “But without Steve it was not the same”). Downes toured and recorded under the Asia banner with various musicians.

Then, in 2006, the original four reconvened. “We booked a meeting at a hotel in Paddington,” recalls Wetton. “The protagonists – or antagonists – were me and Steve. That’s where the trouble was. Then, as fate would have it, we bumped into each other in the lobby having not seen each other for years. We had a hug and it was all over before we’d even got in the elevator.”

In 2012, XXX became the third Asia album since 2008 to feature the classic line-up. “We still make a good noise,” insists Wetton. “We’re better now than we were in 1982. Back then, a lot of people saw Asia as a Yes spin-off. But that couldn’t be further from it. Asia was a whole different direction – and one that Yes picked up on later. Their album 90125 [in 1983] was much closer to what we had done earlier.”

Nevertheless, that four-million- selling debut album still looms large, even more so since being revived in a Hollywood movie. “Thinking about it now, what we did was so leftfield,” says Geoff Downes. “Somehow, we nipped in and captured the hearts of the American public, and, crucially, a younger generation. Even now, we hear people say, ‘I can still remember what I was doing when I heard that first Asia album.’ It never goes away.”

The world's longest-running weekly music show, Top Of The Pops was never exactly a hotbed of subversion. The TV show's most iconic moments - from David Bowie performing Starman in July 1972 through to Nirvana's November 25, 1991 desecration of Smells Like Teen Spirit - gained infamy precisely because they were such a jolt to the senses on a programme regarded as a national institution.

Which might help explain why being confronted by the sight of a twitching, lairy man with a strip of hair shaved from the centre of his head stomping up and down an abandoned London Underground tunnel waggling his pierced tongue down the camera lens caused such outrage when the British public settled down for tea in front of Auntie Beeb's flagship music show on March 28, 1996.

A record number of complaints followed, and as the song began a three-week residency at the top of the national singles chart, the tabloid press and a number of English MPs expressed alarm at what potential messages this self-professed 'Twisted Firestarter' might be imparting to the nation's youth. As a teaser of what was to come with The Prodigy's third album, it could hardly have been more impactful.

A veteran of the underground rave scene whose healthy distrust of authority and love of punk rock and hardcore hip-hop infused The Prodigy's second album, 1994's Music For The Jilted Generation, Liam Howlett remembers the creation of Firestarter with dancer-turned-vocalist Keith Flint as "a special moment."

"I remember driving back to Essex from London after recording Keith’s vocals and we played that shit over and over again," he recalled in 2018. "We knew it would change things. But we didn’t know it would change to the extent where Keith couldn’t walk down the street or walk into a pub without someone going, ‘Oi! It’s the Firestarter!’ But it gave us more strength to know who we are, and who we didn’t want to be. It gave us something to rebel against again.”

Nowadays, when we tune in to music, carefully manicured algorithms offer up songs which fit our natural rhythms and sit comfortably and seamlessly alongside our tried-and-trusted favourites for a smooth, linear, non-challenging listening experience. When it arrived on June 30, 1997 via XL Recordings, The Fat Of The Land was, in contrast, pure smash and grab. The aural equivalent of a bank heist, it found Liam Howlett pocketing a clutch of influences from the worlds of dance, rock and hip-hop and, aided by a supporting cast of like-minded mavericks, uniting them to create a fierce, confrontational sound that's since been ripped off countless times, but never repeated.

A tour through the album's three singles gives a flavour of its appeal. Each song is thunderously heavy in its own way but all of them bark with the creators' twisted sense of humour. Breathe followed Firestarter to the top of the UK charts in November 1996. This time, Howlett paired Flint on vocals with MC Maxim Reality, whose snaking body paint and fish-eyed contact lenses also gave him the appearance of an entity beamed down from another planet to remind us all how music can transport you to a different place. Backed by Howlett's ominous keyboard strokes, DJ Shadow-esque drum patterns and squeaking samples that repeated like a glitch in the matrix, Breathe freaked out fewer people than its predecessor, while delighting many more. The Prodigy's momentum was building.

The album's third and final single, Smack My Bitch Up, arrived one year later, seemingly intent on pouring petrol on the blaze that Firestarter first kindled. This time, the song and its controversial, Jonas Åkerlund-directed video – which followed a party girl on a gleefully hedonistic night out, shot from the protagonist's point of view – were banned from many TV and radio outlets, with the band eventually forced to declare that the track's title and lyrical refrain were absolutely not advocating violence against women. For by the time it emerged, The Prodigy were no longer an underground dance crew, but bonafide global superstars, with a platform to match, after The Fat Of The Land topped charts in the UK, US, Australia, Germany and a host of other European nations.

Such was the mainstream success of its three singles, that it's easy to forget that The Fat Of The Land is more than just a presentation case for Firestarter, Breathe and Smack My Bitch Up. From the futuristic hip-hop of Diesel Power and the Beastie Boys-sampling Funky Shit to the hypnotic Climbatize and the blistering, album-closing, cover of L7's Fuel My Fire, there is power and passion in every beat.

Fuel My Fire is a fitting conclusion for The Fat Of The Land. L7 vocalist Donita Sparks' lyrics seem to articulate the frustrations Howlett has voiced in interviews down the years: despite the epochal impact that his music has had on the British music scene in particular, The Prodigy often remain tolerated rather than recognised as one-offs, leaving them as at-best misunderstood and at-worst dismissed, possibly because they never even flirted with being part of the establishment.

While Oasis cosied up to New Labour only a couple of years after The Prodigy's Their Law had expressed its contempt for the Criminal Justice Act, Howlett refused be sucked into the machine.

"None of the success ever went to our heads," he insisted. "We weren’t interested in being rock stars, we were totally grounded. We always felt like any of us could have jumped out of the crowd on to the stage. That punk rock thing, without us ever thinking about it being punk rock. We just wanted to keep it real. It’s important for us to stay on a knife edge."

"And if another cunt calls me The Firestarter, I'll stab him in the fucking throat," Keith Flint warned, only half-joking.

The Prodigy's next 'proper' studio album, Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, wouldn’t arrive for another seven years: ripping up the blueprint once more, it relegated the estranged Flint and Maxim to appearances on remixed bonus tracks. The approach was somewhat forced upon Howlett - he and Flint in particular were barely communicating - but it showed once again that The Prodigy were nobody's puppets.

Not that Howlett wanted to disown what came before, for on The Fat Of The Land, the convergence of their creative powers and radical energy did more than start mosh pits at rave gigs: it showed that true originality and subversive thinking can't be suppressed. Anyone looking for music that makes them feel like they belong, could do worse than listen to this still incendiary blast of outsider art.

Evanescence’s enduring nu metal-era hit Bring Me To Life has surpassed Diamond status in the United States.

The Recording Industry Association Of America (RIAA) now recognises the 2003 single, taken from the Arkansas five-piece’s debut album Fallen, as having gone Platinum 11 times over in the US, meaning it’s sold 11 million units or amassed an equivalent via streaming services. A song or album needs to ship 10 million units or equivalent to go Diamond.

The RIAA previously acknowledged the single as having gone three-times Platinum in 2019. The new recognition marks Evanescence’s second Diamond-seller, following Fallen itself, which received the honour in 2022.

A Platinum certification means an album or single has sold one million units, but streaming statistics are also taken into account. 10 permanent downloads via streaming services equal one physical “sale”. 150 streams of a song also equal a sale.

Released on January 13, 2003, Bring Me To Life was the lead single from Fallen and Evanescence’s first single overall. It topped charts in the UK, Italy, Australia, Chile and Colombia and reached number five on the US Billboard 200. Its popularity was boosted by its presence on the soundtrack to 2003 superhero blockbuster Daredevil, which came out on February 14, 2003: three weeks before Fallen.

In 2022, the music video surpassed one billion views on YouTube, and the song reached one billion streams on Spotify in 2024.

Bring Me To Life featured a vocal duet between frontwoman Amy Lee and guest singer Paul McCoy, of then-Wind-Up Records labelmates 12 Stones. McCoy’s rap section and backing vocals were not originally intended for the song, but were included as a compromise with Wind-Up, who wanted the band to have a full-time male co-vocalist.

Talking to The Forty-Five in 2020, Lee said that she was scared of being “dropped” from Wind-Up for turning the label down. She added that having McCoy on the track was “hard” because “I had to start out [Evanescence’s career] with our first song feeling like I made a sacrifice on my art”.

Evanescence released their sixth album, Sanctuary, via BMG and Columbia on June 5. It was met with positive reviews, including four stars from Metal Hammer. Writer Holly Wright called it “the most vital thing Amy Lee has made in decades”.

The band are currently touring North America and will play at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada tonight (June 30). They’ll hit Europe in September, starting with a run of UK shows from September 8 to 13. See the full list of upcoming dates and get tickets via their website.

Evanescence were the cover stars on Metal Hammer issue 414 last month. Inside, Lee spoke about Sanctuary as well as the band’s two-decade-plus career. Order your copy now and get it delivered to your door.

We've reached that time in the lunar cycle where Peter Gabriel shares his latest single. This time it's the slow-building, jazzy I Belong To The Sky, which comes with artwork from Dutch visual artist Berndnaut Smilde.

As he did with 2023's i/o album, Gabriel is releasing a new track every full moon. I Belong To The Sky is the seventh track he's released ahead of his upcoming album, o\i, which is due out later this year.

“It's another song which has taken a while to grow,” says Gabriel of the new single. “It was a candidate, in some form, for the i/o record, but didn't get finished off, but it was always one of my favourites.

"The starting point of the song was the timpani tom-tom pattern which was inspired by an old film called Jazz On A Summer's Day and also a wonderful drummer called Chico Hamilton. I think he was the pioneer of the use of timpani sticks on the toms and I always loved that sound; calm and hypnotic. It set a really strong mood for me and the song grew up around it.

"I'm a strong believer that reality is more malleable than we imagine and that if you really make strong pictures of something happening, you really affect the chances of it materialising. Visualising… how dreams leave their nest, is the main topic of the song.

"One of the things that the technological revolution is doing is accelerating the time for thoughts to become material things. The time it takes to transform an idea into something material is being radically cut. In the song, the verses have a more dreamlike ‘on your back and look up at the sky‘ feeling and then in the chorus it's about the execution, the materialising.

"For many years now I let the ends run on every song because what often happens, which I found so frustrating, is you get to the end of a song and the band have just really locked in the groove, relaxed and it then all of a sudden, it stops… and the best feeling for a musician is when you're in the pocket, in the groove, and it's all happening around you. Consequently, I now let these endings loose and wonderful things happen.

One of the things I love about this track is that these amazing musicians let themselves loose and really take off - with Manu (Katché) driving. It's just great.”

Speaking of Smilde's Nimbus de Toekomst 1, 2019, which has been used for the single artwork and you can see below, Gabriel says, "I loved this image of the sky,” adds Gabriel. “The cloud brought inside - that mixture of outside and interior worlds. I think that's what the song is all about. This mix between the interior and the exterior and the transition between them. So, I was very happy that we were allowed to use this image."

Further details on the release plans for o\i through Real World will follow.

From Dance On A Volcano to Los Endos, Prog dissects each track on Genesis’ A Trick Of The Tail and rediscovers what made their first album without Peter Gabriel such an essential listen on release in 1976.

‘You’d better start doing it right,’ sings Phil Collins in opening track Dance On A Volcano. The seventh Genesis studio album, A Trick Of The Tail came with a whole bundle of pressure. With Peter Gabriel departed – but not “to go senile in the sticks,” he told the press – Genesis had questions and doubters to answer. Collins assumed they’d go on as a four-piece instrumental band.

“But my idea went out the window pretty much that first day,” he told this writer. “Tony and Mike said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous! We need a singer, because we’re songwriters.’”

Fortunately, although it took them a minute or two to realise it, they had an excellent singer within their ranks. “He had a lovely voice,” said Tony Banks. “He’d obviously done plenty on previous albums. But we weren’t sure he’d want to do it – he was the drummer, after all. And at the time, he didn’t seem to have the gravitas. But he sounded great.”

After many fruitless auditions with Collins teaching the applicants the vocals, it became clear who was the man for the job. “I do remember saying, ‘OK, I will give it a go,’” he recalled, “‘but don’t expect me to put on the costumes.’ Which is funny, as I was the one that had come from an acting background! It wasn’t a conscious decision to not do what Peter did; I just didn’t feel I could pull it off. So I became the ‘guy next door’. That’s what I did: I just stood there and sang.”

“In some ways that helped us,” Mike Rutherford remembered. “You couldn’t carry on Peter’s mystique – I mean, it’s not in Phil’s nature. With his character, lightening things between the longer, darker songs, it helped the balance of the shows.”

It also helped that the album was a completely inspired winner. A Trick Of The Tail is an exquisitely gauged blend of yearning melodies, heavy but not too heavy thumpers, affecting sad ballads and hypnotic soundbeds. The quartet had found all the right answers.

“We were lucky in a way,” recalled Banks. “Despite what people think of it now, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway – quite a difficult double album – sold less than Selling England By The Pound. We were in debt! So we were able now to come out with something more direct. It was a good place to be.”

An album built by strength but revealing frequent tenderness, A Trick Of The Tail is a very good place to be indeed. It’s a dreamlike world in which to immerse yourself, from the opening rumbles and flourishes.

Dance On A Volcano

“It’s a very arresting beginning to an album,” Banks said. “It gets you in there.” It certainly does, all but erupting. The atmosphere and tone of much of the record is established by the determined drama of this colossus, which also makes a cameo reappearance at the album’s finale. There’s no shortage of unpredictable rhythm, channelling Collins’ beloved Weather Report.

He was still razor sharp at the day job, and longtime fans were reassured the new Genesis chapter wasn’t about to take easy options. Yet for all the twisty interplay, the song surges ever forward, its motivations and momentum rich with excitement.

This was the first album to credit individual songwriters rather than the band as a whole, so it’s telling that this opener was a Rutherford-Banks- Collins-Hackett composition: everyone involved, pulling together, keen to not merely steady the ship but to get it going at a rate of knots.

“We’d started writing, and from the first day things just happened,” said Rutherford. “And after two or three weeks we thought, ‘This feels strong, feels good.’ It gave us the confidence to carry on.”

The listener was confident now, too: this Genesis was both accessible and aesthetically intriguing.

Entangled

And nowhere more so than on this, possibly Steve Hackett’s finest contribution to the band. Banks added the chorus, but it “was based on this really beautiful piece Steve had written,” he said. (His synth solo is simultaneously eerie and charming, and seems to change shape second by second.)

Seeing Hackett’s lyrics for the first time – ‘over the rooftops and houses’ – Collins perceived something of a Mary Poppins vibe about them. But its weird science (Freudian slumbers, hypnosis, sinister urges to sleep) also shares some DNA with Here Comes The Supernatural Anaesthetist from The Lamb. It’s a gorgeous reverie, the band resisting temptation to oversell its innate mood, and Collins’ prowess with soft, alluring numbers – as a singer he rarely does too much or too little, always serving the song – gets an early showcase.

Guy Garvey has said Entangled was a big influence on Elbow’s own 2001 breakthrough, Newborn, and that it’s the one Genesis track everybody in his band agrees on. (He’s eulogised it, and Ripples, on his BBC Radio 6 Music radio show.)

Hackett mused: “I’d gone off to do a solo album, Voyage Of The Acolyte, and it’s difficult then to go back and just write the odd bit or odd song. But on A Trick I’d come up with Entangled and got the ball rolling there. It was a happy camp for most of that period. There are some classics on that album.” Its gorgeous, hazy, stoned coda is a pinnacle.

Squonk

In a way it was Squonk that meant Collins had, as they say, passed the audition. The potential Gabriel replacements struggled with it – even the frontrunner – albeit the band were playing it in too high a key. Collins chuckled that it never occurred to them to give the singers a better chance by adapting, and that his bandmate didn’t offer him that courtesy either. “I had to make do.”

Inspired by the thumping drum sound on Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir (“My John Bonham moment,” said Collins), its lyrics were based on a mythical creature as illustrated in the snappily titled 1910 American fantasy- folklore book, Fearsome Creatures Of The Lumberwoods, With A Few Desert And Mountain Beasts; the squonk was apparently easy to hunt because it wept constantly.

The song is a powerful slab of mythology in its own right – even if it does end up, poignantly, as ‘just a pool of tears.’

Mad Man Moon

The relatively unsung masterpiece of the album, Banks’ composition leans into the multipart ‘suite’ format the band were elsewhere moving on from, and its Mellotron magic coaxes forth a mournful majesty. Banks has suggested the reason it gets less attention than some tracks is because they never played it live.

“It’s more, dare I say, a feminine track,” he told Prog. “I was very pleased when I wrote it, especially the verses. The noodling in the middle is quite fun, but if you listen carefully, it’s beyond my playing ability!” That’s a high bar, then.

With its ‘snowflake in June’ and ‘horse not made of sand,’ this is one mysterious aria. When asked about the line describing ‘a muddy pitch in Newcastle’ Banks said with a smile, “I’ve had a few phrases that you shouldn’t use: ‘Into the breadbin’ in All In A Mouse’s Night. ‘Double glazing’ in Domino. You either like those lines sticking out or you don’t. We’ve always been a divisive band, and I’ve always been happy with that.”

Robbery, Assault and Battery

“Coming from our underdog position,” reflected Collins, “when nobody expected much, A Trick was a bright light. Yes, our fans wanted the band to survive – and they preferred that we’d made it work within ourselves.”

This, though, is arguably the weakest link, as it comes across as Collins trying to “do” Gabriel essaying a Cockney-geezer accent. His childhood role as the Artful Dodger at drama school qualified him somewhat, but it’s awkward.

Penned chiefly by Banks, it’s squarely in the tradition of The Battle Of Epping Forest or Get ’Em Out By Friday, but although it has some charm and humour – and was swiftly dropped into their live set – it never quite breaks free of its chains. And between the romantic lushness of the classics either side of it, it’s almost a mood-killer.

Ripples…

Created via Rutherford’s 12-string guitars and some mid-section Rachmaninov-inspired piano from Banks, Ripples… was one of the first songs written with Collins’ voice in mind. Instantly a crowd favourite, with lovely looped guitars from Hackett, its gentle verses and showstopping lighters-in-the-air chorus exhibit the perfect balance of shrewd songcraft and ‘Genesis epic’ DNA. It gave them the confidence to write more ballads.

And if it’s lyrically vaguely in the same zone as The Lamia, with a flavour of fearing age and mortality, they were to nail their courage to the mast and pen actual love songs imminently. “It’s a strong chorus,” said Banks, with customary understatement.

“There’s still an aspect of the musical odyssey there,” pondered Hackett.

A Trick of the Tail

Banks composed the title track, some years earlier, circa Foxtrot. He’d been reading William Golding’s book The Inheritors (his 1955 follow-up to Lord Of The Flies) and began jamming around the rhythm of The Beatles’ Getting Better. He wanted “something lighter and more quirky.”

Revisiting a world of elves, sprites and aliens, and with a now-visible hint of the cautionary tale of exploiting outsiders in The Man Who Fell To Earth (the Nicolas Roeg film starring David Bowie that came out a month later), it’s a song that could only be Genesis – jaunty, catchy, but with an almost shy pride in its accidental grandeur and undeniable pathos.

It flopped as the showcase single, with Collins citing the video, where effects “shrank” him to a miniature man hopping about on the instruments, as the most cringeworthy of his entire career.

Los Endos

A marriage of overture and an end-of-night rock-out (it became an enduring and glorious live finale), Los Endos was a band composition initiated by Collins summoning his Brand X jazz-funk tastes, offering flashes of Santana and Weather Report.

It has since been revealed that its opening began life as part of It’s Yourself, a track cut from the album for length and which emerged later. Reprises of Dance On A Volcano and Squonk are interjected, there are false endings to die for, and over the fade Collins subtly sings, ‘There’s an angel standing in the sun.’ That quote from Supper’s Ready can be read as a final fond farewell and acknowledgement to Gabriel’s role in creating Genesis.

But, now there were four. And as A Trick Of The Tail got a great response from the press, quickly went gold (doubling any previous album’s sales) and paid off most of their debts, it heralded the band’s new beginning.

“I do feel the strain,” Collins once told this writer, “when it’s said so many times that, ‘It all fucked up when he started singing’ – because, really, we all changed. It was a metamorphosis. And I think we got better at knowing when to stop; to say, ‘OK, this song sounds great just like this.’”

Accessible but never predictable, warm but still weird, and beautiful without being bland, the album proved Genesis could thrive after their reshuffle. For all the Gabriel-era genius, they did sound great just like this. They were doing it right.

Steve Marriott was always going to be a star. By the age of 13 he was playing in bands around his native East London and appearing in the West End production of Oliver!, his hyperactivity an ideal fit for his role as the Artful Dodger. It was a presence he brought to bear on the Small Faces, the band he co-founded with fellow songwriter Ronnie Lane in 1965.

Along with drummer Kenney Jones and organist Ian McLagan, the quartet quickly became totems of the emergent mod culture, assimilating the hard grooves of American R&B and soul into a British vision of sharp suits and laddish bonhomie.

Both Marriott and Lane were unusually gifted songwriters, creating some of the most enduring 60s classics in the shape of Itchycoo Park, All Or Nothing, Tin Soldier and Lazy Sunday. But it was Marriott’s blue-eyed soul voice that set him apart. The Stones, The Who and the Sex Pistols were just a few who acknowledged his influence.

Marriott effectively broke up the Small Faces after a stormy gig in 1968, throwing his guitar to the floor in frustration at what he perceived as the group’s inability to break into more demanding artistic territory. While the others would go on to form The Faces, Marriott co-founded Humble Pie with Peter Frampton, Greg Ridley and Jerry Shirley, and cast off his past glories in favour of a much heavier brand of riff-centric blues rock.

Overshadowed by 70s contemporaries such as Led Zeppelin and The Who, Humble Pie were nonetheless a blistering proposition, especially live. America became their stronghold as the decade progressed, and they crammed in more than 20 US tours in one four-year period.

Humble Pie’s golden era was over by 1975. So, too, was Marriott’s. Divorced, hobbled by debt and with a serious drug and alcohol habit, he made a token attempt at a solo career before ill-fated reunions with both the Small Faces and Humble Pie. His final years saw him return to his roots in the pubs and clubs around London, fronting bands including Packet Of Three and The DTs.

Tragically, Marriott died in a house fire in 1991, having fallen asleep with a lit cigarette. “Though he could be hell to be around, he had a pure heart and I loved him as a brother,” McLagan wrote in his memoir, All The Rage. “He never stopped rocking.”

...and one to avoid

On January 29th, 1967, Jack Bruce came reeling out of Jimi Hendrix’s show at the Saville Theatre in Covent Garden, went home and channelled his shell shock into – arguably – the defining riff of the Sixties, and the song that arguably created the template for heavy metal.

“I don’t think Jack had really taken him in before,” Cream bandmate Eric Clapton told Rolling Stone. “After the gig, he came up with the riff. It was strictly a dedication to Jimi.”

“Pete [lyricist Pete Brown] and I had been working all night trying to come up with some songs,” Bruce said. “I just picked up my double bass and looked out the window and the sun was coming up. And I just started playing the riff of Sunshine Of Your Love.

"And Pete looked out the window and said: ‘It’s getting near dawn,’ and he wrote it down, just like in one of those really cheesy biopics. So we played it, and then Eric came up with that really nice turnaround part: ‘I’ve been waiting so long…’”

For a band brought together by their mutual virtuosity – paying respect to the flashiest guitarist on the London scene – it’s curious that Cream’s most famous moment was little more than a mid-tempo seven-note descending bassline. Yet those seven notes worked their magic, while providing a spine on which Bruce’s bandmates hung some of their career-best playing.

Quoting the melody of Blue Moon, Clapton’s deliciously languid solo found the hotshot guitarist reining in the flash, leaving weeping notes to hang, in the best showcase of his smooth, dark, so-called ‘woman’ tone.

Meanwhile, Ginger Baker pulsed on his toms with an almost hypnotic intensity – although the beat was a sticking point. In later years, Baker would claim he had the idea of emphasising the ‘1’ and ‘3’, but in documentaries, engineer Tom Dowd maintained it was his suggestion. “I said, ‘Have you ever seen an American Western where the Indian beat – the downbeat – is the beat? When they started playing that way, all of the parts came together.”

Bruce sensed that Sunshine Of Your Love could fly: the song had already been endorsed by Otis Redding and Booker T. Jones at Atlantic Studios. The suits were a harder sell, steering Clapton into the frontman role and bemused to be presented with woozy, hippy-ish fare rather than straight-up blues. Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegun, recalled Bruce in the Classic Albums series, didn’t sugarcoat his verdict: “He called it psychedelic hogwash.”

But the bassist’s vindication was emphatic. Released late in 1967, Sunshine Of Your Love would slow-burn to No.5 in the US, putting Cream into the American super-league and inspiring a generation of future rockers.

"Cream were a big influence on Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne told Classic Rock in 2006. "Listen to NIB [from Sabbath’s debut album] and compare it to Sunshine Of Your Love. The riff to NIB – Da-da-d-dah, dah-dah, da-da-d-dah – oh yeah! – is basically the same. I don’t know if it was a conscious decision at the time, but that’s it."

"Sunshine of Your Love is a desert island classic," said Samy Hagar. "I go back to that song again and again and again.

"That riff is probably the very first heavy metal riff ever," said Zakk Wylde. "That’s my mount riffmore."

"When Sunshine Of Your Love came out, it brought all that soulfulness together with some wonderful jazz influences in a way that wasn't self-conscious at all," mused Rod Argent. You had the wonderful imagery of Jack Bruce, you had Ginger Baker playing a drum part that no other drummer in the world would have played, and you had the wonderful lyricism of Clapton."

And almost a half-century later, when Sunshine Of Your Love was the inevitable encore at the all-star tribute concert for Bruce – who died of liver disease in 2014 – it was hard to imagine a finer sunset.

This week in the World Cup of rock, Parker Barrow romped to victory at the top of the group, while Alex Henry Foster and Beth Hart both went through to the knockout stage. What's more, VAR wasn't required once. So congratulations to all of them.

This week, another eight teams will take to the field, and that's the last laboured football analogy you'll hear from us. Keep hydrated, y'all.

Pieces Of Molly - Alligator

Kiwi rock'n'rollers Pieces Of Molly are back with another single from their upcoming album, and hallelujah. For Alligator is a masterclass in no-fucks-given chaos, careening along in a righteous, headlong rush towards damnation, a trail of spent pistons in its wake, gang vocals giving the chorus a degree of singalong friendliness at odds with the pandemonium elsewhere and an utterly savage guitar solo. A word of caution: the video is not vegetarian-friendly.

Green Lung - Necropolitan Line

Doomy heavy metal Londoners rock the bejeezus out of this rip-roaring cut from their forthcoming album, Necropolitan. One of the punchiest tracks on said record, which promises to offer the most fun you can have in the name of historic cemeteries (seven noted sites in London, to be precise). Plus they look and sound like they’re having a total blast in this artfully, lovably lo-fi video – all swirling psychedelic backdrops and face-melting performances. Nice.

Bad Nerves - Network

Midway through a breakneck year, in which they’ve pogoed between continents at a phenomenal pace – as both headliners and support band – Essex’s finest power-pop punks release their heaviest track yet. Still fast, still furious and now with a darker heart, guitars are newly beefed up and stretched out over three turbocharged minutes, without losing the lightness of touch that made them such a charismatic prospect in the first place.

These Wicked Rivers - Horse To Water

And now for a lovely summery, loose-limbed barrelful of southern rock’n’roll by way of Derby – complete with stylishly granny-chic helpings of paisley, lampshades, bolo ties, serious hats and various other visual accoutrements of the TWR miniverse. Imagine rocking up at a BBQ with Blackberry Smoke, armed with a cooler of beers, at sunset, and you’re in the right space for Horse To Water.

The Meffs - Where Did It All Go Wrong?

Perhaps our favourite slice so far of the Essex punks’ second album, Business (coming out in September), Where Did It All Wrong? rides on a rolling tide of powerful, light-footed drums and buzzsaw guitars. Catchy and appetisingly enraged, with a voice to match – courtesy of peroxide-headed singer/guitarist Lily. Going to one of the Joan Jett & The Blackhearts UK shows this week? Get there early and catch these guys, who’ll be supporting.

Radio Everything - Ignoramus Stupidatus

This came out on one of the hottest days of the year so far, and it offered the sort of bright, zingy boost equal only to a freezerful of Fab lollies. Or some quality time in a supermarket chiller aisle. But yes, the latest tune from Chris Catalyst’s gleefully daft cartoon robot metal side project thing is a banger – light, bright pop rock with the expansiveness and urgency of Devin Townsend and lyrics full of incisive disenchantment at the world today. And what says 'happy summer!' more than that?

Bywater Call - Is This Thing On?

Built on delicate acoustic guitars, percussive beats and cascades of strings punctuated by lead fiddle touches, the Canadian rock n’ soul ensemble’s latest is stripped-back without sacrificing the lushness that seems to imbue all their work. Fancy more of that soulful Americana, with healthy echoes of Tedeschi Trucks Band in its sound and overall spirit? Their new album, Broken Souvenirs, comes out in July.

Return to Dust - Sweet Escape

This year, we've heard a lot of new music from bands whose sound seems almost entirely informed by bands that peaked in the first half of the 1970s, but LA rockers Return To Dust are not among them. Instead, Sweet Escape sounds like it emerged from the Puget Sound murk in the early 90s, with moody Alice in Chains riffing matched by a vocal from Matty Bielawski that could go head-to-head with Layne Staley at his most dramatic. The band's debut headline London show next month is already sold out, and grunge, it would appear, is very much back.

Van der Graaf Generator frontman Peter Hammill has announced that he will release his first new album for five years, Tears In Time, through Esoteric Antenna Records on September 25.

The album is a collection of songs that have been recorded at various locations of his Terra Incognita studio between 1991 and 2026, and is his first since 2021's In Translation album, itself a selection of cover songs, making Tears In Time Hammill's first selection of new material his first in almost a decade, since 2017's From The Trees.

"These songs have been a long time in the gestation and making," Hammill explains. "I’m pleased with the way they’ve worked out. They seem to hang together as a group, even though there’s a wide range of styles represented here. I’ve not stopped yet and I’m very happy that songs still seem to find their way into my hands."

Tears In Time will be available on both vinyl and CD. You can see the new album artwork and tracklisting below.

Pre-order CD.

Pre-order vinyl.

Peter Hammill: Tears In Time
1. For A Rainy Day
2. The Wheels
3. Heavy Weather
4. Angle Of The Curve
5. So Much Water
6. Tabula Rasa
7. Oh The End
8. Red Flags (In The Sunset)
9. You'll Never Know
10. The Half Of It
11. And When He Ran

Nightwish frontwoman Floor Jansen is back with a new solo single called Run.

The song brings the Dutch singer back to her symphonic metal roots, following her detour into pop-rock with her 2023 debut solo album Paragon. It also likely precedes the release of her second album, which is as-yet-unannounced. Listen below.

Jansen comments: “To me, Run is about no longer making yourself smaller to fit into a shape that was never yours. It’s about taking off the mask, trusting your own movement, and daring to be seen that way. Musically, it feels like the start of something heavier and more direct, but still honest, still melodic, still completely me.”

To accompany the release, the singer has announced details of a 2027 European and South American tour. The European leg will kick off on January 14 at Trix in Antwerp, Belgium and wrap up at 013 at Tilburg, Netherlands on February 13. The sole UK date will take place at Electric Brixton in London on January 16.

The South American leg will be a three-show run kicking off at an undisclosed venue in Santiago, Chile on April 22, before continuing through Bangers Open Air festival in São Paulo, Brazil on April 24 and another unknown venue at Buenos Aires, Argentina on April 25.

All dates are available below. Tickets can be bought now via Jansen’s website.

Jansen, who joined Nightwish as a touring vocalist in 2012 before going full-time in 2013, confirmed last year that she has been recording her second solo album, from which Run is likely taken. Talking to Metal Hammer in 2024, she said that one song on the upcoming album dates back to before the birth of her second daughter Lucy in October 2023.

“Nothing is finished yet,” she teased, “but it will come.”

Jansen is continuing her solo career while Nightwish remain on live hiatus. Before the release of the Finnish stars’ latest album, 2024’s Yesterwynde, they confirmed that they will not perform again until the next album cycle kicks off. The reasons for the hiatus have never been fully explained, with the band calling them “personal” in a statement. Jansen hinted to Hammer that the lineup doesn’t currently have the “energy” to tour.

“Everything with Nightwish, we’ve done with 120 percent,” she said, “but if you don’t have the energy to do that, it’s better to take a break. It’s as simple as that. It would be great to play it but…”

As well as hitting the road in 2027, Jansen will tour mainland Europe this summer and play two standalone shows in the Netherlands in October and November. Her next performance will be at the Bospop festival in Weert, Netherlands on July 9.

Floor Jansen 2027 tour dates:

• Jan 14: Antwerp Trix, Belgium
• Jan 15: Paris Le Bataclan, France
• Jan 16: London Electric Brixton, UK
• Jan 22: Pratteln Konzertfabrik Z7, Switzerland
• Jan 27: Prague Roxy, Czech Republic
• Jan 29: Warsaw Progresja, Poland
• Feb 04: Gothenburg Pustervik, Sweden
• Feb 05: Stockholm Berns, Sweden
• Feb 07: Helsinki House of Culture, Finland
• Feb 12: Utrecht Tivoli, Netherlands
• Feb 13: Tilburg 013, Netherlands
• Apr 22: Santiago TBA, Chile
• Apr 24: São Paulo Bangers Open Air, Brazil
• Apr 25: Buenos Aires TBA, Argentina

After last week's epic four-day Amazon Prime Day event, the dust has finally settled on the online shopping giant's first major sale of the year.

There were some neat savings on vinyl and CDs, turntables, rock and metal t-shirts and pop-culture collectables – and while the vast majority of discounts have disappeared, there are still a smattering of bargains to be picked up... if you're quick.

I've highlighted 15 of my favourites below, but I have no knowledge how long these prices will stick around for, so if you see something you like, grab it while you can.

US deals

UK deals

If you were to time-warp back to 2001 and tell people that Slipknot will create one of the most vulnerable and evocative ballads in metal, they’d laugh in your face. The Nine rocketed to prominence around the new millennium by being the angriest band of the nu metal takeover: their music was extreme, their live shows anarchic and their appearance deliberately shit-your-pants terrifying. However, continued relevance requires musical evolution – and that’s precisely what the Des Moines renegades underwent as the noughties resumed.

After putting the metal world on notice with their furious debut then doubling down on Iowa (still the angriest album to top the UK charts), Slipknot grew beyond unfettered rage. Members took breaks from the 18-armed wrecking machine in less destructive side-projects and/or got clean from substances. When they regrouped to make 2004’s Vol. 3, they craved acoustic guitars, bigger singalongs and a more colourful emotional palette. That pursuit then reached its apex four years later, with the creation of the band’s softest and most emotionally exposed song: Snuff.

Snuff was controversial at first. When released as the 11th song of Slipknot’s fourth album All Hope Is Gone, reviewers were apprehensive, while fans were either confused or incensed. Many likened its melodic singing and clean guitar tones to Corey Taylor’s hard rock second job Stone Sour. Others, even worse, lambasted the ballad as a sellout move, mocking what were once metal’s rowdiest iconoclasts for lamenting a breakup with lyrics like “It took the death of hope to let you go”.

However, Snuff has since been reappraised as one of Slipknot’s greatest achievements. Its release as a single in 2009, with a cinematic music video directed by percussionist Shawn “Clown” Crahan, broadened the band’s appeal and saw it resonate with anyone who’s felt emotions as universal as heartbreak or self-loathing. In 2023, The Nine were forced to add the ballad to their setlist – such was the intensity of fans demanding to hear it live.

In much the same way Snuff was unusual for Slipknot musically, its songwriting was different to how The Nine normally operated. Late bassist Paul Gray and drummer Joey Jordison were the outfit’s principal composers, especially during the volatile sessions for Vol. 3, but the roots of this song were solely with Corey.

“I get into arguments with fans all the time about this: everybody’s like, ‘Oh, it’s just a leftover Stone Sour song,’” the singer recalled during a 2021 fan Q&A. “No, I wrote that for Slipknot. I didn’t expect them to use it, to be honest, but I wrote it specifically for Slipknot, because it was regarding one of the heaviest times of my life.”

Snuff directly addresses Corey’s emotions at the end of his first marriage, which lasted from 2004 to 2007. “It was one of the heaviest disappointments, one of the heaviest heartbreaks, I’d ever felt,” he said of the split. “It took years to get through, even after moving on and being in different relationships. That haunted me for a long time. It’s one of those things where you knew you weren’t supposed to be together, but there was something there that felt so good. When it’s ripped away from you, you just feel like there’s a hole in your chest.”

The lyrics unpick the complexity of that: ending a relationship where there’s disappointment and hurt yet, also, still affection. “If you love me, let me go,” Corey declares at the start of the second verse, later adding juxtapositions like “You couldn’t hate enough to love” and “Angels lie to keep control”.

Although Corey never expected Slipknot to go for the song, Joey and Paul were hugely impressed by it. Joey secretly recorded a drum track to accompany the frontman’s demo and, when he presented the new package to Corey, the singer burst into tears. Meanwhile, the bassist was an ardent supporter of the tender track to the rest of the band.

“If Paul hadn’t championed that song, I don’t think we would have recorded it,” Corey told Kerrang! in 2018. “But he loved it and saw the potential with it and really wanted us to do it.”

Despite the initial shaky response to Snuff when it was first heard on All Hope Is Gone, its re-examination started as soon as its single release. The song made it to number six on the US Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, a career-best that the band didn’t outdo until 2019’s Unsainted, and number two on the US Mainstream Rock chart. It’s nowadays the second-most-streamed All Hope Is Gone song (behind Psychosocial), while the video currently boasts 163 million YouTube views, which is more than such beloveds as Wait And Bleed and Left Behind.

Beyond cold, hard numbers, Snuff also gained newfound sentimental power following the death of Paul in May 2010, aged 38. The late bassist’s diehard support for the song saw Corey play it to him as a tribute during his solo shows. In this new context, the heartbroken lyrics were reapplied from a breakup to an untimely passing, and videos of Corey getting emotional while singing them went viral in the 2010s, reasserting its emotional impact.

“When Paul passed, the song suddenly became less about the dark side of love and it became about triggering memories of him,” Corey told the BBC Radio 1 Rock Show in 2017. “He loved that song, so it really reminds me of him, especially when I play it live. It’s strange there are a lot of times where I can’t even remember the level of potency that maybe the original emotion had when I recorded it – it just means something different now.”

Today, Snuff remains both a potent tribute and one of metal’s most adored ballads. No, the Slipknot of 2001 could not, and would not, have written something this sensitive and exposing. But that only makes the song a testament to the fact that – beyond playing guitar or having a nice voice – one of the key skills of excellent musicians is personal growth.

“I’m 42 years old, and I’m just discovering a side of myself that’s been a mystery for a long time,” says Daniel Tompkins. The TesseracT vocalist has just announced his new band, Prince Of Failure, a 50/50 collaboration with Chimp Spanner mastermind Paul Ortiz.

Their self-titled debut album, out now via Kscope, finds him addressing his life-long struggles with ADHD, and the pair’s insecurities operating within the music industry.

“I think it’s extremely cathartic as an experience,” Tompkins says of laying it all bare. “This is a very poignant moment of time in my life. Having ADHD isn’t a superpower – but what I can do is turn pain into poetry, and this album does that.”

He continues, “Being diagnosed with ADHD and autistic traits has made me question everything. It’s like growing up with a shadow version of yourself that you can’t see – you just sense it.

“So, the Prince Of Failure is a representation of the insecurity and the ongoing inner turmoil of trying to fit into this world where my ADHD and autistic traits are in conflict with one another.”

The pair are well acquainted, having worked together on 80s synth project Zeta and on Ruins, a heavy reimagining of Tompkins’ first solo album, Castles. “There have been very few times in my career where I’ve clicked with someone like I do with Paul,” he says. “He’s an amazing songwriter. Without him, it’d be like losing an arm.”

The record centres on a love of nu metal, which harks back to the music of their youth, where the story begins. But their prog sensibilities also see them “smashing things together that sound cool.”

“The difference is that the prog isn’t put front and centre – but it’s there in the background,” Ortiz adds. “It adds a little bit of spice and complexity, but it doesn’t make the songs feel uncomfortable. It’s really affirming to have a body of work that we’re both really proud of.”

The project’s timing has a special meaning for Ortiz. “As someone who swings between loving what I do and feeling like I could sell my guitars and never do it again, it’s really affirming to have a body of work that we’re both really proud of,” he explains.

“Working with Dan has pulled me out of a long slump. It’s really amazing.”

Prince Of Failure is on sale now.

The Kinks’ 80s revival, which actually kicked off in the latter half of the 70s, followed several years of concept album indulgence. It began when Ray Davies stopped squinting at the village greens of Albion and embraced the neon glare of American arenas, and Give The People What They Want was the moment the band fully weaponised their legacy, trading music-hall whimsy for slabs of radio-ready arena rock.

The title track was a snarling commentary on media-fed bloodlust that felt decades ahead of its time. Meanwhile, Destroyer cannibalised the iconic riff from 1964's All Day and All of the Night and reintroduced the title character from 1970's Lola. It really shouldn’t have worked, but it did.

Although Ray accounted for 100% of the songwriting credits, brother Dave was the secret weapon, his guitar slashing through the mix with an intensity that suggested the band intended on going toe-to-toe with the new wave kids and power poppers who’d nicked their blueprints.

True to its title, Give The People What They Want was the sound of The Kinks giving the public exactly what they demanded: commercial, radio-friendly arena-bound rock'n'roll. Suddenly, the British Invasion had a sequel.

• Stream on Spotify
• Stream on Apple Music

Every week, Album of the Week Club listens to and discusses the album in question, votes on how good it is, and publishes our findings, with the aim of giving people reliable reviews and the wider rock community the chance to contribute.

Join the group now.

Other albums released in August 1981

• Torch - Carly Simon
• Shot of Love - Bob Dylan
• Tattoo You - The Rolling Stones
• Dark Continent - Wall of Voodoo
• Sleep No More - The Comsat Angels
• Pretenders II - Pretenders
• Scissors Cut - Art Garfunkel
• Fire of Love - The Gun Club
• Brothers of the Road - The Allman Brothers Band
• Maiden Japan - Iron Maiden
• New Traditionalists - Devo
• Short Back 'n' Sides - Ian Hunter
• Time Exposure - Little River Band
• Whitford/St. Holmes - Brad Whitford and Derek St. Holme

What they said...

"Throughout the record, the band kicks up a storm, rocking out with a surprising amount of precision, and although Ray Davies' writing isn't as strong as it was on the group's two previous albums, he has contributed a set of professional hard rock that is distinguished by solid hooks and a clever sense of humour." (AllMusic)

"Hook-laden and hard-rocking, this is the best-crafted Kinks album in over a decade, which means that for someone who's found Ray Davies's world-view increasingly mean-spirited and mush-brained, it's also the biggest turnoff. Back when he was chairing the Village Green Preservation Society, Ray's dotty lyricism put his nostalgia in appealing and appropriate musical perspective; his current clean-cut arena style makes him sound smug and strident, as well it should." (Robert Christgau)

"Ray’s paranoia fires up the band on its first effort of the Ronald Reagan–Margaret Thatcher era. He may have been too old to be a real punk, but this non-concept album about selling out demonstrates he sure had the attitude for it. The spitfest is tempered by one perfect ballad (Better Things) and the most complex portrait of pedophilia ever crooned (Art Lover)." (Blender)

What you said...

Nigel Mawdsley: The UK's record-buying public abandoned The Kinks in the early seventies. Supersonic Rocket Ship from 1972 was the band's last sizeable chart hit before a rerelease of Come Dancing" in 1983.

The Kinks' LP chart positioning was even worse in the UK. Their last stand-alone studio album to reach the charts was Something Else in 1967. (This doesn't take into account the re-release of The Village Green Preservation Society in 2018). But Ray Davies never lost his songwriting ability. Indeed, The Kinks became superstars in the USA from the mid-1970s onwards.

One of the many Kinks' LPs to deservedly hit the Billboard charts was Give The People What They Want, a top 20 smash in 1981.

Give The People What They Want is an amazing rock album from start to finish. The two opening tracks, Around The Dial and the album's title track, state the album's intentions, both great rocking tracks with brilliant lyrics and amazing fretwork from Dave Davies. The superb production really whetted my appetite for more when I first heard it.

The other notable rockers on the album are the punky Add It Up, Back To Front, and the minor US hit single Destroyer. The latter track cleverly intersperses the All Day And All Of The Night riff into the song and really does catch the listener between headbanging and dancing!

Elsewhere on the album, Ray Davies courts controversy with his song Art Lover, with wistful lyrics that should be listened to intently before the listener makes a judgment! Yo-Yo is an amazing song about a problematic relationship with some equally amazing lyrics.

The lyrics to some of Davies' songs on the album dealt with difficult subject matters ahead of their time. A Little Bit Of Abuse is about domestic violence and is very powerful lyrically and musically, whilst Killer's Eyes sees Davies seemingly taking the role of a psychiatrist trying to fathom out why his subject matter became a killer. Better Things" closes the album, a song that saw The Kinks return, albeit with a minor hit, to the UK charts. It deserved better!

Like many of The Kinks' albums from the mid to late seventies and early eighties, Give The People What They Want gets a very rare 10/10!

Zak Browne: I just listened to the whole album for the first time in quite a while. I heard a lot of songs that sound like they could be found on albums by The Replacements. I think Better Things is a great closer, and Predictable and Yo-Yo were my other two favourites. 8/10.

John Davidson: Like many rock fans in the UK, I pretty much ignored everything created by the Kinks after Lola.

This album from 1981 sounds very new wave mixed with American pop-rock. The Knack, XTC, Elvis Costello, The Pretenders, etc., may all have taken inspiration from The Kinks, but this album seems to be a case of the masters aping their apprentices.

On Add it Up, for example, it sounds like Andy Partridge is singing lead for Blondie. Destroyer recycles All Day And All Of The Night and references back to Lola without being quite as good as either of their previous hits.

My first impression was that I wasn't keen, but I think it has enough quirky charm that with more listens, I might be won over. A 6/10 just now, but that might go up.

Greg Schwepe: The story goes that Dave Davies took a razor blade to the speaker in his amplifier so it would rattle and distort more as the volume was increased. And the rest, they say, is history. And if it’s good ol’ distortion and power chords you want, along with a dose of witty and incisive lyrics you’ll pay attention to, then Give The People What They Want does just that.

This was The Kinks' first studio album after the highly successful live album One For The Road. That one got lots of airplay here in the US in my area, and for many (me included), hearing new, recharged, revved-up versions of many of their classics led to an increased interest in new material from an established classic rock band.

The album kicks off with an ode to their favourite DJ in Around The Dial. And the title track after that, um, yes, gives the people what they want. You get the idea. Fun, bouncy, driving rock that has you reaching for the volume knob. It’s radio-friendly 80s Kinks! And it’s like they were saying, “Yeah, we want to be played on the radio again… so here it is.”

Destroyer is a mashup of The Kinks' history. You get a mention of “Lola” in the lyrics and the riff of All Day and All of the Night. Double bonus.

Overall, this is a great collection of songs that ushered in a new era of the band that would result in newfound popularity from exposure on the radio and MTV. They wouldn’t “come dancing” until the follow-up to this one, but this opened the door to a great run of 80s albums. 8 out of 10. I got what I wanted.

Mike Canoe: For the past few years, I have haphazardly tried to find the right Kinks album to suggest to the group. The one with Lola on it? One of the first two albums, even though they were more than 60 years old? Wait, All Day and All of the Night was a non-album single? #@%&!!! Definitely not Preservation Society or Muswell Hillbillies, which were severely lacking in power chords and did not rock.

Give the People What They Want was probably the strongest contender, but, with its 1981 release date, it made me feel like a Johnny-come-lately Kinks fan, which, of course, is exactly what I was because that's the album I came in with, thanks to the brilliantly paranoid Destroyer. The full album holds up well as a rock album and quite possibly their last one, once the nostalgia-fueled Come Dancing changed everything.

It also shows how influential the Kinks were to bands not named Van Halen. A Little Bit of Abuse sounds like the Kinks covering Elvis Costello covering the Kinks. Around the Dial, Back to Front, Killer's Eyes and Add It Up could all be on any number of albums by second-wave UK punk bands. The creepy yet beautifully sad Art Lover makes me think that we'll get to a Stranglers album someday.

Give the People What They Want is fun but still has bite, clever but not too artsy and pretentious about it. And it even has a cameo by Lola.

Philip Qvist: My views about the Kinks: When asked to pick my favourite songs from the year when I was born (1964, yes, I'm that old) then You Really Got Me is my standout track.

I would rate them as one of the most underrated bands from the 60s. There was so much brotherly love between Ray and Dave Davies that they always guaranteed a punch-up or two in the recording studio.

The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society is a masterpiece of an album. That all said, they did come out with some great songs throughout the 60s and early 70s.

I knew their early 70s hit Lola was one of their last big hits until the rather excellent Come Dancing hit the charts in 1983, and I was also aware of their Live 1980 record One For The Road, but what I didn't realise was that they had been releasing more than a few studio albums between those two hits, including this one, Give What The People Want.

I gave it a couple of spins, and while I don't think it quite matches their 60s output, it isn't a half-bad record. Ray Davies' songwriting is still top-notch, brother Dave's lead guitar still rocks out as and when required, while the songs all have that distinct Kinks sound.

The title track, the mash-up of Lola and other tracks that is Destroyer, Yo-Yo and Predictable were my favourite tracks on this record. I don't think the band created new boundaries with Give The People What They Want, but it did prove that The Kinks were still alive and kicking as the 80s began, and that definitely wasn't a bad thing. A 7 from me.

Final score: 7.82 (57 votes cast, total score 446)

Join the Album Of The Week Club on Facebook to join in. The history of rock, one album at a time.

In 1967 Procol Harum emerged from the ashes of a modest Southend beat group to score an all-time best-selling single. But instead of milking A Whiter Shade Of Pale, their debut album wove epic fantasies into a proto-prog classic. We explored the story with the late Gary Brooker in 2012.

When your first single is one of the most lauded in history, there’s a possibility it can overshadow not just your inspired debut album, but your entire subsequent career. Gary Brooker, who co-wrote and sang A Whiter Shade Of Pale for Procol Harum, isn’t one to moan, however.

“I think anybody would be happy to have such a success,” he shrugs. You’d think so, but musicians in comparable situations tend to whine. Brooker’s not having that: “Oh no,” he says. “Suddenly, everything was available. It was only ever a dream to go to America at the beginning of 1967. I would imagine playing in San Francisco, but I didn’t really even know where San Francisco was! But within a few months, there we were. So it opened a lot of doors...”

As did Procol Harum, their first album, which laid some of the foundation stones of what was to become progressive, or symphonic, rock – even though Brooker thinks of it mostly as “modern blues for its time, often with a dark edge.” Recorded after the stratospheric success of A Whiter Shade Of Pale, its original release did not include that one-off smash, and sales suffered. Wasn’t that a strange decision?

“I’d entirely agree with you – today,” says Brooker. “In fact, even a year later, I would have. But the point was, that had sold enormous numbers. I should think that everybody – I’m not exaggerating, everybody – had it. So we felt it would be cheating people to make them buy it again. That was our logic. It made perfect sense at the time.”

Various reissues over the years, and even of-the-time releases in other territories, have had the track-listing meddled with, often including the underrated follow-up single Homburg too; but it’s the band’s original, pure debut album we’ll discuss here. “I have to cast my mind back 44 years,” says Brooker, “but I gave it a listen this morning and I heard a lot in it, considering...”

By ‘considering,’ he means the production. “You have to see through it – it’s disappointing. For some reason, it came out in mono. Which, as stereo had been around for a few years, is hard to believe! One can blame Denny Cordell, the producer, for that. And the four-track machine. So there are limitations, just in the sound of it.

“The guitar solo in Kaleidoscope seems to have got completely lost. When you can hear Robin Trower’s solos they’re absolutely magnificent, ground-breaking. We were live in the studio: he’d be blasting it out, BJ Wilson would be thrashing like an octopus in a bathtub – we were doing things there that people hadn’t done before. So there were high points...”

There certainly were. From the dramatic opening gambit of Conquistador (re-recorded with a symphony orchestra, a hit in ’72 – although Brooker wrote it with The Beach Boys in mind), through the strangely warped rock of Something Following Me and Cerdes (Outside The Gates Of), to the epic instrumental early set-closer Repent Walpurgis, it fuses riffs, bass lines, classical tropes and psychedelic detours, plus surrealist lyrics, into a pulsating, prescient whole.

“It wasn’t typical,” says Brooker. “Neither were we. Where the world was at was ‘smiling beat bands,’ and it certainly didn’t have that atmosphere. Probably just a year before, something like Frank Ifield had been number one. Procol Harum seemed very, very different. That’s how things felt. We were moodier. We were serious about it.”

The album’s genesis was about Brooker and Keith Reid “getting together a bunch of musicians. We had a concept of what we wanted: bluesy guitar, bass and drums, a Hammond organ, then me on piano and singing.” After cutting his teeth as a Southend teenager playing with The Paramounts (seven singles; tours with the Stones and The Beatles), Brooker had ‘retired’ at 21 to become a songwriter. “I’d been bashing around in the van on the road for years. I’d retired from active duty to sit at the piano.”

Introduced to lyricist Reid by producer Guy Stevens, the pair clicked instantly as a creative unit. Demoing their new songs, they realised Brooker was the best man to sing them. They were the core of a new band before they knew it; Brooker’s retirement was short-lived.

With a name suggested by Stevens in honour of a friend’s blue Persian cat (the cat’s name was a misspelling of the Latin phrase for “beyond these things” – Procul Harun), they sought players with influences ranging from Booker T & The MG’s to Dylan to Bach and Tchaikovsky. It took two or three months, but musicians were selected, and the debut single got them off to a flyer.

The album was well under way, but “we decided that it wasn’t quite hitting it,” Brooker recalls. “It wasn’t gelling in certain areas.” So changes were made. “We’d already auditioned a lot of people. Some had turned out to be heroin addicts; all sorts of problems. So I suggested BJ Wilson as drummer and Robin Trower as guitarist, both of whom I’d played with in The Paramounts. Everyone realised they were great. I’d known that anyway, but hadn’t wanted to say, ‘I’ve found the boys, take it or leave it!’”

The line-up was completed with bassist David Knights and Hammond player Matthew Fisher (credited as sole writer of Repent Walpurgis and a man who, along with Brooker, presumably knows something about the minutiae of writing credits after the infamous legal case regarding his contribution to A Whiter Shade Of Pale). They went back into the studio and re-recorded everything. And so a 60s landmark ensued?

“People generalise about ‘the 60s.’ It was 10 years. But ’67 was a landmark... things did change. Like the attitude of young bands creating the music. Was it all long hair, drugs and Carnaby Street? Well, yes, it was! It was part of life in that era.

“What we thought could work became different. The building blocks came from my influences of rock, blues, classical, everything – but when we were asked what ‘sort’ of music it was, we said, ‘Well, it’s our music.’ That was the only answer there was!

“‘Progressive’ rock was a title that was made up a couple of years later. I’m not sure who was the first to be actually called that. But it did involve a lot more movement and thought about the chords and the bass lines. And I think that’s evident from this album.”

Brooker finds if hard to say whether he noticed its influence on others. “We went to America: the album was very big there. They weren’t all that interested in A Whiter Shade Of Pale – they loved these songs. I’ve met musicians over the years who’ve said it really woke them up. If you’ve got somebody who has a different way of doing things and has a big off-the-wall hit, I’m sure others thought: ‘Well, we’ll try doing that!’

“I was putting my classical influences in, little quotes here and there, which strengthened it. On our second album, A Salty Dog, we decided we’d do an 18-minute-long semi-connected suite – ‘the great work,’ we called it. Sound effects; an orchestra. That was very unusual at the time, and after that King Crimson and Yes showed you can do anything...”

Reid’s lyrics were also unusual, displaying a determination to open up doors of perception. People still debate their meaning. Try A Christmas Camel, which offers not only ‘some Arabian sheikh most grand impersonates a hot-dog stand,’ but also ‘some Arabian oil well impersonates a padded cell.’

“Don’t forget I start that one with, ‘My Amazon six-triggered bride…’” Brooker points out. “They were challenging, yes, but that’s what I liked about them. Different, yes; yet I understood all the colours, the images. Everything about them rang a chord with me. I didn’t find it weird. On reflection, how on Earth can you start a song singing about your Amazon six-triggered bride? Or sing, ‘Outside the gates of Cerdes sits the two-pronged unicorn’?

“I wouldn’t say I understood them, in the sense of seeing exactly what was being said, but in Keith’s words there were a lot of references to mysterious women. There’s often a mysterious woman involved.”

Was such material harder to sing than ‘ooh baby baby…’? “The question is not was it difficult, but was it in fact a stroke of genius to be able to sing those things and make them believable? I’m being immodest here, but I made those things sound like: ‘Yeah, here’s a lyric, here’s a song.’

“When Keith gave me Something Following Me, I just thought: ‘Well, it’s the blues.’ This guy’s got a problem, but it’s not that he woke up this morning and his car had gone. It’s just that this guy’s tombstone is following him everywhere and he’s right on the edge. Some of the great minds have pondered over what they mean, these ‘hard to understand’ lyrics – but they’re easy also.”

Robin Trower says he hasn’t heard the album for decades and “never really listens to any bands of the progressive rock genre.” He does recall: “The sessions for that album were relaxed and fun, and the combination of players worked very well, with everyone slotting in easily. I find Keith’s lyrics very hypnotic, and Gary came up with excellent complementary music for them. I don’t think I could bear to listen to it today though, as I know I’d be unhappy with my guitar playing.”

Brooker isn’t. He praises Knight’s bass (“fantastic”), highlights the contrasts (“Mabel was light relief between all the drama”) and says that when Procol Harum play live now, and 20-year-olds call out for She Wandered Through The Garden Fence, a part of him thinks, ‘Oh, it was worth it...’

Just the start of a career that’s been so much more than the bridal train of A Whiter Shade Of Pale, that debut record – a prog dawn – has been praised by everyone from Jimmy Page to Elton John. Paul McCartney would bring the other three Beatles and Pete Townshend to see Procol Harum play.

“They liked what we were doing,” says Brooker. “From the writing point of view, it was a semi-conscious bid to do something that wasn’t being done, and perhaps everybody else picked up on that.”

We’ve all done stuff we’re unhappy with, but when you’re a musician, it usually means it’s heard by thousands or even millions of people – and once it’s out in the world, there’s no taking it back. Here are some of rock and metal’s finest taking a dump on the songs they wrote and wish they hadn’t.

Jonathan Davis (Korn)

“All In The Family [from 1998’s Follow The Leader] is the worst song ever. It’s horrible. We were all drunk in the studio and I was trying to rap. At the time, we were having a good time, but now I just cringe. I’ve got nothing against Fred [Durst, co-vocalist], it just sucks! We were out of our minds drunk! It shouldn’t have made the record.” (via Metal Hammer)

Lemmy

“I’m sick to death of Ace Of Spades now. We didn’t become fossilised after that record, you know, we’ve had quite a few good releases since then. But the fans want to hear it so we still play it every night. For myself, I’ve had enough of that song.” (via White Line Fever)

Kerry King (ex-Slayer)

“There’s a handful of songs in our history that I’m like, ‘Goddamn, I hate that song.’ Like, I fucking despise Desire and I hate Cleanse The Soul.” (via Rolling Stone)

Ronnie James Dio

[On 1983’s Rainbow In The Dark]: “It’s a song I really dislike. When it was finished, I announced to everyone that I was going to take a razor blade and cut the tape up. I went for the razor blade and they went, ‘No, no! Don’t!’ For me it was too poppy for the album [Holy Diver].”

Kurt Cobain (Nirvana)

“I can barely get through [Smells Like] Teen Spirit. I literally want to throw my guitar down and walk away. I can’t pretend to have a good time playing it.” (via Rolling Stone)

James Hetfield (Metallica)

[Before playing Ride The Lightning track Escape in 2012 for the very first time]: “A song that we never wanted to play live, ever, is now on the setlist. You can sing along if you want – it might help! No, don’t do it! Don’t do it, Lars! Are there any other songs left that we haven’t played?”

Robb Flynn (Machine Head)

“There are songs on every record of mine that I don’t like, even The Blackening. Slanderous sucks!” Machine Head’s Robb Flynn (via Metal Hammer)

Chino Moreno

[On Back To School (Mini Maggit)]: “I remember [the record label] sitting me down and pointing out Papa Roach and Linkin Park had sold six million albums while we hadn’t sold a tenth of that. To me, they were saying they wanted some rap-rock, and at the time I was already way over making music like that. My response was no way at first, and then they pointed out the chorus of Pink Maggit was so great, so they asked me to rewrite it as a three-minute song. They kept hounding me about it so I was like ‘Watch this,’ because formulaic songs are so easy to write.”

Shawn “Clown” Crahan

“[All Hope Is Gone is] my least favourite [Slipknot album]: no tension, no pain – just efficiency. Being able to go home, able to sleep, is not good, not for what we do.” (via Google Play)

Amy Lee (Evanscence)

“There have been times where I just hate My Immortal. You listen to your old stuff like, ‘Eurgh!’ I was 19 years old, and I didn’t even know what I was talking about, I was so dramatic! It’s like reading your diary. But I’m over it!” (via Music Week)

Joe Duplantier (Gojira)

[On Flying Whales] “It starts with a super-duper long intro that, honestly, if I’m going to listen to the song, I skip. It’s such a drag! It leads into that main riff, which dictates the tempo of the song. To this day, we don’t understand what’s so special about that riff […] Then the lyrics are like this crazy, mystical bum that lives in a cave and says, ‘Oh, I wanna reach the whales!’… When we play it every night, I’m wondering, ‘What’s up with this song? Why do people want to hear this song?’” (via Metal Hammer)

Paolo Gregoletto (Trivium)

[On The Rising] “What pisses me off about the song is that it kicked off another song [2006’s The Crusade album] that I liked way more, which was Broken One. We were at a weird point and, when we had the song Anthem written for The Crusade, everyone was really excited about the song. I think there was the suggestion of, ‘Hey, let’s have another song like that!’ There really wasn’t a cohesive idea of what the record was going to be.”

Dave Mustaine (Megadeth)

“Probably the dumbest song Megadeth ever did was Crush ’Em… We’d had huge success with our prior album [1997’s Cryptic Writings], big singles and all of that. That had never happened before. So we figured, why not give the label and our management more to work with, since the last one did so well on radio? That was a huge mistake… it didn’t work.” (via Noisecreep)

The early 80s were a time of uncertainty for Don Henley. “I felt tremendous pressure, not to measure up to the success of the Eagles, but simply to write and record without them,” he tells Classic Rock, in an exclusive interview. “Having a solo career was something I’d never considered. I felt unmoored, adrift.”

The Eagles had split in 1980, and all the members began to pursue solo careers. Henley’s debut album, 1982’s I Can’t Stand Still, had been a promising, if tentative, step forward. “I think it was a decent first effort,” he says. “In retrospect, a couple of the songs don’t hold up, but that’s true of all my albums.”

Around the time Henley started to gather material for the follow-up, in 1983, the drum machine was redefining the sound of music. “I had mixed emotions about the new electronic instruments,” he admits. “But Danny [Kortchmar, his post-Eagles collaborator] was knowledgeable about all the modern gear and was keen to incorporate it into our writing and recording process.”

Little did Henley know that a LinnDrum machine, acquired by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, was about to propel his solo career to a new high. On his YouTube channel, Campbell recalled how his first experiments with it inspired the track for Boys Of Summer. “I stayed up all night typing in tambourines and claps and snares. I got a little pattern going, then I came up with that melody line on the keyboard.”

Campbell added guitar and bass, then a week later he played his demo for Tom Petty and producer Jimmy Iovine. But it was rejected as a possible Heartbreakers song for being “too jazzy”. Campbell put the tape on the shelf, and there it might have stayed..

Athough Henley and Campbell have different memories about how they first met, Campbell recalled bringing a cassette of the track to Henley’s house. “We sat at opposite ends of a long table, and he put the cassette on. He didn’t tap his foot or move his head. Just sat there, with his arms folded. He listened all the way through. Ithought he hated it. He goes: ‘Okay, I’ll see what I can do with that.’ And I left.”

Henley says: “People I work with will tell you that I’m not very demonstrative, at least until most of the pieces fall into place. I liked the percussion Mike had created with the machines. I liked the guitar sounds a lot, and the synthesiser lines. All the layers merged into a texture that was really evocative. It just needed a little arranging. Once I’d figured out what went where, the melody and the lyrics began flow pretty quickly.”

The Boys Of Summer was the title of Roger Kahn’s best-selling 1972 book about baseball. But Henley’s reference reached back further. “Even though I am a baseball fan, I had never heard of that book. My inspiration came from the Dylan Thomas poem, which begins: ‘I see the boys of summer in their ruin.’”

Henley’s lyric yearned with a similar ache of lost innocence and youth. Was it written to a specific person? “Some of my songs are, but not that one,” Henley says. “Regardless of the inspiration, or the muse, I try to keep the themes universal. It’s best if songs have an element of ambiguity.”

In the final verse, the memorable line ‘Out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac’ effectively summed up a whole generation and how they’d squandered their hopeful vision.

“It was a gift,” Henley says. “It came from that mysterious place that lyrics sometimes come from. I had been stuck on the bridge section; couldn’t get the words, the melody. One afternoon, I was driving on Interstate 405, somewhere south of Sunset, the cassette of the track blaring through the sound system. I looked to my left and there it was: a 1979 Cadillac Seville with a ‘Deadhead’ sticker on the back. It just struck me as ironic, paradoxical, with a little touch of nostalgia, and it went right into the song.”

Working at Record One Studio in Los Angeles, Henley assembled a band of top musicians, including Kortchmar, Steve Porcaro, and Campbell on guitar. Artists can often grow attached to demos (it’s known as ‘demo-itis’), and Henley came in set on recreating Campbell’s track, with all its quirky, offhand charm.

“Mike’s one of those guys who doesn’t like to do the same thing twice,” Henley says. “And I’m one of those guys who, whenever I’m struck by a piece of music, and am inspired to write lyrics and melody, I want any recreation of that piece of music to be a clone of what moved me in the first place.”

As they revamped the track, they encountered technical glitches – a hiccup with the LinnDrum’s memory, an analogue tape malfunction that required meticulous gluing and pasting – but they finally got it down.

Then Henley decided to change the key. “Danny always pushed me to sing each song in as high a key as I could,” he says. “He believed that more emotion got transmitted that way, that it was more impactful.” So they went back into the studio, trying to recapture that “first-pass magic” again. “Mike was not happy about that, either, but he came through,” Henley says.

Released in October 1984, as the first single from Henley’s second album, Building The Perfect Beast, it took off immediately. It went to No.5 in the US, and was Henley’s biggest single in the UK, making it to No.12. It benefitted from the moody black-and-white video, directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino. “He was the only video director I worked with who took the time to consult with me about the song,” Henley says. The heavy-rotation clip swept the 1985 MTV Video Music Awards.

For Henley, his signature song remains “one of the best I’ve co-written”.

“The song is almost forty years old now,” he says. “It’s just another reminder that life is short, but it’s very wide.”

Rivers Cuomo was a student at Santa Monica College when the chorus melody for Buddy Holly came to him while walking across campus.

Having moved from Connecticut to Los Angeles with his high school band Avant Garde (who changed their name to Zoom), Cuomo had dreams of becoming a metal star. He had the hair, the chops and the drive, but they failed to attract any interest from the music industry.

After Zoom broke up, he played in a string of bands – Fuzz, The Truth, Sixty Wrong Sausages – and set himself the challenge of writing 50 songs before committing himself fully to another band. Working part-time at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard had a profound influence on his musical tastes, and his head was turned by alternative rock.

There, he started listening to bands like Nirvana, Sonic Youth and the Pixies, and became a huge fan of The Beatles and the Beach Boys. By early 1992, he'd more or less reached his goal of writing 50 songs and formed Weezer; it was inevitable that their sound was potent blend of the bands he'd absorbed while replenishing stock on the shop’s shelves.

Former bassist Matt Sharp is credited with helping steer Cuomo away from using any songs he'd written in Fuzz for his new band, encouraging him instead to focus on the pop hooks that he had a knack for creating.

"I think that’s where Matt’s head was at, at the time,” drummer Patrick Wilson told Rolling Stone. “ ’Yeah, let’s not be grunge. Let’s be more like the Beach Boys. But loud."

While juggling his studies and employment, Cuomo found time to be part of his college choir. There, a friend named Steve Graff loaned him a Korg keyboard which inspired him to write a new wave song for what would become Weezer's debut album.

In the liner notes for his solo release Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo, he was inspired to write Buddy Holly in defence of his choir friend Kyung He, who was made the butt of a joke by his bandmates.

"They were the 'homies dissin' my girl'," he wrote. "I rarely wrote lyrics about tension between me and the guys in the band because I thought it would be awkward for us all to perform those songs together. In this case, though, it didn’t seem like a big deal."

And as for the opening line – 'What's with these homies dissin' my girl? Why do they gotta front?' – Cuomo puts this down to listening to lots of N.W.A., Ice Cube and Public Enemy at the time.

The song's chorus wasn't originally anchored by '50s rock'n'roll star Buddy Holly or American actor Mary Tyler Moore. He'd initially toyed with using the dancing duo Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but struggled with the reference points. It was while walking to class that he scrapped the Fred Astaire reference and replaced it with the late rock'n'roll icon who wore thick black frames, just like Cuomo.

By the following year, the band had signed a deal with Geffen. They travelled to New York City to record their debut with The Cars frontman Ric Ocasek. While in the studio, it became apparent that the Cuomo intended to shelve the "dirgey" song and keep it for Weezer's second album.

Ocasek felt it had a place on their debut. He had fond memories of falling in love with Buddy Holly and The Crickets' 1957 single That'll Be The Day when he was a child, and he was convinced this quirky song was worth committing to tape.

In the book Rivers' Edge: The Weezer Story, Ocasek recalls: "I was like, 'Rivers, we can talk about it. Do it anyway, and if you don't like it when it's done, we won't use it. But I think you should try. You did write it and it is a great song.'"

Sharp remembers the subtle charm offensive led by the producer a little differently.

"Ric said we'd be stupid to leave it off the album. We'd come into the [Electric Lady] studio in the morning and find little pieces of paper with doodles on them: WE WANT BUDDY HOLLY."

He succeeded in getting Cuomo to reconsider his feelings on the song, which was released the following year as a single on September 7 – Buddy Holly's birthday – and changed the path of their career.

The seeds for the iconic video were sown two years prior when Cuomo caught the promo for Nirvana's single In Bloom, directed by Kevin Kerslake. Shot on grainy, black-and-white stock, the fun video parodies 1960s entertainment shows, with the show’s host introducing the band as "thoroughly all right and decent fellas" before they perform the song.

"I was overcome by jealousy and admiration for Kurt Cobain as we watched him crooning in his subtly goofy way with Buddy Holly glasses," wrote Cuomo in a 2020 Riverpedia entry. "My feeling was, 'That’s exactly what I would do if I had thought of it, but for some reason I didn’t!' Ah... Kurt, you’re so awesome, I hate you!”

When it was time to make their own video for Buddy Holly, the band enlisted filmmaker Spike Jonze, who had previously directed the dog-friendly clip for Undone – The Sweater Song earlier that year.

The concept, on paper, was relatively simple. Weezer would play a wholesome in-house band at Arnold's, the 1950s diner in the sitcom Happy Days.

Henry Winkler, the actor who played the show's star, Arthur Fonzarelli aka 'The Fonz', gave his permission for his likeness to be used in the video. Thanks to the miracle of editing, the whole Happy Days gang can be spotted watching Weezer play on the purpose-built Arnold’s set. The band even convinced Al Molinaro to make a cameo as grumpy diner owner Big Al Delvecchio.

"For the most part, it looked really good," Wilson told Rational Alternative Digital. "I think the thing that makes it really come off is the fact that Al is in it."

Remarkably, the video was included as a bonus feature on the Windows 95 installation CD-ROM. The band were initially unaware that the label allowed it to be included in a 'Fun Stuff' folder on an estimated 40 million copies.

“I was furious because at the time I was like, ‘How are they allowed to do this without our permission?’" Wilson told Magnet. “Turns out it was one of the greatest things that could have happened to us. Can you imagine that happening today? It’s like, there’s one video on YouTube, and it’s your video.”

Yet despite the massive surge in popularity, the band's newfound success and perception following the Buddy Holly video led Cuomo to question Weezer's place in the world and felt resentment at having to go on tour.

“I seriously thought we were the next Nirvana,” Cuomo told Rolling Stone. “And I thought the world was going to perceive us that way, like a super important, super powerful, heartbreaking heavy rock band, and as serious artists. That’s how I saw us.”

Despite dropping out of the Guitar Institute of Technology before Weezer's debut was released, the frontman decided he wanted to go back to school to resume his music studies. He enrolled at Harvard to study classical composition, but changed his major to English Literature. Even though he enjoyed a life of relative anonymity there, he quickly realised he wanted to return to the band.

"I remember having a conversation with some other kids and one of them said, ‘So, what are you doing for the summer?’," he told Conan O'Brien. "I was like, ‘Uh, we’re going on tour with No Doubt. I’m in Weezer.' Minds were blown at that moment.”

With the release of 72 Seasons, Metallica issued a blunt proclamation that they have absolutely no intention of slowing down - certainly not in their work ethic and especially not in regard to the speed of their music. From the machine gun burst of the title track to the screeching velocity of Lux Æterna and Room Of Mirrors, Metallica gleefully flaunted their ability to unleash sharp, tightly-focused riffs at blazing speeds. That electrifying combination of speed and precision is the very essence of thrash - the genre that they pioneered along with the other members of the Big 4 and bands like Exodus, Testament and Death Angel. With that in mind, we set out to compile Metallica’s ten fastest songs. Which was no simple task.

One of the main issues is that the quality of speed in music is both subjective and objective. Some songs feel supersonic due to the blistering speed of a guitarist churning out triplets with every drum beat, as with the verse section of Spit Out The Bone (starting at 1:09). That song feels like you’re standing in front of a turbofan jet engine right before takeoff. Objectively, however, Spit Out The Bone is fast but its tempo - measured in Beats Per Minute (BPM) - falls well short of other Metallica tracks. Conversely, The Four Horsemen, which can feel like a bit of a mid-temp chugger, is actually one of their empirically fastest songs, clocking in at a breathless 204 BPM. On average, Metallica’s fastest album is Kill ‘Em All, with a median BPM of 159.5, with Master Of Puppets coming a close second at 158.

Compounding the challenge is that there are many sites that provide BPM for most songs but they rarely seem to agree - sometimes the sites differ by a few BPM, while in other cases, the difference is dramatic. Some sites have Master Of Puppets down at a modest 105 BPM when it’s much, much faster. We decided to simply go with a single source - the BPM identified on the sheet music on Songsterr - a user-curated archive of tablature for guitar, bass and drums that includes the tempo for every measure of a song.

Finally, because Metallica songs often include multiple parts with very different tempos, in some cases, we went with an average tempo or with a song’s predominant tempo. This is why relying on a single BPM site doesn’t give the whole story.

Incidentally, the world record for BPM by a drummer is held by Tom Grosset, who earned the title of world’s fastest drummer by hand-drumming at a brain-freezing 1,208 beats in 60 seconds. He beat the former record-holder - Dream Theater’s Mike Mangini - by five strokes.

Here, then, in descending order, are Metallica’s ten fastest tracks:

10. Hardwired (2016) — 178 BPM

Metallica opened 2016’s Hardwired...To Self-Destruct with an absolute belter. Gone was the lurching jock rock posturing of the Black Album and the sonic experimentalism of St. Anger; Metallica had well and truly returned to the biting aggression of their 80s output. Right out of the gate comes the title track, humming in at 185 BPM and holding fast for three breathtaking minutes. In Metal Hammer’s review of Hardwired.., Dom Lawson referred to the track as, “a vicious burst of prime thrash with an irresistible chorus and enough spirit and venom to silence anyone who thought Metallica were too old to nail this stuff anymore.” Years later, it still sounds as good as anything they’ve ever done.

9. Rebel Of Babylon (2011) — 182 BPM (avg)

The closing track of the 2011 EP Beyond Magnetic has only been played live once — at the band’s four-night thirtieth anniversary residency at The Fillmore, in San Francisco. Though it didn’t make the cut for Death Magnetic, it’s a fist-pumping romp with tempos exceeding 200 BPM during some of the verses, while slowing down in several interludes. But even during the solo, the track maintains a feverish tempo, beginning at 176 BPM and getting progressively faster. A deep cut well worth revisiting.

8. St. Anger (2003) — 186 BPM

Spoiler alert: nothing from Lulu makes this list. But from Metallica’s next-most-maligned album comes this absolute scorcher. At 2:37, the band swing into a pummeling cadence that, after ten seconds, enters a whole new temporal realm. This occurs throughout the song — after a couple of interludes for vocals and a breakdown at 3:41, the band push the pedal all the way down. Look beyond the tin can rattle of the snare and you’ve got some of the band’s quickest work to date.

7. Blackened (1988)  — 190 BPM (avg)

One of the band’s fastest tracks is also one of its most complex. Certain sites list the BPM as just under 130, which is baffling, considering that out of the song’s nineteen tempo changes, only two fall below 185 BPM. The majority of the track is played in double time, averaging a skin-peeling 192 BPM. Then there are the track’s multiple time signatures, which flutter between 4/4, 3/4, 5/4 and 7/4 throughout the track. You practically need the janitor from Good Will Hunting to put all of this together. Ironically, though bassist Jason Newsted’s contributions are all but inaudible on the original track (on pretty much the whole album), this is the only song on ...And Justice For All on which he receives a writing credit — for composing the main riff.

6. Dyers Eve (1988) — 194 BPM (avg)

...And Justice For All closes with a venomous screed penned by Hetfield against his parents for leaving him woefully unprepared for the hostile world that awaited him. With its otherworldly, double-bass-driven tempo, it’s hardly surprising that the band didn’t attempt playing the full track live until 2004. Tempos shift at an outrageous pace - at some points hitting 218 BPM - then slowing down into the low-90s before ratcheting back to 195. The majority of the measures hover between 190 and 197. Since then, Dyers Eve has made infrequent appearances in their setlists and when they do play it, Lars leaves out the marauding double bass section, reportedly admitting that it’s ‘too difficult to pull off live. In our recent chat with drummer Jon Dette (ex-Slayer, ex-Testament), he cites the track as the hardest one to play in the entire Metallica catalogue for this very reason. Still, for the listener, it’s pure thrash heaven. Side effects include elevated heart rates, annoyed neighbours and speeding tickets.

5. My Apocalypse (2016) — 196 BPM

The closer to Death Magnetic didn’t just push the band to the limits of endurance with its mach 5 tempo; it also notched the lads a 2009 Grammy award for Best Metal Performance. Not too shabby for the shortest track on the album. This is an example of an already-speedy tempo seemingly revved up faster by the blinding triplets of the rhythm guitar.

4. The Four Horsemen (1983) — 204 BPM

As a matter of taste, metal fans remain split between Metallica’s The Four Horsemen, off of Kill ‘Em All and former Metallica shredder Dave Mustaine’s version, Mechanix, released on Megadeth’s Killing Is My Business...And Business Is Good! (1985). But there’s no doubting that both versions cook and Metallica’s version remains among their fastest, with the majority of the song requiring 204 paint-stripping BPM - obviously not including the Lynyrd Skynyrd-inspired breakdown.

3. Fuel (1997) — 208 BPM

Presumably there aren’t many funeral doom songs about the rush of adrenaline from driving fast, although we’d love to hear one. This track, from Reload, remains a live show mainstay, appearing over five hundred times since its live debut in 1997- and for obvious reasons. Unlike other Metallica tracks, it has a single, searing tempo that never lets up. Unsurprisingly, NASCAR used the track as their official theme song for a few seasons, starting in 2001.

1=. All Within My Hands (2003) — 212 BPM

A tie! Though Metallica are known for kicking off their albums with a show of force, they closed St. Anger with this speed-drenched banger. There are a couple of slower interludes but the vast majority of this track clocks in at a neck-snapping 212 BPM, which is good enough to earn a tie for first place. While the track isn’t exactly their catchiest song, Metallica used its name for their non-profit, which has delivered millions of dollars to various causes across the globe.

1. Master Of Puppets (1986) — 212 BPM

What? Master Of Puppets? With that slow, melodic breakdown in the middle? Yes! Though some BPM sites list its tempo at a glacial 105 BPM, the sheet music fixes the tempo at 212 for most of the track, while some estimates run as high as 220 BPM. One of only two tracks from Master Of Puppets credited to all four band members (James Hetfield, Cliff Burton, Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett), it is the cornerstone of the Metallica canon and recently found a whole new generation of fans when it appeared in a climactic scene in the latest season of Stranger Things. Its nine-minute runtime nearly doubled most of the mainstream rock songs at that time, leading to scarce radio play and yet it remains one of the most beloved and enduring songs in metal history.

Metallica's latest album 72 Seasons is out now. The band headline two nights of Download 2023 next week.

In Piccadilly, London, in 1972, cocky new art-rock types Roxy Music were about to record an album that would become the blueprint for 70s glam. In 2011, guitarist Phil Manzanera told Prog what happened next.

Bryan Ferry nervously brushes back the quiff of hair from his face. Behind him, he hears a preparatory swirl of notes from the sax, and the climactic build of a showbiz-style roll on the snare drum. The guitarist, now finished tuning up, gets everyone’s attention and, after the briefest of pauses, there’s a count-in and it begins.

As the controlled frenzy of the drums erupt and both sax and guitar become demonically entwined, Ferry inches nearer the mic, eyes closed, taking a breath just ahead of his cue. ‘Concrete cold face cased in steel. Stark sharp glass-eyed crack and peel’ he trills over heavy slab-like minor chords. ‘Bright light scream beam brake and squeal. Red white green white neon wheeeeeel.’ The stentorian vibrato in the vocal makes those around take notice. But as the number scrambles to a truncated crescendo, it’s clear that nobody – including Ferry – is especially pleased with the results.

The session is over. The guitarist thanks the singer for his time. His voice was fine but ultimately not right for King Crimson. However, before Ferry leaves the band’s basement rehearsal room, Robert Fripp gives him the telephone number of EG Management, suggesting if Ferry gets his own band together, he should give them a call. Although he doesn’t know it yet, as Ferry steps out onto the Fulham Palace Road, the failed audition will turn out to be the biggest break of his entire career.

For most groups trying to make good the starry-eyed dream of getting signed to a label and eventually recording and releasing an album, you had to get your hands – and much else besides – dirty. Driving the length and breadth of the country’s B roads, humping bass bins into inaccessible venues, playing to indifferent audiences whose only glimmer of enthusiasm is the moment when you announce it’s your last number; all of this, and more, were part of the time-honoured system of paying your dues.

Signing to EG Management (who looked after T-Rex and ELP as well as Crimson), Roxy Music bypassed all that irksome stuff, sweeping onto the scene, apparently fully formed in a haze of pop, pastiche, synthesisers, sequins and Brylcreem in 1972, with only half a dozen gigs under their belt and a debut album that remains a remarkable tour-de-force.

One man who had no doubts whatsoever about Roxy’s future prospects was guitarist Phil Manzanera. “I just knew they were going to be absolutely huge when I first heard them. They were special people. They were all quite stylish and intelligent. I was only about 20 or so and here were these 25-year-olds who all looked so grown up. They’d been to university, they had bank accounts; two of them were teachers; they had a car; they’d got a bank loan to buy a PA! They were really cool people.”

Manzanera famously lost out the first time he auditioned for Roxy in the summer of 1971 to David O’ List, previously a member of The Nice. “If it had been any old Tom, Dick or Harry, I’d have been upset. I’d seen Davey with The Nice at the Royal Albert Hall so I thought, ‘Fair enough.’” Yet when O’ List departed in February 1972 , Manzanera – by then notionally mixing sound for the group – picked up where he left off.

As Roxy Music was released in June 1972 on Island, TRecstasy had vast portions of the nation’s teenage population swooning, and David Bowie was busy unleashing Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. A cursory glance in the direction of Roxy might have suggested they were simply hitching a ride on the coattails of glam rock. Yet both record and band pulled off a how’d-they-do-that conjuring, trick scooping up pop culture references from the past, present, and possible futures, into one unified package that demanded attention and captured the imagination of fans on both sides of the divide between the pop market and progressive scene.

If opening number Re-Make/Re-Model was, as Melody Maker journalist Richard Williams astutely observed, Roxy’s musical manifesto, it was proclaiming that rock’n’roll as we knew it was undergoing a strange and irrevocable transformation.

There’s the knowing post-modern wink that has backing singers intoning a car registration number (‘CPL593A’) in the place where a girl’s name might normally be crooned. Then there’s the hurly-burly blur of continually morphing sax and guitar lines swirling above and below the vocals. Moving quickly, it sounds all above board and ship-shape. Yet listen closely and you might be receiving a transmission from the free-jazz climes of Albert Ayler and Sonny Sharrock.

The track’s coup de grâce was a series of solo statements. Book-ended by Paul Thompson’s thunderous John Bonham-like run-in, in order of appearance we hear Graham Simpson bending the bass into a soulful, jazzy pose; Brian Eno’s outré, atonal caterwauling synth squeal; Andy Mackay’s leery account of Earl Bostic meeting Wagner; Manzanera’s steady-Eddie Cochrane Velvets vamp, and finally, Ferry’s atonal singalong-a-Stockhausen piano party-piece. At the end, this pop culture parade is sucked down the black hole of Eno’s VCS3.

Recorded at Command Studios in Piccadilly in March 1972, the album was produced by Peter Sinfield, himself just recently divorced from King Crimson. Still managed by EG, and having had experience at the mixing desk from In The Court Of The Crimson King (1969) through to Islands (1971), he was viewed as a safe pair of hands to take Roxy out on their first spin.

A former BBC studio, beneath which London’s underground trains could occasionally be heard rumbling, Command’s principal advantage was its cheapness. Accordingly, the album went in the can for £5,000. Given that he’s subsequently recorded in some of the world’s top-flight studios, Manzanera retains a surprising affection for the venue. “It was a big old-fashioned space where orchestras would’ve played. It was very atmospheric and was absolutely perfect for us.”

With Sinfield and engineer Andy Hendriksen ensconced in the control room up a flight of stairs, and the band in the cavernous depths below, the team worked on a set of songs composed largely the previous year by Ferry. Prior to entering the studio, Sinfield and the band had spent three weeks working on the album’s final shape.

Curiously, the songs have a habit of starting off as one thing and then undergoing a startling transformation into something else entirely. Ladytron begins as a languid sci-fi dreamscape, but ends as an exercise in power-chord slash and burn. The country lilt opening If There Is Something rapidly falls away when Mackay’s processed sax solo takes centre stage, and we know we’re not in Kansas anymore. The solo, like all the others on the record, isn’t about instrumental prowess. It’s about the seductive qualities and possibilities of the sound itself, manipulated and mediated by Eno.

Through his electronic alchemy, the sax hovers listlessly over Thompson’s jackhammer beat and mechanistic piano chords. When Ferry’s vocals burst in on the last third of the song with ‘Shake your hair, girl with your ponytail/takes me right back…’ it’s freakish, unsettling, and utterly magnificent. That distinctive warble, which caused heads to turn in Crimson’s rehearsal rooms and far beyond, was never quite as powerful or as singular as here, captured by Sinfield.

Manzanera readily acknowledges that Ferry’s unusual vocal style was something they understood and exploited. “Nobody sounds like Bryan. It’s very distinctive and it comes from nowhere. It couldn’t be any one else in the whole world with this voice. So we were starting with an advantage.”

Though he’d be fired following a drug related breakdown, Graham Simpson’s bass work is frequently adventurous and unorthodox. On tracks like 2HB and Chance Meeting, every part of the fretboard is up for grabs. “He was probably the most accomplished musician among us all at that time,” says Manzanera.

Chance Meeting also contains some of the album’s most haunting guitar. Although his instrument was usually filtered by Eno’s synthesiser, here the space-age sounds are created by more traditional means. “I had a wonderful Gibson 335, which had a hollow body. It just fed back beautifully, and then you could manipulate the note with the tremolo arm and a bit of echo. That’s actually all it is. Now Ladytron; that’s the classic Eno-treated guitar. Terrific stuff.”

The sonic properties of Roxy Music still polarise opinion. Ferry has said he didn’t care for the sound of the vocals. But Manzanera is philosophical about the album’s production values: “On the first one we always said we were inspired amateurs learning how to make a record, so I listen with nostalgia and fondness rather than a critical ear. It was a moment in time captured and I’m very happy to have been part of it. Pete Sinfield did the best job he could, really. But obviously, once you get to For Your Pleasure and Chris Thomas – who’d trained with George Martin – it’s in a different league.”

Yet the exotic, multifaceted soundworlds conjured are due at least in part to Sinfield’s quixotic recording and intuitive response to what was coming into Command’s control room. “It was just the summation of all different individuals putting in their little bits and pieces which then added up to Roxy,” says Manzanera. “You couldn’t have planned it. You couldn’t make it up.”

Reaching Number 10 on its release, Roxy Music catapulted the group from being cultish outsiders and into the mainstream. Though future albums would outsell it, when it came to a forward-thinking, truly progressive fusion of diverse ideas, eclectic style and unnerving bravado, the band would rarely be as challenging or inventive.

When regarding the decidedly colourful back catalogue of the late Lou Reed, the phrase ‘all of human life is here’ springs to mind. Staged against a uniquely urban backdrop, Reed would habitually pick at the persistent scab of human frailty, shine white light upon darkness and generate searing white heat in the process.

In Reed’s world, emotions were raw. His dramatis personae personified facets of his own complex personality. The darkest desires of his darkest characters – from the sexually transgressive (Venus In Furs) to the purely evil (Rock Minuet) – and the simple sentimentality of the unreconstructed romantic (Coney Island Baby, My House) mirrored Reed’s intrinsic duality.

So who was Lou Reed? Many of his songs formed the core of an unwritten autobiography: from idyllic infancy (Egg Cream) to ruined adolescence (Kill Your Sons) and beyond, Reed’s essence endures in his art. With an accumulated writing style that was one part poet (Delmore Schwartz), one part Tin Pan Alley (Doc Pomus) and one part gossip (Andy Warhol), Reed wrote stories so painfully real that rock’n’roll still bears their scars.

THE GIFT

Eventually appearing on the Velvet Underground’s second album White Light/White Heat, released in 1968, darkly comedic spoken-word short story The Gift dates from ’64. Reed recalled: “I wrote this [in] my last year at Syracuse University, where I was an English major. John Cale suggested we set it to music. We put the story on stereo left and the music on stereo right so you could listen to one or the other or both.”

As the Velvets jam in support, a deadpan Cale recites the macabre tale of what transpired when lovelorn Waldo Jeffers mailed himself to Marsha Bronson inside a large cardboard box. Part-Hitchcock, part-E.C. Comics, the final grisly denouement involves the fateful plunge of a sheet metal cutter that causes ‘little rhythmic arcs of red to pulsate gently in the morning sun’.

I’M WAITING FOR THE MAN

A defining moment in rock’n’roll, Reed’s tale of copping $26 worth of heroin uptown in Harlem on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 125th Street transported the gritty verité style of Nelson Algren and Hubert Selby Jr from the printed page on to vinyl.

The song’s protagonist, most probably Reed himself, feels ‘sick and dirty, more dead than alive’. As he clucks impatiently, conspicuous, out of place, he draws attention (‘Hey white boy, what you doin’ uptown?’), before The Man – his dealer – finally arrives (‘all dressed in black’, with ‘PR shoes and a big straw hat’). So what exactly are ‘PR shoes’? “Puerto Rican fence-climbers” according to Lou. So now you know. And there’s a happy ending. Our hero ultimately gets his fix and we leave him temporarily elated: ‘Feeling good, feeling oh so fine... Until tomorrow, but that’s just some other time.’

PERFECT DAY

Simple, concise, practically perfect in every way. Perfect Day is a succinct précis of idealised love that seasoned Reed-watchers – reluctant to accept that he would ever deliver a romantic ballad without a sneering side of whisky-embittered cynicism – spent decades trying to convince the wider world was actually about heroin use.

“That’s not true,” Lou said unequivocally. “You’re talking to the person who wrote it.” It was actually about the day that Reed proposed to his first wife, Bettye Kronstad, in Central Park, a day which, as Kronstad recalls, was far from perfect. Although Lou had already decided to propose, Bettye had just had a riding accident in the park and was severely traumatised.

Despite this, Lou persisted in delivering his ‘perfect day’, even dragging his fiancée to Tiffany’s to buy a ring against her will. Perfection is clearly in the eye of the beholder. “The key to Perfect Day is the last line,” Lou admitted when we spoke in 2004, “You’re gonna reap what you sow.” The couple divorced in 1973.

BERLIN

When Alice Cooper producer Bob Ezrin met Reed to begin work on his third album, the follow-up to his Bowie-produced breakthrough Transformer, he observed that while Reed’s stories had great beginnings they lacked satisfying conclusions.

Citing the central romantic set-piece of Reed’s self-titled solo debut, Ezrin wanted to know what happened to Berlin’s central protagonists (lovers entwined in its ‘candlelight and Dubonnet on ice’ opening verse, but estranged by its ‘I’m gonna miss you now that you’ve gone’ chorus).

Retrieving Ezrin’s gauntlet, Reed used the ensuing sessions to expand Berlin to a full concept work, a dark song cycle incorporating alcoholism, addiction, spousal abuse, prostitution, depression and, ultimately, suicide. Contemporary US critics railed against Reed’s ‘lousy’ (Creem) ‘disaster’ (Rolling Stone), but subsequent reassessment reveals a uniquely moving collection: a Gothic edifice of exquisite pain and sumptuous misery.

Building through the heartbreaking Caroline Says II (‘You can hit me all you want to, but I don’t love you anymore’), the harrowing The Kids (‘They’re taking her children away’) and the painfully graphic The Bed (‘This is the place where she cut her wrists’) towards Sad Song’sclimactic emotional release, it leaves the listener physically and psychologically drained.

In 2004, Reed likened Berlin to “a Bergman or Kurosawa movie. An intense film noir... Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl.” When I observed that ‘girl slashes wrists’ isn’t normally part of the romantic narrative, he countered simply: “That’s the point.”

STREET HASSLE

Arguably Lou Reed’s magnum opus, Street Hassle combines a pair of monologues over a mesmeric repeated string section figure and an impassioned ‘love has gone away’ coda written in the wake of his tumultuous three-year relationship with trans woman Rachel Humphreys. Street Hassle was the Godfather Of Punk’s first artistic statement subsequent to unintentionally acquiring the title, and he rose to the occasion.

Part one describes Waltzing Matilda’s $80 physical dalliance with a male escort, while part two finds a drug dealer addressing the ‘hassle’ of a particularly incautious client’s girlfriend fatally OD-ing before having the good grace to vacate his premises. ‘When someone turns that blue,’ observes The Man, ‘it’s a universal truth, you just know that bitch will never fuck again.’

“It’s a great monologue,” Reed opined in ’04. “Two monologues, really. The person acting out the first part is one way, the person in part two the polar opposite. They’re not even vaguely of the same species... Based on a real incident, as my things inevitably are.”

Street Hassle channels John Rechy, Tennessee Williams and none-more-noir Raymond Chandler. Its first part echoes Herlihy’s Midnight Cowboy, its second Selby’s Last Exit To Brooklyn and its conclusion (enhanced by an uncredited spoken-word cameo from young pretender Bruce Springsteen) is an uncharacteristically passionate requiem for star-crossed love. Ultimately it’s Reed’s great American novel, condensed to the bone and propelled by a monumental ear-worm riff.

NEW YORK

Ever since Reed led us up to Harlem’s ‘Lexington and 125’ to open our eyes to an unseen alternative reality, his narrative has been grounded in New York City. His songs have described characters unsung elsewhere: the transvestites and hustlers of Walk On The Wild Side, the junkies and speed freaks of Heroin and Sister Ray. But with 1989’s New York album Reed – galvanised by the ever-widening divide between the Empire City’s rich and poor – sealed his position as NYC’s poet laureate with a concept work of rare lyrical brilliance.

Here are astute essays on the inner-city ghetto, the environment, and the gay community’s resilience in the face of the AIDS epidemic, along with serial indictments of an oblivious political elite. Literate, poetic, driven and compelling, New York is Lou Reed’s defining achievement as rock’s greatest storyteller.

The original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock 264, in June 2019

It was a long time coming, but after several years under wraps, Yes bassist Chris Squire and former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett released A Life Within A Day – the only album they made as Squackett – in 2012. Three years before Squire’s passing, they gave Prog the backstory.

The union of Chris Squire and Steve Hackett has been mentioned in dispatches for almost half a decade. In recent years Squire has guested on Hackett’s solo albums, contributing his distinctive bass guitar to tracks on 2009’s Out Of The Tunnel’s Mouth and last year’s Beyond The Shrouded Horizon. But a full-blown collaboration between the Genesis and Yes legends has taken longer to come to fruition. At one point, Squackett looked like it would become an elusive, mythical beast – until the release of A Life Within A Day.

At just 46 minutes it might seem a modest dividend for the patience invested those awaiting this rare foray from Squire outside Yes and Hackett’s most notable collaboration since GTR (with Yes’ Steve Howe). But never mind the quantity of music on offer – just revel in the quality: A Life Within A Day’s nine tracks both surprise and delight.

While they’ve never until now been in a band together, Squire and Hackett have shared history. “I first started working with Steve in 2006 on my Christmas album [Chris Squire’s Swiss Choir],” he explains. Squire’s original vision was to involve a number of guitarists on different tracks. “I was hoping to get Jeff Beck, Brian May… but everyone was busy.”

His drummer, Jeremy Stacey, suggested asking Hackett. Surprisingly, given their respective track records, Squire and Hackett’s paths had barely crossed. “I haven’t done a lot of things outside of Yes,” acknowledges the bassist. Initially he sent Hackett a couple of the songs destined for Swiss Choir. The guitarist took little persuasion. “I would have worked on anything that Chris had offered me because he’s such an icon,” he says. “When people think of bass sounds, they think of Chris.”

“What Steve did was so good that I immediately asked if he could do the whole album,” says Squire. “After that, I said that I’d be happy to reciprocate with anything he needed me to play or sing on.” As a result, he guested on Hackett’s last two solo albums. They considered writing a musical together, but ultimately settled for the more realistic album solution.

At the time, though, the bassist wasn’t actively seeking an outlet outside Yes. “I was living in London, doing the Christmas album, and Steve and I just developed a relationship.” It was uncomplicated and remarkably free of the titanic clash of egos that can bedevil such projects. “We got on easily and were able to create at a fast pace without feeling any pressure. That’s very valuable and helped move things along really smoothly.”

But A Life Within A Day has had a lengthy gestation, due to the belated return of Yes, the search for a suitable record label and simple geography. “When we started, Chris lived in this country and we were near neighbours,” Hackett recalls. “Suddenly America beckoned, and I had to put the album on hold for a while.” But the interregnum had an upside. “It meant that when we came back to it, it was all the stronger for that gap and there were things that we shifted around.”

Unusually in an age when many records are tracked by solitary musicians sending files to each other, the pair recorded most of the songs together in Hackett’s studio or at his house. “Most of it was done eyeball to eyeball,” he confirms. “I didn’t want to work in splendid isolation.”

He reports the writing sessions were painless. As a starting point he’d suggested that they pooled material, and Squire offered Aliens – which had already been performed live by Yes – while Hackett contributed Stormchaser. “I had three or four songs that I had written ostensibly for a solo project,” says Squire. “But that never happened, which is the story of my life!” In the end he, Hackett and keyboardist Roger King are all credited on each composition, with the tour-de-force title track and another highlight, Tall Ships, written specifically for the album.

Tall Ships came from Squire experimenting with a new bass and playing a sinuous, muscular riff that inspired Hackett. “It sounded like it had some swing to it,” the guitarist recalls. “Ninety nine per cent of people I‘ve worked with can’t remember the wonderful thing they’ve just played. So unless the tapes were running, you’ve had it. But Chris remembered it, and we had the rhythm which runs throughout the whole song. There was the unvarying link which provides the engine to the journey.”

He added a guitar phrase, the lyric and the chorus tune, while Squire provided the verse melody. “It was very easy to write together – a bunch of mates sat round in the living room, chipping in ideas,” Hackett continues. “It was like a giant jigsaw puzzle with three people going, ‘Here’s another piece – does that fit?’ We avoided the downside of composition by committee where people whittle each other down to the bare essentials and often end up with the lowest common denominator. That can be the downside of working with a group.”

The Squackett scenario of avoiding the dilution of ideas and feeding off but also deferring to each other was largely unfamiliar to Hackett as, since 1986’s GTR album with, he’s largely been captain of his own ship with his solo band. “I didn’t mind handing the wheel to Chris and we didn’t have too many moments where we thrashed it out,” he says. “Most of the time it was plain sailing. Occasionally we’d hit a sticky patch, but it seemed as if Chris and I had been working together all our lives.”

He cites the intensely commercial Divided Self as an example: “Chris played wonderfully and transformed it. He doesn’t just play a bass line. It must be his choral background; he comes up with another melody, counterpoint, descant, and makes it swing. He does things naturally that I suspect other bass players dream of. He plays with a guitarist’s sensibility. There‘s that sense of the size of the bass sound, but there’s also that twang and ring, so you can always focus on the bass part. It’s always clear as a bell and it’s not just all about how loud it is in the mix.”

Another striking feature of A Life Within A Day is the significant use of harmony vocals. “Chris and I are both fans of the great harmony bands – The Beatles, The Who, Crosby Stills & Nash,” says Hackett. While vocal harmonies featured prominently in Yes, they were less prevalent in Genesis. “I was often trying to steer it that way with my own stuff. We made them a raison d’être on this album.”

“My voice and Steve’s blend well together,” adds Squire. “That’s something I was surprised about, and the more we worked on harmonies the better they became.” Hackett and former choirboy Squire are responsible for all the vocals on the album, save for an appearance from Amanda Lehmann, a Hackett band regular who supplies some backing vocals, most notably on the smooth-as-silk Can’t Stop The Rain. Hackett thought that the track had an “a Burt Bacharach aspect to the chorus, so I suggested we go the whole hog and make it sound really luxurious and get some girls in. It needed something feminine.”

As the Bacharach reference suggests, A Life Within A Day contains some surprises, but it shouldn’t disappoint fans of Hackett or Squire. Hackett confirms the tempo for much of the album is very laidback, but it’s hugely atmospheric and rich in detail. There are some exceptions – most notably the frenetic middle section of the title track, which should sate the appetites of those wanting the two to cut loose instrumentally.

Any suspicions that the record might be a cynically contrived ‘GeneYes’ product prove wide of the mark. It’s not an album you might expect two such veterans to make, mainly because there was no masterplan. “It happened naturally,” Hackett explains. “We were working on a number of things for each other, and from the very first thing that Chris did on something of mine, I could see he was genuinely enjoying it. His whole body was moving. I realised that I had this top bass player – such a hero to a lot of people – giving it everything. Chris runs on enthusiasm.”

While they didn’t set out to cater to the Yes/Genesis audience, one track comes close. “The Summer Backwards is a nod to all things psychedelic and the 1960s,” reveals Hackett. “Listening to it a few days ago, I came to the conclusion that with two 12-strings and harmonies we’ve got Yes and Genesis, really. But that’s not what I was intending to do at the time.” In fact, The Summer Backwards was originally earmarked for a Hackett solo album before Squire intervened.

They drew on a wide array of reference points. Led Zeppelin influences are most apparent on Stormchaser and the title track. “It’s John Bonham meets Phil Collins meets Jason Bonham meets Jeremy Stacey meets the production values of the 1980s,” laughs Hackett. “Many years ago in Genesis, we were driving around the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, having just driven back from Belgium or Italy with no sleep all night, and Kashmir by Zeppelin came on. We all stopped in our tracks, particularly Peter Gabriel and myself. The drums were enormous. It was Radio Luxembourg so it was probably even more distorted and strange coming to us in mono.

“It was nectar to the ears, a breath of fresh air. I loved the simple, demonic, relentless, mechanical approach to drums that just marched through time itself. It was a huge influence on Phil, Peter and me. Chriss favourite Zep track is Kashmir – surprise, surprise! In a sense it’s the model for something that can be both orchestral but minimal; something that has pauses.

“For years I’ve been trying to deny the fact that I love slow powerful rhythms – I thought they might be a bit soggy for people who want their rock to be fast. Again, I noticed these slow, heavy rhythms crop up on Joe Bonamassa’s stuff, like The Ballad Of John Henry. There’s something about the earthiness of that.

“I’m like a gannet,” adds Hackett. “I don’t have any prejudice against any musical form any more, because I’ve been caught out before.” He doesn’t disagree with the suggestion that he’s a musical contrarian. After all, choosing to exit Genesis in 1977 was a brave move. “I’ve always tried to prove a point,” he admits. “I’ve always wanted to prove people wrong.”

While Squackett is certainly varied, Squire is keen to point out that Yes have always been willing to head off in different musical directions: “I never put limits on Yes. We’ve delved into so many different areas over the years. We were more of a rock band in the 80s, more of a proggy jazz band in the 70s. I’m not afraid of moving in and out of different areas with Yes.”

An album whose longest tracks are under seven minutes might confound anyone expecting prog rock epics. Squire: “There was no conscious effort to go, ‘This is what we’ve done in our various bands, so let’s do something different.’ We just got on with it. If something had turned out to be a 10-minute plus track and we’d liked it, we’d have used it. There were no guidelines.”

As a teenager, Porcupine Tree mainman Steven Wilson was a swift convert to Hackett’s solo material. “When I was discovering the wonderful world of progressive music, one of the first albums I happened across was Steve’s Please Don’t Touch album, which totally blew me away,” Wilson says. “The second side especially remains for me one of the most inspiring 20-minute sequences of music ever recorded, covering everything from beautiful orchestral soul ballads to the dark nihilism of the title track, and all points in between.”

Wilson declares himself a fan of Hackett’s other early solo albums, and also an enthusiast of his more recent work: “It’s been inspiring to hear how Steve’s last few albums have recaptured the very best of that 70s work, but with a modern twist. His music is epic and musically dazzling – but always retains great songwriting and melody at its core.”

While Hackett’s recent solo albums have many merits, Squackett arguably has greater commercial potential. Whether that potential will be fully realised may depend on how much time and effort the musicians put into promoting it. Hackett relishes the opportunity to continue the partnership: “There’s a sense of harmony between us. Nobody was trying to knock anyone down.” But it’s unclear whether Squackett will tour – Squire’s schedule with Yes having nixed a potential opportunity to play at last year’s High Voltage festival in London.

“I would like to think there’s time in the midst of our busy schedules to play live together,” admits Hackett. “But I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep.” He continues to put in plenty of time on the road. “My attitude is that the clock is ticking for me. I love playing live. I do it because I must. I always want to do everything at 100 miles an hour. I think Chris has a more measured approach.”

The timeline of Refused's initial split is an absolute mess.

Just weeks before the release of The Shape of Punk to Come: A Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts, the band imploded during a disastrous tour of the United States.

After a handful of sparsely-attended shows, the quartet officially broke up on September 26, 1998, but played their final show on October 5 at a basement venue in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The local police department ended the gig after just a few songs, further compounding the sense of futility felt throughout the Umeå four-piece.

Shortly after their demise, the band – vocalist Dennis Lyxzén, guitarists Kristofer Steen and Jon Brännström, and drummer David Sandström – issued a statement and manifesto via the Burning Heart Records website.

"We will continue to, at every attempt, overthrow the class system, burn museums and to strangle the great lie that we call culture... we will continue to demand revolution here and now, and not in some vague future that all reactionary leftist fundamentalists and reformists are talking about. We want every day and every action to be a manifestation of love, joy, confusion and revolt.

"This is the last that we have to say about it, WE WILL NOT GIVE INTERVIEWS TO STUPID REPORTERS who still haven't [sic] got anything of what we are all about, we will never play together again and we will never try to glorify or celebrate what was. All that we have to say has been said here or in our music/manifestos/lyrics and if that is not enough you are not likely to get it anyway. WE THEREFORE DEMAND THAT EVERY NEWSPAPER BURN ALL THEIR PHOTOS OF REFUSED so that we will no longer be tortured with memories of a time gone by and the mythmaking [sic] that single-minded and incompetent journalism offers us. Instead we need to look forward. We got everything to win and nothing but our boredom to lose."

The Shape of Punk to Come was destined to become one of the most influential and ambitious records in post-hardcore. Almost three decades later, it still sounds truly revolutionary.

While the title of their third album was a nod to Ornette Coleman's similarly groundbreaking 1959 release The Shape of Jazz to Come, Refused drew a line under a stagnating post-hardcore scene. Recorded at Umeå's Tonteknik Bomba Je Studios with producers Eskil Lövström, Andreas Nilsson and Pelle Henricsson, they created an avant-garde masterpiece in 12 movements, bringing in jazz and electronic interludes, cellos and violins to soundtrack frontman Lyxzén's anti-capitalist manifesto.

In the years leading up to their 2012 reunion, the band's profile grew and influenced a new generation of bands and musicians, while spin-off projects like The (International) Noise Conspiracy and TEXT toiled away in the shadow of their former band's legacy.

Dennis Lyxzén recognises the far-reaching influence of The Shape of Punk to Come but notes that the scene it was attempting to rejuvenate did not react kindly to the release.

"People were kind of pissed off when that record came out," Lyxzén told Canadian magazine Exclaim!. "They were like, 'You heathens. If this is the shape of punk to come then I'm quitting punk.' We got a lot of that. When Ornette Coleman's record came out people thought he was an idiot and they wanted to kill him so it's kind of fitting in a way."

Of the entire tracklist, two songs in particular kept the album alive throughout their 14-year hiatus. One was Liberation Frequency; the other was New Noise, whose compelling video was aired regularly on alternative music television channels, while the song was included on the soundtrack for the video game Tony Hawk's Underground.

"To a lot of people, we’re just a rock band," Lyxzén told Revolver. "So obviously, there’s gonna be a lot of people who don’t understand where we’re coming from or don’t understand our political background or our musical background, even. That’s not to put anyone down, but if you discovered New Noise 10 years ago and thought, 'This is a killer song. I like this band', but you have no concept of who we are, you might be offended by the fact that we made a theme record saying capitalism is bad.

"But those are the people we’ve always been, and those are the ideas we’ve always had," he added. "I don’t think that’s as clear-cut to people now as it was in the '90s, because in the '90s we were part of something very specific."

Crazy Town loved New Noise so much they would massacre the song during their shows around the time Butterfly was a massive hit. The very idea that this band who’d become famous by sampling another band – and singing about "new art for real people" – left a bitter taste in Lyxzén's mouth.

"It's horrible; they should be shot," Lyxzén told Exclaim! in 2000, whose writer Stuart Green noted the singer’s remark was uttered “with only a hint of irony”. "Seriously, I hate that band. Did you ever listen to them? I don't like to talk shit about bands, there are more constructive ways to work, but sometimes you just have to say, 'Stop... please stop this.'

"If someone listened to The Shape... and really understood what we were thinking about they wouldn't be in Crazy Town and they wouldn't think The Shape of Punk to Come was to add a DJ to a metal band," he added. "If they really loved Refused, they missed everything that was important about that band."

In recent years, the television and movie industries have cottoned on to the song's volatile power.

It has been featured in the films Crank, Here Comes the Boom and Triangle of Sadness, as well as the TV shows Friday Night Lights and Criminal Minds.

Most recently, the song has become a theme of sorts for The Bear, a tense drama set in a busy Chicago restaurant. The show, which began in 2022, boasts an exemplary soundtrack, but it's the 1998 hardcore classic New Noise which gives the series its most visceral pacing.

"I was watching the Emmys or whatever it was when they constantly played New Noise every time they won an award," Lyxzén told the CBC podcast Q with Tom Power. "I'm like, this is trippy. Seeing Steve Martin on stage listening to New Noise? That's wild.”

For the Umeå quartet, it is wild. It’s a surreal coup for the highlight of an album that some sections of their scene originally detested. But almost three decades on, the song and album retains its raw power.

Refused are fucking dead. Long live Refused.

Marillion's final album on EMI was their first not to reach the UK Top 10. Afraid Of Sunlight has since been hailed as one of the band’s greatest recordings. Prog sat down with the band on the album's 30th anniversary in 2025 to get the inside story...

“Do you know what was really amazing?” asks Steve Hogarth. “It was like it had sunk the day before, but in fact, it had been down there for nearly 40 years. It still had the Union Jack on the tail fin, and it was still so blue, so much of it was still intact.”

“I was at the end of the pier taking photos, as the craft broke the surface of the water and they hauled it out of the lake, while all of the world’s press were a hundred yards behind me behind a barrier,” continues Steve Rothery. “It was quite spooky when I think about it. Like someone raising the Titanic.”

“I remember watching [the accident] happen on the news, I was just a kid,” says Hogarth. “This weird, lobster-shaped machine suddenly doing a back-flip and noticing that my mum was crying and wondering what the significance of that was. I was too young to really get it.”

On January 4, 1967 Donald Campbell would make history for all the wrong reasons when his Bluebird K7 craft flipped over during a water speed record attempt on Coniston Water in the Lake District, shattering into pieces and killing Campbell instantly. The infamous footage of Campbell’s craft flying helplessly into the air to its doom sparked something in the young Steve Hogarth and inspired him to begin writing a pivotal part of the Afraid Of Sunlight album: Out Of This World.

“I’d started writing some of the lyrics before I’d even joined the band, I think, I had a handful of lines,” he says. “And then later when I was writing the lyrics, developing what I wanted to say, I thought of it being a little bit of a love song about his wife’s take on it, how maybe he doesn’t love her enough to take his life in his hands like this, made it into something more than a bloke just driving fast over water.”

Either way, the song would catch the ear of one Bill Smith, an underwater surveyor and diver who, inspired by Out Of The World, created The Bluebird Project and set about bringing both the K7 and Campbell back to the surface. And that’s why in the spring of 2001, both Steve Rothery and Steve Hogarth found themselves on the pier at Coniston Water watching the centre hull of Campbell’s ill-fated Bluebird breaking the waters that had once carried it and him away.

“Some songs have influence in places we couldn’t have imagined,” says Hogarth.

“That Bill heard that song and thought, ‘Right, I’m going to see if I can go find it’, and that I ended up singing the song at Donald Campbell’s funeral at [St Andrew’s] Church in Coniston in 2001 was a very weird experience, not least because it came out of this record.”

That song may have helped change the course of history, but in 1995 the band who created it were struggling to tell their story. Although the previous year’s Brave album had been something of a creative landmark for the post-Fish Marillion, the band were at odds with their record label, EMI, after the record had run over time and budget and fallen foul of their A&R man who felt the band had deliberately attempted to undermine him. They hadn’t, but there’s still a feeling that both parties won’t be swapping Christmas cards anytime soon. Still, somehow after the Brave project, Marillion were allowed one more record: Afraid Of Sunlight.

“I was in a café in Stockholm,” says Hogarth, “with our manager at the time, and he was saying that EMI didn’t want another record, but he’d persuaded them to do one more if we could do it quickly and cheaply. I still think it’s a great record, but after that we were gone.”

“I think they’d [EMI] given up on the band before they’d even heard the album,” says Rothery. “The message had come down from on high: ‘Let’s get what we can out of this band because we’re dropping them.’ It was one of those times when EMI was trying to streamline the company to sell it, so they dropped quite a few acts. But I think we were probably the most successful act that they dropped. The album still did something like 400,000 or 450,000 copies. To get dropped by a label after selling that amount, it’s just insane, ridiculous, really.”

“Record companies play games with you,” says Pete Trewavas. “Even on the first album they were muttering to our then-manager about who they thought should stay in the band and who should go. He said, ‘Listen, you’ve signed the whole band, so the whole band are doing this album.’ And when they first heard Misplaced Childhood, they said they couldn’t hear a single and I remember [our producer] Chris Kimsey saying, ‘I’ll make a hit out of Lavender or Kayleigh’, and by God, he did.”

“Sunlight escaped more than it was released,” recalls Hogarth, who claims the band were deceived by their A&R. “I think arms had to be twisted to even get them to release the Beautiful single. Our A&R man, who we’d fallen out with over Brave, and who pretty much hated us at this point, said he didn’t like Dave Meegan’s mix, and he’d sent it to an American remix guy called Michael Brauer [award-winning mix engineer for John Mayer and Coldplay]. But it turns out he hadn’t sent it at all – I phoned Michael’s office in New York myself. So, I ended up sending it and he thought it was great, said he would have loved to do it. But that’s just another example of how being signed to a label can make you suicidal, because it can make you think nobody likes what you’re doing only because your A&R man has lied to you. It drives you nuts.”

Intriguingly, Beautiful would go on to become the mainstay love theme of a very popular South American soap opera called Cara & Coroa.

Mark Kelly explains: “My wife Karina, who’s Brazilian, tells me that whenever the love interest appeared onscreen that Beautiful would start playing in the background, that’s how it became so popular in Brazil and probably explains why it’s our second most listened to song on Spotify.”

Though not even a nation of ardent daytime TV fans could convince EMI to change their minds when it came to Marillion. But as the adage goes, art out of adversity. Talk to each bandmember now and though there are moments not unlike Rashomon – where each party describes the same event in a different or contradictory manner – they can all agree on one thing: how the threat of being dropped galvanised them to create what’s arguably the album of their careers.

“It was a weird situation, though the five of us understood what we had and what we had to do,” says Trewavas. “I remember Steve [Rothery] coming up with Afraid Of Sunlight at Racket [the band’s rehearsal space], the riff, and thinking, ‘Oh, that’s really good.’ You know you’re on to something then.”

“We still had confidence in the band,” says Rothery. “This blind optimism, if you like, because we’d just made such a great album. We thought, ‘We don’t need EMI, we’ll survive.’ And of course, we did, but it meant signing to a small independent label for three albums, and seeing our record sales fall a third or a quarter of what they had been. But the thing I remember about those sessions for Sunlight was that they were fun. It was this very productive writing period, and after Brave I think we wanted to prove that we could come up with an album of great, diverse songs. And that’s what Dave [Meegan – see box out] was so great at: he would kind of encourage you, so you kind of go down a certain path with it. So, you know, something like Gazpacho is so different to something like King, but it was all encouraged, and it just kind of made the process easier.”

“One of Dave’s real strengths is that he gets people,” says Trewavas. “He’s very knowledgeable, very switched on, he picks up on moods and ideas. Also, he’s not afraid of telling people when he thinks they need to stretch themselves: he pushed Steve Rothery with his guitars, did the same with Mark, he just got the best out of all our abilities.”

“He was the sixth member of the band, to me,” says Ian Mosley. “The way he would go through our jams, distil it down and find the right part for the song or the song itself. I remember going into the studio one day, and he’d built this whole section of a song from a jam we’d done, it was almost unrecognisable, pulling one part from here and one from there and then moulding them into this new thing. It’s an incredible skill set and sort of set the way for how we’d write going on from there.”

Afraid Of Sunlight opens and closes with meditations on the vagaries of fame, bookends of avarice and excess. Dizzying highs and the crushing lows, Gazpacho ends with the sounds of OJ Simpson’s televised run from the police, a helicopter buzzing overhead (Ian Mosley: “Dave recorded that when he lived in LA, and Universal Studios
was burning down. And there were helicopters circling over his building.”). King opens with a babble of famous voices before ceding into Hogarth’s plea to escape the rigours of celebrity. They’re extraordinary entry and exit points on an album filled with surprises, and though far from a concept record, the toll stardom can take is never far away. Hogarth, unapologetically frank as a confessional lyricist – he sometimes refers to the process of going into himself to find the right words to fit the band’s songs as soul mining – is at his most explicit here.

“I was struggling a bit,” he says. “My marriage was in a bad place, and so was I. I was just generally burnt out by having a bit of the rock star excess, I suppose. Everything that goes with it, the price to be paid for all of that was getting to me. I was raw and suggestible and there was the whole OJ Simpson thing, the Mike Tyson rape case, and I was thinking a lot about what success and fame had done to these people and thinking like I could relate to some extent and that all lead to King.

“Then [Marillion lyricist] John Helmer sent me Gazpacho, and that’s what those words were saying to me as well: they’re all about the whole trip, when I sing: ‘the boys who run the house’ll make it all OK’ when you feel screwed, the list of causalties is endless,
the machine eats its own. And what everyone keeps forgetting is the sheer amount of work people have to do, the constant pressure and that gets to you eventually as well. We’ve never had that kind of success, never been the biggest band in the world. I think if we had been then we’d have split up years ago.”

Brave had seen the band set up home at a château in the French countryside. By the time of Afraid Of Sunlight, they were calling the upscaled version of the Racket Club studio in Buckinghamshire not just a rehearsal and writing space, but a recording hub, too.

“I could see the logic of having our own place,” says Kelly. “Though I do recall us having a problem with rats in the loft. But it was the right idea, we got dropped after we’d made our first record there and if that had happened and we hadn’t had Racket, then we would’ve had nowhere to work. It would have made it much harder for us to continue, especially through the late 90s, the lean years when we were doing the Castle albums. The records wouldn’t have sounded half as good, either.”

“The album just flowed. Top to bottom it took something like three months to make,” remembers Mosley, “which is unheard of with us. We’d just finished the Brave tour, too, and we were on something of a high, firing on all cylinders as players. Even though
we had the whole EMI thing hanging over us, it was just a case of crack on and get it done.

“It’s a very ambitious-sounding record, too. Even though it’s our album, you’ve got lot of styles on there, that Beach Boys vibe with Cannibal Surf Babe – that was a one-take thing, we could never really reproduce it as well as we did the first time we played it – the Yes-like punch to Gazpacho and then the Joni Mitchell feel of Afraid Of Sunrise. It’s a very much standalone kind of record, there’s a lot of experimentation on that album. I mean, we all love Brave, but this was a much more freeing experience. Brave was a mammoth task. I remember being back in the US, and after about three months calling the boys to ask how it was going and them telling me that they’d just finished the bass parts. I went, ‘What?!’”

And while Hogarth was struggling with his own demons, Mosley was having problems at home, too. His marriage was also falling apart. Though while Hogarth poured his
pain onto the page and into his songs, Mosley went a more conventional route to kill the pain: Prozac.

“I was all over the place,” says Mosley. “I was taking quite a lot of the stuff, which was just brilliant. I had a lot of energy. I was coming over from the States and doing blocks of work at a time, so Sunlight is a bit hazy for me. In the middle of working, because of the Prozac, I’d be thinking, ‘I might go for a bicycle ride and get a packet of fags.’ Suddenly I’d be riding 70 miles!

“I went to New Zealand for the weekend. There was a girl that I knew, so I popped over to see her. I went on the Friday and I’d finished taking the Prozac – this is quite funny really – I got to New Zealand and I was standing on top of this building, looking out over the harbour and I thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ I came home –
I was back in London by Monday night!”

One of the sublime highlights of the record is the folksy-sounding Afraid Of Sunrise, which echoes elements of the title track, but comes at the lyric from
a completely different musical world.

“I remember us working on that song,” says Hogarth. “I used to go in about seven in the evening to do lead vocals with Dave, and I went to the Racket Club. It was early in the year, and I did about seven or eight takes of the vocal for Afraid Of Sunrise conjuring up this desert heat, the golden light coming in through the window, sun
on skin, mirages and heat coming off roads, all of that stuff. Then I went outside to drive home, and several inches of snow had fallen while I’d been there. I spun the car three times on the drive home on these A roads, which were totally impassable, but I had to get home. And that was a weird thing to sing a song like that with all this snow piling up outside, in this sort of sanctuary we’d made for ourselves.”

Ask all five members what they make of Sunlight now and they’re unified in their effusiveness, even if they can’t quite pin down just how they managed to capture lightning in a bottle so ably. Steve Rothery thinks it might be their best record, and he might be right, even more remarkable really considering that EMI were distancing themselves from the group and Hogarth was in something of an emotional freefall.

“If the mood’s right, then creativity can be effortless,” says Rothery. “For me, Sunlight is a perfect example of that. The title track and The Great Escape [from Brave] are probably my all-time favourite Marillion songs. We were still optimistic about the future and how can you be despondent when you’ve made an album that’s
this good? If the ideas had dried up and the creativity had gone then we would have wondered what the point was, but we were very far from that.

“I don’t think there’s a weak track on there. Part of that might have been because the writing was on the wall with EMI, I don’t know. But I do know that Dave Meegan did such a great job bringing that out in all of us, especially in H, I think. Making us
do things in a way that you wouldn’t naturally gravitate towards as well, playing different parts of the songs in different keys, different tempos. It was quite something.

“You also have to remember that it was our first time recording in Racket, too, changing the way we were doing things. So, it was quite groundbreaking for us and set the pattern for the next 30-odd years. I also think it’s probably the first album where the five of us were fully interacting. We’d tried pop with H and failed. Brave was a band reaction to that, us restating our prog credentials if you like, but with Sunlight there was no agenda, it was just us, our essence, this crafted music. For me it was the perfect storm, everything came together, even though the circumstances were less than ideal in that we were being dropped.”

It was telling of the situation the band found themselves in that Hogarth and Trewavas were sent to Paris to do a day of press and ended up in their hotel rooms doing phone interviews to other territories instead, the culmination of their trip being an extended face-to-face interview with a French fanzine. Back at home, Q magazine raved about Sunlight and found a place for it in their albums of the year, but by then EMI had just about cast the band adrift.

“That was a mad, little press trip,” says Trewavas with a smile.

“You got the feeling that they looked up and went, ‘Marillion are coming in today? Oh God, who can we get to talk to them? Who’s in town?’ It was really stupid, we just sat in our room on the phone to all these different territories, and then they got some bloke from a fanzine to come in a chat to us, bless them, but it was a bit underwhelming, shall we say?”

Dave Meegan didn’t realise the potency of the album until he went back to visit the remaster and was blown away by its creativity and depth of songwriting. It took Mark Kelly a few years to realise the album’s worth, too, though for different reasons.

“We were really rushed, or it felt that way, and I wasn’t very happy with it at the time,” he says. “Not that I wasn’t happy with the results, but my opinion of the album was spoiled by the process. There was a song called An Accidental Man, which we did
a version of that I liked, and for some reason we threw it out. It resurfaced with different music on This Strange Engine, but I liked the Sunrise version. Dave Meegan and Steve H didn’t, I’m still not sure why, and my opinion of the album was tainted by that, you know? ‘You threw out one of my favourite songs!’

“It was just that particular thing, really. I got a bee in my bonnet about it. I liked the original, there’s a demo of it kicking around somewhere and I think we did actually put it out as part of the This Strange Engine [2024 deluxe] reissue. I should go and listen to it and decide whether or not it really was as good as I thought it was at the time, but I was a lone voice. I don’t know how it happened, but I think it got bumped off the album in favour of maybe Afraid Of Sunrise, which I particularly didn’t like. So, I was probably doubly hurt about the fact that one of my songs got bumped for something that just sits on the same musical motif for five minutes, but then, Nowhere Man goes around like that for five minutes and it’s a classic.

“So, my whole opinion of the album was kind of coloured by that experience. Of course, you go back to it years later you realise that it’s a really good album, one of our best. We just did it in full alongside the Marbles album, another one of our best records and another Dave Meegan record, at the Port Zélande Weekend, and it’s
so good to play live. All the tracks work really well, it sort of plays itself: well-constructed songs, good lyrics.”

Before gentrification gave it a slick makeover, Battersea Power Station was made famous on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals. In reality, as a listed building, the façade remained intact, but the interior was left empty and unwanted, which makes it odder still that a photographer and members of Marillion were in there shooting promo pics for Afraid Of Sunlight record. Pete Trewavas plays Napoleon, OJ Simpson and Mike Tyson stand in the frame, an astronaut sits at the edge of the photograph. Fame, downfall and celebrity crashing together in the burst of the photographer’s flashgun.

“I’m still not sure why I was Napoleon,” Trewavas chuckles. “And was H the angel? Of course, he probably was. I think it was the photographer’s call to take us there. It was this weird wasteland and there was what I think was a Pedigree Chum [dog food] factory next door. All very odd.”

“It was like this big vacant lot,” says Hogarth. “We’re doing these promo shots, and half the band aren’t in them. But it had something to it and it clearly caught someone’s imagination.”

Two years later, on the band’s 21-city crowdfunded US tour (financed to the tune of $60,000, around £45k today, by eager American Marillion fans), Steve Hogarth was reminded of that shoot as he was stood outside the band’s show in Columbus, Ohio, signing autographs and posing for pictures with fans.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” says Hogarth. “This guy was having his photo taken with me and he asked me why there was an astronaut in that publicity shot. So, I was explaining to him that it’s an album, in part at least, about people who become unhinged as a consequence of their success, and Buzz Aldrin says he came back from the Moon a slightly different man. And this guy says to me, ‘That’s strange, because this album is like the story of my dad’s life’, and I said, ‘Who’s your dad?’ And he said, ‘Neil Armstrong’ and my jaw hit the floor, as you might imagine.”

“Rick, that’s the son, and Neil had been playing golf up in Scotland so I got to meet him at Heathrow for lunch as they were on their way home. I had my son with me, and he’d just got a new bike and Neil was asking him all about it, the most normal things from one of the most abnormal individuals on Earth. They had to get to Gatwick to make their connecting flight home to the US, so I’ve got them in the back of my car haring around the M25, really gunning it to make sure they don’t miss their plane and thinking, ‘God, don’t be the man who kills Neil Armstrong.’

“And he was great, excuse the pun, but so down to earth. And it’s really hard to comprehend, isn’t it? When you really think about it, he’s been to another planet. He’s travelled through space. It’s such a great privilege just to be around someone like that, to have anything to do with it.”

Strange to think, how the disparate yet pioneering spirits of both Donald Campbell and Neil Armstrong could echo through the ages, and both find their place on a record that was, in its own way, pushing the envelope of a band who were trying to find their own path forward and do things their own, new way. Marillion might not have touched the sky or tested the limits of machine and man on the frigid waters of a northern lake, but in their new way of doing, they shared stories, changed some ways
of seeing, and helped bring at least one modern hero home from the black waters of Coniston. All with unflinching endeavour, staring at the sun.

How about that intense sunshine? Thankfully, here are 10 bands which have thoughtfully scheduled new music in advance to help take our minds of those red and amber weather warnings. It's like everything Nuclear Assault predicted in the '80s is coming true.

Check the best 10 metal songs of the week before your local power infrastructure buckles under the weight of a million fans being switched on at once.

The Hu – Grey Hun

Mongolian folk metallers The Hu are set to release their third album Hun on July 24. According to horsehead fiddle player and backing vocalist Enkhsaikhan ‘Enkush’ Batjargal, Grey Hun is a thumping anthem that celebrates everyone’s right to be themselves and deserves to be played at a more than reasonable volume.

“It started with composing the riff as I imagined a man riding his horse through a vast landscape," he explains. "From there, it took a while for us to finish the song because we wanted to make sure to clearly communicate [its] positive message."

Loathe – Fangs

Merseyside four-piece Loathe release their long-awaited new album A Stranger To You on July 17. Fangs is a bass-y slab of downtuned R&B featuring a sublime vocal performance from Kadeem France. Following on from the thudding metalcore of Revenant, it's clear that their time away has been wisely spent adding even more colours to their sonic palette.

Five Finger Death Punch – De Oppresso Liber

It's been about four years since Five Finger Death Punch released their last album, AfterLife. The Nevada quintet are readying the digital release of album 10 – Legacy – at the end of July, with physical releases planned for later in the year. On De Oppresso Liber, it's business as usual for Zoltan Bathory's mob. It's got more crunch you could shake a stick at and a memorable, soaring chorus. "[The title] is more than just a motto," says the guitarist. "It's a calling. It's a philosophy. It represents a willingness to stand between danger and those who cannot defend themselves. Throughout human history, there have always been people who were drawn to accept that responsibility. This song is our way of paying respect to that mindset."

Bring Me The Horizon – Dehumanized

Bring Me The Horizon aren't celebrating the 20th anniversary of their album Count Your Blessings with a lazy reissue. Count Your Blessings Repented is a new recording, which sees the Sheffield four-piece give the album a proper makeover and deliver the sound they'd envisioned as teenagers. Dehumanised is a brutal bastard of a single with an aggressive, unsettling video to match.

King Ultramega – Loud Love

King Ultramega is the star-studded tribute to late Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell. This cover of the Louder Than Love single features an incredible vocal performance from Halestorm's Lzzy Hale, Testament guitarist Alex Skolnick and former Pearl Jam drummer Dave Krusen. It's a faithful rendition by all those involved and a bittersweet reminder of Cornell's incalculable loss.

Chelsea Wolfe - Death is Not the End

This week, Chelsea Wolfe released two new songs which will feature on her as-yet-untitled ninth studio album. The first was the folky The Dark but it's Death is Not the End that is the most affecting. A fragile vocal floats above a delicate piano and guitar line, before gradually swelling into a soaring, meditative doom riff by former Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck.

Russian Circles – Empath

Well, if it's not our favourite post-metal hypnotists named after an ice hockey drill who return with a new song and news of a brand new full-length. Taken from the album Nine, which was recorded at Steve Albini's Electrical Audio studio and engineered by Converge's Kurt Ballou, Empath is gloriously heavy, all-enveloping, ominous and mesmerising. Absolutely perfect.

Psycroptic – No Blade of Grass

Australian quintet Psycroptic return with The Pulse of Annihilation, their first album in four years, on July 17. No Blade of Grass is a ferocious bark of tech-death with an immense groove. And to drive the song title home, the narrative part of their video is set in a desert. Thanks lads!

Green Lung – Necropolitan Line

Here's another taster from the occultist stoner doom quintet's forthcoming album Necropolitan. This song is about the Necropolis Railway, "a real-life train line that carried corpses and mourners across London in the late 19th century". So imagine if Deep Purple were trapped in a carriage with a bag of cans and holding torches under their chins, then you've got yourself some creepy 70s psych pomp. Lovely stuff.

New Idea Society – Lantern

Here's a second mention of Kurt Ballou, and that's a wonderful thing. New Idea Society, a project featuring Cave In's Stephen Brodsky and Euclid's Mike Law, have filmed a performance of the slow-burning Lantern at God City Studios with a few friends: Cave In's Adam McGrath, Old Man Gloom's Santos Montano and Ballou. The original can be found on the album Fire On The Hill, which was released last month through Relapse.

Welcome to Prog's brand new Tracks Of The Week! This week we've got seven more new and diverse slices of progressively inclined music for you to enjoy.

Well, what a battle we had on our hands last week! And huge congratulations to Bulgarian proggers Untold Stories, whose Pale Horizons edged ahead of Alex Henry Foster to win last week. And in third place, we had US prog metal quintet Outrun The Sunlight who pipped fellow US band North Sea Echoes by the closest of margins to grab third place. Well done all!

The premise is simple - we've collated a batch of new releases by bands falling under the progressive umbrella, and collated them together in one post for you - makes it so much easier than having to dip in and out of various individual posts, doesn't it?

The idea is to watch the videos (or listen if it's a stream), enjoy (or not) and also to vote for your favourite in the voting form at the bottom of this post. Couldn't be easier, could it? We'll be bringing you Tracks Of The Week, as the title implies, each week. Next week we'll update you with this week's winner and present a host of new prog music for you to enjoy.

If you're a band and you want to be featured in Prog's Tracks Of The Week, send your video (as a YouTube link) or track embed, band photo and biog to us here.

THE PINEAPPLE THIEF - HOLD THE ASHES

The new single from The Pineapple Thief, Hold The Ashes, is the band's first release since signing to InsideOut Music, and although there's no news about a new studio album yet, Prog understands the band have recently completed work on their as-yet-untitled sixteenth album. So it doesn't take much to connect the dots and reckon this is a taster for the new album. Sounds really good, too...

“One thing is certain, one day we’ll all be ashes," says signer and guitarist Bruce Soord, cheerily. "It’s the ‘gift from the gods that comes to us all’. For some reason, when writing this song, I couldn’t stop singing about ‘ashes’ in the context of understanding what life is about. ‘Writhing in constant conflict’. Why? So take these ashes and scatter them far and wide. You know, make the most of it.”

CHANGING PLACES IN THE FIRE - HOME

Changing Places In The Fire are a Venezuelan quintet who will release their self-titled debut album through Wild Thing Records on July 24. As you will hear from the band's latest single, Home, they meld muscular prog rock - think Tool, laced with Porcupine Tree, with more expansive post-rock moments which bring to mind the much-missed Oceansize. We reckon they're in to a winner here...

"Home reflects on distance, guilt, and memory - on the ghosts that follow long after leaving," explains keyboardist Alfredo Ovalles. "It confronts the ache of belonging to a place you can’t fully return to, and carrying that absence forward."

SOURCE - OPTIMISTIC

If you're going to cover a song like Radiohead's Optimistic, then you'd better be prepared for some scrutiny. Fortunately, this Boulder, Colorado trio have got the chops and deliver a thoroughly engaging version. The band talk of their music in terms of "heavy psychedelic prog rock" and they've released four albums thus far, with new single, Optimistic, nodding ahead to a fifth.

"When we decided to cover Optimistic, we really wanted to showcase our love for the song while bringing our own voice to the arrangement," the band say. "I think our version has a lot of similar ingredients, but the way we choose to highlight those ingredients really displays our unique approach and sound. The tones are much heavier, the tempo is faster so it feels like there's more energy, and the way we flip the ending into a heavy riff is my favourite part of our version."

RAPHAEL WEINROTH-BROWNE - FALL FOR ME

Not one but two covers this week! Canadian cellist Raphael Weinroth-Browne offers up his take on Sleep Token's Fall For Me, the video set against the stunning backdrop of Ontario bathed in golden sunlight. Sleep Token divides the prog world, mostly, we suspect, because they seem to have emerged from the metal world despite evidently not being a metal band, but Weinroth-Browne offers a take on the song that's probably far more palatable to prog fans, all the while managing to keep his shirt on for a promo video. No mean feat in itself!

"Fall For Me is a hidden gem in Sleep Token’s catalogue - its gorgeous melodies and rich choral harmonies lend themselves perfectly to the cello. In reimagining this song, I tried to convey the same juxtaposition of sadness and beauty that makes the original so poignant," he says. "The music video was shot at the epic Eagles’ Nest Lookout in rural Ontario by Ben Kissner of Monscene Studios. My face was completely devoured by mosquitoes and black flies by the end of the shoot, but I believe it was worth it for the final result!"

PRINCE OF FAILURE - PHANTOM

Prince of Failure is the new collaborative project featuring TesseracT singer Daniel Tompkins and Paul Ortiz from Chimp Spanner, and they've just released their self-titled debut album through Kscope. It's an album rooted in deep ideas, based around neurodivergence, masking, and the psychological weight of living out of alignment with expectation

"Phantom explores the fight against the darker forces that live both within and around us. It’s about being haunted by destructive impulses, temptation, and the feeling of losing control to something that seems impossible to escape," Tompkins explains. "Within the wider story of the album, it represents a descent into chaos - the moment where the protagonist is forced to confront the parts of himself he’s tried to suppress, only to realise that the battle may already be consuming him. Themes of conflict, self-destruction, and overwhelming power run throughout the song, creating a sense of inevitable collapse as everything begins to burn around him."

MAYA ONGAKU - ASTRAL ECHOES

Anyone who's been suffering during the heatwave that's been hitting the UK this past week might find the gentle melodies of Astral Echoes something of a balm. it's the new single from Japanese psych tri Maya Ongaku, who will release their new album Nothing Space Music on August 7 (digitally) and September 9 (physically) via Guruguru Brain. The band draw inspiration from the experimental rock of the 1960s and 70s, Japanese folk and psychedelia, avant-garde art movements, literature, philosophy, and cultural anthropology, and this all sounds rather wonderful.

"Astral Echoes explores the moment when art comes into being — when inspiration quietly enters the mind," the band state. "I believe inspiration is not something to be chased or seized, but something that emerges when we patiently wait for its arrival in silence."

DATURA LODGE - STONE

Datura Lodge are a brand new prog duo from Bergen County, New Jersey. The enigmatically named Nicky B and “W” will release their self-titled debut album through Arquen Records on October 2. The album has been produced by the band and Ben Karas from Thank You Scientist, who also adds violin to this single, which, according to the band, "fulfils the 'rock' component of their progressive sound."

"I was listening to Lou Reed’s 'middle-aged man era' albums a lot and love how his lyrics are rooted in reality but also very funny," explains "W". "Stone is my third-rate impression of that."

They may have emerged during nu metal’s infancy, but Deftones quickly carved their own path, becoming one of the most inventive bands of the last 30 years – and one of the most turbulent. In 2010, as the band prepared to release their sixth album, Diamond Eyes, singer Chino Moreno and guitarist Stephen Carpenter looked back over the highs and lows of their career.

There aren’t many bands in modern rock who’ve gone through as much as the Deftones. Through inner-band conflict, substance abuse, the tragedy of losing a member to a car accident and all sorts in-between, they remain one of the biggest bands within our stratum. They’ve outlasted nu metal, emo, metalcore and screamo (and they’ve been labelled in just about all of them) without ever altering their core sound. Ol’ Blue Eyes says he did it his way, but Deftones are the real deal.

Their seeds were sown in 1988, during seventh grade at a school in Sacramento, California. Abe Cunningham and Chino Moreno were classmates who would sit in lessons and spend their time like most other high school students: by taking apart a pair of headphones and running one ear up each of their sleeves and playing the then-recently released …And Justice For All by Metallica over and over again.

“I knew Abe played drums but there was a song on that record that he said he could play all the way through,” laughs a reminiscing Chino Moreno. “I was like, ‘No you can’t!’ I went to his house and he played the whole song. I had to take him to meet Stephen (Carpenter).”

Hailing from the same modest suburban neighbourhood of Sacramento as Chino, teenage guitarist Stephen had already taught himself how to shred. By this point, Stephen was already able to rip on the likes of Death Angel and S.O.D., and following Chino introducing the pair, the musical chemistry between Abe and Stephen was instantaneous.

“They were locked in straight away. Stephen’s jaw just hit the ground when he heard Abe play,” says Chino. “I saw Abe at school a few weeks later and he said he and Stephen had been jamming for a few weeks and they’d written a few songs and Stephen wanted me to sing.

“I didn’t know anything about heavy metal really, apart from a couple of Metallica records, so I didn’t know how to sing like that,” admits Chino. “I didn’t know how to sing but in junior high school, I used to rap. I loved The Smiths so I’d try to sing like Morrissey and I’d rap too, so I had no identity at all. All of those things are still in me and that’s made the uniqueness of what I do, I guess.”

With bass player Chi Cheng completing the Deftones lineup, the young band wrote everything from reggae-rap to straight-up, balls-to-the-wall heavy metal in a crusade to cement their sound. Honing their craft locally in Sacramento, they formed their signature sound and hit LA to get themselves a deal, meeting fellow newcomers Korn in the process. After recording a demo with soon-to-be nu metal über-producer Ross Robinson, Chino says that people were already starting to spit jibes at the band and label them ‘baby Korn’.

“We were definitely grouped in with Korn,” says Stephen. “The only similarity was that we both made heavy music and we were both doing something that people considered exciting at the time, but I liked what those guys were doing.”

“We had to take our own road and not attach ourselves to any scene,” agrees Chino. “That’s something that’s always been our thing.”

Recruiting Pantera and Prong producer Terry Date and signing with Madonna’s Maverick label,  Deftones recorded and released their debut album, Adrenaline. Alongside Korn and Incubus,  Deftones were cited as pioneers for the burgeoning nu metal scene and riot-starting tracks like 7 Words and Minus Blindfold sound as fresh and club-ready in 2010 as they did upon their release.

“I’m not sure our mental capacity has ever been forward- thinking,” says Stephen, who laughs and reveals that his down-beat turn of phrase has earned him the nickname Negatron amongst his bandmates. “We try to do something that sounds good to us and that’s just about it. There’s never a masterplan behind what we do.”

“I couldn’t even say that we put that much thought into that record,” says a modest Chino. “We captured an energy and a youthful spirit that you can still hear and that still shows today but we were just excited to be recording an album.”

If the band fired early warning shots with their debut release, their sophomore effort, 1998’s Around The Fur, blew the fucking doors off. Maintaining the zip-and-bounce of their debut on the dancefloor-filling My Own Summer (Shove It), the band also began to extend their journey into the world of atmospherics with Chino’s other-worldly vocal delivery growing in stature tenfold, on an album that’s rightfully regarded as one of the most essential rock albums of the 90s.

“It’s funny, people always think it’s me who brought that other side to the band,” Chino shrugs. “It was Stephen who wrote Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away) and started building on our sound in that way and it just kind of worked for all of us.”

“I wrote Mascara too and that’s pretty mellow, right?” laughs Stephen. “I don’t always write the heaviest music. I write what I feel. I just feel the heavier stuff more often than not because that’s how I am as a guitar player.”

Riding universal acclaim for their bold leap forward on …Fur, its follow-up White Pony saw the band branching out further than ever before with Chino adding second guitar to the writing process but, due to his amateur ability, also adding an age to the band’s recording process.

“It slowed us down incredibly because he didn’t really know how to play guitar,” says Stephen. “That time when he was learning to play guitar was when we went from taking a year or less to make a record to two years or greater.”

“I sucked at guitar,” admits Chino. “I was learning to play and I didn’t really know what I was doing and I still don’t, but Stephen only recently admitted that it made him mad.”

“I still joke around with him about how I wish I could have learnt to play guitar in a band that was signed already,” Stephen concludes.

Through this sense of frustration, there were allegations within the press that a power struggle was starting to emerge between Chino and Stephen during the album’s creation.

“There wasn’t a power struggle,” says Stephen with point- blank directness.

“People don’t realise that me and Stephen wrote a lot of that record together and we were in the same headspace at the same time,” asserts Chino. “It wasn’t that I took control and mellowed out the band at all. We write well together because we’re both looking to push ourselves. It’s not that we want to out-do each other but we do try to out-do ourselves.”

Through all of the alleged creative control issues and added time to the band’s schedule, the Deftones created what is commonly considered their finest hour with White Pony. Fearlessly experimental and a true journey of an album, it’s a record that is rightfully revered as one of the best rock albums of the last decade and an essential purchase for anyone interested in alternative metal.

“Towards the end of the making of that record, we knew we had something special,” admits Chino. “When we were listening to the final mixes, we knew we were doing something that nobody else was doing, that had pushed ourselves and I felt great about it.”

White Pony saw Deftones hit new heights, landing at number three on the Billboard charts and taking in headline arena shows in the UK that included A Perfect Circle and Linkin Park serving as support acts at Wembley Arena and the now-defunct London Arena in Docklands respectively, as well as beating Pantera, Iron Maiden and Slipknot to win Best Metal Performance at the 2001 Grammys.

If it seems all fluffy kittens and rags-to-riches up to this point, prepare for a slight change in pace. If this were an episode of VH1’s Behind The Music, this would be the part where the music becomes sombre and the voiceover guy puts on his best serious voice…

Beginning work on their self-titled album (ironically, originally set to be titled Lovers), the band began to hit hard times in their personal lives.

“That’s the only album where the music was secondary to our personal problems,” says Chino. “We were all going through different things like divorce or drugs. It’s hard to really think back to that period because I was out of my mind!”

With Chino beginning to fight a war with drug abuse that was set to consume him for the next few years of his life, the personal problems that were coursing through the band’s lifeblood would start to cause a musical breakdown. With those reports of creative power struggles within the band rearing their ugly head once more, Stephen admits that he took a stand in the making of that album.

“When we got to the self-titled album, Chino would play the quieter stuff and little jangly things and me, as a guitar player, I made a stand on that record,” Stephen states. “I said, ‘If it’s not heavy, I’m not playing on it.’ I stuck to that. I was introduced to Meshuggah and I was consumed by their music and we’re a heavy band and I just wanted to play heavy-ass music and Chino wasn’t into that. We were as far away from each other musically at that point as at any point in our history.”

The band battled through their problems to create the most challenging and musically diverse collection of their career. While it stands as the most successful Deftones album in terms of chart positions in both the UK and the States (numbers seven and two respectively), the self-titled effort didn’t garner the widespread acclaim of any of the band’s previous outings and remains something of a love-hate album amongst the band’s fanbase. This feeling of indifference was to prove the least of the band’s worries, with Chino’s drug problem beginning to spiral out of control.

“I’d do whatever, mostly coke and speed, and get amped out of my mind,” admits Chino. “I’d think I was being produc- tive but I’d never finish anything. I’d drink a lot of Jamesons to bring me back down too. When things were bad, I’d just drown myself in the dirtiest shit I could do. For a whole lot of my career, I lived like I didn’t give a shit about the next day.

“That was probably why I was so difficult to deal with for those years, but I wasn’t the only one in the band doing something that they shouldn’t have been doing.”

Sessions on the band’s fifth album, Saturday Night Wrist, came to a grinding halt. With Chino continuing his stop-start style of working and then going on to complete an album with his ambient side-project, Team Sleep, his bandmates started to lose patience with their vocalist.

“It wasn’t a fun time at all,” says Chino. “I really lost my friendship with the band during that whole thing and there was something really personal which I will tell you because it never really gets spoken about. I heard they were talking about getting someone else to sing so they could finish the record. When I heard that I laughed, but I thought, ‘Could they really just do that to me?’ I believed it and I stopped communicating with them and I went and did Team Sleep and I didn’t do that out of defiance, I was going to do that anyway, but I left and I didn’t talk to any of them for six months.

“I still haven’t really confronted them about that whole thing because it’s not worth it,” says Chino. “But that was the main thing I look at and go, ‘Man, you knew me since I was eight years old and you guys would really get somebody else to record these songs because I’m having a hard time in my life right now? If I really am a drug addict then help me!’ and I felt like they were pushing me away and they probably felt that I was running away. It was a pretty deep time.”

Did you think about quitting the band?

“Yeah,” admits Chino. “I thought about it a lot during those times. During the self-titled and also during Saturday Night Wrist. When I was finished with my vocals on …Wrist I told the producer that it was the last Deftones album that I would ever put vocals on.”

“It wasn’t just me that considered [replacing Chino], it was all of us and it really didn’t have anything to do with him at the time,” said Stephen. “We had the music all done and he’s just going to bounce now and do Team Sleep before we’re finished? What the hell! Nobody wanted to replace him but nobody wanted to sit around and wait for him either.

“When he got back and we were clear that we were ready to move on and we put out B-Sides & Rarities, it lit a fire under Chino,” says Stephen. “The overall sound of …Wrist needed to go through that whole process to get to what you hear today. As wild a journey as that was, we were coming together as individuals by the end of that process and it was good for us and the vibes within the band have been good ever since.”

Saturday Night Wrist was released to moderate acclaim from fans and the press but, more importantly, the Deftones began to enjoy each other’s company for the first time in too long. Chino is currently two years sober of drugs, and the band’s shows on the Saturday Night Wrist tour were better than they had been since their arena-selling heyday. They were seemingly invincible. 

Then tragedy struck. It was as the band were finishing up work on the album known as Eros that they took the biggest hit of their career. On November 4, 2008, Deftones bassist Chi Cheng was involved in a car accident in Santa Clara, CA that left him in a coma. Chi has come through a potentially fatal septicaemia infection and is currently in a minimally conscious state.

“It was one of the hardest things we’ve had to deal with in our lives,” says Chino, the anguish evident in his every word. “We never had that conversation about the band continuing. We just wanted to play music together to help escape what was going on; we just wanted to get in the room and play and we invited Sergio (Vega, former bassist with influential post-hardcore outfit, Quicksand) to play with us and it felt good. We couldn’t have just sat and wallowed in it, it was too much. We miss Chi dearly and I look at [new album] Diamond Eyes as being really therapeutic for us as a band.”

“Chino calls it therapy through music, but for me it’s just that you can’t sit around forever, you have to go on and live. It’s just not easy,” says Stephen. 

“That same energy that carried us through …Wrist when Chino was away and not thinking about the rest of us that dragged us through, is the same energy that’s dragged us through Diamond Eyes,” Stephen continues. “The only difference is that when we went through the same struggles with Chino, it was of a selfish nature, and this whole thing with Chi has just been tragic. It’s not that I’m uneasy talking about it, it’s just that I don’t know what to say. One of my best friends who I spent my whole adult life with is not here with us because of one moment and he’s fighting day-by-day to come back to the world and be himself and that’s just difficult and there’s nothing perfect to be said.”

But through all of the heartbreak comes Diamond Eyes. A defiant and uplifting listening experience, it stands up as one of the greatest albums of the band’s career and hind- sight could well prove it to be a milestone in modern metal.

“We made this album in the wake of Chi’s accident and created something positive in amongst that huge negative,” says Stephen. “What I hear when I hear this record is positivity; it was a fun and enjoyable experience making it.”

“This is the first record in a while where I can’t wait to get out and play these songs for people,” agrees Chino. “We’ll always play the old stuff that people want to hear but there’s lots of this record that feels just as necessary for us to play because we’re so proud of this record.”

Celebrating the 15 years since the release of their debut album, perhaps the biggest testament to the Deftones’ career to date is that they’ve never allowed themselves to become a nostalgia act. They are still creating some of the best work of their lives in 2010. Constantly moving forward, Deftones have never allowed themselves to become cartoon characters for the media like so many of their peers, nor have they ever descended into self-parody. Quite simply, Deftones have been one of metal’s most gloriously creative shining lights for the better part of two decades and they continue to create career-affirming music to this day.

“There’s never been a point where we’ve found a formula and stuck to it or wanted to fit in with what’s cool,” says Chino. “We’ve changed as we’ve changed as people and as musicians and we’ve grown that way and that people have liked what we do is great. We’ll keep evolving, I can promise that.” 

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 205. Since the piece originally appeared, Chi Cheng sadly passed away in 2013

Renowned prog guitarists Steve Hackett and Steve Rothery have shared their first new music as Hackett & Rothery, with a video for The Black Sea.

It's taken from the pair's upcoming studio album, The Roaring Sea, which Prog announced last week was being released through InsideOut Music on August 28. The pair have also shared the artwork for the sea-themed album as well as the tracklisting, which you can see below.

"I think The Black Sea is the perfect introduction to the sonic world we’ve created between us," says the Marillion guitarist. "We have a very special chemistry.”

“For The Black Sea, our joint guitar sounds with the keys created a strong vibe of intrigue along with a sense of a musical dark sea adventure," adds Hackett, adding, "It’s not the kind of album that guitarists normally make together.”

"You’re trying to create an atmosphere… like painting a picture,” Rothery continues. “Taking people on a journey."

The pair are joined on The Roaring Sea with Hackett's new keyboardist, Riccardo Romano, who has also performed in Rothery's band as well as French proggers Nine Skies, and who also co-wrote, mixed and played keyboards and bass, and drummer Leon Parr, also from Rothery's band.

The Roaring Sea is available on several formats, including a limited edition CD+Blu-ray mediabook edition including Dolby Atmos (by Andy Bradfield) and High Resolution Stereo mixes. The album will also be available as a standard CD and a Gatefold 180g LP, cut at half-speed at Abbey Road Studios by Miles Showell. All feature artwork and layouts have been created by Simon War.

Pre-order The Roaring Sea.

Hackett & Rothery: The Roaring Waves
1. The Storm
2. Sandsend
3. Red Dragon
4. The Roaring Waves
5. K-129
6. The Black Sea
7. Pacific Coast Highway

Not much ran smoothly for The Doors. And so it was with sessions for their sixth album, L.A. Woman. In November 1970, regular producer Paul Rothchild, unconvinced by what he was hearing in the studio, decided to quit. Enter engineer Bruce Botnick, who joined the band in their old rehearsal space, the Doors Workshop, on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was a back-to-basics move that mirrored the eventual tone of the album itself. Gone were the symphonic flourishes and painstaking exactitude of their most recent work, replaced instead by a freer, garage-blues sound that harked back to their beginnings.

This was most keenly expressed on the title track, the final track recorded during the album sessions. On one level, it’s a simple song about barrelling down the LA Freeway, lights a-blur and the wind at its tail. But it’s also a conflicted homage to Los Angeles as a living entity, a promised land of midnight alleys and Hollywood bungalows, peopled by the lost and lonely.

As drummer John Densmore remarked in the documentary, The Story of L.A. Woman: “The metaphor for the city as a woman is brilliant - cops in cars, never saw a woman so alone…The physicality of the town and thinking of her and how we need to take care of her. It’s my hometown.”

Musically, L.A. Woman shifts through the gears. Densmore’s tight rhythm and Ray Manzarek’s descending organ riff hurry it along, before Jim Morrison’s vocals (mimic’d after each line by Robby Krieger bluesy guitar) open the throttle. Elvis’s former bassist Jerry Scheff adds a sense of propulsion, as does rhythm guitarist Marc Benno.

Morrison’s repeated phrase – ‘City of Night, City of Night’ – takes its cue from John Rechy’s underground novel of the same name, which depicts a demi-monde of hustlers, fiends and illicit sexual trysts, partly set in Los Angeles, while further inspiration came from 1940s writer John Fante, who described Hollywood in love-hate lines like: ‘So fuck you, Los Angeles, fuck your palm trees, and your high-assed women, and your fancy streets… Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand…’

"L.A. Woman was recorded in a state of high excitement," said Manzarek. "The Doors jumped in. We dug our teeth into that song. It was all about passion and hauling ass. It felt like we were on Route 101, on the road from Bakersfield to San Francisco. You can hear our enthusiasm. Welcome to Los Angeles!”

Hurtling through eight minutes of dark psychedelic blues, the song heads for optimum pick-up when Morrison begins to intone ‘Mr. Mojo Risin’ (an anagram of his own name) over and over. As his vocals become more frenzied – ‘Risin’!, Risin’!’ - the symbolism is obvious.

The Doors debuted L.A. Woman at the State Fair Music Hall in Dallas that December, and reprised it at The Warehouse in New Orleans the following night, the only times the four men played the song.

In Texas, a doomy 15-minute version of L.A. Woman was unveiled during a relatively triumphant show. Morrison was drunk but coherent. But Louisiana was a fiasco, and the last live show the band ever gave.

“He just lost his energy completely," said Mazarak. "He was so dissipated. His voice got lower and lower, and he ground to a halt. He was empty. This wasn’t like when he comes to the studio wasted and can’t deliver, but then there’s always tomorrow – and by God, he will deliver. This was final."

Morrison's legend continues to endure, of course, not least via what Krieger calls “the quintessential Doors song,” but within three months of its parent album’s release in early 1971, Morrison was dead. The music was over.

1966 was the year the guitar hero was born. It was the year that Eric Clapton, aged 21, recorded the landmark Beano Album with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and then walked away to form Cream; the year that Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, both aged 22, ended up smashing guitars and bashing through sonic barriers together in The Yardbirds; the year that marked the arrival of 19-year-old wunderkind Peter Green and a game-changing 24-year-old named Jimi Hendrix. It was, in short, the year when a new generation of guitar giants transformed the American deep blues songbook into a new strand of rock music.

Things were happening at a grass roots level too. The British R&B/blues circuit was a hothouse for new musical talent, many of them the stars of the future. Steampacket featuring Rod Stewart, Julie Driscoll and Long John Baldry, an amazing triumvirate of singers, along with the organist Brian Auger, was one such band. Ten Years After, boasting the speed-king Alvin Lee, Chicken Shack with the wiry blues warrior Stan Webb, and The Paramounts with apprentice guitar hero Robin Trower criss-crossed the country in their Commer van, playing a network of clubs, bars and town halls that stretched from the Club A’Gogo in Newcastle to the Florida Rooms in Brighton.

“There was an underground feeling in the air,” John Mayall says of the period just before the Beano Album came out on July 22. “The people in the clubs were flocking to see us, regardless of what was happening in the record business or the pop charts. We were playing to capacity crowds, six or seven nights a week, everywhere we went. So we figured something was about to happen.”

And happen it did.

The electric guitar has always been part of the British pop dream. At the start of the 1960s, the immaculately groomed Hank Marvin and the Shadows, with their gleaming red Stratocasters, gave way to a wilder breed of player with the arrival of Keith Richards and Brian Jones.

The Rolling Stones themselves had been mentored at the outset by the bandleader/guitarist Alexis Korner and harmonica player Cyril Davies, who had introduced the blues to jazz audiences when they formed Blues Incorporated in 1961. The players who passed through the line-up of this loose collective included Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and Charlie Watts, while those who made guest appearances with the band on their regular Rhythm and Blues Nights at the Ealing Jazz Club included Mick Jagger, Mayall and Page.

By the start of 1966, Korner was about to wrap up Blues Incorporated and – at the grand old age of 38 – embrace his well-earned status as an elder statesman of the R&B scene he had done so much to inspire. All around him his protégés were flourishing. In the pop charts the Stones were second only to The Beatles, while R&B-influenced bands such as The Animals from Newcastle and the Spencer Davis Group from Birmingham were dominating the airwaves on the ever-more popular pirate radio stations.

Foremost among the British blues pioneers who had followed the Stones into the world of pop stardom were The Yardbirds. Their album Five Live Yardbirds, released in December 1964, was an early prototype of the blues rock genre, thanks to the advanced musicianship of the band, and in particular that of its young lead guitarist, Eric Clapton. Although poorly recorded, the album’s wild-eyed versions of Smokestack Lightning, I’m A Man and others provided a template for the instrumental wig-outs that two years later would become the stock-in-trade of Cream and many other groups that emerged in their wake.

Clapton’s tenure with The Yardbirds ended abruptly in March 1965 when he deemed the group’s first hit single, For Your Love, to be insufficiently bluesworthy for him to be associated with. He was replaced by Jeff Beck, another supremely gifted guitarist with a similar art school background and fascination for the blues, but a more mercurial and experimental nature.

By the start of 1966, The Yardbirds had already travelled a long way from their blues beginnings. In February, they released the pivotal single Shapes Of Things. With its bold, philosophical lyric and Beck’s heavily distorted guitar solo, it found them exploring new frontiers of psychedelic pageantry. “We were all on the threshold of this new thing,” Beck later said. “The Yardbirds were the very first psychedelic band, really.”

But back in the clubs, bars, town halls, student unions and speakeasys of the UK, Alexis Korner’s legacy was clearly in evidence. There, a dedicated cadre of young musicians immersed in the history and artistry of the blues played to fans rammed into smoke-filled rooms who spread the gospel further afield with every day that passed. Like a gathering storm, the blues was about to break.

“It all happened very quickly,” recalls Mayall, who had relocated from his native Manchester to London, and by the start of 1966 had taken over from Korner as the torchbearer of modern blues in Britain. “British audiences had been listening to trad jazz for ten years, and a new generation was ready for something new. There was a really great energy that suddenly came about.”

Nowhere was that energy more concentrated than in the latest line-up of Mayall’s Bluesbreakers that featured John McVie on bass, Hughie Flint on drums and Eric Clapton on guitar, who Mayall had snapped up as soon as he’d left The Yardbirds.

On January 1, 1966 the Bluesbreakers saw in the New Year playing an all-nighter at the Flamingo in Soho, the first date on a gig sheet that already stretched ahead with few breaks into the months ahead. The Flamingo, a basement club in Wardour Street, was run by brothers Rik and Johnny Gunnell. Rik, an ex-boxer and bouncer, was also Mayall’s booking agent, and the venue was a colourful R&B mecca – “semi-dubious”, according to Mayall – where gangsters and prostitutes rubbed shoulders with jazz and blues musicians.

“Everybody knew everybody, because we were all playing the same circuit,” Mayall says. “Everybody was all part of one big family, if you will. We were all really surprised to discover that we could actually earn a living out of this music.”

For Mayall it was all about playing live and keeping together a band that could handle the workload. “The club scene was rolling for everybody,” he recalls. “There was so much work going on. There was enough for everybody.”

The bigger bands had a driver but there was no road crew. Drummer Aynsley Dunbar, who joined the Bluesbreakers in September 1966, remembers it as a time when road and vehicle safety were not the best, when nobody wore seatbelts and a new law prohibiting drinking and driving was passed in January 1966 but it was rarely enforced.

“I couldn’t sleep when I was being driven,” Dunbar recalls. “There were so many drivers around who’d had a drink or were too tired, and there were a lot of crashes so, over the years, I used to do a lot of the driving myself. I loved it! My average speed was always a hundred miles per hour or a bit more. We had some near misses.”

When the band got to the gig they would have to unload and set up the gear themselves. Mayall’s equipment included a Hammond organ that took some manhandling. “I fashioned some wooden handles and fixed it up like a sedan chair with a couple of poles running through the organ,” Mayall explains. “Two guys could navigate most of the venues like that, whether it was down to the basement at the Flamingo or up a flight of stairs in some cases.”

Mayall’s first album, John Mayall Plays John Mayall, released on Decca in 1965, had sold less than 1,000 copies and he had accordingly been dropped from the label. A succession of singles fared even worse, and it was only thanks to the persistent lobbying of producer Mike Vernon that Decca countenanced recording and releasing the Beano Album.

No one in the business was expecting the thunderbolt that arrived in the summer of ’66. But Clapton’s street reputation was already a phenomenon, and at least one tastemaker with a spray can had declared ‘Clapton Is God’ on a wall in Islington, North London. It was a measure of the young guitarist’s charisma and ability that such an outrageous tag stuck. And it was a measure of the brilliance of the album, formally titled Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton – but known as the Beano Album after the comic that Clapton can be seen reading with effortlessly cool insouciance on the cover – that it exceeded all precedents, never mind expectations.

The Beano Album raised the bar in modern recorded music overnight. From the opening notes of All Your Love, in which Clapton’s distinctive vibrato and steely tone slice through the mix like a guillotine, the sound and performances on the album were – and still are – superlative. The combination of Clapton’s Les Paul and an overdriven Marshall amp became the new template for a cool electric guitar sound and one that has rarely been bettered in the 50 years since.

“Eric’s contribution was quite phenomenal,” Mayall says. “He was the best there was. He wanted to play the blues and I provided a platform on which he could develop that.”

Mayall’s own routines on the harmonica-driven tracks Parchman Farm and Another Man were no less remarkable for their raw, gutbucket energy, while his howling vocal call on the Mayall/Clapton composition Double Crossing Time echoed the ghosts of blues singers down the years.

More than just a stunning blues collection, the Beano Album was the first de facto rock album. It featured nothing so commerical as a hit single, yet it reached No.6 in the UK. Its unexpected yet emphatic success was a key moment in the process whereby albums started to take over from singles as the barometer of a band’s success.

With its revolutionary sound, its reverence for the nuances of electric Chicago blues, its spiritual vigour and technical rigour, the impact of the album was seismic. A generation of guitarists had just received the wake-up call of their careers, and within a year the British Blues Boom would be in full swing.

For Mayall it was simply business as usual. “The record business was something we had no control over,” he says matter-of-factly. “But we did have control over getting our weekly quota of shows. The main focus for me was to keep the band together – or some line-up of the band – so that we could continue to go out and play.”

For Clapton, however, the Beano Album was instant history. By the time it was released he had already left the Bluesbreakers. Things happen fast when an art form is at a pivotal stage of its development, and Clapton was a young man driven by the same urgency of feeling that you could hear in his playing. On July 30, the day that England won the football World Cup, and just eight days after the Beano Album was released, Clapton, Bruce and Baker played their first gig together as Cream at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester.

Bruce had played with Clapton in the Bluesbreakers for a stretch the previous year, and on one occasion Baker had sat in. “That was when Eric, Jack and Ginger got talking in dark corners about their own futures,” says Mayall, who was remarkably unfazed at the prospect of having to carry on gigging without the star of an album that had just reached the Top 10. “For me it’s never been a problem,” he says. “Somehow or other I’m always able to find somebody else and make a different band.”

Clapton’s replacement was Peter Green, another blues prodigy from East London, who had deputised for Clapton in the past. “It took me a while to talk him into it,” Mayall recalls. “He’d been offered a job to tour America with The Animals. But in the end the music won out. He decided he’d rather play blues than go off to the States.”

In September, Hughie Flint also called it quits and Mayall was now on the lookout for a new drummer. He spotted Aynsley Dunbar playing a gig with Alexis Korner at a venue called Les Cousins in Wardour Street, and invited him to come and check out the Bluesbreakers a couple of days later at a gig at Chelsea Town Hall.

“They came on stage and Peter Green started with three notes and I just fell in love with the band right there and then,” Dunbar recalls. “His playing was just so soulful. It wrenched me apart. I couldn’t wait to play with them.”

He didn’t have to. Mayall instructed him to report for duty the following day and the drummer played his first gig as a member of the Bluesbreakers at Norwich Town Hall that night. He played six or seven gigs a week for the next six months. “There were no rehearsals,” Dunbar recalls. “All rehearsals were done on stage in front of an audience – or you might get a run through before doing a take in the recording studio.”

There was also the small matter of recording the band’s next album, A Hard Road, which was completed over four days in October 1966 at Decca Studios in West Hampstead. As with the Beano Album before it, A Hard Road was a showcase for the band’s new guitarist.

While Clapton, Beck and Page shared similar backgrounds, Peter Green was unlike any of them, indeed unlike anyone else on the scene. A quiet, contemplative man from a Jewish family, he took up the guitar after he first saw Clapton, whom he idolised, playing in The Yardbirds. Where Clapton (and Beck’s) playing was driven by an insistent, aggressive urgency, Green’s playing (and singing) style had a more emotional elegance that tapped into the mournful quality of the deepest blues.

Green’s instrumental composition, The Supernatural, built around a single, spine-tingling sustained note, was one of the most haunting pieces that Mayall ever recorded - and Out Of Reach, an achingly sad song composed and sung by Green (not on the original album, but released as a Mayall B-side around the same time), was simply one of the most soulful recorded performances by any blues act of this era.

“I can say without hesitation that Peter Green was the most brilliant musician I have ever played with,” said Mick Fleetwood, who played drums in the Bluesbreakers after Dunbar left in 1967 and later formed Fleetwood Mac with Green. “He could be running through a blues progression we all knew, one that we’d heard a million times, but when Peter played it those same old notes sounded brand new.”

While Green was recording A Hard Road, and Clapton was gigging and recording his debut album with Cream, the era’s two other great guitarists were about to be immortalised on the big screen. Between October 12 and 14, The Yardbirds were at Elstree Studios, where the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni was making his film Blow-Up, a murder mystery-cum-social snapshot of Swinging London. The script called for a cameo from a rock group who would sum up the nihilistic, countercultural energy that was rippling through the capital’s musical psyche in 1966, and The Yardbirds were it.

It had already been a turbulent year for The Yardbirds, whose bassist Paul Samwell-Smith had left the group in June and been replaced by session guitarist Jimmy Page. Page and Beck had known each other since they were teenagers, and enjoyed a lively relationship delicately balanced between respect and rivalry. Page was never going to be anyone’s bass player for long, and switched to guitar the first chance he got.

The new line-up (with Chris Dreja on bass) had just finished a tour with the Rolling Stones and Ike and Tina Turner when they got the Blow-Up gig. Antonioni filmed them playing Stroll On, a rocked-up version of an old American jump-blues song Train Kept A-Rolling, on a stage set that replicated the Ricky Tick Club (actually in Windsor rather than the capital) in every detail, right down to the chewing-gum on the chairs.

“Antonioni was an awkward bastard,” Beck later recalled. “He says to me: [adopts Italian accent] ‘We want you to break your guitar.’ I said: ‘Oh yeah? A 1954 Les Paul and you want me to smash it? Get away.’ He said: ‘Don’t be ridiculous, we pay for it.’ I said: ‘You can’t replace that.’ So then they got Höfner to bring down these shitty guitars. So I had this tea-chest full of these twenty-five-quid joke guitars. They were just destined to be smashed, and I went right through ’em three or four at a time with this Höfner rep standing watching at the side. He thought it was all great fun.”

This was a good day’s work for The Yardbirds. Blow-Up was hailed as a masterpiece and became one of the biggest-grossing films of the year in America. As a means of rubber-stamping the concept of the British guitar hero for an international audience it could hardly have been bettered. But according to the band’s manager, Simon Napier-Bell, the experience of making the film gave Beck a taste for smashing up equipment on stage during the group’s ensuing US tour, which proved destructive in other ways.

“Gig after gig he tottered round the stage, ramming the neck of his guitar through the speakers and crashing his feet into the delicate electrical controls. I was left a prisoner in my suite at the Chicago Hilton, phoning round America trying to find the location of every Marshall amp in the country and chartering planes to fly them to the next evening’s gig, only to be destroyed by another night’s bad-tempered Beck-ing.”

The expenses mounted, and relations between Beck and the rest of the band soured until, three-quarters of the way through the tour, Beck left the group, pleading “inflamed brain, inflamed tonsils and an inflamed cock”.

Beck was duly booted out of the group in November. Page took over and began a process of ramping up the grandstanding performance elements with a violin bow during increasingly extended solos, and laying the foundations for the his next band, the New Yardbirds. Within two years he had changed their name, and Led Zeppelin were born.

The emergence of the Thames-delta guitar hero as an icon of popular culture was almost complete when the most exotic creature of all landed in their midst. Jimi Hendrix arrived unknown and unheralded in London on September 24. With the help of his manager Chas Chandler, he began sitting in with just about every band in town – including the Bluesbreakers and Cream – while recruiting an English rhythm section to be his band. Dunbar was one of the drummers who auditioned for him.

“We were perfect together,” Dunbar says of this encounter with Hendrix. “Later, when I had my own band [the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation] Hendrix would jump on stage and play with us every time we played at the Speakeasy. One night, he just poked his guitar through the ceiling.”

Be that as it may, Dunbar didn’t get the job with the Experience. The story goes that Hendrix and Chandler tossed a coin to choose between Dunbar and the man who got the job, Mitch Mitchell.

“I’ve got to clarify that,” Dunbar now insists. “They were offering me twenty pounds a week to play with Jimi. I said: ‘Give me thirty a week and I’ll be there.’ It wasn’t a toss of a coin. They were just trying to be cheap.”

Presumably Dunbar was making more than £20 a week playing with the Bluesbreakers. According to Napier-Bell, bands such as The Yardbirds and The Who could command a fee in the UK in 1966 of £350 a night (about £4,500 in today’s money). Setting the gold standard, the Stones would go out for a fee of £450 (£5,800) and The Beatles – who played their last live concert, at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August ’66 – would have been charging “around a thousand pounds” (£13,000).

A year of freewheeling creativity ended with two of the most significant rock releases of the decade. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut single reached the shops on December 16. Hendrix’s cover version of the old murder ballad Hey Joe and its B-side Stone Free was a harbinger of a revolution to come.

Released a week earlier, Cream’s debut album, Fresh Cream, was a game changer in much the same way that the Beano Album had been six months previously. Applying a skill-set that was more akin to that of the great jazz improvisers than to pop musicians, Clapton, Bruce and Baker made an incredible opening statement, full of mind-bending harmony vocals and unprecedentedly extravagant soloing on guitar, harmonica and drums. Blues rumbles such as Willie Dixon’s Spoonful and Skip James’s I’m So Glad were turned into monumental instrumental workouts, while original compositions such as N.S.U. and Sweet Wine redefined the parameters of a rock genre that had only just been defined in the first place.

It was an astonishing album with which to bring the curtain down on a year during which the skill of the guitarist had for the first time been elevated above the appeal of the singer, and the skill and daring of one guitarist in particular – Clapton – had been elevated above that of all others.

Rock was finally rolling.

Arriving soon after Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day, Muse's 10^th album is a roaring comeback in a similar vein, a widescreen sci-fi blockbuster that combines extraterrestrial speculation with crowd-pleasing entertainment and a warm emotional heart. With their stadium-sized, chart-topping, omnivorous, prog-metal glam-punk maximalism, the Teignmouth trio have long transcended genre labels. Their loyal fanbase would probably embrace any outlandish indulgence right now.

Even so, The Wow! Signal feels super-focussed, densely layered and stacked with killer tunes. Cramming 10 tracks into 45 minutes, this is Muse at their sharpest, eclectic and energised but low on the bloat and bombast that sometimes marred previous albums.

The Wow! Signal is named after a mysterious deep space radio burst, detected in 1977, which some scientists speculated was proof of extra-terrestrial life. These familiar Close Encounters themes run through the album, notably opening track Dark Forest, which refers to the theory that alien civilisations would assume all others to be hostile and thus conceal themselves from discovery. Combining orchestral strings with Hi-NRG electro beats, solemn choral sections with supercharged guitar solos, this baroque'n'roll disco-metal epic is one of Muse's most ambitious mini-operas yet, a Bohemian Rhapsody for the post X-Files era.

Fans of classic Muse tropes – virtuosic guitar shredding, histrionic vocals, apocalyptic imagery, complex tempo changes – are well served by Cryogen and Hexagons. But Bellamy also has a solid track record of blending high-octane riff-scorchers with slick, shiny, catchy dance-pop. Powered by Chris Wolstenholme's snappy, super-funky bassline, Nightshift Superstar is a falsetto-voiced disco earworm, Daft Punk meets Hall & Oates. The Sickness in You and I leans more into nu-metal funk-rock, sounding like Prince Against The Machine, while Hush finds Bellamy sharing a muscular, melodic duet with Britpop diva Ellie Goulding.

For all their intergalactic excess, Muse have always had a deeply romantic side, and Bellamy makes some of his most nakedly emotional statements to date here. A mighty electro-gospel anthem built around a church organ, Be With You is a majestic heartbreak ballad with strong Freddie Mercury overtones. The climactic Space Debris is another stand-out, a tender orchestral heart-tugger that likens two lovers growing apart to broken satellites falling out of orbit, its skittish rhythm resolving into a lush, tumbling, waltz-time fade-out. Bellamy reportedly split from wife Elle Evans last year, so he may be channelling real feelings here, private pain as public catharsis.

Rich in everything but understatement, The Wow! Signal finds Muse on thrilling mid-career form. Their interstellar ambitions will always be too gauche for self-serious music critics, but they remain unique prime movers in the field of unabashedly grand-scale rock, undefeated world champions at balancing outer-space spectacle with inner-space psychodrama.

You can get the new issue of Metal Hammer in the ultimate bundle for Bring Me The Horizon fans, celebrating the upcoming release of the Yorkshire band’s re-recording of their propulsive debut, Count Your Blessings.

Exclusively via the Louder webstore, get your hands on the magazine with an exclusive cover dedicated to the 2006 album, wrapped in stylish silver foil. The package also comes with a vinyl copy of the re-recording, called Count Your Blessings Repented, plus a ‘Count Your Fuckin’ Blessings’ t-shirt and a poster depicting the band in their early days.

Only 500 editions of this extensive bundle will ever be made, so buy now while stocks last!

Inside the new Hammer, singer Oli Sykes reflects on the Count Your Blessings era, when the band’s rapid rise while still in their teens won them goodwill and jealousy in equal measure. He reveals that he and his cohorts dropped off of one festival lineup in 2006 as another act threatened to beat them up.

“We said we were sick [when we dropped out of the festival], 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,” the frontman recalls.

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

Also inside, you’ll find an interview with singer Bruce Dickinson and bassist/founder Steve Harris of the legendary Iron Maiden, as the veteran Brits gear up for their two-day festival Eddfest at Knebworth House in Stevenage next month.

“When I walk out onstage, it’s one of the few moments during my life when the rest of the world can go to hell,” he says. “On a really good night, you completely lose yourself in some weird higher power that takes you over. You inhabit the song, your voice just seems to anticipate everything, and that’s why I do it. Simple as that.”

We also look back on System Of A Down’s early years as the nu metal-era stars prepare to return to Europe, and we tell the story of the long-lost Slipknot album Look Outside Your Window as it finally gets a wide release, 18 years after being recorded.

Plus, we review new albums by The Pretty Reckless, Warning and others, and we report back from Desertfest, Incineration festival and gigs by Karnivool, Dogma and more!

Get your mega Bring Me The Horizon bundle now via Louder while you can!

It was Global Beatles Day yesterday but if you've been waiting for the weekend to unwind and celebrate the Fab Four but aren't sure what to watch, I thought it would be a good idea to collect some of the better documentaries about The Beatles, as available on some of the best TV and film streaming services.

The formative titans of early rock and studio experimentation are simultaneously globally renowned and criminally underrated, an intriguing paradox that only serves to pull you deeper into the music and the mythos of the band that may or may not have been Bigger Than Jesus.

And with Prime Day coming to a close later tonight, there are plenty of last-minute discounts on Beatles vinyl, books and more happening right now. Just remember that Prime Day comes to an end just before midnight.

Paul McCartney: Man On The Run

Watch on Amazon Prime Video

Much as there is an impossible wealth within the Beatles’ storied career, it’s what happened afterward that often carries the most intrigue. Paul McCartney: Man On The Run is one of the most recent explorations of What Happened After.

The 2025 documentary by Morgan Neville follows McCartney on his journey out from under the shadow of the world’s most famous band. It covers his first solo efforts and the formation of Wings, via heady swathes of archival footage. If McCartney wasn’t your favourite before, this might move the dial a bit.

The Beatles: Get Back

Watch on Disney+

Peter Jackson’s meticulous stitching-together of archival footage from the making of Let It Be – that is, both the album and the documentary film accompanying it – is a metatextual wonder. You are a fly on the wall, but the Beatles know you’re there; it’s hauntingly intimate but also All A Show, as the band play up for cameras in spite of their various and glaringly-apparent internecine struggles.

The Beatles: Get Back is a hugely valuable series, and worth watching for the run-up to the rooftop gig; for the insights into early Apple Studios; or just to see Paul write Get Back in real time. For me, the real definitive moment of the series is Paul and John attempting to have a serious conversation between themselves on a soundstage, before their eyes, and the camera, look up to a boom mic dangled daringly overhead – at which point they immediately switch gears to japery.

Beatles '64

Watch on Disney+

The Beatles’ journey was a remarkably short one, being that everything they did they did in just eight years. It’s hard to believe that just five years prior to the bittersweetness of Let It Be, they were on the cusp of breaking America – a journey revisited with careful reverence by this Martin Scorcese-produced documentary.

Beatles ’64 interviews Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney in the present day, amongst a coterie of cultural commentators and people present for the day Beatlemania truly went international.

John Lennon: Love Is All You Need

Watch on Netflix

Over on Netflix, avowed John Lennon fans will find themselves somewhat satisfied by this retrospective on Lennon’s life. John Lennon: Love Is All You Need combines never-before-seen footage with old Lennon interviews, and new interviews with Lennon’s family – including an often unheard-from Cynthia Lennon. The thrust of the doc is nothing new, but the insights within do build a more three-dimensional picture of the Beatles’ most complicated character.

The Beatles: Anthology

Watch on Disney+

Finally, where better to get the whole story about the Beatles than from the Beatles themselves? The Beatles: Anthology is an expansive 1995 documentary series produced by the Beatles’ parent company Apple Corp, that explores the full history of the Beatles from before the beginning to after the end – through the Beatles, in their own words.

The same restoration technology that Peter Jackson used on Get Back was used to spruce up the footage for a new audience, and another episode with new footage of the remaining members’ getting-together to record Free As A Bird and Real Love is a neat epilogue on a definitive history of the Beatles as a project.

In 1973, Jon Anderson sold Steve Howe an idea he’d come up with from the pages of a guru’s memoir. The result was sixth Yes album Tales From Topographic Oceans – a four-sided release containing just four tracks. In 2016 Prog explored the determination it demanded of the band members, and the price they paid to deliver it.

“I actually wanted to record Tales From Topographic Oceans in a tent in this beautiful wood that I’d found, miles from anywhere. I thought we could bury a generator 300 yards away under the ground so we could have electricity in the tent. We’d be able to record there and have all these natural sounds around us. That’s where my brain was at at that time. Of course, they thought I was totally crazy!” laughs Jon Anderson.

“Crazy” turned out to be one of the nicer things said about the sixth Yes studio album upon its release in December 1973. Although achieving Gold status on both sides of the Atlantic, it received a mauling from many critics. When the band played the four-sided opus live, many fans found it a challenge. But challenge is exactly what Yes thrived on. Always a band on a mission and in a hurry to push forward, they were keen to do whatever was in their power to be at the forefront of a musical movement where nothing that was worth anything stood still for very long.

Chris Squire observed that the build-up to Tales… had been going on for some time, with Heart Of The Sunrise marking the realisation of an ambition to produce something on a much bigger scale. With Close To The Edge, they went bigger still. An epic release, it meshed adventurous solo excursions with tightly knit arrangements. The punch Yes delivered came not from a single source but rather their collective force. Anderson was determined their music should avoid showboating licks for their own sake. “There were a lot of bands up there soloing forever but that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to create music that had length and breadth and adventure, that would carry the audience through this experience. With lights and staging, you could take them on a journey.”

They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Tales From Topographic Oceans began with a single conversation between two characters at very different ends of the musical spectrum. In Bill Bruford’s London flat in early March 1973, along with dozens of other friends celebrating the drummer’s wedding earlier in the day, Anderson sat perched on an open windowsill talking with Jamie Muir. “He was an unbelievable stage performer,” says Anderson of the eccentric King Crimson percussionist, known at the time for wearing bearskins, spitting blood capsules from his mouth and flailing his percussion rig and packing cases with heavy chains. “I wanted to know what made him do that; what had influenced him.”

Muir enthused about Autobiography Of A Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. The late guru was well-known in esoteric circles, and had made a more secular cameo appearance on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, wedged between HG Wells and James Joyce. Reading Yogananda’s words, Muir told the singer, had had a profound impact upon him. “He said to me, ‘Here, read it,’ and it started me off on the path of becoming aware that there was even a path,” says Anderson. “Jamie was like a messenger for me and came to me at the perfect time in my life… he changed my life.”

It was powerful stuff. Reading the book prompted Muir to quit music and become a Buddhist monk, and while the effect upon Anderson may not have been so extreme, it was the catalyst that took Yes into uncharted waters.

Discovering a reference to the different levels and divisions within Hindu scriptures in a footnote led to a ‘Eureka!’ moment for Anderson as the group toured Japan. Convinced he’d found the structural framework within which to place the large-scale ideas and concepts he’d been mulling over, he found a willing ally in Steve Howe. Having written Roundabout and Close To The Edge together, there was a real bond between the pair.

“We were really up for the big, challenging things like, ‘Let’s do an album with four Close To The Edges,’” laughs the guitarist. Over several post-gig evenings in candlelit hotel rooms, locked away from all the usual distractions from life on the road, they trawled through a huge accumulated array of musical sketches and motifs, searching for pieces to complement Anderson’s thematic ideas.

“I’ve a lot of cassettes of Jon and I sitting in places like New York or Cincinnati recording songs,” recalls Howe. “Jon would say to me, ‘What have you got that’s a bit like that…’ so I’d play him something and he’d go, ‘That’s great. Have you got anything else?’ and I’d play him another tune. I notice that one of the pieces he turned down early on eventually became part of side three. He heard it later and said, ‘That’s a good piece,’ because we were looking for something different then.”

At the end of a marathon all-night writing session in Savannah, Georgia, the basic themes and broad outline of the next Yes project had finally coalesced. Alan White recalls them presenting their deliberations to the rest of the group. “I thought it was great. The band wanted to make a big statement here worldwide. We had this whole story, you know? I wanted to create music that had length and breadth and adventure that would carry the audience through this experience.”

Howe remembers a slightly more cautious reception. “Some guys in the band were like, ‘Hold on a minute.’ They were fine with a double album but were, you know, ‘Just four songs?’ But Jon and I did manage to sell the idea.”

If the starting point of Tales… had come about when the paths of Yes and King Crimson had accidentally crossed at a party, the next stage in the story found Yes indebted to another part of the prog spectrum: Emerson Lake And Palmer and their Manticore Studios, based in an old converted cinema in Fulham. Over several weeks in the summer of 1973, occupying the main stage at the rehearsal complex, they got to grips with fragments, sketches and outlines. In some respects, this was business as usual for the group. Countless times in their history, Yes had sewn together different musical elements – never the easiest of jobs

The arrival of Rick Wakeman in 1971, who understood the nuts and bolts of the music, had improved the pace with which loose ends and threads might be put to use or dispatched. If things weren’t quite so quick this time, it came down in part at least to the sheer scale of the task. Nailing one track can be hard enough. Trying to map out four, each lasting the side of an album, was enough to give even the most enthusiastic in the band pause for thought. The logistics of creating a piece that would go through several distinct transformations over 20 minutes was a formidable prospect even for a group with Close To The Edge under their belt.

Likening the process to climbing a mountain, Anderson argues, “Sometimes you need someone to say, ‘This is where we’re going to go; we’re going to make it, we’ve done it before. Don’t worry, it’ll be okay.’ If you wait for everyone else to arrive at a decision, we’d still be climbing the mountain!”

He readily admits he was frequently overbearing during the writing and rehearsals, chivvying his bandmates along, trying to keep people focused. “So many things happened in that two-and-a-half-month period. In rehearsal I tended to know exactly where we were going, to a point. I knew there were going to be some solos from Steve, and in the first movement there were solos from Rick, and in the second movement. In the third movement there’d be solos from Chris and, especially the fourth movement, a lot of drums. I had such great faith in doing it.”

That faith was something shared by Howe. It was tough going, he admits, but there was a sense that there lay an unprecedented opportunity before the group, provided they were able to keep their nerve. “As hard as it was, and it was hard, nobody wanted to bottle out of what we’d committed ourselves to do. We just knew we had a big landscape we could explore. Side one set the scene so much. It was showing that we wanted to use some themes but use them in different ways. It was quite plain what we were doing.

“By the time we got to the second side, I think we really wanted to go off somewhere else altogether if we could. There’s folky bits where I’m playing lute and we got very light and spry, which is its own dynamic. We could really stretch out; and no less so than on side three, when most of the beginning is a stretch-out of some mad, really quite wacky ideas – some quite Stravinsky, some quite folky. With Leaves Of Green you get back to the roots of our music. There’s almost a Renaissance period that we play at the end of side three. To close, we had to do something that was going to be bigger than big. We felt that with what we had constructed we had a beautiful song, Nous Sommes Du Soleil, and there was a use of theme again that we did nicely, I think.”

Anderson recalls being eager to get started as early as possible because they had so much to get through, though not everyone in the group shared that particular body clock. “It’s a known fact that Chris Squire never wanted to play music before midday,” laughs White [who died in 2022]. “We’d spend all day going over things and we’d get to dinner time and then get some rest. There was some trial and error initially. It was a collection of lots of pieces of music that we had carrying the story. We had to find a way of joining the jigsaw puzzle together to make it work.”

With much of that puzzle now in place, albeit somewhat loosely, Yes transferred to Morgan Studios in Willesden. Its urban location, on a busy road with heavy traffic, was about as far away from the countryside idyll Anderson had originally envisaged as you could get. On the plus side, it boasted a 24-track desk that was more than capable of containing the band’s expansive musical ambitions. And that lack of bucolic charm? Well, Rick Wakeman had the answer.

“One day Rick was in a particularly funny mood, which is not hard for Rick – he used to play jokes on everyone,” reveals White. “He said he wanted some cows in the studio. He had a cardboard cutout cow at one end of Morgan Studio, so we all said we didn’t mind. Then he brought some palm trees in. I was like, ‘Okay Rick, have you finished decorating ?’ ‘It’s a nice environment now,’ he said, and I went, ‘Okay, I can live with that…’”

As an indicator of how strange things had become, White also remembers a shower cubicle complete with tiles being built inside the studio in order to try to replicate the sound Anderson heard when he was singing in the shower at home.

Ask any musician about their ambition and the opportunity to make a record will be pretty high on the list. All the players in Yes had been there and done that several times over. As seasoned and successful professionals, there was no naivety about what was involved. They’d experienced the nitty-gritty of putting records together. Yet this time it was different. Every day, as each of them drove from home to the studio, the distance between what Anderson and Howe had outlined and the reality of what was going onto tape gnawed at their confidence. Of course, other sessions hadn’t always been plain sailing, but nobody in the band was quite prepared for how choppy the waters had now become.

Squire [who died in 2015] recalled in 1992 that despite the cardboard cows and DIY plumbing, there was little in the way of levity. Journeying deeper into the making of the album, he and Anderson were bumping heads. “At that time, Jon had this visionary idea that you could just walk into a studio and if the vibes were right, the music would be great at the end of the day… which is one way of looking at things! It isn’t reality. It took a lot of Band-Aids and careful surgery in the harmony and embellishment department to make it into something.”

Wakeman’s musical skills and flair for arrangements had been heavily utilised throughout the making of Fragile and Close To The Edge. However, changes in the personal and social interactions between the band took their toll in the confines of Morgan. As the construction of the vast musical edifice continued, the personal harmony prevalent on other albums was now rather elusive. Speaking in 1995, co-producer Eddy Offord commented on the rift that opened up during the recording. “At that point it was obvious that Rick became really much more outside the rest of the band. It wasn’t so much musical direction… If you want the honest truth, it was the fact that the whole band was into smoking dope and hash and Rick was into drinking beer. He never touched pot. I don’t know what it was, but he was on the outside.”

Yet there was perhaps another, more significant factor. The phenomenal success of Wakeman’s solo career with The Six Wives Of Henry VIII had created its own momentum and, not unreasonably, there was demand for a follow-up. As Tales… slowly progressed during the summer and early autumn, Wakeman, when not supplying keyboards to Black Sabbath in the adjacent studio, was also busy scoring his next solo project, Journey To The Centre Of The Earth.

Anderson, believing that these extracurricular activities were distracting and preventing Wakeman from contributing to the full extent as he had done on previous recordings, was in little doubt as to what the priority should have been. “My feeling was, ‘Why don’t you put that music into this project, into Tales…?’ We had a couple of times when Rick said, ‘Well, I’m doing what I want to do,’ and I was like, ‘Okay, well, I’ll just get on with it.’”

For his part, Wakeman had genuine misgivings about the general direction of the material. “Yes was heading towards avant-garde jazz rock and I had nothing to offer there,” he observed in 1974. “We had enough material for one album but we felt we had to do the double.”

Marshalling both music and esoteric concepts into a series of cohesive suites required a kind of commitment that was beyond their usual experience, says Howe. That some were struggling was, of course, a cause for concern but, he argues, the way around that was to overcome the doubt by diving in. “You could say to another member, ‘Well, you don’t like this bit but have you got a part worked out yet? Because if you find a part, you’ll get involved in the music!’ Jon and I sometimes really had to spur the guys on.”

A byproduct of Wakeman’s absences was to create a space for others to fill. White recalls sitting at the piano and coming up with the chords that would be used for the ‘Hold me my love’ bridge on Ritual. On another occasion, the drummer sat tinkering with a guitar, working out some chords. They captured Anderson’s attention as he strolled past. “Jon said, ‘Show me those chords,’ and then he took it over,” resulting in the chord sequence being added to The Remembering.

A hungry beast, Tales… called upon all of their songwriting resources, meaning that many items that had been discarded from their previous writing sessions were now re-examined and press-ganged into service. Some, such as the Young Christians theme that appears on side one, dated as far back as Fragile. Back then the passage had been given a much rockier treatment but had ultimately failed to find a suitable home. At this point, necessity demanded it be piped aboard the good ship Topographic.

The clock was ticking. A UK tour was already advertised for November and December. Factory time for pressing of the album was already booked. Every hour that swept by in the studio not only broke down into minutes and seconds but pounds and pence as well. “God bless Eddy Offord,” laughs Anderson, referring to the period when the pair were literally camping out at Morgan Studios as they worked around the clock, even sleeping there in order to cross the finishing line as mastering and manufacturing dates loomed.

“In those days it was like rolling the dice, whether you could mix it well on the first take or the 20th take. There’s a classic photograph of all of us on a fader. It was crazy but what happened was we would mix in sections: two minutes, one minute, four minutes and so on. Then we’d have the quarter-inch tapes hanging from the wall and Eddy would then stick it together with Sellotape and that was how we made albums in those days. There was no automation or click tracks.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, remixing the album in 5.1 surround sound was no easy task for Steven Wilson. Despite having so many previous surround sound remixes of classic material under his belt, he recalls how daunting it was to delve into the source tapes and make sense of what were in effect micro-managed moments and decisions taken on the fly 43 years ago.

“Even though it was recorded on 24-track, the complexity of the music and arrangements meant that every inch of tape was crammed with overdubs. One channel on the tape might start off as vocals, but then switch to a percussion overdub, then a lead guitar phrase, then some mellotron, et cetera. In order to have maximum control over the mix, and to be able to give each sound its own space and treatment, I had to identify and break every element out onto its own channel. This meant that one side of the original album could extrapolate out from 24 channels to 50 or 60 individual parts. Actually, I think side four ended up being more like 100!”

Although they’d always built their albums from a patchwork quilt of takes, Tales… had without doubt been the most arduous recording in the band’s career. The grand themes and vistas, meticulous sonic sculpting and textural details embedded into the album hadn’t come easy, and nor did the completion of the record. With mastering and manufacturing deadlines looming, as Anderson and Offord sat bleary-eyed after the final overnight mixing session, their sleep-deprived state caused a last-minute drama that came perilously close to farce.

“At about nine in the morning, me and Eddy packed up the tapes and went to our car and he put the tapes on the top while he found the keys,” says Anderson. “Then we got in and started to drive toward the main road with all the tapes still on top of the car, making them slide off into the middle of the road. There was a big, red double-decker bus coming towards us and I ran out and stopped the bus [laughs]. That was our wild experience of making this album – we nearly had it crunched under a double-decker bus!”

The true extent of Wakeman’s antipathy towards Yes’ music became obvious early on in the UK tour in November 1973. “I remember we played the whole thing in its entirety at The Rainbow and he wasn’t happy,” says White. “It kind of went downhill from there.”

Wakeman’s growing disenchantment would famously manifest itself in eating curry on stage during Tales… and though it became something of a running joke, it was in truth an expression of his boredom and a protest of sorts. Looking back, White feels a sense of disappointment at the rift between Wakeman and the rest of the band.

“For some reason Rick couldn’t get his head around what we were doing but he played all the parts and he was great. He’s just an amazing keyboard player. But he couldn’t see where the band was going. He felt he wanted to move in his own direction.”

Even some of the band’s long-term supporters in the press at the time baulked at a record that had slipped far from rock’s usual moorings. With this double album, the argument went, they had overreached. Wakeman’s oft-quoted assertion that the album suffered from too much padding because of a lack of real musical substance became received wisdom in discussions of the band’s work. In later years it was routinely cited as evidence of prog rock’s over-indulgence, with sceptics pointing to its 80 minutes as proof of hubris and artistic extravagance.

When Yes went off the road in January 1974, Wakeman staged and recorded Journey To The Centre Of The Earth. Shortly after its release in May ’74, it topped the album charts. Hearing the news on his 25th birthday, Wakeman rang in his resignation from the band on the same day. Anderson recalls the recriminations following Wakeman’s departure. “Management and the record company were saying, ‘Why didn’t you just do another Fragile?’ I just had the feeling that if we don’t try something in this lifetime then, okay, we’re just rock stars, and I personally don’t think that way… You’ve got to do things that are a little bit different in this lifetime. And when you have the chance to do it, you have to jump in that water and enjoy it.”

For Howe, the album remains an important milestone in the Yes story. “It was a time of spreading our wings, a wonderful project where we went to the end of the earth to do it. There was often a feeling that disaster was almost about to strike, but we got there in the end. You have to account for Tales… in our history to properly talk about what Yes achieved because it was quite exceptional. I don’t think we’d be the same group without it.”

In 2016, as Yes toured America, The Revealing Science Of God and Ritual resurfaced. “Going on the road playing side one and side four is really nostalgic,” says White. “We made a great career of really adventurous material that was trying to move music in a good direction. Side one is a difficult thing to play and side four, you’ve got the whole Ritual thing at the end, which is quite a thing to put together, where you’ve got the drums playing the lead melody. We had a theme running through the album, recurring though different songs, and it culminated in the whole band playing the melody on drums, all of us at the same time. I’m really looking forward to playing it live again.”

Tales From Topographic Oceans is an album you can’t be ambivalent about. Asked if it’s a formidable achievement or a folly, Steven Wilson says, “Both! One of the things I miss in modern rock music is the will to reach for the stars and risk falling flat on your face. Conventional wisdom might be that with this album Yes roundly achieved the latter, but I’m happy to see a growing number of those like me that appreciate its beauty and ambition. Even when the ideas perhaps aren’t entirely coming off, I still admire and enjoy the sheer uncompromising strangeness of it. It doesn’t have the immediacy of some of Yes’ other records of the era, but I think, given time, it reveals itself as perhaps their greatest musical statement of all. It’s pure hardcore Yes!”

Question: What do you call a woman at a Rush concert? Answer: Lost.

It's an old joke, and it's never been true, but it's also something that Rush themselves have been happy to jest about.

"There were women on one tour!" Geddy Lee jokingly told MuchMusic in 1988. "The trend has always been mostly male, and I think that's because we attract a young musician type of audience, and they're mostly male musicians. I guess the kind of rock we play has some sort of masculine vibe to it.

"When we did Signals, we started getting more girl fans. Sometimes we'd come out, and there would be girls screaming. It was short-lived, though. Things got back to normal on the next tour."

Those jokes are no more. Anika Nilles is nailing Neil Peart's parts on the Fifty Something tour, and it's the doubters who are nowhere to be seen. And, in a bathroom in Missouri, Payton Rose Velligan has videoed herself singing all 15 minutes of Rush's 1978 prog epic Cygnus X-1 Book II.

Payton is the guitarist in "Weird Al" Yankovic's band. She worked with late Boston singer Tommy DeCarlo. At the age of 15, she was the bassist and singer of Irrashional, a Rush tribute band turned original group. And, these days, she also fronts another Rush tribute act, The Camera Eye.

So it's probably not entirely unexpected to find Payton singing Cygnus X-1 Book II. The choice of venue might be novel, but the bathroom's natural reverb works in her favour, and the performance is committed and dramatic – complete with air guitar and dance moves – albeit with more of a Broadway musical vibe than you'll get from Geddy Lee.

"Rush is the greatest!!!!" says Payton, using more exclamation marks than is strictly necessary.

So are you, Payton. So are you.

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2026

Jun 26: Fort Worth Dickies Arena, TX
Jun 28: Fort Worth Dickies Arena, TX
Jun 30: Fort Worth Dickies Arena, TX
Jul 02: 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.

Led Zeppelin's seventh studio album Presence wasn't the easiest to make. Robert Plant was recovering after the August 1975 car crash in Crete that had left him with serious arm and leg injuries, and the band's touring schedule had been pitched into turmoil.

The show had to keep rolling, and the following month the band gathered for writing sessions in Malibu Colony, 30 miles south of Los Angeles, before recording commenced at Musicland Studios in Munich, Germany.

Over the years Presence has frequently been cited as Jimmy Page's favourite album, presumably because – as with Led Zeppelin I – he was fully in control. With Plant's input restricted, there were, as Tight But Loose editor Dave Lewis says, "no Mellotrons, acoustic guitars or keyboards of any kind – no Jonesy! It was all Jimmy. No one else really got a look in.”

Below, Jimmy Page recalls the recording of Presence.

A lot of people presume that Presence is your favourite album

I don’t know why they think it’s my favourite album; I don’t have any one favourite album because they all mean different things from the whole journey of Led Zeppelin. Presence was recorded in real stressful circumstances, Robert was in plaster with his leg and we didn’t know what the outcome was going to be of all that at the time.

It’s a very dark album, it’s really intense.

That’s the one where it took three weeks to record and do overdubs. We did it in the Musicland Studios, Munich and after us were the Rolling Stones. I called them up and asked if I could get a couple more days, because they were busy trying out various guitars, and they said OK. The tracks were done and Robert’s vocals were done and I was going to do what I had normally done and still do – the overdubs and production.

There was me and the engineer Keith Harwood, and whoever woke first would get the other up and we’d get straight into the studio and do the guitar overlays. It was the same with the mixing. Jagger was staying in the same hotel and I went up to see him to say thanks for letting us use the studio in their downtime. He said, “What have you done?” I said “I’ve done an album, do you want to hear some?” I put on Nobody’s Fault But Mine, which he sort of knew as a blues song and he was quite startled by it.

Although doing an album in three weeks was an exception, I never worked slowly, nor did anyone else. We were all very fast and to the point. If we were recording something and it wasn’t happening we would stop that number and do something else, there was no point labouring it. That’s something I brought with me from the session days – you know when the spark’s there and you know when it’s gone and there’s no point proceeding, especially if you have other numbers to do.

When Presence came out, everyone thought it was the direction Zeppelin would be taking in the future.

Yeah, for example, Tea For One is exceptional. It was to the point, recorded in a couple of takes. Robert’s vocals are tremendous. He was doing that his leg was in a cast, miles away from home.

Weren’t you particularly out of it during the recording of Presence?

I was into it. [laughs] I was seriously focussed. You don’t make music like that in such a short amount time falling about in the street drunk. You do it when you’re one hundred per cent focussed.

This interview originally appeared in Classic Rock's Led Zeppelin Special, in November 2007.

Dark proggers Crippled Black Phoenix have moved away from their usual narratives on broken society and turned inwards on Sceaduhelm. Multi-instrumentalist Justin Greaves and vocalist Belinda Kordic take us on a journey beneath their music’s shadowy veil.

“It’s not going to get better – I’m sorry!” says Belinda Kordic. “It’s just going to get worse. We’re doomed!” Bastions of radical rock since 2004, Crippled Black Phoenix have never been a band inclined to mince words; and on their latest album, Sceaduhelm, core members Kordic and Justin Greaves deal with some difficult subjects that reach into the heart of our modern malaise.

But rather than indulge in a political debate or prosaic protest, their new songs take a more thoughtful and personal approach to confronting the impending end of all things.

Thankfully, the music contained on their 13th album of new material is often majestic, uplifting and weirdly accessible, as if the poison pill of their brutal lyrical preoccupations has necessitated a more easily digestible backdrop. But underneath that gritty, grandiose and fervently melodic exterior, multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Greaves and vocalist Kordic are laying landmines for the unsuspecting public to stumble upon.

“Yeah, in a way it’s cheery pop songs, but with a basic message of ‘We’re fucked!’” says Greaves with a laugh. “I’ve said it many times in the past, but sometimes I feel like we’re giving people candy with razor blades in it. It sounds really nice, but there’s always some vicious little things in there, and it’s pointed in terms of its themes and stories. This album is more dark than political. It’s a little more personal for Belinda, while it’s all a little more veiled.”

Previous albums have dealt with the harsh realities of everything from the abuse of animals to the impacts of depression. Sceaduhelm is less bombastic in its themes. From recent single Ravenettes – which at least seems to be about struggling to shake off past traumas – to the self-explanatory Tired To The Bone – a paean to post-millennial exhaustion – this is an album that stares into the dark with a keen eye and a heavy heart.

The title is a neat synopsis of the current state of things and a typically ambiguous statement from this ferociously intelligent band. “The translation of the title is ‘the cover of darkness’,” explains Greaves. “The first half of the word is pronounced ‘shadow,’ which represents darkness; and ‘helm’ is a protective cover or a castle in the rocks or whatever. So it could be that darkness is covering us all, and the world is in darkness, or it could be about protecting yourself from the darkness. It’s a duplicitous title!”

“I mostly sing about animals and politicians and all that stuff,” adds Kordic. “But this time I’ve gone more inwards. I’m not a person who wears their heart on their sleeve. I’d rather not tell you exactly how I feel; I veil it, because it feels too naked for me.

“People say it’s therapeutic to write a diary and express how you feel, but for me it’s the other way round. It gives me more anxiety. I need to keep shit locked up in a box. I feel worse writing down how I feel. But I felt like doing it this time, at least with a few of those songs, so it’s more personal this time.”

At a time when caring deeply about the world and the poor, downtrodden bastards that live in it is just about the most radical thing we can do, Crippled Black Phoenix’s outlier status is more apparent than ever. An admirably tricky band to pin down to any one sub-genre or stylistic approach, Greaves’ amorphous crew take pride in their opposition to the obvious and the conventional.

That they maintain their identity while making glorious, impassioned rock songs is even more impressive in light of the amount of abuse they get from – to be slightly reductive for a moment – angry people on the internet. Particularly when it comes to their militant opposition to animal cruelty, Crippled Black Phoenix have turned the act of rubbing people up the wrong way into a noble, if accidental, artform.

“I’ve found in recent years that because we do stick our heads above the trench a few times and try to shed light about something we’re passionate about, it’s made us a target,” says Greaves. “People think they can try to destroy us with stupid comments, like we’re always up for debate or we can be bullied.

“I posted something that was related to Gaza and I’ve had death threats ever since! We post something about animal abuse, and there’s always someone going, ‘Ha ha! I like my burgers! Shut the fuck up!’ or the classic one: ‘I came to this page for the music, not your opinions!’ Well, fuck off, then! You came for the music and you’ve got the music. You can have something else as well if you want – but if not, just ignore it! There’s no reasoning with these fucking idiots.”

“If I had the mental strength to be out in the field, working for animals or documenting slaughterhouses and all of that, I’d do it,” Kordic notes. “But I don’t. I can’t handle that stuff. So we do it this way instead: we write about it. How can people tell musicians what to write about? I would never tell someone else what to write.”

By far their most focused and cohesive album to date, Sceaduhelm pitches Crippled Black Phoenix as inveterate refuseniks who use music as their means to find some shred of sanity along life’s relentlessly enervating journey. It’s both a magnificent slice of dark, progressive rock and one of the most thrillingly punk records in recent memory.

That curious dichotomy has driven them throughout their lengthy career, and Greaves continues to take pride in such gently subversive creativity. “What we do is whatever we want it to be, but it will always have that spirit, whether it’s a punk spirit or we’re just free-spirited,” he states. “I think the punk spirit is about having a conscience, being tolerant of other people and being creatively independent and creatively original.

“But we ended up being on a prog label and being in Prog magazine, and yeah, we can be classed as progressive. It’s like the spirit of ’69 to ’75, when bands were genuinely doing original stuff. They were the ones in charge; they tried different things and did whatever they wanted, and that’s progressive to me.”

Even though they light fires of comfort and solidarity under the cover of darkness, Crippled Black Phoenix are still primarily concerned with being the best band they can be. As they enter a new era, with a largely settled line-up and the prospect of tours and festivals on the horizon, their desire to offer something honest and real is as refreshing and inspirational as ever.

Sceaduhelm is a riveting, agit-rock Trojan horse, designed to make people think – and, with any luck, to find some humanity and compassion too. “This is our little outlet to be creative,” Greaves says. “People still don’t know where to put us. We’re not preaching, but long live independence! It’s all about thinking for yourself.

“We record an album, and if people like it, great; but we’re the ones who decide what it is. We’re old-fashioned, I guess. No one knows what to do with us. We’re always the anomaly!”

Sceaduhelm is on sale now.

Norwegian prog rockers Green Carnation have announced the third part of their epic A Dark Poem trilogy of albums, The Messiah Complex, will be released through Season of Mist on September 4.

And the band have shared their first new music from the album with the release of a video for new single, Unconditional Artificial Chemistry.

“A Dark Poem is by far our biggest achievement since Light of Day, Day of Darkness”, Green Carnation vocalist Kjetil Nordhus says. “Our new album trilogy returns to the epic storytelling that put us on the map back in 2001. While the reception to Part I and Part II has been overwhelmingly positive for us, we do believe that Part III saves the best for last. The Messiah Complex ties the whole story together with our most uncompromising statement to date."

“The intention behind A Dark Poem was to build a completely new musical universe”, Green Carnation bassist and primary lyricist Stein Roger Sordal says. “While the direction revealed itself as the creative journey unfolded, The Messiah Complex was carefully planned with a clear vision for where we wanted the story to end. Our goal was for all three parts to stand on their own, but Part III brings them all together into a unified whole."

“The video for Unconditional Artificial Chemistry tells a meta story about the danger of artificial intelligence”, Nordhus continues. “We all know, if we are being honest with ourselves, that A.I. is going to take control of our lives. There are powerful people who stand to profit from it and that makes its takeover inevitable.

"The video shows this happening before our eyes. As soon as the A.I. takes control, our likeness is corrupted. Before the song is even finished, we’re completely destroyed."

A Dark Poem, Part III: The Messiah Complex will be available as a CD digipack, in various coloured vinyl formats with a gatefold sleeve, and there will also be a limited edition A Dark Poem, Part I-III Colored LP Box Set (includes demos and outtakes)/.

Green Carnation will perform all three parts of A Dark Poem at a special live show at the Kilden Performing Arts Centre in their hometown of Kristiansand in Norway.

Pre-order A Dark Poem, Part III: The Messiah Complex.

Get tickets for the Kirstiansand show.

Green Carnation: A Dark Poem, Part III: The Messiah Complex
1. Unconditional Artificial Chemistry
2. The Messiah Complex
3. Broken Souls, Common Enemies
4. A Dark Poem - Orchestral Suite

British metal seemed ready to take over the world in the mid-1990s, but then the rise of nu metal scuppered its momentum. In 2020, Hammer caught up with Orange Goblin, Paradise Lost, Napalm Death and more to find out what exactly went wrong.

August 17, 1996 was a good day to be a British metal fan. The sun shone on the hallowed turf of Donington Park, and tens of thousands of metalheads made the annual pilgrimage to witness a reformed and re-made-up Kiss headlining that year’s Monsters Of Rock alongside Ozzy Osbourne, Sepultura and many more.

Plus, while the mainstream was wrapped up in ‘Cool Britannia’ and the Britpop phenomenon, our metal bands had been thriving. Carcass, Napalm Death, Bolt Thrower and more were all doing fine business, despite the threat of grunge that had killed off so many of their US peers.

“It was incredible when you think back,” reflects Nick Holmes of Yorkshire doom merchants Paradise Lost. The band had broken out of the underground, been tipped as the next Metallica and, with 1995’s classic Draconian Times in their back pocket, were added to the Main Stage line-up. “We always dreamed about playing there. We don’t really get that excited by anything, to be honest, but that was pretty special after all the work we’d put in.”

Everything seemed set up for a moment of coronation for the new breed of British metal, a springboard to the next level for our scene… but, of course, that isn’t what Donington ’96 is remembered for. A few hours after Paradise Lost stepped offstage, Korn arrived to headline the second stage of the festival, their incredible, day-stealing performance triggering the forthcoming domination of the as-yet-untitled nu metal movement.

Almost overnight, the pendulum swung back in favour of the USA: nu metal became the biggest movement on Earth, Carcass split, Bolt Thrower were plagued by line-up changes, Paradise Lost rejected metal for synth-pop, and a generation of young, vibrant British metal bands ended up being treated almost exclusively with apathy and ignorance for half a decade.

“It was a really great scene back then, because it was so underground,” says Orange Goblin frontman Ben Ward. “You’d go see Electric Wizard or Cradle Of Filth in [south east London’s] The Amersham Arms and Barney would be handing out flyers for Napalm Death gigs. We didn’t think about commercial concerns, because there was no chance of it. Everyone sort of knew each other and got along whatever music they were playing or into.”

The UK may have invented metal, but there was no place for the more dour, straightforward British stereotype in the nu metal scene that was taking over in the late 90s.

“It was funny to see the change in the scene,” says Paul Catten of Herefordshire-based metallic hardcore band Medulla Nocte. “We were coming from the punk scene and it just hit a point where you’d suddenly see all these people in baggy jeans getting piercings and dying their hair blue or whatever.”

It’s safe to say that, for some of the bands that had enjoyed success in the early 90s, nu metal was an unwanted addition. Nick Holmes remembers being backstage at a festival during the years of Korn and Limp Bizkit’s dominance.

“They were brash and loud,” he laughs. “I didn’t know who these bands were, but I saw a bunch of guys all smiling and high-fiving each other and wearing multicoloured clothing. I remember thinking, ‘This ain’t metal, is it?! Smiling!’”

The British bands of the time were not anti-American; they just took their influences from other areas of the US scene.

“We loved American bands and were hugely influenced by them,” Karl Middleton of Nottingham post-metallers Earthtone9 explains. “But our problem is that we weren’t influenced by hip-hop. We were taking bits of Corrosion Of Conformity and Kyuss, and there was very little of that in what was popular at that time. The band from our scene we really looked up to was Pulkas; they had this very British, almost Killing Joke, kind of vibe.”

Pulkas were one of the first bands to turn heads in the press during the dominance of nu metal. Although they were short-lived, the band splitting with no fanfare shortly after the release of 1998 debut album Greed, they were arguably the first band from British shores that had the audacity to take the fight to America, leaning heavily on the atmospherics of Tool and the textured groove of Deftones or Helmet. They wouldn’t be the last.

“I remember when Pitchshifter signed to Geffen,” says Karl, still awed all these years later. “One of our bands signing to an international major was a game-changer. Everyone re-evaluated the possibilities of what they could achieve.”

Pitchshifter were undoubtedly the biggest band of this period, their evolution from underground, Godflesh-worshipping industrialists to major-label drum’n’bass punks as surprising as it was exciting. Their 1998 album, www.pitchshifter.com, was their first to feature clean vocals.

“I didn’t want to make another record with grunting vocals,” Pitchshifter vocalist JS Clayden explains. “The guys were gracious enough to let me present more varied vocal and song ideas. I believe British anything can be successful if it has structural support. Unfortunately, that support had to come from the USA. Only Geffen were adventurous or dumb enough to back our brand of experimentation, so we took the money and ran.”

Pitchshifter’s success seemed to make the door creak open, and trickles of British bands, such as Anglo-Irish rap-metallers One Minute Silence and industrial northerners Kill II This, began to experience a modicum of success – albeit in guises that borrowed from the US metal sound du jour.

“I lost interest as that decade progressed,” says Napalm Death’s Barney Greenway, who appeared on Kill II This’s Deviate album in 1998. “The spark that made heavy music interesting wasn’t there for me anymore. So we went back to being inspired by the things that originally inspired us, and if we did take anything from 90s music it was more stuff like Sonic Youth.”

But progress was being made. In December 1999, British/Gibraltan post-grungers Breed 77 opened for Black Sabbath at their one-off show at the Astoria, and Kill II This opened for Slipknot at their legendary debut UK show there. At the same time, One Minute Silence were out as main support to Machine Head on their Burning Red tour, and then played on Slipknot’s first-ever UK tour. Once again, though, it was Pitchshifter who were the trailblazers. They were added as the opening band on the bill of the inaugural UK Ozzfest at Milton Keynes in 1998, proving that British bands could hold their own if given the chance.

“That was a trip,” JS Clayden remembers. “We learnt a lot on Ozzfest. Love them or hate them, the American bands took no prisoners – they killed it like it was their last show at every gig.”

While Pitchshifter had the industry infrastructure in place to rise to the challenge of playing alongside the American behemoths, many of their peers didn’t, and the thrill of being placed on a bill with some of the biggest names in metal didn’t last long when the reality of the situation was made apparent.

“It’s the old adage: be careful of what you wish for,” says Karl, when asked about Earthtone9’s experiences of touring with the likes of Soulfly and Glassjaw. “We soon realised that without the machine you need for touring behind us, we couldn’t compete. We can’t complain about our label and the small budget we were on, but ultimately, you’re being put in front of the first few people through the door who don’t know your stuff and might not necessarily be interested in what you’re trying to do.”

“I loved the challenge,” smiles Paul Catten when remembering Medulla Nocte’s stint as the opening band on, again, a Soulfly tour. “You see your name on the poster with the bloke who used to be in Sepultura and you think, ‘Bloody hell! This’ll be good!’ But I remember building up the London show in my head, and when we got onstage, there were only about 30 people in the building! We still played well, mind.”

While most of the British bands were swimming against the tide of the American onslaught, one band vehemently went out of their way to alienate themselves from everyone: Nottingham’s Iron Monkey. Their blend of New Orleans sludge, mixed with British grit and driven by the inhuman, nihilistic belch of iconic frontman Johnny Morrow, made them a band to look up to.

“They were something else,” laughs Paul, who formed Murder One with Johnny in 2001 after the break-up of their own bands (Johnny sadly passed away shortly after). “The first time I saw them, I had to laugh; this quiet, polite guy that I’d met before the show was up there making all these noises! And they didn’t give a fuck. Bands all say that, but Monkey were proper punk rock.”

By the dawn of the new millennium, most of the lower tier of British bands had split up due to a lack of interest. Those that were continuing suffered from diminishing returns, but Earthtone9 gave the scene its definitive parting shot with the arc’tan’gent album. This sprawling masterpiece should have catapulted them to the highest of heights, but instead they split just over a year after its release.

“We were really happy with the record,” says Karl. “We didn’t know that it’d be thought of as our ‘magnum opus’, we just felt we were getting closer to our initial vision. But it wasn’t working as a unit; it was actually a relief when we split.”

As nu metal flooded the mainstream, the metal world looked around for something new. The Dillinger Escape Plan’s visionary masterpiece Calculating Infinity arrived in 1999, and ushered in a new attitude to music. Suddenly the dirtier, angrier, more progressive and noise-based likes of Meshuggah, Botch, Candiria and many more shifted focus away from the ludicrously over-the-top third wave of nu metal and, slowly but surely, being British no longer reduced you to second-class citizen status.

Corby-based sludge metal sextet Raging Speedhorn came within touching distance of the UK top 40 singles chart, Watford tech oddities Sikth suddenly found themselves being played on Radio One, and the likes of Hundred Reasons and Funeral For A Friend, and later Bullet For My Valentine and Gallows, put heavier British music back where it belonged… to the point where, over 20 years after Paradise Lost stepped out onto the main stage at Donington Park, one of the original members of British metal’s 90s underground scene did the same.

“It was hugely satisfying,” says Ben Ward of Orange Goblin’s appearance on Download 2017’s main stage. “After all these years of toil, we are taken seriously. You look at us and at Electric Wizard, and we’ve grown from that scene I was talking about earlier. We never could have imagined that day coming back then, but if we’ve played our part in helping it to where it is now then I’m happy with that.”

The late 90s may not have been the most commercially viable time to make metal in this country, but without the grassroots underground scene, we may not have reached a point where we hold the likes of While She Sleeps, Bury Tomorrow, Venom Prison, Black Peaks, Employed To Serve and the rest in such esteem.

“I wouldn’t want to comment on the artistry of others too much,” says JS Clayden to sign off. “But I think that Pitchshifter and Earthtone9 were underground bands that made music from the heart and didn’t have to pretend to write ballads to make more money. From my perspective, our music was a genuine and stentorian voice that came out by necessity rather than any nonsense designed to fill our bank accounts.”

This article was originally published in 2020.