In which the 1960s’ doors of perception cracked open. Rubber Soul, The Beatles’ sixth album, is where their fascinations with American folk and soul fused with their own barrelling beat-pop momentum to create a pivotal Sixties artefact: the pop album as complete artistic statement, and the first buddings of UK psychedelia.

In the twangling sitar of Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), the Grecian textures of Girl, the baroque effects of In My Life (Lennon’s self-proclaimed “first major work”) and the Byrdsy drug fun of The Word and If I Needed Someone, The Beatles took their boldest steps into revolutionary pop experiment, and nothing – music, art, fashion, your mum’s body count – would ever be the same again.

The album itself, be it in the mono, stereo or Dolby Atmos mixes included in the various formats of this Special Edition of up to five LPs or four CDs, repels criticism by this point. It’s a masterwork; argue among yourselves over this or Revolver. But the expanded release has other treats to recommend it.

The inclusion of a seven-inch of Day Tripper /We Can Work It Out is a nifty gimmick smacking of period authenticity, and the decidedly folk-rock Capitol Records US version that ditches some of the more intriguing tracks (Drive My Car, Nowhere Man, If I Needed Someone) in favour of a couple of songs left off the US version of Help! evinces how far American fans were behind The Beatles’ evolution as 1966 dawned.

It’s the discs of unreleased demos, instrumentals and alternative session takes that will most excite the faithful. Amid the magical larks, fluffs and Goonslike Beatle-babble – the laboured We Can Work It Out demo that becomes a game show interlude, or the whole track of Beatle Talk in which they quote Stingray lines and call each other “pickled onion” – some tracks arrive ready-made for greatness (In My Life), while others evolve on-mic.

Michelle begins in country trek fashion, Nowhere Man has several wonky early iterations, and take one of Drive My Car almost invents grunge. Most revealing are the various takes of Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), involving a clunky, heavy-handed folk take and a highly experimental sitar version that illuminates their desire to push their own boundaries, and a previously unheard Lennon demo titled Little Girl, a twee romantic acoustic ditty exposing his true feelings towards such material by 1965: ‘If you’d asked me yesterday,’ he sings, heartthrobishly, ‘then I’d have told you sweet FA.'

In 2016 Opeth continued their move away from metal and towards prog with their 12th album, Sorceress. Ahead of the launch, band leader Mikael Akerfeldt and guitarist Fredrik Akesson told Prog what made the record different from previous outings.

If you cut through Opeth they’d bleed Mellotrons. Or flutes. Or any classic tool of the prog trade. Since veering away from their metallic roots after 2008’s Watershed, the enigmatic Swedes – who first won over scores of fans with boundary-crushing death metal – have dived further and further into the swirly depths of progressive music.

Frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt has spent most of his adulthood cultivating an obscenely extensive vinyl collection, much of it proggy and/or pre-dating 1976. Now, five years after their ‘prog debut’ Heritage, he’s capitalising on the influence of all that fantastic plastic with more gusto than ever. Oh yes, Opeth have gone to the prog side, no question.

Their new album Sorceress – recorded at Rockfield Studios, Wales, with Royal Blood producer Tom Dalgety – continues this thread. Two songs were initially called ‘Jethro One’ and ‘Jethro Two’. One piece, The Wilde Flowers, was named after the 60s Canterbury band, who never released anything but did end up spawning Caravan and Soft Machine, which pretty much started the whole Canterbury scene; another, The Seventh Sojourn, shares its name with a Moody Blues album. Give them some whimsical outfits and songs about dragons and these former metal men would be proggier than Yes at a wizard convention in Hastings – in capes.

“Steven Wilson played me a Jethro Tull record, Stormwatch, that I didn’t have,” Åkerfeldt tells us in a velvety Swedish accent. “He was like, ‘Have you heard this record? There’s a song you have to hear – it’s called Dun Ringill.’ It’s late-70s Jethro Tull. I generally have a limit around 75, 76, because production went downhill after that. But that record made me want to write a song with a capo, up high on the fretboard, because it brings a nice ringy sound to the guitar.”

Offstage, Åkerfeldt – the band’s singer, guitarist and songwriting mastermind – is easy, very likeable company, but not without an element of reserve. He swears relatively rarely, but when he does, it’s with relish. He’s tall and slim, with a big moustache that he calls his “70s porn director” look. And he’s infinitely happier talking about music than he is about anything personal. The merits of Tull, therefore, is an area he’s pleased to get stuck into – as is his bandmate who joins him here today.

“We listened to Stormwatch quite a lot when we had beer sessions over the last couple of years,” nods guitarist Fredrik Åkesson, a thoughtful man with a gentle voice, regal goatee and a giant crop of springy curls. “I’ve been obsessed by the song Orion on that record.”

“And Minstrel In The Gallery,” adds Åkerfeldt, “we played that a lot. I love that album. So I’ve been rediscovering some of these records that I’ve been listening to for a long time.”

This conversion to the prog side hasn’t sat well with all of their fans. 2011’s Heritage, their first record with no screamed vocals, prompted outrage from a very vocal contingent of metal purists, and they’ve never been totally silenced. Not that it’s done them serious harm. Their last album, 2014’s Pale Communion, hit the Top 20 in both the UK and the US. New waves of non-metal listeners have joined their fan base. And this year they’re headlining London’s Wembley Arena – no small feat for any ‘non-mainstream’ band, and especially not for one as unbothered about what sells as Opeth.

Indeed, their huge success (which has also seen them fill the Royal Albert Hall) is almost inexplicable in an age where things like social media optimising and crowd-pandering are supposed to be crucial for widespread outreach.

“For me, the only thing that’s important is to keep the music fun and interesting,” says Åkerfeldt, “and to develop and experiment. That’s what I think music should be. It should be fun. The idea of stagnating, of writing a record simply to feed a career, that’s scary.”

For now at least, they’re showing no signs of stagnating, as they demonstrate on album number 12, Sorceress – a beautiful hybrid of classic prog, folk touches and hooky hard rock riffs. There’s no concept, and most of the songs hover around the five-minute mark, but to our ears, it sounds the most cohesive of their prog albums. The songwriting seems sharper; catchier even.

“It is a bit more catchy, I think,” Åkerfeldt says. “But I haven’t even listened to the final version yet. We did so many mixes – I listened to each and every one of them – so I needed some time to step back. But I think it’s a really good record. I’m really happy with the songs. I think it’s a very diverse record. I made a point of having each song as different as possible.”

Alongside his own collection of classics and obscurities, Åkerfeldt has been ingesting his girlfriend’s jazz records – not a direct influence on the new record, but certainly a background factor in the creative process. “She’s a huge John Coltrane fan. And I had a nice little Miles Davis collection, so I’d been going through his musicians that play on those records, guys like John McLaughlin and Herbie Hancock,” he says. “But I don’t think it rubbed off on my writing.”

Instead, it’s bands like Mahavishnu Orchestra and Tull that you’ll hear on the record. The flute-tastic likes of A Fleeting Glance reflect their folky side, while Seventh Sojourn captures an alluring Eastern quality. With the title track, Åkerfeldt wanted to trick the metalheads who’ve hated his prog adventures but remain interested in Opeth nonetheless. Accordingly, it starts with a classic fusion-esque melee of Fender Rhodes keys and proggy timings. It has no place in 2016 whatsoever.

“I wanted the haters to go, ‘Oh, not that shit again!’ and turn it off,” Åkerfeldt grins, “until some of their friends say, ‘Why did you stop listening? It gets really heavy after a while!’ So it’s a bit of a trick. But we haven’t really played it yet. We rehearsed it once. It’s one of those live tracks – big, stupid rock, basically.”

“Neanderthal rock!” Åkesson beams. “After Watershed, this is probably the heaviest record we’ve done.”

The fact that Åkerfeldt paid a lot of attention to the drums for Sorceress goes some way to explaining this, after drummer Martin ‘Axe’ Axenrot, a deft all-rounder, revealed a particular penchant for classic rock. “We did a soundcheck at a show and he was fooling around, playing this meat’n’potatoes rock, this Judas Priest 1978 type of drumming,” Åkerfeldt explains. “And he’s so good at that stuff. So I was thinking a lot about the drums for this record, about what he loves to play. Because, like everyone, when something’s fun, you’re good at it. You play better. He can play anything, but he’s exceptional when he’s doing that kind of stuff. When I see him laugh, that’s when he’s at his best.”

This style is an important dietary staple for both Åkerfeldt and Åkesson. Åkerfeldt has long professed his admiration for Ritchie Blackmore and Black Sabbath, and he began his lifelong vinyl obsession by collecting Iron Maiden records. Before joining Opeth in 2007, Åkesson – a violinist, initially, before he discovered the guitar at the age of 12 – played with Europe guitarist John Norum and melodic hard rockers Talisman, as well as the metallic likes of Arch Enemy and Krux. “I think it helped me a lot to have done all these different styles previously with other bands,” he says.

We wonder how much they listen to this kind of heavy rock fodder, which seems to add melodic beef and familiarity to their proggy cocktail. “Quite a lot, actually,” says Åkerfeldt. “More than we listen to… I want to say Yes, but I do listen to Yes quite a lot. We are first and foremost hard rock guys, metal guys. That’s what shaped us in the beginning. So those records are immortal to us, the AC/DCs and the Michael Schenkers, Judas Priests…”

Åkesson: “Iron Maiden, Scorpions, Accept…”

“And many of those guys, in the early days, were really quite progressive,” Åkerfeldt says. “Like Priest, Sabbath, Deep Purple. They were labelled progressive rock, or progressive pop, on the back of the records.”

Thematically, Åkerfeldt says the new record largely deals with love. Unhindered by the potentially squishy, sickly connotations the word carries, this chief idea splits into individual song vignettes, ranging from anger to melancholy.

“It’s mainly personal,” he says. “I’ve had a turbulent life in the last five or six years or so, though I didn’t deliberately, specifically write about that. Back in the day I used to start by writing mock lyrics about… beer! And then I’d translate them into something more meaningful, or something that looked good. But this time I started writing, and in the middle of the process I found many of these lyrics dealt with love – mostly the negative emotions you can get with a positive feeling like love: paranoia, insecurity, anger, jealousy, hate even. I didn’t set out to write these types of lyrics – it was only afterwards that I kinda knew what they dealt with.”

Just like his friend and collaborator Steven Wilson, Åkerfeldt isn’t forthcoming about his personal life. He’s divorced from his wife Anna, the mother of his two daughters, but doesn’t talk about it. Now happily settled with his girlfriend, he’s reluctant to say whether any particular incidents ended up influencing what he wrote.

“Well, again, it’s my recent life,” he says slightly awkwardly. “I’m not saying those lyrics are biographical or anything like that. But I’ve been troubled, and when you have these kind of weird thoughts, catastrophic thoughts, which I had… So what I wrote down is not necessarily something I experienced myself. I didn’t think too much when I wrote. I wrote each line down and thought, ‘Okay, that’ll work with the rhythm, with the vocal, that sounds nice.’ And then I finished it and became more and more angry every now and then, which I found interesting.

“I just know that when you’re in the middle of a chaotic relationship, or when you feel that you’re being mistreated or something like that, you get weird thoughts. Not necessarily about… [laughs] stabbing somebody in the fucking face, but you start acting weird. Love is like a mental disease, which everybody kind of wants to catch. It’s crazy when you think about it. I love ‘love’, but I’m also interested in how it can affect you; how this positive emotion that musicians have been talking about for years – ‘All you need is love’ – can feel so damaging when you’re in the middle of it. So that’s the basis for those lyrics. But they aren’t about anyone in particular.”

Indeed, simple glances at the news proved to be incredibly fruitful sources of inspiration too. “The other day I heard about a guy who killed his pregnant wife with a machete in Sweden,” he tells us. “I assume that somewhere before this event took place, he loved her. So it’s an interesting emotion, and it’s interesting to see what it can bring out of seemingly normal people.”

In a wider sense, Opeth have never been publicity seekers for anything other than their music. Their recent 25th-anniversary book, the Book Of Opeth, chronicled their evolution without delving into personal issues or potential controversy. Nevertheless, after over two decades in the business and a rotating cast of band members (Åkerfeldt is the only remaining founder member), they must have had a diva rock star phase at some point. Right?

“Currently in the middle of it,” Åkerfeldt laughs. “But no, there’s a lot about this band that we kept under wraps, but we decided to… I mean, we did the Opeth book recently, and deliberately kept that down. But there’s been a lot… of that. A lot of that.”

Can you elaborate at all? “Well, if I was going to, I would have done so in the book, wouldn’t I?” he says, only slightly defensively. “But there’s a lot of things happening in this band. I mean, we’re good people, everyone who’s been in the band has been good people, but there’s been massive trouble.”

And that’s all he’ll say on the matter, though he’s gleefully candid when we ask what the most ‘metal’ thing he’s ever done is. “I threw chairs out of a balcony once – 25 floors,” he enthuses. “I think it was in Adelaide, maybe around the time of Deliverance in 2002. It was me and Per [Wiberg], our then-keyboard player, [Martín] Méndez and [former drummer Martin] Lopez were sharing a room and they were passed out, and me and Per were drinking on their balcony, so we decided to throw out the chairs. I thought we were closer to the ground. I was really drunk. The next day the hotel manager stopped us when we were checking out and said, ‘Didn’t you like the chairs on the balcony?’ We had to pay for them, of course.”

And then there was the time he poured vodka all over a major label exec in the US. “I’d been drinking heavily and smoking mushrooms mixed with hash or something,” he recalls with some pride. “I don’t usually do drugs but I thought this seemed like a good idea. I got really crazy, and it was at an after-party in a hotel room in the US. I didn’t know anybody there. And the label manager for Century Media in America was there, and I grabbed him by his hair and poured a bottle of vodka in his face.”

“You do get a bit of an ‘evil eye’ when you’re drunk…” Åkesson says thoughtfully, stroking his beard. “When I started in the band, he used to jump on people and wrestle them.”

It’s an oddly endearing, childlike image – the tall, suave Åkerfeldt taking a running leap at some unsuspecting roadie or bandmate. “But I’m very anti-violence,” Åkerfeldt hastily adds. “I’m not trying to hurt them. It’s childish playing, and I was drinking a lot then. I haven’t done it since I stopped drinking hard liquor.”

Hidden darknesses aside, Opeth haven’t had a great need for violence – certainly not as far as creative control is concerned. Slightly amazingly, they’ve never been seriously pushed around by label execs and the like, which has allowed them to remain in a progressive niche and build a substantial fan base entirely on their own terms. The only real opposition they’ve faced has been from fans, when they largely abandoned metal in favour of prog with Heritage. This year, onstage at the Be Prog! My Friend festival in Spain, Åkerfeldt commented on how much hate the album has received, and how he equally hated the people that hated it. Tongue-in-cheek, but it points to truth…

“I don’t hate people who hate that record,” he says measuredly. “The people I do hate are the ones who try to tell me what to do. So it’s more that I have a problem with authority to begin with. And I hate a lot of records, y’know. I’m not very vocal about it. I’m not going to assume that my personal wish will change what the organisation or band or whoever, what they’re doing. My opinion means fuck all to them, I know… And I would never go up to bands I look up to and tell them that what they’re doing is bad. But I’m a different generation.”

Has that less flattering side of the metal world made the prog community seem a bit more welcoming by contrast? “I assume that the prog fans are generally a bit older,” says Åkerfeldt slowly, “and maybe more mature. They’re not necessarily so keen on hating; making it known that they hate this and that band. Maybe they’re like me – if they don’t like something, they just back off. They’re not actively repulsed.”

“I’m trying to think about the live shows we do and the reception we get to those,” muses Åkesson. “At Be Prog! My Friend, I saw a lot of young kids, metalheads, but they were totally into the proggier stuff.”

They hope to see a lot of said kids in November, when they headline Wembley Arena in London. Today they’re relatively tight-lipped about their plans, but they do tell us that there may be a special set specifically for the Wembley show. Unlike previous gigs, they’re looking to be more involved with the whole staging process.

“We’re working on a new stage set for this upcoming tour for the new album,” Åkesson says, “which includes this new lamp design. It hasn’t been used much. You can do a lot of spaced-out stuff with it.”

For such a classic, prog-loving band, Opeth’s stage shows have hitherto remained rather minimal. As they continue to embrace the musical daring of their prog forefathers, we wonder if there’ll ever be a visual side to match. As it stands, they’re not exactly talking [earlier Opeth album] ‘Blackwater Park: ON ICE’ à la Rick Wakeman.

“That’s the Achilles’ heel, the visual thing – everyone’s a bit uncomfortable with it.” Åkerfeldt gestures to his demure all-black attire – not a gimmick in sight. “I’m in my stage clothes now. I don’t mind bands with a strong image, and I wouldn’t mind if we had a strong image if it was something we were comfortable with, but we haven’t found anything like that yet. We’re trying to get the guys onstage to move a bit and have some sort of ‘look’, so no shorts, no free tour T-shirts from the support band… that’s as far as we’ve got.”

So no capes then? Or a giant peacock, like the one seen on the Sorceress album cover? You could get an inflatable one and have it float around the arena?

“Well, that could be done, of course,” Åkerfeldt nods, in a voice that says ‘but probably not’. “Mendez is an artist and painter, so he’s more into that type of thing. Whenever the guys in the crew start talking about the show and how it’s going to look, he’s the one who gets most involved.”

It turns out that Åkerfeldt has more important things than stage design to worry about. For such a long‑serving frontman, as adept at voice‑of-Satan metal growls as melodious straight vocals, he admits that his confidence is “pretty shit”.

“Our first show after we did the record was our first show in nine months, supporting Iron Maiden – in front of about 65,000 people,” he says. “I was nervous. I was doing some newspaper thing outside, and I felt calm but my legs were shaking. So yeah, I do get nervous.”

How do you combat that? “I go onstage,” he replies, simply. “I go out there and do my best, but I don’t get pumped up or anything – no ‘Yeah!’ or fist-pumping. I’m not really rock star material in that sense.”

“We do a handshake before we go on,” Åkesson nods.

Off tour, it’s a little easier to relax. Both Åkerfeldt and Åkesson, who is also a father, currently live in the suburbs of Stockholm. Return trips home are spent with their children, barbecuing, cycling and jumping in the nearby archipelago, largely free of the demands of being in a world-famous band.

How often do you get recognised back there? “Quite often actually,” says Åkerfeldt, “but it’s not like I need a wig or a disguise. But yes, people do come up to me.”

“But it’s not like Beyoncé,” Åkesson adds.

“No,” agrees Åkerfeldt, “not like Beyoncé.”

Star Trek hero William Shatner’s upcoming metal album is far from his first musical venture. In 2013 he’d never listened to prog before he started work on Ponder The Mystery (which he revisited a decade later). Inspired by Billy Sherwood (before his full-time return to Yes) the pair created an album dripping with heavyweight guest talent. It led to the actor’s discovery of a connection between progressive music and science fiction, and a record that moved him to tears.

“Every year Tom Hanks has a Shakespeare reading to raise funds for schools,” says William Shatner, demonstrating his ability to spin a great celebrity yarn. “He gets all his friends together – of which I’d like to consider myself one – and we do a reading of one of Shakespeare’s plays. The latest one is The Two Gentlemen Of Verona. Paul McCartney is going to sing some songs, and I’m going to do Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds with him.”

That $1,500-per-seat event took place at a sold-out Broad Stage Theater in Santa Monica. Hanks, Macca and Shatner were joined by Val Kilmer and Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander, among others, to raise money for various good causes.

With its tempo changes, Mellotron intro and marshmallow skies, Lucy is a pretty proggy piece of work. Shatner’s remarkable take on it was the highlight of The Transformed Man, his debut album – released in 1968 as the original Star Trek series was entering its third and final season. “My understanding is Paul found my interpretation ‘interesting!’” the actor laughs. “That’s the word he used!”

William Shatner does. From time to time. Speak in. Staccato bursts. Also, he has a knowing, almost English sense of irony about himself. He’s well aware that many people might find him – or at least his musical endeavours – faintly absurd. And yet he’s friendly, articulate and, with his 83rd birthday coming up, still in possession of more marbles than many Hollywood stars begin with.

“He’s just an amazing, down-to-earth guy and an amazing artist,” says former Yes guitarist Billy Sherwood. “He’s capable of going to the Bahamas and retiring, but he wants to continue with his art, and I respect that.”

Sherwood has collaborated with Shatner on his fourth musical enterprise, Ponder The Mystery. They were introduced by Brian Perera, founder of Sherwood’s regular label Cleopatra, which also released Shatner’s daffy 2011 covers album Seeking Major Tom.

“Brian suggested I meet Billy,” says the actor, “and they asked what I’d do. I said, ‘Well, I could take a period of time: there’s a guy on a beach who’s in despair an hour before sunset. The sun sets, and through the beauty of what he sees, he regains his joy of life.’

”They said, ‘Uh, okay!’ They didn’t really know what I was talking about – and in a way, neither did I. I began to write new lyrics about twilight, sunset and the sounds of the night, and before we knew it we had 15 songs.”

“I thought it was an incredible artistic expression for a man in his position,” says Sherwood. “I said, ‘Let’s go at this like a serious progressive rock record. Let’s try to make an interesting piece of art here, not worry about what people are expecting and just do what we want to do.’

“He was into that and ran with it. I waited for him to give me lyrics; I got the vibe, harmonically speaking, and bounced off of those.” He cites and example: “He wrote So Am I about his dog dying, and equating it to himself and mortality. It was melancholy, so I wrote music with almost a church-like atmosphere.”

Though perhaps not for everybody, the concept works well for those who to go with it. Shatner’s spoken-word existential enquiries are set to Sherwood’s highly effective symph-prog rock arrangements, on songs such as Where It’s Gone... I Don’t Know, I’m Alright, Where Does Time Go? and I Think. Musically and vocally, Sherwood – “a bloody genius,” according to Shatner – does the heavy lifting. His layered harmonies and rock tones are an astringent counterpoint to the Star Trek hero’s distinctive, what’s-it-all- about recitative.

Musically, jazz is Shatner’s first love; and he admits that, before hooking up with Sherwood, he’d never been a big progressive rock fan. “But when I came up with this idea, I went back and listened to all these great bands like Pink Floyd, to get the cohesiveness of the concept. I tell ya, I’m getting myself into deep water here! I seem to have lurched into this area by osmosis.

“I conceived the idea that progressive rock is to music what science fiction is to literature. There is in science fiction a desire to further the imagination, to take what exists and go further to explore the boundaries, the horizons. In progressive rock you push the music to the edge and discover new ways of doing things.

“Maybe this album is a new way of doing things – I don’t know, but in my experience this is new. It tantalises you with new ideas of how music and the spoken word – the music of language itself – can combine.”

The oddest, most avant-garde tune on the album must be Rhythm Of The Night. Hawkwind’s Nik Turner adds sax to an evocative, glossy slab of AOR- inflected prog that’s intriguing and fun, with Shatner’s love of wordplay at the fore. “I had the idea for the line, ‘The cricket is the ticket to the rhythm of the night / The cadence of the hawk is obligato to the dusk.’ Billy took the rhythm of my words and put them to music.”

Sherwood adds: “I wanted that in an odd meter – to have the rhythms move around. So I played the drums crazy on that one. It’s a cool tune. My main challenge was to make sure when I played something, he was digging it. He was really accepting of the compositions; it became very natural. Many of the projects I do, we start getting in a flow and they become easier over time.”

Through his Prog Collective and numerous tribute albums, Sherwood has a proven track record for eliciting great performances from a galaxy of prog stars. Ponder The Mystery is energised by guests including Steve Vai, Edgar Winter, The Doors’ Robbie Krieger, Foreigner’s Mick Jones and Tangerine Dream’s Edgar Froese.

When Al Di Meola heard Shatner was doing a new album, he called him up directly and asked to be a part of it. The actor had never heard of the jazz fusion guitarist – but Sherwood leapt on the chance to get him involved. Rick Wakeman has been a Sherwood ‘friend and ally’ for years so he’s added some nimble parts. The album is notable for featuring some of the last recorded work by the late keyboard great George Duke, whose overdubs were sent to Sherwood’s studio just days before he died.

The theme of mortality is a major aspect of the work. Shatner’s strong second album, 2004’s Has Been – produced by Ben Folds – contained some intense moments such as the hauntingly sparse What Have You Done, inspired by the tragic 1999 death of his third wife, Nerine Kidd-Shatner. “That’s what I tuned into,” says Sherwood.

“It was very heavy; it was real. I knew there’d be people who would get Ponder The Mystery, and others who were waiting to hear Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds – there’s nothing we could do about that, so I decided to roll the dice to get people thinking rather than waiting for the joke. I’m very very proud of what we’ve come up with.”

They launched the album with three small club dates in LA, where Shatner was backed by Sherwood and his regular band Circa, featuring Tony Kaye. “I’ve never done a show like that,” says Sherwood. “I’m used to music in its traditional form; this was more like prog rock theater. I’m singing, doing my thing, and Bill’s reading and doing his, and the mixture created a unique experience.

“One night he told a story about how musicians, if something’s wrong, give each other a look – he’d realised the battery pack for his in-ear monitors wasn’t even on. I said to him afterwards, ‘Dude, you’re supposed to tell me these things so I can come over and fix it!’ In rehearsal we musicians might be getting a little tense; he’d be just sitting there, smiling through it all. I’d tell him, ‘You need to screw something up so I can yell at you a little bit!’ It was all so funny, and so surreal.”

If Sherwood’s main priority was to keep his captain happy, he certainly achieved that. “I’ve never had a more creative, enjoyable and spectacular time with anyone in any place,” says Shatner of his co-writer. “There are such unbelievable players on the album.

“I’d worried there’d be a sameness to the songs – but they’ve lent their uniqueness to them. There are songs on here that move me to tears no matter how often I hear them. It’s been wonderful.”

When Santana had a Top 5 single with Black Magic Woman in 1971, it was a great example of how music can often be the result of – to borrow a phrase from Sir Isaac Newton - “standing on the shoulders of giants.” In this case, guitar-wielding giants.

The evolution of Black Magic Woman stretches back to 1957, with an obscure record by Chicago guitarist Jody Williams. Williams had cut his teeth in the early '50s, playing on the street with his mentor Bo Diddley, then gigging with such blues artists as Memphis Minnie and Elmore James. That's him playing the incendiary solo on Diddley's classic Who Do You Love?

In his extended break, you can hear several licks that would inform the styles of both Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. Williams made his own records too, and the B-side to his 1957 single You May was an instrumental called Lucky Lou. From the phrasing of the opening guitar riff to the slinky Afro-Cuban groove, it's obviously the blueprint for Black Magic Woman.

A year later, fellow Chicago blues guitarist Otis Rush “borrowed” that riff and feel for his record All Your Love (I Miss Your Loving), adding a vocal melody. Produced by Willie Dixon and featuring Ike Turner on rhythm guitar, it became one of Rush's signature hits.

Eight years later, in 1966, it was covered by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, on the landmark “Beano” LP featuring Eric Clapton. The bass player on that record was John McVie. And a year later, after Clapton left to form Cream, there was a brief three-month window when the Bluesbreakers line-up included McVie, drummer Mick Fleetwood and lead guitarist Peter Green, the nucleus of the soon-to-be-formed Fleetwood Mac.

From there, we cut to Green writing a song for his svelte fashion model girlfriend, Sandra Elsdon, who he'd nicknamed “Magic Mama.” Green said in Peter Green: The Biography: “One of the things John Mayall said was that if you really like something, you should take the first lines, and make up another song from them. So that's what I did with Black Magic Woman.”

The song, nodding to All Your Love and Lucky Lou, was released as a single by Fleetwood Mac in 1968 and hit #37 on the UK charts.

And that's where Carlos Santana enters the picture. In the book Guitar Greats, he said, “I used to go see the original Fleetwood Mac, and they used to kill me, just knock me out. To me they were the best blues band.”

So in 1970, when Santana keyboardist Gregg Rolie started to play Black Magic Woman during a soundcheck, it was a memorable moment. Santana told Rolling Stone, “I swear to you, and this is for real, whenever we play the song, I remember the first time we played it in a soundcheck in Fresno in a parking lot. Gregg brought the song from Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green. And I remember saying, 'Hmm, I can bring a little bit of Otis Rush here and a little bit of Wes Montgomery here.'”

Santana's recorded version, featuring Rolie on lead vocals, was on the their best-selling second album, Abraxas. Adding yet another shoulder and another giant, the single switched gears into a double-time outro jam, based on Gypsy Queen, by Hungarian jazz guitarist Gábor Szabó. Discussing the song's long journey, Santana told Raised On Radio in 2016: “We all listened to everything, and we sculpture our own beauty and expression from the things that we love.”

In 1998, when Santana was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the band was joined by Peter Green for a seven-minute version of Black Magic Woman.

Pain Of Salvation and Kayak alumnus Kristoffer Gildenlöw has returned to his prog metal roots with new solo album [Humanised]. The Swedish musician reconnects with former bandmates, explores what it means to be human, and tells Prog why he's still hopeful of the future.

It’s been 20 years since Kristoffer Gildenlöw was somewhat acrimoniously forced out of Pain Of Salvation, the well-respected Swedish prog metal band led by his brother Daniel. In the space of those two decades, the younger sibling has reinvented himself as a successful session musician and solo artist. He’s played and toured with Neal Morse, Lana Lane and Damian Wilson. His solo albums have hit a string of rich and varied notes, ranging from smoky singer-songwriter vibes to stirring moments of full-on symphonic prog.

What he hasn’t done much of – a few session slots aside – is the sort of progressive metal with which he originally made his name. His 2024 album Empty made some tentative steps toward the rockier side of the prog spectrum; but on his latest release, [Humanised], he’s finally returned to his roots.

“I’ve never seen myself as a singer and I think that’s the biggest obstacle I’ve had,” he offers by way of explanation. “With the earlier music, I could lean more towards the story-telling and the lower voice. I’ve really picked up the electric guitar and got better with that, so I felt more secure in doing more guitar work on my own, and also singing and raising the bar. That’s when I decided, ‘Okay, I’m ready to take that step into a heavier sound – a more technical kind of music than before.’”

[Humanised] is, indeed, a technically accomplished album; but one that also retains the emotional weight of his previous releases. There’s a tension running through most of the songs and a deliberate sonic heaviness, but it’s far from one-dimensional. It’s meticulously constructed: even a track like The Almosts, built around just two chords, stacks multiple layers of texture and melodies to impressive effect.

Elsewhere, there’s a full complement of virtuosic bass runs, drilling modern prog metal riffs, unconventional vocal phrasings and giddily veering time signatures. It’s a fantastic album that more than stands on its own merits. Beyond some superficial similarities in dynamics and vocals, it doesn’t particularly sound like Pain Of Salvation, but that shadow was always going to loom large when Gildenlöw turned back to the heavier side – especially as it also features current POS drummer Leo Margarit and a guest appearance from their former guitarist Daniel Magdič.

“It’s a blessing and a curse,” Gildenlöw says of his history. “I’m extremely proud of everything we did and I learned so much from it. But yeah, I think you’ll always be ‘the ex.’ In my case, I’ll always be Daniel’s younger brother and I’ll never be able to get out of that shadow. He’s so much better than I am: more talented, better music, better singer. Everything I can do, he can do 10 times better.”

That seems a harsh conclusion, given the quality of the younger Gildenlöw’s own body of work; but his feeling of being overshadowed isn’t a new sensation. “It was a weird, but also kind of magical time,” he says of his stint in POS. “I’m five years younger than my brother. It doesn’t matter now, but when you’re 17 and your brother is 22, that’s a huge difference. So I was always watching over my shoulders, like, ‘Okay, when’s the real bass player showing up? When will I be kicked out of the band?’ In the beginning it was like, ‘I love doing this, but am I good enough? Am I worthy enough? Am I just here temporarily till they find someone better?’”

As it turned out, he’d hold down that bassist role for 12 years, touring the world and playing on POS’s first five studio albums, including 2002 breakthrough Remedy Lane and sprawling theological follow-up BE. He was only asked to leave after his relocation to the Netherlands produced apparent logistical issues for the band.

“There was for years some bad blood between us as to how and when it happened,” he says today. “I moved in 2003. We played our last tour in 2005 and I had said, ‘Guys, if it’s not working, I’ll make this my last tour.’ They said, ‘No – no problem. We’ll make it work and we’ll start on the next album.’ I went to Sweden for Christmas and they played me a couple of the new songs and I was like, ‘Will you send them to me?’ But they didn’t send anything. They had a chat and gave me a call: ‘You’re out of the band.’ It was, ‘Damn it, guys! I could have left with a little bit more dignity than this.’”

Two decades down the road, Gildenlöw acknowledges the decision was probably best for both parties and says that his relationship with Daniel is in a much better place. “When I left the band, it definitely felt like I got my brother back as a brother,” he adds.

When it came to looking for assistance putting [Humanised] together, Margarit was one of a shortlist of two for the drum seat (Gildenlöw diplomatically declines to name the other). The pair had never overlapped in Pain Of Salvation, but had worked together previously on Within Temptation guitarist Ruud Jolie’s prog side-project, For All We Know. “I know a lot of great drummers,” Gildenlöw says, “but there has to be a little bit extra. There’s more jazz and fusion in there than hard rock and metal. It’s not going to be just a technical thing. It has to groove.

The multi-instrumentalist handled everything else himself apart from those guest solos from Magdič and Dutch newcomer Thijmen van der Meer. “The great Paul Coenradie, who’s in my live band, had done most of the solos until now. For Empty it was a no-brainer for him to do all those David Gilmour-ish kind of solos. But for this album I needed something with a little bit more history in metal to get the right tones and the right chops.”

The music for [Humanised] didn’t appear in a rush – some of the songs had been hanging around for years in a rudimentary form. Gildenlöw says he writes all the time, curating pieces that seem to fit together. It’s only then he starts thinking about lyrics and themes.

“I know where the song wants to take me musically, but lyrics are always the last thing I do. This album was the biggest journey for me because I tried so many themes to get it to work. Then I came up with the idea: ‘What is it like to be human, or become human?’ Binary is about a robot or some kind of AI acquiring human feelings – in this case, falling in love with a human girl on the other side of the computer. What is it like to be human but not accepted in this society; the people on the edge who don’t belong?”

These themes are channelled into songs that sputter with anxiety. But when it comes to the future of humanity itself, Gildenlöw remains cautiously optimistic. “On one side I’m extremely excited about what we have done. We just went past the Moon – how crazy is that? But then there’s war again, which we’ve been doing for thousands of years. One side of humanity evolves and the other side doesn’t. I can get pessimistic, but there’s also a spark of hope. I love being alive and being here with amazing people. And there’s always music to enjoy.”

[Humanised] is on sale now.

When it comes to the deployment of the ultimate rock vocal, that indefinable sand, glue, honey, whisky, grit ’n' gravel cocktail that speaks of a life well-lived and more than a few hearts broken, there’s no one quite like Rod Stewart.

Following a formative apprenticeship on London’s R’n’B scene and fronting The Jeff Beck Group, Stewart enjoyed a concurrent success with the Faces as his solo career exploded in 1971, when his pivotal third album, Every Picture Tells A Story, and its attendant Maggie May single, simultaneously topped charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

He went on to dabble in everything from disco to the Great American songbook, bagging a knighthood in the process, and now he's finally beginning to wind down, with a farewell tour announced for 2027. But these are the six essential Rod Stewart solo albums.

During the ‘70s Yes pushed musical boundaries about as far as any band could go while selling out stadiums and regularly going platinum. But is it possible to select their 10 best tracks of that era? In 2016 Prog bravely gave it a go.

10. Astral Traveller (1970)

Taken from Time And A Word, the song is driven by short-lived original guitarist Peter Banks’ recurring jagged riffing, and pushed into overdrive by original keyboardist Tony Kaye’s searing organ and Bill Bruford’s skittering, high-tuned drums. They’re rocking out, veiled behind psyche-tinged effects that properly belong back in the ‘60s. However, the ruminative, ornamental middle section hints at what lies in the future.

9. On The Silent Wings Of Freedom (1978)

Spawned from a jam between bassist Chris Squire and drummer Alan White, Yes end controversial album Tormato with a commanding flourish. There are times when Steve Howe’s terse guitar and Rick Wakeman’s Polymoog sound as though they’re jousting for supremacy, goading each other with a series of escalating runs.

8. Going For The One (1977)

You want an ebullient air-punching song whose lyrics involve attainment in sport as well as the sometimes tricky art of songwriting? Want it to sneakily co-opt some hairy-arsed, back-to-basics rock ‘n‘ roll with a pinch of punk and soupcon of succinct symphonics? This blast from ‘77’s album of the same name should sort you out.

7. Starship Trooper (1971)

Punchy grooves, tremulous bass and nebulous harmonies that sound like the Beach Boys in outer space. Though Tony Kaye famously got bored with the repeating chords of the song’s striking conclusion, there’s no denying that this cut from The Yes Album is a masterclass in tension; and when it comes, ecstatic release, this is where Yes really took off.

6. The Revealing Science Of God (1973)

Just ignore those fair-weather friends and naysayers. Sixth studio album Tales From Topographic Oceans remains an astoundingly ambitious venture, filled with glorious themes and impressive dynamics from a band willing to take a leap into the unknown. When Jon Anderson sings that he’s waited all his life for this moment, you know he really means it.

5. Roundabout (1971)

From 1972’s Fragile – and the song that broke the band in America via FM radio – Roundabout is a tumultuous yet catchy synthesis of West Coast harmonies, with shards of spiky bass cartwheeling around Howe’s deft chords and glancing harmonics. It shouldn’t work but it does, as new boy Wakeman’s firework-filled organ solo unabashedly seals the deal.

4. Yours Is No Disgrace (1971)

The template for the classic Yes sound is crystallised with this song from the aptly-titled The Yes Album. With sections seamlessly integrated, you can almost hear the giddy shock they experienced during its recording. Blending Howe’s dizzying, euphoric soloing with the central soaring theme, it’s an overture awash with joyous invention.

3. Heart Of The Sunrise (1971)

Squire’s thunderous bass, Bruford’s surgical strikes, Wakeman’s shiver-inducing Mellotron, Howe’s galloping runs and Anderson’s yearning vocal – it’s the moment Yes proved they could go beyond anything previously attempted. Epic in every sense of the word, this moment from Fragile is the point at which they acquire the confidence to be a world-beating band.

2. Awaken (1977)

Anderson once said that all the extended compositions the group had been working in the ‘70s were leading to this track from ‘77’s Going For The One. A sublime arrangement of several contrasting elements, the convergence around the Master of Light section builds into one of the most transcendent moments in the Yes catalogue.

1. Close To The Edge (1972)

The final act by this particular incarnation of the group, from the album of the same name, is nothing short of astonishing. Retaining a magical aura even now, due to its masterful arrangements, some of Anderson’s most potent wordplay and their exceptional instrumental firepower, the focus isn’t lost for even one of its 18-plus minutes.

Slipknot guitarist Jim Root has offered a juicy update on the band’s upcoming album via social media, warning fans that it’s going to “hurt some feelings”.

The 54-year-old, who joined the masked nu metal megastars as they were recording their breakthrough 1999 self-titled debut album, posted a video of his guitar pedalboard to Instagram on Monday (September 28). “We’re about to get real busy,” he teased.

Replying to comments on the post, Root spilled more details, saying, “[One] very important thing for us at this time is to not ‘repeat’ ourselves. It’s gonna hurt some feelings. We’re really experimenting with different approaches.”

He urges people not to expect another Slipknot or Iowa, their chart-topping 2001 second album, explaining that “we’ve been there”.

“The vibe feels honest and true to me,” he continues. “It’s uneasy and reminds me of recording in the earlier days. I’m not saying that means it will translate to the type of music we’re creating or the sound/production of it. The early records had the vibe. You can’t miss that with Ross [Robison, Slipknot and Iowa producer].”

Root adds that some of Slipknot’s more recent material has been “over-produced” – something he intends not to repeat on their next release: “Not necessarily the ‘best’ sounding one. The most exciting sounding… liveliest etc. We did track on the floor live with Eloy [Casagrande, drums]. We hadn’t done that in a long time for various reasons. Everything is analogue and played. All the pieces that need to be there are there.”

The guitarist also replies to a fan who offers a pretty harsh critique of Slipknot’s last album, 2022’s The End, So Far. “Please don’t make another The End, So Far,” the fan writes. “We need this to be heavy and not Stone Sour,” referring to Root and singer Corey Taylor’s former melodic rock project. Root simply responds, “Agreed.”

Root has been critical of The End, So Far in the past. Talking to MusicRadar days before the album’s release, he lamented the fact that the band didn’t do pre-production, and said that more preparation would have resulted in “a better product”.

“Directors will say constantly that they never finish a movie, they just abandon them!” he added. “I feel like, more than anything with this record, we had to abandon it and move on from it.”

Slipknot are recording their new album, their eighth overall, with former Faith No More producer Matt Wallace. It will be their first via their own label, (sic)est Records. They released the single Arsenal earlier this month, but Root revealed shortly afterwards that the track will not appear on the new album.

On Monday, Slipknot announced extensive touring for 2027, kicking off with a show at Wembley Stadium on July 3, their only European date all year. The announcement of Marilyn Manson as main support for the Wembley and South American dates proved controversial, as Manson has faced multiple misconduct allegations in recent years. A lawsuit by his former assistant Ashley Walters accusing him of verbal, physical and psychological abuse has been granted a trial date in November. Manson denies any wrongdoing.

NWOBHM legends Iron Maiden released their album Somewhere In Time on this day in 1986. It’s one of their most intricately detailed album covers, layered with many in-jokes and nods to their past.

Artist Derek Riggs spent weeks on the 32-inch by 15-inch painting.

“It wore me out quite severely,” Riggs revealed in Martin Popoff’s book Run For Cover: The Art Of Derek Riggs. “I was living in London at the time, and working on that for two months, and it took three months in all – I just had to stop, because I had had enough. It got into my head and I just couldn’t see anything else. I couldn’t think about anything else. It did my head in, because there’re all these little details.”

We’ve stared at the front and back cover for what feels like days to bring you 39 of those little details…

1) Riggs’ stylised signature can be seen as a badge on Eddie’s chest.

2) Eddie is posed next to a street sign which partially reads Acacia. We can only assume it’s a reference to The Number Of The Beast song 22 Acacia Avenue.

3) Next to him is a poster from the band’s 1980 debut album.

4) To the left of Eddie’s gun, there’s an Eye Of Horus placed at the top of a skyscraper. This ancient Egyptian protection symbol is mentioned in the title track of 1984’s Powerslave.

5) Behind Eddie’s right leg, reflected in the window of the Bradbury Towers Hotel International, there’s a sign that reads ‘This is a very boring painting’. Speak for yourself, there’s plenty of references to go.

6) The biohazard sign on Eddie’s crotch? “He’s got a nuclear-powered willy,” says Riggs. Quite.

7) Next to Eddie’s left leg, there’s a plastic yellow bin fixed to a lamppost, referencing the cover of Iron Maiden’s self-titled debut album.

8) Aw. Who’s this? It’s the black cat from the Live After Death artwork. Name unknown.

9) Who’s Webster? Charlie Webster was EMI’s art director.

10) Hungry? There’s a Pizza Hot which can be seen through Eddie’s legs. “The Cyrillic above the words Pizza Hot? I think it says sour milk in Russian,” remembers Riggs. The perfect drink to wash down a Meat Feast.

BACK COVER – SECTION ONE

1) Fancy a pint before jumping in the cockpit and starting up the engines? Try the Aces High Bar.

2) There’s a spitfire from the single cover twisting overhead.

3) In the skies beyond the city, all you can see are pyramids. That’s all to do with Powerslave.

4) L’Amours was a Brooklyn venue which Maiden played often. They returned to play a secret show in 1988 under the name Charlotte and The Harlots.

BACK COVER – SECTION TWO

1) Long Beach Arena is where Maiden recorded Live After Death.

2) Hammerjacks is a Baltimore nightclub they used to visit.

3) Below Hammerjacks reads a sign for Tehe’s Bar, where the gang vocals for Heaven Can Wait were recorded.

4) The angel plummeting down the side of Bradbury Towers is Icarus. Still not having much luck there. It’s not even sunny this time. It’s also a nod to Led Zeppelin.

BACK COVER – SECTION THREE

1) Iron Maiden filmed a 1980 concert at the Rainbow in London’s Finsbury Park. It’s now a Christian church.

2) See the sign saying Sand Dune over the bridge? That’s in reference to To Tame A Land, from 1983’s Piece Of Mind album, which was based on Frank Herbert’s novel Dune.

3) The band called up the author to ask his permission to name the song after the book. His reply? “No, you can’t call it Dune. And you can’t do anything based on my book, because I think rock ‘n’ roll is decadent and corrupt”, remembers Riggs. “So they put Herbert Ails [on the bridge], as in, Herbert’s not very well.”

4) Next to that is a sign for the Marquee Club, which looks bigger than the original venue in London.

5) There’s Doctor Who’s TARDIS. Bruce Dickinson is a fan.

6) The Ruskin Arms was an East End pub where Maiden cut their teeth.

7) Above the pub, there’s a prostitute in a red room. That’s probably Charlotte The Harlot, still on the game after all those years. Good grief.

8) On the bridge across the road, there’s a digital clock reading 23:58. Two minutes to midnight. See?

9) ‘The Philip K. Dick Cinema’ is a nod to the author whose book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the film Blade Runner.

10) That’ll explain the Dekkers Department Stores and Tyrell Corp signs in the background.

11) Asimov Foundation is a nod to the sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov.

12) There’s the Grim Reaper from the Live After Death and The Trooper artwork.

13) The Phantom Opera House refers to the band’s song and one-time Lucozade soundtrack Phantom of the Opera.

14) Another West Ham reference on the bridge. According to the scoreboard, the Hammers appear to have given Arsenal a spanking. As we said, this is the future and all just fantasy.

15) Down the road, there’s a neon sign saying that Gypsy’s Kiss are performing that evening. They were Steve Harris’ first band. It’s also Cockney rhyming slang for piss.

BACK COVER – SECTION FOUR

1) Fancy a fish dish that takes around 14 minutes to prepare? Head to the Ancient Mariner Seafood Restaurant.

2) Bradbury Towers can be found on Upton Park, once the home of Steve Harris’ beloved football team West Ham United.

3) Under the Bradbury Towers sign reads ‘Maggie’s Revenge’, the now-dead Tory Prime Minister whose nickname was ‘The Iron Maiden’. She fucking loved her metal.

4) Batman can be seen lurking in the shadows on the bridge.

5) Nicko McBrain’s t-shirt says ‘Iron Wha?’. “They complained because they didn’t look exactly like them. Hello? They’re inches tall. They’re the size of postage stamps,” said Riggs.

6) Bruce Dickinson is holding a brain, a reference to the band’s 1983 album Piece Of Mind.

Much-loved Brit-rockers Little Angels have released their first new music in more than three decades. Hero (That Was Then, This Is Now) comes from the band's upcoming Big Bad & Back EP, which will be released on November 6. It's their first new music since the Too Posh to Mosh, Too Good to Last! album in 1994.

“This was never in the plan,” say the band, who announced their first shows in a decade earlier this year. "We would never make a new record unless we felt we still had something to say… and it turns out we do. Toby [Jepson] started writing new ideas, and while we were rehearsing the set for the tour, we started to jam around this new material, and it just felt great."

“Lyrically, the challenge was always going to be: how do you take what Little Angels represented back then and bring it into the modern world with guys that are now in their mid-50s?" adds frontman Jepson. "We discussed what the past meant to us and the penny dropped.

"This wasn’t about youth anymore. Of course not. It’s about reflecting on where we had come from, and the kind of people we are now, and all of a sudden, it made sense - this is about returning home."

The Big Bad & Back EP was recorded at Chapel Studios in Lincolnshire and mixed by Mike Fraser in Vancouver. Fraser, best known for his work with AC/DC, Bon Jovi and Aerosmith, also recorded and mixed Little Angels' 1994 single Ten Miles High.

"We encouraged him to evoke the spirit of those great records that he mixed back in the day," say the band.

The Big Bad & Back EP is available to pre-order now. Little Angels' UK and Ireland tour kicks off in Dublin on November 9 – full dates below.

Little Angels: Big Bad & Back tour 2026

Nov 09: Dublin Opium, Ireland
Nov 10: Belfast Limelight, UK
Nov 12: Glasgow O2 Academy, UK
Nov 13: Manchester O2 Ritz, UK
Nov 14: Leeds O2 Academy, UK
Nov 16: Norwich UEA, UK
Nov 17: Newcastle O2 City Hall, UK
Nov 19: Oxford O2 Academy, UK
Nov 20: Nottingham Rock City, UK
Nov 21: Wolverhampton KK’s Steel Mill, UK
Nov 23: Cardiff Depot, UK
Nov 24: Liverpool O2 Academy, UK
Nov 26: Bristol O2 Academy, UK
Nov 27: Bournemouth O2 Academy, UK
Nov 28: London O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire, UK
Nov 29: London O2 Forum Kentish Town, UK

Find Little Angels tickets.

There aren’t many record labels with as much personality as Sub Pop. Less a business than a state of mind, it began life in mid-80s Seattle as a fanzine edited by Bruce Pavitt (it was originally titled Subterranean Pop, and gave away compilation tapes of local underground bands), and grew to become the refreshingly snark-infused, ultra‑DIY figurehead of the city’s burgeoning grunge scene. It provided a springboard for Nirvana, Soundgarden and Mudhoney, among others, and established its dysfunctional family as the heart and soul of the city’s musical awakening.

But while their logo remains synonymous with “this primal rock stuff” that would become tagged as grunge (the term ‘grunge’ gained traction after Mark Arm of Green River, and later Mudhoney, used it to describe his music, although he denies coining the phrase), Sub Pop have adapted over the years to survive – sometimes, admittedly, by the skin of their teeth – the evolution of American indie rock after the 90s explosion began to lose its heat. In fact, so varied, extensive and consistently good is their roster, we’ve had to be painfully strict about our choices for the main sections here – no singles (despite excellent one-off releases from Babes In Toyland, Shudder To Think, Cheap Trick, Les Savy Fav and a stereo mix of The Beach Boys’ I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times), no comedy albums (even though there’s genius to be found from stand-up David Cross and musical comedy duo Flight Of The Conchords) and no compilations (but really, do track down Sub Pop 100 and Sub Pop 200 for a spectacular snapshot of a particular time in US punk rock). And even then we’ve had to miss out truly brilliant albums by bands including Codeine, Sunny Day Real Estate, the Postal Service and the Gutter Twins, simply because it’s physically impossible to cram it all into just one feature.

The Sub Pop motto is, “We’re not the best, but we’re pretty good”, but here are the records which made the label great.

Green River – Dry As A Bone/Rehab Doll EP (1987)

Soundgarden – Screaming Life (1987)

Mudhoney – Superfuzz Bigmuff (1988)

Nirvana – Bleach (1989)

The Afghan Whigs – Congregation (1992)

Mark Lanegan – Whiskey For The Holy Ghost (1994)

Sebadoh – Bakesale (1994)

Sleater-Kinney – The Woods (2005)

Band Of Horses – Everything All The Time (2006)

Downtown Boys - The Cost Of Living (2017)

One of the highlights of Marillion’s second album Fugazi was its top 30 second single, Assassing, which remains regarded as a high point of the band’s Fish era. Its video, however, was less well-received – especially by the band. When they spoke to Prog n 2021 they seemed as bewildered about it as they’d been when it was released in 1984.

The early 80s was the Wild West when it came to the emergent art form that was the music video. But even by the maverick standards of the day, the clip for Marillion track Assassing was something else.

The second single from 1984 album Fugazi was accompanied by a promo that yoked state-of-the-art digital effects to a plot that was somewhere between would-be spy thriller and office training video. The results were both visually striking and utterly incomprehensible.

It was directed by Simon Milne, who’d overseen the eye-catching clips for He Knows You Know and Garden Party. This time, the filmmaker was determined to try out the new chroma key technique, aka green screen. The only problem was, no one had quite got a handle on how it worked.

“Because they were inexperienced, they didn’t light it properly, so they weren’t able to superimpose the images on the screen,” says keyboardist Mark Kelly. “That’s why some of the time you just see a plain blue or green screen.”

The ‘plot’ featured Fish joining a group of dark-suited office workers – possibly spies – gathered in a dim room to watch a woman give a presentation, in which footage of the band playing is accompanied by lines of computer-generated data, mainly describing the colour of the text that’s appearing

“What the fuck they were doing with all the computer-generated graphics and Jimmy Bond spy stuff, I have no idea,” says Kelly. “It was just rubbish.”

At one point, the woman finds herself trapped in the middle of screens showing separate performances by the each bandmember. There’s also a moment of high comedy on the set when a car is driven through one of the giant green screens.

“The stunt driver was, like, ‘Oh yeah, I can do that,’” says Kelly. “So he drives through this screen – then bounces through the warehouse and crashes into a wall on the other side of the room.”

Fish recalls: “The first time Ian Mosley saw the video for Assassing, he said, ‘What the fuck was that all about?’ I had to agree with him.”

In March 2025 Steven Wilson returned with The Overview, an album that even he admitted was prog. Comprising two tracks, the conceptual suite included lyrics from XTC’s Andy Partridge and visuals that were out of this world. Prog visited the musician at home to get the lowdown.

There’s a phenomenon that affects astronauts when they travel into space and look back at the Earth, called the overview effect. “It’s reportedly a cognitive shift that occurs that’s to do with perspective and how they feel about their lives,” says Steven Wilson, a man who hasn’t been into space yet but has thought about the overview effect a lot over the last couple of years.

“It’s a mental perspective – quite literally having an overview of where we fit in time and space, or some inkling of it, and understanding in a split second of just how insignificant we are.”

It affects different people in different ways. When actor William Shatner, at the age of 90, travelled into space aboard the Blue Origin shuttle in 2021, the former Captain Kirk had an overwhelmingly negative reaction. “He said he’d expect to feel this sense of euphoria – but all he felt when he looked back at the Earth was a sense of death and nothingness,” says Wilson, as we sit at right angles on a pair of sofas in the open-plan kitchen of his north London home. “Isn’t that funny? Of all the people.”

Others have found beauty or even comfort in something that only emphasises our ultimately insignificant place in an unmeasurable, potentially infinite universe. Steven Wilson can understand this. “Your life is futile, it’s meaningless – and isn’t that a wonderful thing?” he says with more relish than it probably warrants. “And I do mean that. We spend so much of our time anxious, stressed, worried about things that sometimes we just need an injection of perspective.”

The idea informs Wilson’s new solo album, tellingly titled The Overview. Across its two lengthy tracks – one 23 minutes, the other 18 – it makes a dizzying, dazzling journey from the surface of the Earth to the most distant reaches of the universe. Musically, it’s the most recognisably prog album he’s made since 2014’s The Raven That Refused To Sing, even if it shares little with that record’s self-conscious homage to vintage prog.

Instead, the new work offers a much more contemporary version of the genre. “This record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock,” he says wryly at one point. Conceptually, it’s extremely ambitious. It starts with an encounter with an alien on some unnamed moor and ends billions of light years away on the very edge of the universe, taking in everyday dramas on the streets of Swindon, the destruction of Earth and such vast cosmic phenomenon such as the Omega Centauri, the Andromeda galaxy and the Eridanus supervoid.

It’s an album about the rise of social media and the death of curiosity, about the existential futility and beauty of human life. But mostly it’s about perspective. As Wilson puts it: “Sometimes being reminded how insignificant you really are in terms of time and space can create a sense of perspective, in a positive way as well as a negative way.”

Prog has already heard The Overview through headphones; but before we sit down for the interview, he invites us through to his home studio to listen to it through the ultra-high-end equipment he uses in his capacity as both a musician and one of the most in-demand Atmos remixers around. Sitting in a high-backed chair, bathed in unearthly wall-mounted mood lights, a screen flickering with lines and numbers before us as the album bounces around the room like it’s alive, it feels like we’re on the deck of a spaceship.

The album’s two parts has two personalities. The first, Objects Outlive Us (“The human story,” as Wilson describes it), is detailed and protean – a suite of music that shifts from acoustic passages to warm electronics, capped by an all-time-great solo from guitarist and regular Wilson collaborator Randy McStine.

The second half, the 18-minute title track, is entirely different. More electronic, it evokes the sparseness and coldness of space – emphasised by the sound of Wilson’s wife, Rotem, dispassionately intoning numbers that correspond to increasingly vast distances from Earth and the cosmic phenomenon they represent. It may be a cognitive illusion of our own, but it evokes a sense of movement: a camera view of Earth as it gets more and more distant, pulling away until what Carl Sagan referred to as the “pale blue dot” vanishes; part of an ever-growing tapestry of galaxies and nebulae, as everything we know is erased by distance and time.

“What did you think of it?” asks Wilson, when Prog emerges, blinking, from the studio and touches back down on the sofa in the kitchen. It sounds brilliant, but it’s also thought-provoking, disorientating and existentially terrifying, in a good way. “I kind of want that,” he says. “The whole album is about cosmic vertigo. That’s what the overview effect is.”

The Overview is Wilson’s second solo album in less than 18 months, following 2023’s The Harmony Codex. He seems very proud of that fact. “It’s not quite up there with Taylor Swift knocking them out every year, but it’s not far off!” he says. “By the standards of musicians in their 50s it’s pretty good going.”

He admits he didn’t know what to do next after finishing The Harmony Codex. “Every time, I think, ‘How the fuck am I going to do another record? What the fuck am I going to do next? There’s nothing left in the well.’ I’m always thinking, ‘What can I do next that’s completely different?’”

One of the things he considered was writing the music for an installation of some kind. He met up with Alexander Milas – former editor-in-chief of Prog’s sister magazine Metal Hammer, and founder of Space Rocks, a unique multimedia project that brings together science and the arts – with a view to collaborating on something. It was Milas who introduced Wilson to the overview effect. “It was the lightbulb moment,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh Christ, there’s an album there, isn’t there?’”

Wilson has never had any particular interest in sci-fi, at least not in the kid-friendly Star Wars variety (the cold, existential sci-fi of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is a different matter). What he is interested in is space itself – the scale, the emptiness, the mindblowing incomprehensibility of the numbers involved. He starts reeling off stats.

“There are two billion trillion stars in the universe. That’s 23 zeros; I worked it out with Google! Earth has been here for four billion years, and we – as in humans of some sort – have been here for 300,000 years. That’s 0.007% of the time the Earth has existed.” How does that make him feel? “I don’t know,” he says, shaking his head like someone whose brain is in danger of short-circuiting from data overload. “I. Don’t. Know.”

He dove into research. Not books or movies, but facts. He spent a lot of time “mucking about” on an interactive website, Scale Of The Universe, which allows the user to zoom into the most infinitesimally small thing science can comprehend (the ‘string’ of string theory) and out to the most immeasurably large thing (the Hercules- Corona Borealis Wall, which stretches to an estimated 10 billion light years).

But it wasn’t just the daunting sizes and distances of these universal phenomena that were inspirational. It was the reality of space itself. “Space is very often portrayed as this kind of cuddly place, where people have adventures,” he says. “And the reality is the complete antithesis of that. It’s nothingness; it’s scary; it’s death. It’s fucking terrifying.”

Wilson’s journey to the stars began here in north London with a five-minute piece of music originally written for The Harmony Codex, but left out. “It was good, but I felt it was a bit too progressive for that record,” he says. The piece appears halfway through The Overview’s title track.

He admits he’s not the kind of person who “can go into a hotel room with an acoustic guitar and come out with something.” Instead, he develops ideas from piano melodies, drum patterns or keyboard textures. Lyrics, he says, slow down the flow of music. “They always come at the end. I can’t stop to write lyrics.”

These lyrics – and its overarching narrative structure – don’t feel like an afterthought. Musically and conceptually the pair of tracks are two sides of the same coin. “Objects Outlive Us is about what we do to the planet, juxtaposed with what’s going on on the other side of the universe. Then The Overview itself is basically about being lost in space, on the other side of the universe.”

Objects Outlive Us begins with an encounter with an alien, who asks, ‘Did you forget about us?” – plugging into another favourite Wilson theme: the idea that humanity has lost its curiosity. It also ties in with a recurrent bugbear: our obsession with screens, with gazing downwards at the internet rather than upwards.

“The first line on the album is, ‘I incline myself to space,’” he says. “The idea is that we no longer look up at the stars in the way that we used to in the 60s, when Kubrick made 2001 and everyone was obsessed with the Moon landing. These days we’re more interested in looking into the phone than we are looking up. It’s self-obsession; it’s narcissism – it’s the enemy of curiosity. Curiosity is one of the most undervalued human attributes. It’s what takes you to great music, to great movies, to other countries.”

For one sequence in Objects Outlive Us, Wilson enlisted the help of XTC’s Andy Partridge to write the lyrics. “The whole thing about Andy is that he’s brilliant at observing smalltown England,” he says. “I knew early on that I wanted a sequence that would be this juxtaposition of the triviality of human life with these nebulae exploding and black holes imploding on the other side of the universe. So I rang him and said, ‘I’ve got a challenge for you. I want smalltown soap operas juxtaposed with cosmic phenomena.’ And he said, ‘OK, I’m going to give it a try.’”

Partridge nailed the brief. That sequence, titled Objects: Meanwhile, offers pithy yet perfectly-drawn portraits of a shopper helplessly watching as her grocery bag bursts, spilling their contents in shapes that resemble star clusters; a distraught driver weeping in his car over the debt he owes as a star blinks out billions of light years away; or an elderly widow dreaming of dead spouses as “a nebula dives into our Milky Way.”

“The idea was that you have these little soap operas in Swindon – because it’s Andy, obviously – which end with, ‘…Meanwhile, on the other side of the universe, this is going on...’” says Wilson. “Isn’t that fucking amazing?”

A subsequent section of Objects Outlive Us takes what Wilson calls “a nihilistic, doom vision of where we are right now as a planet”, before the remnants of humanity packs into an ark and heads for the stars. “The alien becomes our guide, and we end up literally floating in nothingness on the other side of the universe, billions and billions of light years away.”

Objects Outlive Us concludes with one of the album’s most transcendent moments courtesy of Randy McStine. The guitarist delivers a monumental solo, one worthy of David Gilmour or Steve Hackett. It’s the point of lift-off in more than one sense.

Wilson recalls: “What I said to him was, ‘We need to reinvent the classic rock solo. What I don’t want is Comfortably Numb – what I want is something that’s similarly heroic and epic. I want you to find a new way to speak in that vocabulary.’”

The result is a solo statement. It doesn’t sound like Comfortably Numb or Firth Of Fifth or any of the great 70s solos that defined the form, instead updating that heritage. Why didn’t Wilson play it himself? He laughs. “Honestly? I don’t think I’m good enough. I can shred a solo OK, but I bore myself. What’s beautiful about a soloist coming along is that they’ll give you something unexpected and make you rethink where the music is going to go. And that was what Randy did.”

If Objects Outlive Us sees humanity’s tiny, cosmically insignificant dramas playing out on the vast stage of the universe, the 18-minute title track flips things around. It features the aforementioned contribution from the album’s other notable guest, Rotem, making her third appearance on one of her husband’s albums, following The Future Bites and The Harmony Codex.

In a featureless, almost mechanical monotone that deliberately echoes HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, she relates a series of increasingly large numbers followed by the proportionately enormous cosmic phenomenon, representing both their size and distance from Earth. ‘Size beyond one megametre... 10 to the power of six... Ganymede, Callisto, Wolf 359...’ she recites, culminating with: ‘Size beyond one yottametre... 10 to the power of 24... Virgo super cluster, Eridanus supervoid, supercluster complex’, the latter one of the most distant structures discovered in the universe. It’s a lesson in contrasts.

“It all goes back to perspective,” he says. “That idea of cosmic vertigo. And that, by the way, is exactly why I think we’ve invented religion. Religion is a classic manifestation of cosmic vertigo: ‘I don’t understand my place in the world, I don’t understand the point of my life, there must be a reason for this – let’s invent religion.’ What amazes me is that it still clings on as an idea in such a big way when you think we should have evolved beyond that. To even understand even the very simplest, most basic facts about space, should be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion of God. But apparently it doesn’t.”

If he sounds disappointed by culture’s inability to let go of outmoded models of thinking, that’s because he is. “I’m a 57-year-old man – of course I’m disappointed,” he says with a laugh. “It disappoints me that people still believe in bullshit; it disappoints me who people vote for, it disappoints me what they eat. But at the same time, I think life is amazing. I think it’s an incredible gift.

“I look around the world and there’s so much to be fucking depressed and miserable about. But there’s also so much incredible stuff that we do – unbelievable, beautiful, inspiring, dazzling. It’s possible to hold those two things simultaneously in your mind: the logical and the illogical, the good and the bad.

“And one of the things The Overview is about is that once you realise just how futile your existence is, and what a random gift life is, you think, ‘OK, fuck it, I’m going to make the most of it.’ That’s the positive side to it. At the end of the day, your life is meaningless – so embrace it.”

He pauses. Suddenly the interstellar camera stops, reverses. In a fraction of a heartbeat, we’ve flashed back across tens of billions of light years and we’re back on a sofa next to a window in a kitchen in north London. “Do you want another cup of coffee?” he asks. In the face of a vast, unforgiving, incomprehensible universe, yes, another coffee would be nice.

If there’s a thread running through Wilson’s eight solo albums, it’s that no two sound the same. The Steven Wilson Solo Musical Universe stretches from the abrasive guitar rock of Insurgentes to the graceful art-pop of To The Bone, from the robots-dancing-on-a-production-line electronics of The Future Bites to the wilfully boundless multi-genre exercises of The Harmony Codex.

The Overview finds him broadly circling back to the same territory he explored on 2014’s vintage prog homage The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories), albeit in markedly different form. “To pre-empt a question you’re maybe going to come to, why have I gone back to a more progressive style?” he says. “It’s because that’s what the theme suggested to me. It all comes down to this idea of perspective. That immediately suggested something more long-form, more conceptual and, dare I say it, more progressive.”

So, you’ve made a prog album. “It’s definitely going to appeal to...” he starts to say, then laughs. “It’s a prog record, yes.”

Having to prise this admission out of Wilson shouldn’t be a surprise. His relationship with progressive music runs deep – he’s said that Pink Floyd were fused into his DNA as a child after being introduced to them by his late father. But it’s also a complicated one. His solo career has often seemed like an exercise in running away from the idea of being pigeonholed as a prog musician.

“Did I run away?’ he asks, almost to himself. “I guess I did. I think the simple answer is that I don’t think of myself as a generic artist. This is a progressive album, and I’ve made progressive albums before, but I never thought that was the extent of what I could do. Perhaps part of making records like The Future Bites, which is an electronic pop record, or The Harmony Codex, which is a fuck-knows-what- kind-of-record, and coming out the other side is that I feel like I can make a progressive rock album again and people aren’t going to say, ‘That’s all he does’ –because they know that isn’t all he does.”

Prog wonders if being pigeonholed was really that much of a fear. He thinks for a couple of seconds before answering. “It’s more that I listen to so many different kinds of music and I love so many different kinds of music that I didn’t think of myself as being someone with a very limited pool of inspirations. So when anyone would tell me that I’m a ‘progressive rock’ artist... yeah, I guess I’m in that tradition, but I also reserve the right to go off and do dark ambient drone music or noise music or electronic pop music.

“I’ve always kicked against the notion of being a generic artist, of being associated with only one genre and one musical style,” he continues. “The great movie directors are able to go from making a costume drama to a horror movie to a ghost movie. They can go from one thing to another and no one thinks that’s off. Do that as a musician... it’s hard to redefine yourself with every record you make. And yet the artists I admire the most are the ones that have done that.”

It sometimes seems like Wilson has a healthy disregard for what other people want from him. He doesn’t go out of his way to alienate his audience, but he certainly doesn’t pander to them. “I love the idea of confronting expectations,” he says. “People think I deliberately go out of my way to upset prog fans! There’s a small group of hardcore fans I probably would be very happy to upset: ‘If it doesn’t sound like it was recorded in a basement in 1972 with Mellotrons, it’s not proper music and people need to be educated to enjoy it.’

“Those people, I would be very happy to upset any day of the week, and I’ll go out of my way to upset them. But generally, people who like more progressive, more conceptual rock music, they’re much more open-minded than perhaps even they give themselves credit for.”

Still, it seemed like he did lose some of your audience with To The Bone and especially The Future Bites. Is that how it felt? “For sure.” DId that bother him? “Of course,” he admits. “It’s not my goal to lose people. But there is another side to that coin. The Future Bites got me so much more attention in parts of the media that had never paid me any attention before. While it wasn’t resonating so greatly with my fanbase, it was getting phenomenal reviews with the more indie, hipster people that hadn’t really paid attention to me before.

“Certainly this time around there are people paying attention to this record that would never have paid attention to The Raven 10 or 11 years ago, and that’s because I’ve made songs like King Ghost and Personal Shopper. Not that it was intentional – I want to make that clear. There was no masterplan: ‘I’m going to make this record and get more press on my side.’ The thing is, I don’t mind if people don’t like what I do. It’s when they dismiss it as trash...” That doesn’t really happen very often, though, does it? “I don’t know,” he says, shrugging. “I don’t read stuff online.”

A cynical view of The Overview – one that glosses over its brilliance – is that it’s a deliberate move to claw back some of those more dug-in prog fans lost through The Future Bites. “No, absolutely not,” he says emphatically. “Because if I were to do that, I would have done it with The Harmony Codex. It’s hard to answer that question, because on the one hand I’m aware that it’s going to happen; on the other hand it really wasn’t a motivating factor.

“I’m sure some people might draw that conclusion, but anybody who knows me well enough knows that wasn’t the case. Also, with my next record – whatever it is – I’ll be looking to do something completely different. Which will probably alienate people who like this record!”

Even before The Harmony Codex, Wilson reasserted his prog bona fides with the surprise return of Porcupine Tree after an 11-year hiatus with 2022’s Closure/Continuation album and a hugely successful tour. Where The Harmony Codex was written “before, during and after” the reunion, the new one is the first Wilson album to be written since then. Did the Porcupine Tree comeback feed into The Overview in any way? “It must have done, but I can’t tell you how, not in a conscious way,” he says. “Did I feel more liberated? No, because that’s never been an issue for me anyway.”

The subsequent Porcupine Tree tour was a huge deal. Venue for venue, they played to more people than Wilson does as a solo artist. “For sure,” he says. Is that annoying? “Not at all. The reality is that Porcupine Tree came back and played to more people than Porcupine Tree did. When we stopped in 2011, the pinnacle was one night at the Royal Albert Hall.

“I played three nights at the Royal Albert Hall as a solo artist. When Porcupine Tree came back, it leapfrogged all that and we sold out Wembley Arena. I’m going to take a little bit of credit for that myself, having carried on as a solo artist. And Gavin Harrison being in King Crimson helped too.”

Does that mean people want a shot of nostalgia from old music more than they want to hear new music? “I’m not sure about that, because we made a point of playing the whole of the new record,” he says. “Everyone who comes to a show wants to hear their favourite songs; of course they do. That’s true of my solo shows – people want to hear The Raven That Refused To Sing and Harmony Korine.

“Maybe I’m flattering myself in saying this, but Porcupine Tree were a little bit ahead of our time in the way we infused big metal riffs with classic songwriting and electronic sound design. It was very unusual when we were doing it back in 2002, 2003. Since then it’s started to grow. A lot of bands sound like they have been quite influenced by us. In fact, I know there are a lot of bands who have been influenced by us.”

The surprise return after a decade of radio silence defines Wilson’s modus operandi. It’s not that he’s unpredictable – that suggests chaos and randomness, which don’t seem to be his style. It’s more that he thrives on confounding predictability, partly from fans but mostly from himself. Pretty much the only thing that links his solo albums is the impulse never to repeat himself. It‘s why he’s come back to prog – or at least a version of it – on The Overview.

“I always like to do the unexpected,” he says. “‘I always like to do something different to what I did before. I do really push my audience around, and for whatever reason – with the exception of the prog hardcore that have drifted away – they’ve stuck with me. Even if people don’t like everything I do, they’re still curious. Even if it’s to moan that you’re not doing what they wanted.”

There’s another thing that defines Steven Wilson, which is the fact that, in mainstream terms, he’s been on the outside looking in for the whole of his career. He’s had huge success within whatever fields he’s chosen to operate in, but he’s never crossed over to reach an entirely new audience. He’s one of the most successful cult artists on the planet, and there’s sometimes a sense that this frustrates him.

“Would I love to be embraced by the mainstream? I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t. Would I love to have a Grammy, finally? Yes. Would I like to have the same level of respect afforded to Radiohead or feel like Thom Yorke digs what I do? Of course I would. Why am I never considered in the same breath as Thom Yorke? ’Cos I’m not as talented, I know that. Or it could just be down to the music I make. But yes, there’s a part of me that does crave that – the part of me that looks at Pink Floyd or Radiohead and says, ‘They never compromised and they’re household names.’”

On the other hand, you’ve done pretty well without mainstream approval. “Yeah, I’ve done alright. But wherever you are, you’re always looking in the distance at something you can never get to. You’re always looking at the horizon, and when you get there you’re still looking at the horizon. You can never reach it.”

On the near horizon for Wilson is a run of UK and European dates in May and June, including four nights at the London Palladium. Remarkably, it’s his first solo tour in seven years. He’ll be playing The Overview in full, together with a set of solo songs he says “will be informed by the style of the new record.”

So, a prog set, then? “I didn’t say that,” he replies good-humouredly. “But I think Prog readers will be happy with the set. I’m going to be doing more long-form tracks. That’s not a cynical thing – it feels like the right thing to do.”

And further out in the Wilson universe? It’s too early to think about a new solo album, but there will be one at some point. He’s not opposed to the idea of another Porcupine Tree album, either. “We haven’t got any plans, but I think we’ll make another record,” he says. “We really enjoyed making the last one, partly because nobody knew we were doing it. Everybody thought the band had gone away forever. We had so much fun, just the three of us without any agenda.

“One of the things we said at the end of the Closure/Continuation cycle was that if we were going to make another record, it would have to be something different that we feel is exciting. So yeah, I’d be surprised if we didn’t make another record.”

Given The Overview was seeded by a conversation about space, so Wilson is keen to dive deeper into that world. He invited astronomer Dr Stuart Clark – a member of prog rockers Storm Deva – to a recent Atmos playback of the album, and would like to involve astronauts with their experience of having gone into space. “Imagine someone who has actually experienced the overview effect talking about it,” he says. He has plans to visit an observatory in Chile to look first-hand into the cosmos.

Any musician could conceivably do this. What sets Steven Wilson aside is that he’s actually thinking about doing it. In a world where success is measured in streams and views and the luck of the algorithm, there’s something to be said for turning left when everyone else turns right. The sky isn’t the limit. That’s the whole point.

“Just be emboldened to do what the fuck you want,” he says. “These days, you can never second-guess what people want or what’s going to do well and what isn’t. So just do what the fuck you want. Being able to do that, that’s got to be the measure of success, right?”

Celebrated US alternative singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe recently released her ninth studio album The Dark to much critical acclaim, and to celebrate, Metal Hammer has teamed up with Chelsea for an exclusive new bundle that you won't find anywhere else.

The bundle includes a special variant edition of the upcoming November issue of Metal Hammer - in stores October 15 - with an exclusive Chelsea Wolfe cover, alongside a 'Hermit' tarot card keyring also bearing Chelsea's initials.

The bundle will only be available through the official Metal Hammer store, so get yours now while you can.

Order the new Chelsea Wolfe x Metal Hammer bundle here.

Reviewing The Dark for Metal Hammer, writer Alex Deller noted: "For her ninth album, the Californian singer-songwriter reinvents herself once again, citing a need to be a truer, newer version of herself rather than cede to the expectations of others," suggesting that Chelsea's trademark "glower and menace has been scrubbed down to a more accessible sheen."

Acknowledging the more straightforward nature of her writing for recent single Cold, Chelsea told Metal Hammer: “It felt scary because it was so direct. I wasn’t hiding behind layers of noise or metaphorical haze. I was just singing a song, and that felt like a real risk for me.”

Metal Hammer, the world's biggest metal media brand, is turning 40 and will be marking the occasion by kicking off a full year of celebrations. Starting with an exclusive industry party set to take place in London this week, Hammer will be unveiling a series of special events, collaborations, tie-ins, new brand extensions and more, with 40 separate activations in total set to launch across the coming twelve months.

"Reaching our 40th anniversary is incredible!" says Metal Hammer Editor, Eleanor Goodman. "Be it honouring legends like Black Sabbath, Metallica and Iron Maiden or platforming exciting younger artists in the scene today like Spiritbox, Orbit Culture and Castle Rat, from the UK and US to Australia, mainland Europe, Africa and Asia, we've been proud to fly the flag for metal in all its forms across the last four decades.

"We've got so much fun stuff planned for the coming weeks and months to mark this amazing milestone, and we can't wait to celebrate it all with the people that matter most - our incredible readers and community who have kept Metal Hammer going through the years. Thank you for your support - we're only just getting started."

The UK edition of Metal Hammer magazine was founded in 1986, growing to become the world's foremost authority on metal. Over its four-decade lifespan, it's helped break dozens of household name bands, including Korn, Slipknot, Avenged Sevenfold, Trivium, Lamb Of God, Nightwish, Babymetal, Ghost and Sleep Token.

In 2003, Hammer launched its own awards show, the Golden Gods, which ran for 15 years and saw attendance from the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, Slipknot, Iron Maiden, Bring Me The Horizon, Kiss, Motörhead, Def Leppard, Motley Crue and more, with film, TV and pop culture stars including Sir Christopher Lee, Bill Bailey, Triple H, Brian Blessed and Jessica Pimentel also celebrated with special awards over the years.

During the 2000s and 2010s, the brand launched a series of acclaimed tours including the Defenders Of The Faith tour, which ran for four editions and featured the likes of Lamb Of God, Five Finger Death Punch, Trivium and Ghost on its lineups, plus an extreme metal off-shoot, Destroyers Of The Faith, and the Metal Hammer Razor tour, which spotlighted upcoming bands in the British metal scene.

Metal Hammer was also one of the first major music brands to launch its own podcast in 2009, as well as hosting the Metal Hammer Radio Show from 2013-2018 and a historic Spotify collaboration, In Residence, in 2016.

In recent years Metal Hammer has launched its own store featuring exclusive designs and collaborations with major metal artists, as well as becoming a key commercial partner of Danny Wimmer Presents, the North American festival company behind the likes of Louder Than Life, Aftershock and Sonic Temple.

Metal Hammer's 40th anniversary celebrations will see the brand return to more fan-focused events and tie-ins, with plenty more announcements due in the coming weeks. Watch this space. 🤘

The surviving members of Nirvana - Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear - reunited on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards last night, accepting a special award on stage and using the opportunity to celebrate their much-missed bandmate and Nirvana frontman, Kurt Cobain.

Accepting the MTV Vanguard Award - previously awarded to the likes of Mariah Carey, U2, George Michael and Michael Jackson - Nirvana's appearance was preceded by a highlight reel of some of their most iconic music videos, with bassist Novoselic acknowledging Cobain's role in conceiving those clips.

"Thank you very much to Nirvana's fans around the world and to everyone at MTV," said Novoselic. "This award brings back so many memories of making those videos. We saw the dystopian pep rally with anarchist cheerleaders; our version of an Ed Sullivan TV appearance; performing in a Wizard Of Oz-like field of poppies and so many more.

"The ideas for those videos all grew out of the vision of one of the greatest artists of all time, Kurt Cobain. Kurt was one of one. None of us could have imagined that our band, our sound, our aesthetic could mean so much to so many people, but ultimately the music had a life of its own. It charted its own course. Nirvana continues to resonate so deeply because people are so hungry for authenticity, for something real, something uncompromising. It's something that tells you it's just okay to come as you are. Kurt would've loved that legacy. Thank you so much."

Watch Nirvana's acceptance speech below. Other winners at this year's MTV VMAs included Madonna, Taylor Swift, BTS, Olivia Rodrigo and Ella Langley.

Yes are to release Keys To Ascension: The Studio Recordings through Spirit Of Unicorn Music/Cherry Red on January 29. The double vinyl release features the complete studio recordings from both Keys To Ascension albums, on vinyl for the very first time.

Keys To Ascension marked the first proper reunion of the Tales From Topographic Oceans/Going For The One/Tormato line-up of the band of Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, Rick Wakeman and Alan White since the early 1980s (although all five had featured on the multi-line-up Union album of 1991 and subsequent tour).

The band regrouped following the splintering of Yes after 1994's Talk, when a new manager struck a deal with the Essential label (a subsidiary of Castle Communications) for a live album as long as the 70s line-up reunited. The new line-up had recorded two lengthy new songs, Be The One and That, That Is, but the record company's attention was on a new live album.

Three live shows were recorded at the Fremont Theater in San Luis Obispo, California and the two studio tracks were added to the end of the 1996 live album Keys To Ascension. More new studio material was recorded, but no new studio album was forthcoming. Instead, a second live volume, Keys To Ascension 2, was released in 1997 with more studio material.

Angered by the lack of interest in the new material from the label, Wakeman again left the band, who then recruited current bassist Billy Sherwood and recorded the Open Your Eyes album, which was released on the Eagle label. Wakeman would never again record with Yes, although he did return from 2002 to 2004 for live work, but no new studio recordings occurred. In 2001, a single CD, Keystudio, was released, featuring the studio material.

The new 2LP set will be available as a gatefold double vinyl edition, a limited blue double vinyl edition, and a studio CD edition, featuring brand new material from Roger Dean and new liner notes from Prog magazine’s Jerry Ewing.

The live material is expected to be released at a later date.

Pre-order Keys To Ascension: The Studio Recordings.

Yes: Keys To Ascension: The Studio Recordings
1. Foot Prints
2. Be The One (The One / Humankind / Skates)
3. Mind Drive
4. Bring Me To The Power
5. Sign Language
6. That, That Is (Togetherness / Crossfire / The Giving Things / That Is / All In All /How Did Heaven Begin / Agree To Agree)
7. Children Of The Light (Children Of Light / Lifeline)

Formed in 1971, Vinegar Joe were one of the lesser lights of the British pub-rock explosion, and will be remembered by most as the band that introduced Elkie Brooks and a pre-solo-stardom Robert Palmer to the world.

Six Star General, their third and final studio album, released in 1973, is a prime example of their classic soul-infused rock. Brooks brings a whiskey-soaked, belt-it-to-the-back-row soulfulness that rivals Janis Joplin at her peak, while Palmer counters with his signature R&B croon.

Tracks like Proud To Be A Honky Tonk Woman and Lady of the Rain are a testament to a band that should have been bigger, although their recorded output struggled to capture the supercharged energy of their live shows.

“It wasn’t good enough on record, was it?” Brooks told Classic Rock in 2015. “We did very well on tour, but we just weren’t pushed enough in the studio.”

• 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 October 1973

• For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night - Caravan
• Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - Elton John
• These Foolish Things - Bryan Ferry
• Cyan - Three Dog Night
• Suzi Quatro - Suzi Quatro
• Selling England by the Pound - Genesis
• Moondog Matinee - The Band
• Mystery to Me - Fleetwood Mac
• Time Fades Away - Neil Young
• Wake of the Flood - Grateful Dead
• Live in Europe - Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Montrose - Montrose
• Hat Trick - America
• Pin Ups - David Bowie
• Quadrophenia - The Who
• Frampton's Camel - Peter Frampton
• All American Boy - Rick Derringer
• Ashes Are Burnin - Renaissance
• At the Rainbow - Focus
• Full Sail - Loggins and Messina
• Gone Crazy - Grin
• Inside Out - John Martyn
• The Joker - Steve Miller Band
• Laid Back - Gregg Allman
• Marjory Razorblade - Kevin Coyne
• Nine - Fairport Convention
• On the Road - Traffic
• Please Don't Ever Change - Brinsley Schwarz
• Sweet Revenge - John Prine
• Takin' My Time - Bonnie Raitt

What they said...

"Vinegar Joe were initially marketed in the UK as a homegrown amalgam of The Allman Brothers Band and Wet Willie. However accurate Island’s marketing ploy might have been is a matter of opinion; what Vinegar Joe’s third, final and biggest-selling album makes clear is their empathy with, and mastery of, their craft." (Record Collector)

"Elkie Brooks tries hard to be like a kind of white version of Tina Turner, and doesn't do badly, and the playing is first-rate; the band's rhythm section was always solid no matter who was in it, and Pete Gage's guitar work was lithe and aggressive. The songs are all good, ranging from searing R&B to straight-ahead rock & roll, and the recordings provide a glimpse of the kind of surging, energetic performances that made their shows a major attraction – it's a pity there aren't any live tapes." (AllMusic)

"A pretty well-balanced album. A good mix of raunchy blues rock with a couple of slower songs and a fair bit of funk/soul influences thrown in, often in the same style as Kokomo and Cado Belle. This sounds better today than it did years ago. Elkie Brooks is a superb vocalist, and Robert Palmer ain't half bad either." (RateYourMusic)

What you said...

Greg Schwepe: The only good thing about Mondays is waking up and seeing what album was selected for this week’s review. And more often than not, it’s “Wow, never heard of the band or the album!” And then the adventure begins. This week’s pick of Six Star General from Vinegar Joe was a nice little surprise. And who knew that the one person in the band I knew of would star in a music video over a decade later that featured a highly attractive female “backing band” and was all over that network.

But before we get to hear Robert Palmer, we are treated to the bluesy wail of Elkie Brooks right off the bat with the opening song Proud To Be (A Honky Woman). And unfortunately for Elkie (or any other early 70s female singer with a voice like that), the inevitable Janis comparisons come about. But the more you listen, you can hear that Ellie has her own style and is no Janis clone. Big vocals will continue throughout Six Star General.

Food For Thought has some nice funky keyboards. Dream My Own Dreams gives us a little chicken pickin’ boogie. Lady Of The Rain brings us a little reined-in vocals, which shows Elkie Brooks is not just belting it out and howling. Stay True to Yourself has more funky keyboards and might be my favourite track on the album. We get Robert Palmer joining in on this one.

Talkin’ ‘Bout My Baby features Robert Palmer and a vocoder. You can’t get more early 70s than that. Let Me Down Easy features a rollicking guitar riff and more big vocals.

7 out of 10 on this one for me. If you’re looking for something more recent and comparable, check out one of the two releases from The Rossington Collins Band featuring the vocals of Dale Krantz Rossington.

Mike Canoe: Ask and you shall receive. While, of course, I know Robert Palmer (but mainly from his 80s "plastic soul" heyday), I had never heard of Elkie Brooks or Vinegar Joe. Six Star General may be a little too jam band boogie woogie for my tastes, but I'm still glad I heard it. Dream My Own Dreams hit particularly hard while going nowhere fast on my Monday morning commute, and Black Smoke Rising from the Calumet is a nice melancholy big number. Bigger things were in store for the two singers, but Six Star General demonstrates they were already capable of delivering the goods.

Nigel Mawdsley: There's some excellent musicianship on this powerful album and maybe if they'd written/ released a single in the Status Quo vein chart success could have beckoned.

I did compare some of Babe Ruth's tracks (last week's review album) to Vinegar Joe in places, but I found the former's album a lot more varied. Like most reviews on this FB page 7 out 10 for a very good blues rock LP.

Glenn McDonald: Good band they were. Kinda like a better-mannered British version of Big Brother & The Holding Company. But they came across better live than on their records. Still, they gave us two of the UK's greatest singers. Both Elkie and Robert made great albums in the 70s before tasting mainstream success.

Which is why Elkie's second album Two Days Away, or Robert's Sneaking Sally Through The Alley would be worthwhile future choices for the group to consider. Both far surpass what they did with Vinegar Joe.

Philip Qvist: I always saw Elkie Brooks as one of those middle-of-the-road singers, with her biggest hit being penned by Chris Rea, while my first introduction to Robert Palmer was his rather good 1980 Clues album, and of course those famous mid-1980s videos. So it is a bit strange to hear both of them singing blues numbers for Vinegar Joe, a band that I had heard about but never really explored.

And all in all, both singers pull it off. I notice that guitarist Pete Gage was the main songwriter, although both singers, along with bassist Steve York (who I am sure ended up on Marianne Faithfull's excellent Broken English record) and drummer Pete Gavin, also picked up some writing credits.

Six Star General doesn't set new boundaries, but it's a decent record and well worth a spin or two. Another 7 from me this week, thanks for the suggestion.

John Davidson: Like most people, I know of Elkie Brooks from her mainstream solo success at the end of the 70s (Pearl's A Singer) and Robert Palmer mostly for his smooth, soulful 1980s pop (Some Guys Have All The Luck, Addicted To Love).

I'd heard of Vinegar Joe, more as a pub quiz answer than as a band, and consequently never really given them much thought until I listened to the album today. Six Star General is a competent, professional slab of vocal-heavy, stonesy blues rock.

Where last week's Babe Ruth leaned towards progressive/psychedlic influences, Vinegar Joe favour southern rock and country twangs. There is a good variety of tempo and tone through the album, but they never lose their core sound.

Giving Yourself is a jaunty romp, while Black Smoke is a mournful lament to peace. Talking Bout My Baby has a sleazy groove that is closest to the Stones.

There is nothing on the album that makes me want to add them to my list of favourite bands I'd never heard of before, but it's good music, and almost any of the songs would fit well on a blues rock playlist. A good listen this week and a solid 7/10.

Chris Elliott: It's a mildly interesting blues rock album. Not quite sure what it wants to be and never manages to master anything.

For some bizarre reason, in the midst of my hippy phase I totally fell in love with Pearls' A Singer - and then the two Pearl albums. Vinegar Joe seemed a safe bet, but I'd rather hear Ellie doing MOR well.

Gary Claydon: By coincidence, there was an excellent interview in The Guardian a week or so ago with Elkie Brooks - now 81 years old and still performing. Well worth a read.

Final score: 6.95 (22 votes cast, total score 153)

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

It's been another triumphant week for Kiwi rockers Pieces Of Molly, with new single Skinwalker the fourth song by the band to top the Tracks Of The Week podium, ahead of hot things Greta Van Fleet and Dirty Honey. This quadruple victory is a feat matched by very few, and bodes well for Pieces Of Molly's debut UK shows in November.

This week, another eight contestants are on the starting grid, and look! The lights have changed! Off they go!

Clutch - Wasted Lands

Listen up, rock fans: the title track of Clutch’s next album is here, and it does not disappoint. H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King are name-dropped within seconds. Fallon and co’s inimitable blend of bluesy hoodoo, punk-addled fire and piledriver riffing sounds match-fit and ready for a fight. It’s like hearing ZZ Top with lead boots. Or the dirtier, gnarlier cousin of their 2015 groovefest Psychic Warfare. The sort of shit you definitely want in your life, in other words.

Thundermother - Bimbo Boost

With that hard-kicking, Smoke On The Water-in-reverse riff and shoutalong AC/DC vibes, the Swedish foursome made us smile with this one. Yes it’s about as subtle as a bowling ball to the head (not to say that the point about women in the public eye being held to disproportionately more exacting beauty standards than men isn’t spot-on – it is), but pulled off with the right combo of humour, melody and quality chops. Familiar and faintly ridiculous, in a good way.

HOL1D4Y - Holotropic

“Some albums I’ve made have been pretty arduous, filled with debate and ideas from many different directions,” Holiday says, as he releases his psychedelic new album Topology. “We’ve made a joke that it is difficult, like birthing a child. Topology was more flowing and came quick and without strain…like releasing a valve.” You can definitely hear that here. Holotropic is the hypnotic, blissed-out opening track with a touch of QOTSA in its veins, evocative of childhood nights spent stargazing to Pink Floyd’s Echoes in his Californian desert home.

Europe - Come This Madness

The title track of the returning Swedes’ new album is a banger, reflective of the big, moody but groovy good stuff to be found therein. Capped off with a casually ace solo from John Norum – and with Joey Tempest seemingly yet to feel the wear of age on his voice – it’s the sort of textured, dynamic banger you’d be genuinely stoked to hear in a setlist. Classy work from one of classic rock’s most consistent groups.

The Temperance Movement - Silverlight Blues

Further teasing their much-anticipated comeback album, New Promise Land Incorporated (out in full next month), The Temperance Movement are on prettily bittersweet form with Silverlight Blues. Like the rest of the album it’s a raw, hot-off-the-floor affair with the ease and warmth you’d hope for from such a tight group of seasoned pros – while also channelling the life experiences of the last few years. It’s good to have them back.

Crown Lands - Through The Looking Glass

Tales of ancient darkness, riding on dragon’s wings and a pedalboard the size of a swimming pool all feed into this sumptuous live single from the Canadian prog duo. Weaving textures of Rush and Zeppelin with their own old-world atmosphere and fantastical storytelling, Cody Bowles (percussion and vocals) and Kevin Comeau (guitars with *all* the necks) create something that feels luxurious yet light, its heaviness and technical flexes offset by a melody that slips down very easily.

The Sedonas - Reckonin’ More

Stomping into Tracks Of The Week in a rich, gritty flurry of blues rock guitars and strident lead vocals (“Is he an American Toby Jepson?” one Classic Rock staffer wondered) The Sedonas mix swaggering US roots and rock’n’roll into one juicy, classic but bright-eyed package. You could say it’s what’d happen if Joe Bonamassa wore denim shirts and made a heartland record, but really Reckonin’ More is its own thing. No rulebooks are rewritten and yet it has a certain edge that makes us sit up and pay attention.

Crossbone Skully - Riding With Angels

Tommy Henriksen and the gang are back with another track from their upcoming, Mutt Lange-assisted second album Condemned To Rock 'N Roll, and it's undeniably huge, with drums that boom like Def Leppard at their peak and a chorus so big it can probably be seen from space. Riding With Angels is so confident it begins with that chorus, with Henriksen's Joe Elliott-meets-Marc Storace voice handling the vocal with the right amount of razor-throated ease. The album arrives in January.

Bad Brains will release their first-ever recordings this November through Trust Records.

The studio sessions were captured in 1979 at Inner Ear, a recording facility synonymous with the Washington, DC hardcore scene, and were only available on the tape-trading circuit. Now, following a remix by their longtime friend, Ian MacKaye, they're about to get an official release on all formats.

“In 1979-80, not only did we have this great local band, we actually had the greatest band in the world playing in Washington,” MacKaye told WTOP News in 2016, following the news that Bad Brains had been nominated for a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "I don’t know who the nominators are, and frankly don’t care, but the person who put Bad Brains' name in the hat is either a visionary, or they’re savvy and trying to bring some legitimacy to their brand.

"The Bad Brains obviously connected with a lot of people in the 1980s,” he added. “Maybe some of those kids swam upstream to where they now want to bring Bad Brains along. If this is something they want, I’m happy for them. I know the impact they had on my life, and that of other people."

While the Washington quartet did not make the Hall of Fame cut the following year, their impact on punk is immeasurable. The intensity of their early live performances can be felt in this archival six-song collection, which includes an early version of their 1980 debut single, Pay to Cum.

This, then, is the story behind the song.

If punk lit a fire under metal, Bad Brains strapped a rocket to it and shot it into the sun. Four Black youths from the South West side of Washington D.C., they started out as a jazz-fusion outfit named Mind Power before they discovered punk rock.

“I was a fan of [jazz fusion bass pioneer] Stanley Clarke and now I was getting into punk,” bassist Darryl Jenifer recalls of the band’s turning point. “Most kids were just into punk, but here I was loving fusion. So I was like, ‘Punk rock? Shiiit, I’ll kill this.’ I can remember turning to Sid [McCray, original Bad Brains vocalist] and saying, ‘If the Ramones think they can play fast, watch this!’”

Clocking in at less than two minutes, their 1980 debut single, Pay To Cum, was a blast of hyperactive lightning, pushing the genre to almost absurd speeds. In Bad Brains’ own way, it was just paying forward the impact punk had on them. Darryl remembers that the band’s early songwriting was “stream of consciousness,” ideas put together in a jam with “tricky bits” that helped differentiate the likes of Don’t Need It, Supertouch/Shitfit and Pay To Cum.

“The Bad Brains sound was a combination of plain old D.C. soul, [jazz fusion group] Return To Forever technical shit, and The Damned mixed with the Ramones with a little nudge from The Dickies on the speed,” he explains.

The song’s immense speed didn’t happen overnight, though.

“I created Pay To Cum as a takeoff of the Ramones’ approach – it was actually a lot slower at first,” he says. “It got faster as we went on. There’s a cowbell in that original version, and you realise as it gets faster there’s no way you can turbo-bang a cowbell – it’ll only go so fast!”

With less cowbell and more speed, Pay To Cum helped plant the roots of hardcore punk, and with it thrash metal. Bad Brains bridged those worlds, inspiring everyone from Minor Threat to Metallica, Killswitch Engage and Dave Grohl among countless others, occasionally popping up on bills with the likes of Slayer to remind everyone who did it first.

“All the metal dudes could play and had pretty girlfriends,” Darryl concedes. “But they started coming to our shows and saw how energised little bald punk kids were, and realised they had to get up and get on it!”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 388 (July 2024)

The party line to toe is that the 1990s was a tough time for metal. But... really? Was it, though? The rise of Fear Factory, Machine Head, Korn, grunge, black metal, death metal’s dalliance with the mainstream, the Peaceville three, Swedish melodeath... that all sounds pretty good to us, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Basically, when people are talking about the death of metal in the 1990s, they tend to mean the confusing, ill-advised and often just frankly appalling cack put out by many of the genre's biggest established names during that period. There’s no doubt that the decade was not so kind to the thrash and hard rock bands of the 80s.

There are a few of the 90s big boys here as well, and there are some omissions from the decade that might seem obvious to some readers. Like Machine Head’s divisive The Burning Red, that isn’t included here due to 2001’s atrocious Supercharger being even worse. Ditto the criminally underrated Load series by Metallica, which are very good records and a quantum leap away from St. Anger. Carcass’ Swansong is actually great (yes it is), so that’s never getting in. Same for Judas Priest’s Jugulator and Ministry’s Filth Pig, which are both far better records than you remember. And Motley Crue’s risible Generation Swine, is left out because... well... are Motley Crue a “brilliant” band? No, obviously not.

They all just made it out unscathed, but here are 10 albums we just cannot defend.

Exodus – Force of Habit (1992)

So, in the 90s Metallica sold out and made a hard rock album, and all the other thrash bands stayed true, right? Sorry, but we’re calling bullshit. There are a few examples of this idea being nonsense on our list, but none stinkier than Exodus’ fifth album from 1992. Most of Force Of Habit is pretty unmemorable groove metal that attempts to mix itself with the darkness of Alice In Chains, which is not what we want from Exodus. But really this album is on this list thanks to one song: the truly woeful Rolling Stone cover Bitch. A song where the Bay Area’s most notorious metal band enlist a brass section (lads, what were you thinking?) then proceed to try and impersonate the good-time funk metal of Extreme. It’s a ludicrous idea that’s appallingly executed, it pretty much represents the absolute nadir of thrash metal, and might be the single worst song on this entire list. And you got annoyed about Nothing Else Matters? Give your head a wobble.

Danzig – Blackacidevil (1996)

Glenn Danzig: the evil Elvis and a man who released some sublime and essential goth-laden alternative metal in the early part of the 90s. But by 1996, Danzig was looking a little old hat. He decided to combat this by looking at the success of White Zombie, Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, and jump onto the industrial metal bandwagon. A bandwagon with a set of wheels that were rapidly in the process of failing during the second half of the 90s. If industrial metal needed saving, Blackacidevil was certainly not the album to do it. Sounding dated pretty much before it was even made, the sound of Glenn binning off his smoky croon to belch all over the Republica B-side electronics of a song like Sacrifice was eye watering enough to smear his entire fanbases’ mascara. Glenn soon realised and retreated back to his Roy Orbison records, with his leather trousers between his legs.

Body Count – Violent Demise: Last Days (1997)

It was a different time, guys! Ice-T and Body Count have always gone out of their way to be as provocative as possible, and are still doing it to this day. And that's fine. But there are certainly some moments in their career that aren’t as challenging and necessary as Cop Killer, and are, in fact, just grotty and ill advised – and most of them happen to be on Violent Demise. Like the lyrics of Strippers, for example. But it’s the jaw-droppingly offensive I Used To Love Her, where Ice puts himself in the shoes of OJ Simpson as he murders his ex-wife – a crime he was famously acquitted of – that really does it. It’s a hot potato he’s handling, and it certainly burnt our hands. Ultimately this was just a very bad idea – quite how it got made without some record executive rightly putting a stop to it is frankly baffling.

Iron Maiden – Virtual-XI (1998)

The mid 90s were the lowest point of Iron Maiden's career. After managing to keep their heads above water with Fear Of The Dark on the strength of the title track alone, the band lost their iconic frontman Bruce Dickinson and replaced him with Wolfsbane vocalist Blaze Bayley. 1995's The X Factor wasn't great, but many were willing to give Maiden the benefit of the doubt. That last little bit of belief in Maiden as a force was totally extinguished by Virtual XI three years later. The album was inspired by both their upcoming video game and the 1998 World Cup (?), which is obviously not what you want from a legendary heavy metal band.

Listening back to it today, Maiden have never sounded so tired or so old hat as they do here, even on records that were released nearly two decades after this. The plodding, folk-tinged prog of The Angel And The Gambler feels longer than a prison sentence, When Two Worlds Collide would be rejected by Spinal Tap for being too ridiculous, and The Educated Fool sounds like a load of pissed up football hooligans doing an impression of a metal band. Bless Blaze, he did his best, but this album has been rightly forgotten.

Van Halen – III (1998)

Van Halen were just a soap opera in the 90s: falling out with Sammy Hagar and trying to reunite with David Lee Roth, before settling on former Extreme frontman Gary Cherone for 1998’s ill-fated III. Amazingly, Eddie Van Halen spoke gushingly about the working relationship the band had with Cherone for his sole album with the band, both prior to release and in the years that followed. But, with all due respect to Eddie, this is comfortably the weakest album of the band's career.

The tight, taut, brevity of their debut and 1984 had been replaced with pointlessly long, overwrought and dull songs, with none of the outrageous OTT personality that made them so exciting. Cherone was essentially a “yes man”, allowing Van Halen to indulge every idea that Eddie had, with the nadir coming on the six-minute plus album closer How Many Say I, where the guitarist inexplicably takes lead vocals with disastrous results. They might have thought it was the greatest musical relationship they had ever had as a band, but everyone else thought it sounded like the greatest guitarist of all time deeply inhaling a jar of his own farts.

Slayer – Diabolus in Musica (1998)

Exhibit-B in our counter argument on the classic, “Metallica sold out and all the other thrash bands didn’t.” Oh yeah? Got any explanation for why Slayer sound like a nu-metal band on this album? In the years since Diabolus In Musica, guitarist Kerry King has been at pains to remove himself from the creation of the album.

This is clearly the most simplistic Slayer record in their catalogue. That’s fine when they get it right, like on the excellent Stain Of Mind, where Slayer actually sound like a pretty good version of Static-X. Although, shouldn't the bar be a little higher for the greatest thrash metal band of all time? We think so, but that’s not the real problem here. Ultimately songs like Overt Enemy and In The Name Of God sound like a sort of lobotomised, dopey, plodding version of the band that wrote some of the most thrilling metal ever. It might not be a truly terrible record like some on this list, but it’s arguably worse: a Slayer album that just rolls along, all of it forgettable and aimless, before politely ending. Our Slayer would never...

Sepultura – Against (1998)

To be fair, Sepultura were on a bit of a hiding to nothing in the late 90s. With the acrimonious departure of frontman Max Cavalera after their superb Roots album in 1996, and with Max hitting the ground running with his Soulfly project and getting their well-received self-titled debut out before the Seps had even announced his replacement, many people had already written the band off.

Against was the first album to feature new frontman Derrick Green, and although he is a much-loved part of the band now, back then he was still finding his feet. Against sort of bears the hallmarks of a Sepultura album, but without ever really sounding as confident, controlled or, crucially, catchy as they had on the four world-beating albums that had come before. Instead, songs like Old Earth and Common Bonds just resemble shells of Sepultura ideas, all tribal rhythms and big riffs, but lacking hooks or personality. The balance would eventually be struck, but, first go or not, this is a messy effort.

Paradise Lost – Host (1999)

Is Host actually a bad album, or is it just a result of metal fans' snobbiness at a formerly brutal band bringing in a whole new set of influences? To be honest, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Yes, the reaction of the metal community to the doom metal maestros going all electro-pop was certainly over-the-top, but Paradise Lost didn’t really help themselves with the record.

The band had never really had a problem penning memorable hooks and songs previously, even when they were going for full-blown heaviness, so quite why the choruses seemed to desert them here is anyone's guess. Paradise Lost going full Depeche Mode is not a terrible idea, but the latter are stadium-bothering megastars because they write huge pop songs, and, with the exception of the lovely Harbour, this album is a bit of a barren wasteland for moments that sucker onto your brain as this style should. Plus, the production of the songs themselves sound malnourished and sparse where they should sound bombastic and huge. It took a 2018 remaster to really fill the album out. But by that point, the damage was done.

Megadeth – Risk (1999)

Exhibit-C and the absolute knockout blow to the idea that thrash bands “kept it real” during the 90s. Listening back to Risk today, it’s amazing that Dave Mustaine actually could believe that this turgid slice of radio rock would be a musical risk in any way. Although, writing a song like the opening track Insomnia, which sounds like Def Leppard getting off with the Happy Mondays, and letting anyone hear it, does feel like a risky thing to do if you want people to think you are actually good at making music.

The album's best-known song Crush ‘Em was written by Mustaine in the hope that it would end up being a huge sporting anthem to be played in stadiums around the US, but it doesn’t sound big enough to be suitable for Scunthorpe vs Barrow in the Papa John’s Trophy group stage, let alone the World Series. The difference between The Black Album and Risk is, on the surface and stylistically, very little. But the main thing that sets them apart is that while Metallica wrote Enter Sandman and Sad But True, Megadeth wrote faux cowboy, Bon Jovi shite like Wanderlust, and tried to marry Rush and the Goo Goo Dolls on Breadline. They couldn't even sell out properly.

Coal Chamber – Chamber Music (1999)

Admittedly it's something of a stretch to call Coal Chamber a “brilliant band”, but when you consider just how big a deal they were in the nascent nu-metal movement, it feels fair to include Chamber Music. Because Coal Chamber’s second album was a disaster. Opening song Tragedy features the kind of vocoder that you have to assume they thought would help them sound futuristic, but actually just sound like a pissed up Daft Punk hiccupping into a kebab. Burgundy sounds like Sloth from The Goonies trying to cover Faith No More, and the truly bewildering cover of Peter Gabriel’s Shock The Monkey, which ropes in Ozzy Osbourne (who sounds like he’s just been dragged out of bed at half five in the morning and kicked into a vocal booth) set a new low benchmark for nu-metal bands covering 80s pop songs. It’s an album that turned Coal Chamber from one of metal’s hottest bands to a joke in just under an hour.

Pure Reason Revolution linchpin Jon Courtney revealed the title for Terrifying Angels – the band’s seventh studio album – came to him after he and his family attended an Easter church service in his adopted home city of Berlin last year.

“The sermon pointed out that angels tended to be terrifying most of the time,” he says. “They’re there to give some kind of judgement or message that scared the hell out of people.

“Traditionally, angels aren’t cute cherubs. Their general aura is often overwhelming and intimidating.”

The new LP, which follows 2024’s Coming Up To Consciousness, is Courtney’s second with Dutch singer/multi-instrumentalist Annicke Shireen (of Heilung) and My Vitriol drummer Ravi Kesavaram. Courtney’s fellow founding member, Greg Jong, also appears and co-writes, as does Paul Mullen of Yourcodenameis:milo.

Elsewhere, Kenny Fitzgerald, a prog songwriter whom Courtney has mentored via Patreon, supplied the meditative piano part that opens Below Radiance – but much of Terrifying Angels takes Pure Reason Revolution in a heavier direction.

Indeed, while classic prog elements remain, Courtney says it was partly inspired by his longstanding love of grunge greats such as Nirvana, Mudhoney and Smashing Pumpkins.

“Coming Up To Consciousness was probably the most chilled Pure Reason Revolution record; less riff-based,” he explains. “It came from a sombre place because of my OCD diagnosis and things like that. I didn’t feel that LP was particularly well-received, so that pissed me off and gave me a bit of fire.

“Songs like Spin Like Fire, Haywire Heart and Rumination Ruin all came out of that angrier energy. It just made sense to do something heavier.” Elsewhere, Black Arrow Acrobats was inspired by a dream where he was chased by strange Ninja-type acrobat beings.

Summarising the themes, he reports: “It’s is about encountering forces that appear redemptive and discovering that transformation is never gentle. The album follows a narrator who repeatedly mistakes salvation for safety – only to learn that the forces that save us are often the same forces that undo us.

“Ultimately, he must reach a deeper understanding by accepting complexity.”

Terrifying Angels is on sale now.

If Larry E. Williams had written just this one song, he’d have probably been okay with it.

Williams wasn’t even a songwriter by trade, but a guitar tech for Neil Diamond across much of the star’s touring career. Their relationship was such that in the mid-70s – undaunted by his employer’s own way with a melody – Williams felt comfortable enough to present Diamond with a song he’d written with him very much in mind.

Let Your Love Flow was a gently upbeat piece with a smile on its face. A simple, three-chord, three-minute-and-change ride with a southern-country lilt and summery vibe, it had a sweet verse, an uplifting chorus and a positive, almost hippie lyric about letting your love flow like a mountain stream, like a bird on a wing. These were dark times – Watergate. Saigon. OPEC shenanigans – so any consolation or hope music could give were welcome.

At the time Diamond was busy turning his slowing career around with his ambitious Beautiful Noise album, produced by The Band’s Robbie Robertson. Williams’ song wasn’t for him, but Diamond did see to it that it was published by Bicycle Music Company, the boutique publishing imprint set up by Diamond’s manager, David Rosen.

The song got its first bite from pop/folk artist Gene Cotton, best known for the subsequent US Top 30 hit, Before My Heart Finds Out. With its staccato brass, rather stilted rhythm section and workaday female backing vocals, Cotton’s recording for ABC Records failed to trouble the chart on release in 1975. But around that time some of Diamond’s band had begun to hang out with two musicians, twenty-something brothers, who’d come out to LA from Florida to make it big.

David and Howard Bellamy had played live music all their lives. Growing up near Tampa, they’d been taught the ropes/strings by their rancher father, who was an enthusiastic amateur country swing musician on the side. The radio at home only ever played country music, but by high school David was playing in a gospel group, and Howard was getting into soul, and they wrote songs.

The band they formed together, Jericho, played clubs across the South, with a set covering quality soul acts such as Percy Sledge and Otis Redding. At Studio 70, a small-town studio in Tampa, they played sessions for other artists, and wrote and recorded jingles for local TV and radio too.

A demo of a David-penned tune, Spiders & Snakes, made it to record producer Phil Gernhard. He had made his name recording Maurice Williams and The Zodiacs’ 1960 doo-wop classic, Stay, and by the 70s was working with singer and TV star Jim Stafford, who’d had a US Top 40 hit with Swamp Witch. Released in January 1974, Stafford’s recording of Bellamy’s Spiders & Snakes hit No.3 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and No.14 on the UK singles chart.

“That sold a couple of million records,” David said later, “and Phil suggested that we should move out to LA. I didn’t want to at first, but when we started making money from the sales of that record, I knew things would be pretty good in LA.”

With the brothers signing to Curb Records, David’s own debut song, Nothin’ Heavy, did nothin’ much, but through the recording he befriended some of Neil Diamond’s group, including drummer Dennis St John. It was through him that the demo of Williams’ Let Your Love Flow got to – depending on who you ask – either the brothers or Gernhard. Either way, David and Howard loved it.

In the autumn of ’75, despite Curb’s reticence about the viability of the song, the Bellamy Brothers convened at LA’s Wally Heider Recording Studio with Gernhard as producer and some of Diamond’s seriously talented band around them: St John, bassist Emory Gordy, guitarists Doug Rhone and Richard Bennett and keyboardist Alan Lindgren. David has said that it only took the group a few takes to cut the song that would launch their career and make Larry E. Williams some serious royalties.

"I would say the guy who wrote this song is the wealthiest roadie now that ever was," said Howard.

With their plangent two-part harmonies and country twang, The Bellamy Brothers channelled Let Your Love Flow’s pure-heartedness beautifully. Their producer and elite group cottoned on to the crucial, elegant simplicity of the song’s groove and arrangement, and their easy, laidback recording found unexpected favour on US radio, then across the world.

In the States Let Your Love Flow hit No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100 that May (sandwiched between the likes of Johnnie Taylor’s Disco Lady and Welcome Back, the theme of John Travolta-starring sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, performed by ex-Lovin’ Spoonful frontman John Sebastian). The following month the song peaked at No.7 in the UK charts, sharing an eclectic Top 10 with The Wurzels’ The Combine Harvester, Diana Ross’s Love Hangover and Cliff Richard’s superb Devil Woman. Over 30 years later, in 2008, it would re-chart in Britain at No.21, after its use in a heavily rotated TV ad for Barclaycard.

Back in ’76, the international success spread to Holland, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Sweden, all the way to New Zealand and Australia. Germany offered a testament to the song’s musical appeal: after the song’s five-week run at the top slot in that country, it was replaced by a German-language version of the tune, by Schlager singer Jürgen Drews, which stayed at No.1 for a further six weeks.

The song’s popularity caught both the Bellamys and their label by surprise. The downhome duo had just had a worldwide pop hit, and this apparent contradiction flummoxed their marketing bods. The debut album – called, inevitably, Let Your Love Flow – was rushed out that year, bouncing just shy of the UK Top 20, and barely making the US Top 70.

It didn’t matter. The Bellamy Brothers career was set. Their first major tour was with fellow crossover duo country/pop duo Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina. They played with The Doobie Brothers (whose own life-affirming Listen To The Music makes a neat segue into Let Your Love Flow). Whereas their debut single was sweetly callow, the Bellamys’ subsequent hit, 1979’s David-penned If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me was gleefully cheesy. Still, it was also the first of a strong run of US country No.1s across the 1980s, which helped them seal their reputation. They still tour today, with Let Your Love Flow tucked away, their encore-friendly ace card.

Joan Baez, Tom Jones, Ray Charles and Bowling For Soup are among the many artists who've tackled the song over the years, but it’s hard to separate that song from the duo it suited so well. Thanks to them, in 1999 the single made the list of BMI’s most played songs of all time on US TV and radio. In this ‘Top 100 Songs of the Century’ it landed in a respectable 68th place, right behind Take It Easy by – another band who blurred the boundaries and understood the power of a crossover tune – Eagles.

And as for Larry E Williams, he did write other tunes, but his only other major writing credit was for Gentle On Your Senses, Easy On Your Mind, a Country Top 20 hit for Mel McDaniel in 1976. But what an incredible life Let Your Love Flow must have given him. Wherever he is now, odds are it’s somewhere nice, and he’s not tuning another man’s guitar…

Released in 2000, Linkin Park’s debut albumHybrid Theory was a genre-defining juggernaut. A jagged blend of metal, hip hop, electronica and irresistible pop choruses, it pushed nu metal to a new mainstream level. The following year, it became the best-selling album in the United States.

By the time the Cali six-piece started creating its follow-up, Meteora, the hype around them was at an all-time high. Recorded at a time when online piracy had started putting the shitters up the music industry, protecting the record became top priority for the band’s label, Warner.

“We had 16 boxes of giant reel tape that we had to take to New York, to go mix the record, on a plane with two security guards,” says Rob McDermott, who managed the band from 2000 to 2010 and was tasked with devising an over-the-top strategy to keep the music secret.

Security measures continued as Meteora’s release date approached, and journalists invited to an exclusive prerelease listening party were asked to give up their phones on arrival. Luckily for Linkin Park’s team, the plans worked.

Speaking to us over Zoom from his home in LA, Rob motions to the shimmering plaques on the wall behind him, including a Hybrid Theory diamond award representing 10 million sales “Warner made those just internally,” he continues, “because we were able to ship four million records around the world without a leak.”

Hybrid Theory might have put Linkin Park on the map, but Meteora proved they were here to stay. Released at a time when the star power of nu metal was beginning to wane, it ushered in a bigger, more polished, anthemic sound, purpose-built for stadiums and festival fields, and produced ubiquitous blockbusters such as Numb and Somewhere I Belong.

“In places in Asia, we started getting to the point where we couldn’t leave our hotel without a planned itinerary and security,” says bassist Dave ‘Phoenix’ Farrell, revealing the band’s profile rose to uncomfortable levels during the Meteora touring cycle. Recalling instances when the band were bundled into vans to escape mobs of fans, Dave says he used an alias every time he checked into a hotel.

“If I want to go to Starbucks, I don’t want it to be a big ordeal. Now I know how to navigate that a lot better, but with Meteora, we were just starting to come to terms with a lot of that. We were learning on the fly.”

Linkin Park started piecing together the songs for Meteora during Ozzfest in summer 2001. Working in a makeshift studio at the back of their tour bus, spirits were high and creative juices flowed: at one point, the band had more than 80 songs in various states of realisation.

By the time they headed into LA’s NRG Studios in August 2002, where they had recorded Hybrid Theory, with returning producer Don Gilmore, they had whittled that down to 13 close-to-complete demos.

Constant interference from label Warner, who questioned everything from the band’s line-up to their vision, had made the Hybrid Theory sessions feel fraught. Due to the album’s success, they now stepped back, allowing the band to make the follow-up they wanted.

It didn’t have the same fresh-out-the-box vigour as their debut, but Meteora is arguably a stronger set of songs – less angsty, deeper and more emotional. And while that’s no doubt due to the band’s growth as writers, Meteora’s ongoing ability to resonate is unmistakably down to late singer Chester Bennington who, despite being sick for five weeks and having to record his vocals alone while the rest of the album was being mixed, put in the strongest performance of his career.

Having struggled with addiction and depression from an early age, the turmoil in the singer’s private life is laid bare in the powerful lyrics for tracks such as Somewhere I Belong, Easier To Run and Numb. The latter would go on to become nu metal’s last true mega hit, passing over a billion streams on both Spotify and YouTube.

“I’ve learned over the years that really great vocalists can mimic many different things,” says Dave. “Chester was that to a T. He could be a trumpet. He could sing like Barry White. He could mimic stuff with his voice, and, because of that, he had such an incredible range.”

Meteora, Dave says, was the sound of the band realising what a potent weapon they had in their midst. “We were like kids in a candy store as we discovered more and more places that he could go vocally.”

Meteora was released on March 25, 2003, to critical and commercial acclaim – although the general consensus was that Linkin Park had played it safe and turned in Hybrid Theory 2.0. Speaking in 2008, Chester agreed. “Within the band, we call Hybrid Theory and Meteora ‘Volumes I and II’,” he told Kerrang!. “They’re very similar in a lot of ways. There’s almost a formula to them, you can tell what each song is going to do next.”

However, Meteora didn’t merely rehash past glories. “We wanted to further define and evolve our sound as well,” rapper Mike Shinoda said. “A song like Breaking The Habit, for example, could never have existed on Hybrid Theory; it was a more mature song, lyrically and sonically.”

To promote the album, alongside five massive singles, the band embarked on a tour lasting from February 2003 to September 2004. The gruelling cycle included their first ever foray into stadiums, supporting Metallica on their 2003 Summer Sanitarium tour, alongside Limp Bizkit, Deftones and Mudvayne. It saw them take on the daunting task of playing to almost a million diehard Metallica fans over two and half months.

The intensive schedule proved especially tough for Chester. Drink and drugs had started to take a toll on his relationship with his bandmates during promotion for Hybrid Theory, but by the end of the Meteora tour, he was in an even darker place.

“I wasn’t leaving my house. I’d shack up in my closet in the dark and shake all day,” he told Kerrang!. “I’d wake up and have a pint of Jack Daniel’s to calm down, then I’d pop a bunch of pills and go back in my closet and fucking freak out for the rest of the day. I was a mess. I was falling through windows, having seizures and going to hospital the whole time. It was fucking ridiculous. I was a total wreck.”

“He’d talk about it later, but in the moment, you wouldn’t notice it,” says Rob McDermott of Chester’s mindset at the time. “He left it all out on the stage. To me, that was his therapy. He was there. He was in that moment feeling the pain of everyone and himself.”

If Chester was struggling with his mental health on the road, he hid it well, according to P.O.D.’s Sonny Sandoval, who supported Linkin Park on the North American leg of the Meteora tour in 2004.

“He was a sweetheart,” Sonny remembers. “He had something about him that lit up the room.” Sonny describes the tour, which also featured Hoobastank and The Story So Far, as a real “family” affair. Each night, the bands would hang out in each other’s dressing rooms, smoking shisha and drinking, while later Chester would invite everyone onstage together to perform the band’s incendiary closer, One Step Closer. Those bonds of friendship were put to the test one night, however, when the bands and crew celebrated on the roof of a high-rise hotel.

“At one point, we all get excited, not even realising that we’re so close to the edge,” recalls Sonny, revealing his heart still races when he tells the story.

“I picked up Chester and, not even realising and just having fun, he flings back. Literally, if he had fallen out of my arms, he would have fallen off this roof. But I had him so tight, and then he was just dangling there screaming, and I am panicking, freaking out. I told him, ‘Bro, I could have dropped you.’ And then he looked at me and said, ‘You would never have dropped me.’ And then he just gave me a big old hug.”

The cultural impact of Meteora went far beyond its initial burst of success. In 2003, Session, the album’s eerie instrumental track composed entirely of scratching and sampling, courtesy of turntablist Joe Hahn, was nominated for a Grammy. The following year, the band teamed up with rapper Jay-Z for the now iconic, MTV-sponsored mashup collab, Collision Course.

“Mike had just gotten off the phone call with management saying, ‘OK, Jay-Z wants to do this new thing through MTV with us,” says Dave, remembering the moment they heard the news. “At that point, Jay was an artist that we loved – one of our favourite rappers. We were like, ‘Holy crap, we don’t know what that means, but yup, let’s make this happen.’”

In 2006, the band and Jay-Z won the Grammy for Best Rap/ Sung Collaboration for Numb/Encore, and performed it at the awards ceremony, with a star vocal turn from Paul McCartney.

“The first time I met Paul, he showed up to a rehearsal and I was terrified,” says Dave, who cites working with the Beatle as a career highlight. “I was terrified that he was going to be disgusted with my bass playing – why am I playing bass if Paul McCartney’s here? That didn’t make sense in my head. I don’t think I slept the night before that first rehearsal, but it couldn’t have been anything more the opposite.”

Today, Meteora is rightly viewed as a modern classic, and has sold 27 million copies worldwide. In February 2023, the band surprise-released Lost, a gloriously wistful, clenched-teeth track from the Meteora sessions that had been languishing on one of Mike Shinoda’s hard drives. Originally left off the album because the band felt it was too similar to Numb, it sounds nostalgic yet fresh – a gift to the legions of fans who thought they’d never hear Chester’s voice on a ‘new’ song again.

It’s also a testament to how much gas was in the tank during Linkin Park’s early days. Having reached a level in their career they could never have imagined, the band would take a left turn with their third album, 2007’s Minutes To Midnight, working with producer Rick Rubin to strip down their sound and enter a brand new era.

“Meteora really set the stage for us to make Minutes To Midnight and to begin to branch out,” agrees Dave, considering the album’s legacy. “But I think more than anything, it needed to prove to listeners that what we had done or accomplished on Hybrid Theory wasn’t an accident, and that we did have something to say.”

Originally published in 2023

Crack The Skye established US prog metallers Mastodon on many prog fan's radars. When it came to a follow-up there were bigger riffs and choruses, but it still beat with a prog heart, as the band told Prog when we sat down to talk about The Hunter in 2011.

Unlike its namesake, Atlanta progressive titans Mastodon have sidestepped extinction through the clever notion of adaption. In an industry and a market that cries out for new ideas and reinvention, they continue to surviv and thrive with The Hunter. “It’s not in our nature to say we’re going to write songs that are different to anything we’ve ever done, because that puts pressure on us.” sasy bassist Troy Sanders. “But thankfully it comes naturally. I love change – we embrace the unknown.” His words resonate not just with his bandmates, but with the swathe of fans they’ve amassed.

When their previous album, Crack The Skye, came out, people sat up and listened. Here was a band, traditionally regarded as metal, releasing a masterpiece in heavy prog. It became not only a landmark record for metal fans, but an enthralling concept album for proggers with a penchant for metallic elements.

For their fifth album, they could easily have knocked out Crack The Skye II and no one would have batted an eyelid. But sticking to their ethos, they have surprised again. The Hunter is the most melodic record the Georgia-rooted four-piece have created to date, to the extent that it contains a plethora of – saints above! – sing-a-long choruses. Gone are the heaps of thick, oppressive, acerbic riffs borne out of their mutual admiration for post-punk and sludge metal. Here instead are groovy basslines, acrobatic drumming, sensitive riffs, vast, spatial, shimmery effects and gentle psychedelic vibes.

“Once we decided to shed the idea of having another concept album, I feel like it breathed fresh energy back into the band,” says Sanders. “And that’s what lent itself to songs coming together rather quickly.”

Drummer Brann Dailor adds: “We thought how cool would it be to abandon the Mastodon comfort zone and do something completely different.” While very melodic in many points throughout the record, The Hunter is also more urgent and riff-laden than Crack The Skye. “It’s a knee-jerk reaction to spending two years touring Crack The Skye, which was so proggy and layered,” Dailor explains. “We wanted to let loose from that. The songs are probably the most instinctual we’ve ever put together – where we’ve worked the least on fine-tuning and tailoring every little piece.”

Knowing that they’d be booked up all summer with festival appearances, it was ‘now or never’ to get the songs laid down. “Our music is like milk,” Dailor says. “If we’d let it sit while we go to Europe it would have spoiled a little bit.” They split their time between Los Angeles and Atlanta over six weeks – a remarkably short period in any band’s books, let alone one whose records are crammed with labyrinthine riffs and melodies.

Continuing their trend of doing things differently, they roped in producer Mike Elizondo, known for his work with hip hop artists such as Eminem. Their choice of cover art saw another departure. Instead of Paul Romano – responsible for their first four covers – they went with AJ Fosik, who created of the vibrant yet terrifying mythical beast sculpture that defines The Hunter. “We don’t know him, but I saw his work years ago and always had him in the back of my mind in case we used a different artist,” says Dailor. “And, yeah, Romano was disappointed, but I think he understands.”

Sanders summarises the hiring of Fosik in the context of this project as a whole: “Every aspect of the album changed – new producer, new artist. We want the artwork to come from someone who is incredibly passionate and talented and we want people to realise it isn’t just a picture of a mythological creature – this is an epic wood sculpture that took complete dedication.”

It‘s been mentioned that album title refers to guitarist Brent Hinds’ brother, who died last year while on a hunting trip. But Dailor and Sanders stress that The Hunter is in no way a concept piece, nor is the lyrical content directly connected to their bandmate’s sibling. “Ultimately it’s a collection; each song has a story of its own,” says Sanders.

It becomes apparent that Hinds’ loss is not the only traumatic experience to affect the band. Behind every rock’n’roll lifestyle there are loved ones who get left by the wayside; and while Dailor won’t discuess his own personal life, you sense there’s a family that deeply misses him. “We are constantly disappointing the people that we care about the most with being gone so often,” he says. “So a lot of the themes on the record kind of have to deal with the people we’re closest to. Some of it’s almost like an apology to those people.”

Sanders confirms: “We touch on loss, we touch on grief, we touch on triumphant moments – it’s all over the place. And then we’ll think about how an octopus feels. We’ll go from very deep, sorrowful subjects to talking about the Swamp Thing’s baby.”

“Or being a baby!” Dailor adds. “The Thickening is about being in a crib and wanting to be picked up and nursed. Then there’s Stargasm, which isn’t exactly about having sex in space, but it’s about having the best sex you’ve ever had with someone you really connect with and you go up into space. Blasteroid is like a playground song where you’re bouncing off the walls and the lyrics are: ‘If you’re sad and need to cry then turn around and go outside.’ It’s like a little kid wrote it.”

Although the title Bedazzled Fingernails is a cheeky nod to Hinds’ playful fretwork, the lyrical content is a reference to the fact that his entire family are born under the Chinese sign of the Ox. Dailor explores a further emotional topic in All The Heavy Lifting: “I had a movie playing in my head, of my wife and I in the woods running around and me saving her, and then some of the lyrics are about a bad situation I had back home. I was sitting behind my drums feeling numb and stressed out at not knowing what to do, and I heard in my head: ‘Just close your eyes and pretend everything’s fine’.”

This lyrical refrain is one of the catchiest moments on The Hunter, and also the first of its songs they recorded. Asked whether they can see their fans joining in, Sanders seem eager: “That, we hope, is the song that all our friends will be able to sing along with. I’m excited about that!”

Like their previous albums, The Hunter touches on both old and recent influences. There are moments that echo Radiohead’s OK Computer, Pink Floyd’s spatial awareness or the atmospheric grandeur of Muse, while heavier songs hark back to their sludge roots. Had Mastodon stuck with the style exemplified in early albums like Remission they could have ended up playing the type of music we traditionally class as stoner or desert rock, with a weighty Sabbath influence. Yet the band’s love for prog has spurred them on to create something far more complex.

“The old Genesis stuff is probably some of my favourite music ever created,” Dailor says. “Gabriel-era Genesis, too. But even when he left there were records that still embraced their proggier side.”

Sanders explains: “I remember very well when I was introduced to Pink Floyd – they frightened me! And King Crimson irritate me to this day because they’re so damn good. Recently touring with Mars Volta and Tool, I love that specialness they embrace with this thinking man’s music.”

On top of their genre-defining sound, iconic artwork and incendiary live shows, it’s sometimes forgotten that here’s a band who have stuck together since their inception more in 1999, overcoming deaths of loved ones (Dailor’s sister took her own life aged 14), drug abuse and a near-fatal altercation involving Hinds. That’s a vast achievement in itself.

Sanders admits: “I never thought it would last. It’s rare that any relationship can last this long – much less with three grown men that I’m ‘married’ to.”

September is done! We're closing in on spooky season now (and damn if we can't hear the faint rustle of bells in the distance) but before we hit the end of the year there's still plenty of great new releases to explore, meaning its important as ever for us to cut through the clutter and bring you some excellent new metal songs.

First, the results of last week's vote! Belgian speed metallers Evil Invaders charged into third place, while Waterlines took a very healthy second with Giant Killers. But the overall winners for the week were Ukraine's Ignea, whose collab with Combichrist Prefab proved too good to resist.

This week we've got the first glimpse of an Alissa White-Gluz fronted Dragonforce as well as new music from Bullet For My Valentine, Crypta, Enslaved, Clutch, Apocalyptica and more. As ever - and with the end of year rapidly approaching - we need you to tell us which songs excite you most, so don't forget to cast your votes in the poll below - and have an excellent weekend.

Apocalyptica - Upperhand (ft. Kalandra)

Partnered up with nordic folk star Kalandra, Apocalyptica's Uppherhand makes great use of the Finns' ability to create a sense of scope and drama. It's a slow building track, Katrine Stenbekk's voice soaring over brooding melodies before the song really leans in on its symphonic metal elements at the 2:30 mark. Gorgeous.

Dragonforce - Hunger Of The Beast

Recruiting Alissa White-Gluz was always going to have a big impact on Dragonforce's sound, but we'd wager few people were expecting this. It feels like a full mash-up of the powerful melodeath that Alissa has been belting out for over 15 years now, colliding head-on with Dragonforce's brand of full-tilt power metal. With a self-titled record set for March 17 next year, we reckon this is just the start of exciting new realms for the power metal vets.

Crypta - A Portrait Of Decay

It's been three years since Crypta's last record, but we're finally getting a glimpse of what comes next. With guitarist Victoria Villarreal joining their ranks, the Brazilian death metal group have offered up something grandiose and sweeping on A Portrait Of Decay, a six-minute monolith with some gorgeous proggy guitars creeping in before the end.

Bullet For My Valentine - Social Apocalypse

Picking up from the more metallic edge they reintroduced on 2021's self-titled album, Bullet For My Valentine are going big on Social Apocalypse. Far from going back to The Poison playbook after celebrating that album, the Welsh band have picked up where they left off and crafted something that would fit comfortably in the modern metalcore bracket alongside the likes of Parkway Drive or Bring Me The Horizon. They're certainly writing for the arenas they've eyed up for the UK tour next year.

Tom Morello - Unconquered (ft. Kneecap)

Tom Morello has never shied away from making political statements. The fact he appears in this video wearing a Bob Vylan shirt, with Kneecap guesting is a pretty clear line in the sand. Musically, Unconquered feels like that all-too-often unexplored realm of rave-rock energy, not quite using EDM but bringing to mind acts like the KLF or The Prodigy with a tight, dancy riff. Tom's new album Everyone Gets Everything They Want is out today.

Polyphia - With Eyes To See

Keeping those danceable riff vibes going strong, Polyphia's With Eyes To See also delivers some tight, stomping beats. In truth, if you heard this on radio - or a club, which seems like a much more fitting setting for it - you could be mistaken into thinking this is some Glastonbury-friendly dance group, such is the track's infectious energy (with the looping vocal definitely helping cement the sense). New album Be Not Afraid is expected October 23.

Clutch - Wasted Lands

If you were worried that rock'n'roll had all but given up on its street walkin' cheetahs with hearts full of napalm, and fellas who make love to mountain lions and sleep on beds of red-hot branding irons, rest assured: Clutch have you covered. The band's latest single - and the title-track of their next album, due January 22 - Wasted Lands is exactly that kind of dick-swinging, chest-beating bravado that made rock so damn brilliant in the first place: "What's it's name? This creature of malice? No one knows for sure, but the locals call him Neil Patrick Fallon."

Suicide Silence - Make Your Exit

It's been a hot minute since Suicide Silence sounded this feral. There's been no shortage of heft on the last couple records, but Make Your Exit is genuinely abrasive and punishing in the most satisfying ways, spelling good things for new album Graceless, due November 20.

Wolfbrigade - Doomrunner

If the d-beat and barked vocals weren't a dead giveaway, Wolfbrigade love them some crusty punk. Doomrunner is a rampaging, slobbering beast, simple yet effective as the band kick it out fast and hard like Discharge and Napalm Death did before them. New album Howl From Underground is out October 9.

Leng T'che - Hammered Into Collapse

Wait, is that another d-beat we hear? For the briefest moment, yes, but Leng T'che aren't exactly the kind of band to stick in one lane, Hammered Into Collapse managing to sprint its way through a extreme metal's diverse land-scape in under two-and-a-half minutes as they go from squealing deathcore, grind and death metal to sludgy filth. Its been almost a decade since their last record, but they're making up for lost time.

Haerdsmaelta - City Of The Dead

"We built this city on rot 'n' mold." Its hard to say exactly where you'd place Sweden's Haerdsmaelta, the gaskmask-festooned group pogoing on skronky, off-kilter riffs that bring to mind Voivod's X-Stream with their weird punk-metal weirdness. Taken from the band's upcoming self-titled album - due October 23 - it's a delightfully weird and fizzy track well worth your time.

Brat - Speculum Bleed

Fancy some gore? Brat are going full Cannibal Corpse with the lyrical content to Speculum Bleed, while adding a subversive twist that is really highlighted in the splat-happy video. With some big, thrashy riffs, it's proof that they're pushing their brand of bimboviolence into new directions on new album Manslayer, out today.

Enslaved - Tale Of Trees

Prog be damned, Enslaved are back in the realms of frosty nastiness. Alright, not entirely, but you'll forgive our excitement after shanties and folk tunes (which were great, we'll concede) just having the Norwegians go absolutely barmy with raspy black metal scratches the itch nicely. Taken from upcoming album Mið, Tale Of Trees suggests the album will be anything but.

Peter Gabriel has shared his latest single from his upcoming o\i album. After the relatively upbeat previous single, One By One, Face The Wall finds the 76-year-old singer pondering death.

"After last month, where we were ‘looking for the happy’, we can just follow that line all the way through and come to Face The Wall, which is looking directly in the face of death. A nice, cheerful subject," Gabriel says.

“The lyric is partly about getting older, facing illness, and it's looking death in the face, which I think we don't do enough of. I know I've talked about this before, but cultures which seem to include death as a normal part of life seem more comfortable with it and live life to the full. That was the starting point.

"Music is a cathartic process for a lot of us, and when I'm singing at the end, ‘I see you coming through’ that is a cathartic moment. I think that is an important line; conditions are getting worse and more intense as the song progresses, but with that lyric it suggests there is a reason to be hopeful.

"You never quite know when you’re in the studio whether the song is going to be a vehicle that can carry people, or not. I know this is going to speak to some people."

As with 2023's i/o album, Gabriel has been releasing a new track every full moon, and Face The Wall is the ninth track he's released ahead of his upcoming album, o\i, which is due out later this year.

The cover art for Face The Wall features a piece entitled The Nest by Tadashi Kawamata, photographed by Mika Huisman, which you can view below.

"When I saw The Nest at Amos Rex, I fell in love with it," Ganriel adds. "To me, the wall is there, big, solid, you know, a bit like death. These messy human chairs are falling over the wall and, somehow, they spill over the top. It's funny, but it's also hopeful and against unbelievable odds.

"I wasn't aware of Tadashi Kawamata's work before seeing this image, but this was the thing that got me excited. I thought it was perfect for this song and got me looking at a lot of his other work.

“I guess I'm attracted to stuff that is going against the rules or doing what it does in an unconventional way. We are used to seeing art in a museum or on walls, and here it is tumbling over the walls. That feels like a more interesting, adventurous, and unlikely context. Tadashi was taking a lot of the elements, the chairs in particular, from local reclamation sites, so they, if you like, belong to that community, that area. [The Lasipalatsi building in the heart of Helsinki]. The site-specific nature of the work is really something that he's having fun playing with.

“An artist to explore for those of you that love this image like I do.”

According to the Guinness Book of Records, the world's most foremost authority on verifying facts and achievements, Napalm Death hold the record for the shortest recorded song.

In the time it takes light to travel from the Earth to the Moon or a Zoomer to lose their attention span while watching online ads, the Birmingham grindcore pioneers recorded their shortest song in 1986. It has a running length of just 1.316 seconds.

You Suffer appears on the first half of the band's 1987 debut Scum. We say first half, because two-thirds of the band who wrote and recorded the first 12 songs – guitarist Justin Broadrick and bassist/vocalist Nicholas 'Nik Napalm' Bullen – left to pursue other musical interests and university studies before a brand new line-up joined drummer Mick Harris to complete a further 16 songs for the album's second half.

The first half of Scum was mostly written in the Broadrick's teenage bedroom in Shard End, Birmingham, where he lived with his mother and step-father. Partly inspired by Oregon crossover thrashers Wehrmacht's own cough-and-you'll-miss-it-song, titled E!, Bullen added his lyrics – four words: 'You suffer, but why?' – before the trio entered Rich Bitch Studios in Birmingham's Selly Oak in August, 1986.

"I was a barely functioning 15-or-16-year-old during my time in Napalm Death," Broadrick told Metal Hammer. "Everyone else in the band was two years older, but what I could do prolifically was write music and create songs. I was writing the majority of the music, and Nic was writing pretty much all the lyrics."

"You Suffer was largely a comedy thing, a one-second song," Bullen told Decibel magazine in their book, Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces. "It's ridiculous, but it was hilarious. We played that song in front of 30 local kids, like, every weekend. We played that song 30 times. It was a laugh."

Sometimes the laughter was directed at the teenage band, rather than with them. But gradually, people began to embrace the Napalm Death's relentlessly chaotic take on metal and punk.

"People would often come to laugh at us because we were like a kid band who played super-fast," Broadrick told Skinny Puppy's cEvin Key on his podcast. "We were like a laughing stock, you know, but eventually we weren't – people started taking this quite seriously. We saw people flocking to this sound. I remember thinking, 'What the fuck is happening here?'"

By the time Scum was released in the summer of 1987, the band's line-up had solidified to feature Lee Dorrian on vocals, Bill Steer on guitar, Shane Embury on bass, and Harris on drums. The four-piece were invited by John Peel to record the first of several Maida Vale sessions for his BBC Radio 1 show, and the late DJ would later play You Suffer a handful of times during a single show.

"There was a period when we had thrash band after thrash band after thrash band coming in to do Maida Vale sessions," said Peel. "These bands played pretty hard, full-on music, and they'd been in a tour van for the last two weeks, and you'd walk into their studio and you'd know they'd been working hard, if you know what I mean. Napalm Death was an extraordinary session because the songs were so short. When a song only lasts two seconds you can hardly say to the band, 'Can you play that again, please, I think a guitar was out of tune."

During this session, which was broadcast on September 22, 1987, the band performed a slightly longer version of the song, titled You Suffer (Part II).

"There is a bit of a novelty," said Harris. "Let's do the shortest, fastest thing you can do. And yeah, there are notes there. People think we just go, 'Blllp,' and that's it. And I believe there's, like, four notes or something. There's a lyric, 'You suffer, but why?' And it's played quick, fast and sharp and as tight as we could. We had a bit of reverb on there. It probably made it longer."

In 1989, the song was given away as a free seven-inch single as part of Earache's scene-defining Grindcrusher compilation. Backed by the Electro Hippies' micro-ballad Mega-Armageddon Death Part 3, it became the shortest single ever released, a feat recognised by Guinness Book of Records.

"We didn't ask for it," Harris told Decibel. "It just got put in there. We were told, 'You've made the Guinness book of World Records.' And we were like, 'Nah, get out of here,' and yes, there it is. It's sort of funny, isn't it? A bit of achievement, I guess."

Unbelievably, the song was brought to national attention two decades after its release, when current Napalm Death vocalist Mark 'Barney' Greenway guested on Labour MP Ed Miliband's BBC Radio 2 show.

The MP, sitting in for presenter Jeremy Vine, invited Greenway into the studio to talk about the band's upcoming appearance at the Glastonbury Festival. During the segment, the former Labour leader was given a lesson on how to become a grindcore vocalist.

“I’m going to now take my career into my hands if it’s not already gone down the pan and you’re going to try and help me to sort of do a bit of this extreme metal," said Miliband, before failing as quickly as the song itself.

The MP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Seattle, March 1972, under a grey gunmetal sky. Black Sabbath are on their biggest US tour yet. Private planes and limos and all their chicks for free. Plus all that blow. Or ‘Charlie’ as they called it back then. Sabbath’s third and most recent album, Master Of Reality, had become their first US Top 10 hit. They were still in their early twenties, and they weren’t even peaking yet. The future was theirs to fuck with.

A hundred shows into an eight-month tour, four nights earlier they had watched Joe Frazier become the first man to beat Muhammed Ali in a boxing ring. Now they were at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle – famous for being built on stilts by the water’s edge, making it an ideal spot for fishing from your hotel room window. The Edgewater was also scene of the now infamous Led Zeppelin ‘mud shark’ episode, where a willing groupie reputedly agreed to be tied-up and pleasured with a fish for the amusement of various wasted band members and roadies.

Every band that stayed there since wanted their own shark adventure. Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne took the shark he caught and hauled it into his bathtub, filled it with water, then forgot about it and left for the gig. When he returned several hours later and found the shark dead, he began disemboweling it with a knife, leaving blood and fish entrails all over the walls. Guitarist Tony Iommi, meanwhile, who had also caught a shark, managed to hurl it through Bill Ward’s hotel room window, where it landed on the hapless drummer’s bed. “He was very surprised,” Iommi deadpanned. “Not pleasantly…”

At the end of the US tour the band were given a long weekend off, a three-day gap before flying to Japan for two shows at the Koseinenkin concert hall in Osaka. It’s the venue where Deep Purple would make their Japanese debut three months later, and tape the shows for their legendary live Made In Japan double album. Sabbath could have beaten Purple to it. Except that they were denied entry visas because of their various criminal convictions: Ozzy for theft, Tony and Bill for dope.

The Japanese shows were cancelled, as were dates in Australia. So the band flew home and were glad of the break. On the tour, bassist Terry ‘Geezer’ Butler had been the first to crack, complaining of terminal tiredness, as one show blurred into another.

“The trouble was in them days it wasn’t: ‘Oh, have a few weeks off until you feel better,’” he said, frowning. “It was: ‘Here, have a line of this’ or a smoke of that. ‘Take these pills, they’ll keep you going.’ It was about keeping going on the road. Until one day I knew I’d had enough – and had to stop. The others weren’t happy but there was nothing I could do. I thought: ‘I’m cracking up here,’ you know?”

When Ward was then diagnosed with serum hepatitis, they knew they were in real trouble.

“We were only about twenty-two years old, but we were already pretty much veterans,” Ward told me. “I got serum hepatitis from narcotic abuse. I was jaundiced for months.” Hepatitis B, as it’s also known, is not an infection that can be contracted from casual acquaintance, but a serious virus that is almost always caused by using infected syringes – ‘dirty needles’ – to inject drugs. Until then, Ward said, “I thought I was invincible… I didn’t feel so invincible after that.”

Despite doctors’ warnings, as soon as the jaundice subsided he went straight back into doing what he’d been doing. It was 1972, and that was simply “what you did, what everyone did”. He paused. “I’m pretty lucky to be alive, to be honest.”

With little else to do, Sabbath went to work on their next album. Or rather, Tony did. For the first time since their debut album two years before “took off like a fucking rocket,” as Ozzy put it, they were allowed to take their time. No more albums recorded on the run, between tours. This was the big time, they had a lot to live up to suddenly, and, as with Led Zeppelin’s momentous fourth album, released six months before, a great deal was expected of Sabbath’s fourth album.

Just one snag: a pub less than a mile from their Birmingham rehearsal studio. Most days, after a cursory plod through a few loose jams Iommi would be left to toil alone, after the others had wandered to the pub. Hours later they would return and half-heartedly enquire of their stone-faced leader: “Got anything yet, Tone?”

Iommi began to get the hump. A week into this irksome routine he’d had enough. When it was suggested they continue work on the album in LA, partly as a tax avoidance scheme, partly because studios were cheaper there, Iommi jumped at the idea. The others dragged themselves away from the pub long enough to follow.

Iommi had always been the driver – Osbourne liked to refer to him as Darth Vader – but now he was a man on a mission. It hurt that, as big as Sabbath were, they were still cold-shouldered by the music press, rarely mentioned in the same breath as more fashionable London-based contemporaries like Zep and Purple. Iommi was going to fix that.

A week later, working in LA on what he had decided would be titled Vol 4, in that portentous 70s way where albums were regarded as the latest almost biblical statement of earnest artistic merit, they were living together in the same luxury Bel Air mansion that quickly became notorious.

They rented it from John Dupont, millionaire scion of the Dupont family, who owned the multinational Dupoint chemicals corporation – key players in America’s development of atomic and chemical weapons, an irony not lost on Butler, the writer of War Pigs and other antinuclear diatribes, but who was too busy snorting mountainous lines of coke to care.

“We were like the fuckin’ Monkees’ evil twins,” Osbourne recalled in his baleful Brummy accent. “Hey hey we’re the-junkies…”

The house came with an Olympic-sized swimming pool, overlooked by an enormous ballroom which the band used to jam in and work on material. Band manager Patrick Meehan also set up office there, along with two French au pair girls. Recording took place at the nearby Record Plant, one of the first state-of-the-art studios to offer rock stars the ‘relaxed’ vibe they worked best in and also the go-to hit factory for high-decibel bands.

It was the perfect environment, Sabbath decided, to produce the album themselves – that is, for Iommi to lavish time and effort on his baby. A loose arrangement that contrived to make the sessions the longest the band had spent on an album (more than two months eventually) and by far the most hectic. What really helped the process along, Iommi would later admit, was “the enormous quantity of coke” the band were now getting through.

“We were all fucked-up bad,” Osbourne recalled. “Dealers coming round every day with cocaine, Demerol, morphine, everything round the fucking house.”

“It became a ritual,” Iommi would tell me. “Every time we’d do an album, we’d get a load of dope and then some coke and whatever else and off we’d go. I never used to want to leave the studio. That’s why we enjoyed making Vol 4 so much, because we had the house, and it was a great vibe we had.”

He pauses, before adding: “It did become insane.”

The cocaine would be delivered in phials in a box disguised as one of their speaker cabinets. It was the strongest, purest cocaine then available anywhere in America. The band would drool with anticipation as huge mounds of the white powder – the ‘snow’ – would be carved out on one of the marble-topped banquet tables, from which the band would take what they wanted, when they wanted, however they wanted – which was a lot.

One night, Osbourne was so stoned he accidentally sat on the button for the alarm, rigged to alert the local police station. As two squad cars screeched to a halt outside and armed cops began banging on the ornate front door, the band freaked out and flushed several ounces of grass and dozens of phials of pharmaceutical cocaine down the mansion’s various toilets.

Convinced they were being busted, “we must have flushed, like, ten thousand dollars’ worth”, Butler recalled. When finally they got one of the au pairs to answer the door and discovered the cops were simply responding to the false alarm, there was another crazy scramble to see if they could unclog any of the toilets and recover their drugs. Too late. Quick, get on the phone… According to Butler, it was also at the house in LA that he and Ozzy first enjoyed LSD.

“I’d done acid in England,” he told me. “Never wanted to do it again. Just had a terrible, really bad experience with it, really bad. The girlfriend I had at the time had to literally lie on top of me to stop me jumping out the window and killing myself. I swore I’d never do it again.

“Then we got to California, and we were at this chick’s place, this massive beach house in Laguna. And she gives us this stuff, psilocybin. I’d never heard of it, didn’t know it was another name for acid, and just took it – me and Ozzy and these girls. Ozzy went for a swim in the ocean [laughing] – at least he thought he did, but he was still on the beach, flailing away in the sand.”

“At that time in America, too, people were very fond of lacing your drinks with acid. I didn’t care,” Osbourne said. “I used to swallow handfuls of tabs at a time. The end of it came when we got back to England. I took ten tabs of acid then went for a walk in a field. I ended up standing there talking to this horse for about an hour. In the end the horse turned round and told me to fuck off. That was it for me…”

Word got round, and Sabbath’s Bel Air pleasure dome became one of the most debauched and therefore trendiest places in LA to hang out. Crowds of drug dealers and groupies and new best mates gathered night and day. So many that the band would make the girls queue outside on the lawn. Getting up and being driven to the studio and working was “the down part,” Ward admitted. Not for Iommi, though, who was spending longer and longer at the studio, as the long cocaine nights flitted by like the lights of a runaway train.

“You’d always read about bands like Deep Purple or The Faces going off playing football together,” he told me. “But we took our music much more serious than that. Or I did, anyway. Once I got in the studio, that was it, I wasn’t coming out again till it was over.”

Despite the mayhem surrounding its genesis, Vol 4 became another stone-cold classic Sabbath album. Opening with the eight-minute-plus epic Wheels Of Confusion, what jumps out is Iommi’s leonine lead guitar, a future-flash step on from the muggy sound of previous album Master Of Reality.

Intent on proving the band’s critics wrong, desperate to somehow catapult Sabbath’s musical credibility into the same starry stratosphere that Zeppelin and The Who now inhabited, the emphasis was on versatility, musicianship, rock’n’roll witchcraft.

Iommi sat down to play piano while Geezer operated the Mellotron on Changes, their most sophisticated ballad yet, and their first fully formed love song. It might have been a US hit single, too, if they had taken the advice of the Warner Bros radio promotion team, but Iommi wasn’t far gone enough yet for that. Keeping with their policy of not releasing more than one single from an album, they plumped instead for Tomorrow’s Dream, a stolid mid-tempo rocker and a great album track – and never a hit single in a million years.

Elsewhere it was First Class all the way. With its ferociously funky rhythm and needle-sharp single-string riff, Supernaut was like a white metal version of Isaac Hayes’s Theme From Shaft, a huge hit the year before, Osbourne’s voice like mercury pouring over the silver spoon of the guitars and drums; Butler’s lyrics, which he now claims to remember very little about writing, yielding to the new era of debauchery the band were now fully embarked on, of wanting to ‘touch the sun’ with the ‘need to fly’. There is not even a guitar solo, just a hail of percussion that takes over halfway through, before finally allowing the twisted riff in again through the back door.

The subject matter – and chief inspiration for an album they would not so subtly thank in the sleeve notes for with the words: “We’d like to thank the great COKE-Cola company of Los Angeles – was addressed even more directly in Snowblind, with Osbourne balefully singing about his dreams being ‘flaked with snow’ as the band pounded down on the juddering rhythm, lashing out the icy riff like a razor blade chopping white lines on a gigantic, cracked mirror.

Again the melodrama is expanded, with the surprise addition of a string quartet over the last minute or so, as Iommi weaves his way through a typically frenzied guitar solo. Even the lighter moments that Iommi always insisted on, as contrast for the frosted darkness of the show stoppers, were somehow more malevolent.

Of the two instrumental interludes, the first, FX, was simply Iommi, fuelled by way too much coke and grass, standing naked in the studio control room, distractedly fiddling with his electric guitar, as if sending signals out to space. Which is in effect exactly what it was, hence its title.

“He took all his clothes off in the studio,” Butler recalled, “and he was hitting on his guitar strings with the crosses that he wore around his neck.”

The second, Laguna Sunrise, came fully formed from his childhood imagination, a lush acoustic instrumental, flamenco in style, accompanied by a soaring, blissfully romantic string section. This was music to watch the Californian sunrise to – but only after you’d been up all night getting wasted on the moon and stars first. There was also another hit-that-never-was in the surprisingly short and catchy St. Vitus Dance, its irresistible tunefulness belied only by the mercilessly brutal chords Iommi stabs each verse with.

The true voice of Vol 4, though, was captured on its finale track, Under The Sun. A perfectly executed bookend, it’s another epic journey track, long, convoluted, and as hard to hold on to as the tail of a tiger. Moving through three discernible musical sections, it was tracks like Under The Sun that would become the sonic signpost for those bands that would follow Sabbath in the years to come; groups like Iron Maiden and Metallica, whose entire careers could be traced virtually to the last two and a half minutes of Under The Sun; self-absorbed, pained, almost repellent in its undeniable magnetism; over-involved and desperately serious; epic right down to its last inglorious, nail-hammering chords.

The final mixes for Vol 4 took place back in London, but of the band only Iommi was there to oversee them. Osbourne had gone back to his first wife Thelma and the family in Birmingham and talked about opening a wine bar. Now a husband and father – although mainly by long distance – he also moved his young family into a new house.

Butler, although also married, was still taking his laundry home for his mum to wash when he finally passed his driving test – and promptly bought a Rolls-Royce, phoning manager Patrick Meehan and getting him to “send a cheque”. Then he bought a house. A big one.

Not be outdone, Ward also bought a Rolls Royce, filling the back seats with crates of cider. Ward was, as he put it to me, “leading a Sid and Nancy lifestyle” with his latest girlfriend, who travelled back with him from LA, “living in hotels [and] loaded all the time”.

“That was the first album where I nearly got kicked out the band,” he said, frowning.

It was one thing for him to be zonked out all the time on cider, dope and cocaine, quite another for him to raise any objections to the “more sophisticated” music, as Iommi saw it, that presented itself on the new album. When Ward suggested they “forget fucking Mellotrons and string quartets and do some blues jams,” Iommi turned on him. After that, said Ward, “there was kind of a cold eeriness in the studios, and I realised I was under the gun”.

When Vol 4 was released, in September ’72, British music press reviews of the album were, again, universally snub-nosed – Max Bell described it in Let It Rock as “a monumental bore”.

In the US, however, the critics seemed to be coming round to Sabbath at last. Even Lester Bangs, who had eviscerated their first two albums, now performed an unabashed about-face, describing Sabbath in Creem as “moralists” and comparing their lyrics to those of Bob Dylan and the books of William Burroughs.

“We have seen the Stooges take on the night ferociously and go tumbling into its maw, and Alice Cooper is currently exploiting it for all it’s worth, turning it into a circus,” Bangs wrote. “But there is only one band that has dealt with it honestly on terms meaningful to vast portions of the audience, not only grappling with it in a mythic structure that’s both personal and universal, but actually managing to prosper as well. That band is Black Sabbath.”

Paradoxically, however, just as the media spotlight was finally swinging their way, Sabbath experienced the first reverse of their career, with Vol 4 getting only as high as No.13 in the US – their lowest chart placing since their first album. In Britain it was a similar story, getting to No.8, the same spot Sabbath had peaked at in 1970.

These days, ironically, Vol 4 is one of the Sabbath albums that mainstream critics cite as their favourite, yet at the time Tony Iommi looked upon it as a comparative failure. He blamed the pressures the band were under to come up with a follow-up to their biggest US hit. He also blamed the rest of the band for, as he saw it, “leaving everything up to me”.

Iommi was determined that their next album would be different. None of which stopped fans flocking to their latest American tour, where Sabbath’s reputation as monolithic doom merchants now preceded them. Sabbath rooled. By the start of the US Vol 4 tour, in the first week of July, they had their own coke dealer travelling with them. “He’d just turn up,” Osbourne said, “and he had a suitcase full of fucking kilos of this shit. Then one day I was in his room, and I opened his bag and there was bags of uncut coke, cut coke, different grade coke. I picked up one of these bags and there was a revolver underneath! I thought: ‘This smells like bad news!’”

That was also the tour, according to Osbourne, that “the groupies knew more about our tour itineraries than we did”. One morning he was awakened by a voice telling him: “I’m the Blow Job Queen. And who are you?” Freaked-out, Osbourne pretended to be Butler and gave her his room number. Ten minutes later Butler was on the phone to Osbourne complaining bitterly that he’d got some crazy chick in his room that he couldn’t get rid of. When he stopped laughing, Osbourne called Iommi and Ward and got them to accompany him to Butler’s room.

“So we all go over and say: ‘Please leave.’ And she says: ‘No! Why? I give the best blow jobs in the west. Don’t you believe me?’ We don’t want to hurt her, we don’t know fucking what to say or do. So finally we all threaten to piss on her if she doesn’t leave, and she does.”

Osbourne looked forlorn. “Gigs, bars, hotels, radio interviews… they were everywhere we went. We suffered the results as well. We got clap, crabs, all sorts of diseases. Then we’d have to go through the cures, big painful shots of penicillin in the arse…”

There would be many more volumes to come in the decades-long Black Sabbath saga, but their 1972 Vol 4 shows were the last shows before the rot set in as a combination of money and drug problems eventually robbed the band of their original spark. For all their misadventures on the road in America, they would never be quite so innocent again.

This feature was originally published as the cover story of issue 305 of Classic Rock magazine, in September 2022.

Black Sabbath legend Tony Iommi is on the cover of the current issue of Classic Rock. Buy it here.

U2 are one of the world's most divisive bands. To some, they’re insufferably-earnest, middle-of-the-road stadium rockers led by a smug, holier-than-thou preacher man. To others, they’re four music-obsessed Dublin school friends whose spiritual, open-hearted songs resonate with a huge global audience, and who found a way to stay culturally and artistically relevant thanks to a mischievous, fearless appetite for reinvention.

"The sound of the future is what we're most interested in," Bono said last year. "It doesn't exist yet. It's ours to make, and that's what we have the chance to do."

Here is U2's catalogue ranked from worst to best.

14. Songs Of Innocence (2014)

The corporate tie-in which saw Songs of Innocence 'gifted' to everyone owning an Apple product upon its 2014 release may have been the single biggest mis-step of U2's career: you can still find people grumbling about it today. Doubtless those complaints would linger even if Songs of Innocence was U2's defining masterpiece, but, trust us, it most definitely isn't.

Kind souls might allow Bono's humble love letter to the transformative power of punk rock, The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone), but while the singer hailed the group's nostalgic 13th studio set as "the most personal album we've written", it's a slog which singularly failed to strike a chord beyond the group's most devoted fans. A PR disaster, certainly, but a musical one too.

13. Pop (1997)

Having brilliantly launched U2.0 with the knowing, post-modern Achtung Baby and the less-startling-but-still-rather-smart Zooropa, U2 pushed it too far. Without long-term producers Daniel Lanois/Brian Eno to rein in their wackier ideas and trim excess fat, the quartet became a parody of a parody with Pop.

Stories of the album being rushed to completion with indecent haste to emerge ahead of an already booked stadium tour make sense when listening now: Pop is too long, it sounds cheap, and it's full of aimless, half-baked, dance-rock plodders that lack the smarts or craft of Achtung Baby. Pop? Flop.

12. No Line On The Horizon (2009)

If No Line On The Horizon often sounds like hard work, that's because it was. After an unsatisfactory first run at Abbey Road with Rick Rubin yielded nothing worth keeping, the group took a second tilt at following How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois in Morocco.

The stated aim, according to Bono, was to produce "future hymns" - classic songs which could be played forever - and some 50-60 new songs were written across two years, but when the new album was introduced by the grungy but utterly disposable Get Your Boots On, one sensed that this latest reboot was doomed. Talk of a huge stylistic shift proved to be anticlimactic too: too mannered to inspire mass sing-a-longs, and not sufficiently experimental to be seen as a unique curio, NLOTH exists as a frustrating halfway house of nothingness.

11. Songs of Experience (2017)

Three years on from the Songs Of Innocence debacle, U2 were still convinced that the thematic ideas of that album were worth mining even further. Songs of Experience was initially conceived as an EP, much like Zooropa was originally envisaged as a succinct accompaniment to Achtung Baby, but, once again, it morphed into a full-length album.

No one is ever going to pick Songs Of Experience as their favourite U2 collection, as it suffers from much of the same blandness as its predecessor, but the inclusion of the very excellent Summer of Love elevates it above U2 at their worst.

10. How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (2004)

Winner of the 2006 Grammy for Album of the Year, which is... a bit much, truthfully, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb might be the most 'U2-sounding' album of U2’s career; all gargantuan, hook-heavy, soft rock, precision-tooled to trigger the synchronised sparking of lighters above head height in the world's largest venues.

Clichéd? Often. Schmaltzy? A bit. Effective? At its best, very much so. Recognising that City of Blinding Lights is clearly going for emotional manipulation doesn't mean you'll be immune to its charms, and lead single Vertigo is punchy, if obvious. If it's hard to understand exactly what got the Grammy voters frothing, HTDTAB is undeniably low-key seductive.

9. All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000)

After the dismal Pop, U2 retreated to safe ground for All That You Can’t Leave Behind; out went flashy stage outfits, onstage lemons and arch irony, back in came earnest stadium rock anthems, jeans and t-shirts. It's rather a shame that they felt compelled to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but rather this than it getting any sillier.

Re-establishing the brand, ATYCLB is not the classic return to form some have made out, but there are more than enough moments of soaring quality - Beautiful Day, Elevation, Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of - to make it a solid reaffirmation of the group's core values.

8. October (1981)

It’s fair to say that U2 still hadn’t completely found themselves by the time their second album was released. Still, if October is the weakest release of their first decade, mainly due to an over-reliance on blueprints established by post-punk influences like Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees, it still features some great moments.

With a Shout (Jerusalem) is driven along fantastically by Larry Mullen’s militaristic punk beats and opening track Gloria, with its spidery riff and ceaseless rhythmic march, is a true anthem. They’d get better, and quickly too, but October still stands up to scrutiny today.

7. Zooropa (1993)

Originally planned as a stop-gap EP to sate fans' appetites for new music between legs of the mammoth ZooTV world tour, the material on Zooropa fluctuates in quality, but a wealth of superior songs stack up to make this the last very, very good U2 album.

The quartet's experimental, Krautrock flights of fancy are milked for all their worth here, with The Edge fronting the band for the first time on the superb, staccato electro of Numb, and the industrial pulse of Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car proving absurdly OTT. Johnny Cash's cameo on The Wanderer is a nice touch, while album highlight Stay (Faraway So Close) is genuinely beautiful, heartfelt chamber pop. A bit of a lost classic, all told.

6. Boy (1980)

Opening your debut album with one of your greatest ever songs is a neat trick, one U2 pull off on Boy, with the shimmering, urgent I Will Follow an irresistible introduction to the young Dubliners.

It'd be a huge push to suggest that Boy foreshadowed U2's rise to become the biggest band in the world, but there's undeniable excitement in this set's youthful enthusiasm and kinetic energy, from the Joy Division-go-New Wave march of An Cat Dubh to the chugging guitars and gang vocals on Out of Control.

5. Rattle and Hum (1988)

U2-haters really hate Rattle and Hum: former Creation Records boss Alan McGee once said he would never have signed Oasis had he known that Noel Gallagher was a fan. Yes, the 1988 film documenting the quartet's love affair with America and its roots music is a little po-faced, but its companion album is so much better than it is given credit for.

The live tracks are predictably great, but it’s the studio cuts that shine brightest: Billie Holiday tribute Angel of Harlem is a fantastic soul song, Desire is a great bluesy stomp, and All I Want Is You is one of the finest ballads of U2’s career, with Bono’s subtle croon interweaving with soaring strings in spellbinding fashion. We're with Gallagher Snr. here.

4. War (1983)

Arguably the first album that truly sounded like the definitive version of U2. War is where everything falls perfectly into place for the Irishmen: the songs are broader, grander and more instantaneous, individual performances more assured, the balance between worthy punk and stadium rock expertly pitched.

Two Hearts Beat As One is gorgeously slinky, and Sunday Bloody Sunday is a stirring call to arms, but it’s New Year's Day that remains the high watermark - that bass line, those keys, that skyscraper chorus. The sound of a band truly finding their own voice, War represented a benchmark for U2's future.

3. The Unforgettable Fire (1984)

The passing of time has only accentuated the brilliance of The Unforgettable Fire, with the re-emergence of shoegaze and post-punk sonics in modern rock making these 10 songs sound more vital than ever.

The first fruit of U2's creative alliance with production duo Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, it sounds incredible. Pride (In The Name of Love) is the album's timeless anthem, Wire is where U2 finally out-Cure The Cure, and, although the definitive version of the song would be heard a year later at Live Aid, the sublime Bad, inspired by the heroin-related death of a close friend, might just be the best song of U2’s career.

2. The Joshua Tree (1987)

The record that turned U2 from a very big band into the biggest band on the face of the Earth. The Joshua Tree is a wonderful achievement, birthed by a group of still-hungry musicians giddy at their discovery of blues and Americana. The opening three tracks - Where the Streets Have No Name, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For and the beautifully simple With Or Without You - may well represent the most potent introduction to any album in the rock canon, and neither age nor familiarity can wither their impact.

Arguably though, the album gets even better towards its close, with less-lauded but exceptional deep cuts In God's Country, Exit and One Tree Hill. However you spin it, The Joshua Tree is an all-time classic.

1. Achtung Baby (1991)

You’re the biggest band on the planet, but experiencing a crisis of confidence: you can't see where you fit artistically at the dawn of a new decade and critics are sharpening their knives in anticipation of your inevitable fall from grace. What to do?

The obvious answer is probably not to buy some bug eye shades, abandon every element of the style that got you to this position, head to Berlin, make a self-mocking, ironic, post-modern set of dance rock songs and promote it by setting up your own television station.

But, that’s the weird world of Achtung Baby in something of a nutshell. With 18 million copies sold worldwide, it's hard to argue against U2's extraordinary reinvention as anything but a clear and obvious triumph, but even without that context, Achtung Baby deserves its spot at the top of this list on musical merit alone.

Nowhere is this band’s fusion of daring ambition and expert songwriting better realised; The Fly is a smarmy, glam rock belter, Acrobat a breathless rock waltz, Until the End of the World a maniacal mixture of tenderness and menace, while closer Love Is Blindness shows U2 at their grittiest, darkest and most moving. And that's before we get into the sublime One, the irresistible Even Better Than The Real Thing, So Cruel...

The biggest band on the planet proving exactly why they deserve all the plaudits that come their way, Achtung Baby is simply one of the finest albums you’ll ever hear.

Peter Hammill’s Tears In Time – his 37th solo album – arrives five years after his last solo release, 2021’s covers album In Translation, and nine years since 2017’s From The Trees, his last collection of original material. But the first thing to clear up is how to pronounce the new title – is it “tears” as in rips or as in crying?

“It’s whichever you choose,” says Hammill with amusement. “It’s like a flickering Chimera! I haven’t decided which way to say it myself; I’ll probably switch between one or the other. An interesting conceit, I thought!”

The 11-song work is described as having been “recorded at various locations between 1991 and 2026” – which might support the ‘rips in time’ interpretation – but the arrangements and lyrics all come from the past few years.

“I usually put in the dates of recordings, and a couple of pieces had their origins way back when I was still in [recording studio] Terra Incognita in Bath,” he explains. “But I’d say that actually both the tears and the tears are to do with the fact that there’s quite a lot of separations and endings in these songs.”

One of the oldest compositions on the album, dating back to 2022, is Heavy Weather, a version of which originally appeared on a limited-edition CD sold at Hammill’s October 2023 shows in Tokyo. While many of the songs on Tears In Time are reflections on time, memory and coming to terms with the hand that life has dealt, Heavy Weather is about the current state of the world.

“And specifically Ukraine,” says the Van der Graaf Generator man. “But Ukraine stands as a marker for so much of what’s happened since then. Obviously one has to live in hope and expectation and positivity, but these continue to be very worrying times.”

As has been standard procedure for decades now, he played, recorded and produced the album almost entirely on his own, although The Wheels is a co-write with longtime collaborator Saro Cosentino, who was also involved in its recording.

Hammill laughingly scoffs at the very idea of exposing his work to external feedback during its creation – but admits, “It’s probably not the most advisable thing to do. I end up with a finished piece of work I know everything about, but I don’t know how anyone else will take it, or how it fits into whatever I’ve done in the past.”

The first person to hear the finished product is always his wife Hilary, who’s described Tears In Time as “quite dark” – although, as Hammill says, “She usually does!”

The work feels vivid and accessible, certainly compared to the more minimal From The Trees. One of its standout tracks is Red Flags (In The Sunset), a terse rocker with a catchy refrain.

“Every so often, a three-chord trick will fall into your hands,” says Hammill. “It goes back to a Nadir-ish feeling, really, I’d say.”

And When He Ran, closing the record, is a particularly personal song about the death of his dog Bentley, known as Bendy. “Sometimes you have to write a song because that’s what you do, but I wasn’t sure at first whether I’d even make it public,” he says.

“But it’s something that a lot of people will have experienced. It’s about the acknowledgement and acceptance of the inevitability of things – it’s tough, but it’s OK. There’s still a memory of this spirit of life darting through the fields.”

Tears In Time is on sale now.

We're back with a brand new Tracks Of The Week! This week we've got another seven new and diverse slices of progressively inclined music for you to enjoy.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Steven Wilson walked off with the honours last week with the title track to his much-anticipated album, Requiem For A Village. The Pineapple Thief came a very credible second and fellow UK progger Joh. Holden in third place.

The premise is simple - we've listened to a batch of new releases by bands falling under the progressive umbrella, and collated them together in one post for you - it 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 (please, don't forget the photo!) and biog with quotes to us here.

LESOIR - HIDDEN FIRE

The Dutch band's latest single, the Eastern-sounding Hidden Fire, is taken from their upcoming album Tomorrow Is Now Today, which is released through V2 Records on October 23. It's without a doubt one of the most enigmatic pieces of music we've yet heard from the Maastricht sextet. You'll be able to hear more from the new album when the band play live with Airbag in the UK in October and with Annicke van Giersbergen across Europe in November.

"The track captures that quiet despair of watching identity dissolve into passive consumption, questioning whether people still make conscious choices about what they let in," the band say. "Do you let it go, or do you push back? Let the frustration win, or stay true to yourself and speak up anyway?"

CROWN LANDS - THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Canadian prog duo Crown Landes have been preparing for their upcoming homeland headline tour by decamping to Chalet Studios in Pickering, Ontario, where their heroes Rush had worked on albums such as Presto, Roll The Bones and Counterparts in pre-production, to record a few tracks from their recent Apocalypse album, including the epic Through The Looking Glass. Impressive stuff.

“For me, what separates a good band from a great band is what they can do as a live band. When there are no tricks or backing tracks, " explains guitarist/bassist/keyboardist Kevin Comeau. "Just the musicians in the room. We wanted to capture ourselves as honestly as we could with this live series. I’m very happy with the way that we captured the band at Chalet studio. Chalet is probably my favourite place to be in the entire world. I spend as much time there as I can. In fact, I married my wife there 3 years ago!'

PILOTINTHEPICTURE - RUN

Pilotinthepicture is the introspective solo project of Hamburg-based musician and songwriter Wolfram Zarnack, better known as the drummer for the psychedelic rock band Lee Shore and the post-metal band Drownship. Zarnack's solo work blends prog rock, ambient, post-rock, and psychedelia into a melancholic, atmospheric sound, and he releases his debut album, While We Escape, is released on October.

Zarnack refers to his sound as “post-progressive rock”, and the insistently melodic new single, Run, which is released today, also features the charming vocals of Josefine Winter, which add another level of magnetism to the overall sound.

THE FLOWER KINGS - THE GODS OF ROME PT. 2

Sweden's prog rock royalty, The Flower Kings, have followed up last year's LOVE album with the similarly themed HOPE, which they released through InsideOut Music on October 23. The Gods Of Rome Pt. 2 is more classy prog from Roine Stolt and pals, who show no sign of letting on their message of positivity, which hasn't always been taken well by some online, Stolt told Prog magazine last year!

"At a certain point in life - you arrive at a place where outside opinions matter less - and the process gravitates towards making an album that YOU yourself would LOVE but would perhaps normally not be viewed as a commercial attempt at all," Stolt says. "We, the band - trust YOU, the audience - to be curious and to trust us that we want to bring you a grand glowing adventure.”

“This is one of several parts of an epic piece of music that has been swirling around for some years. I reworked bits and wrote some new lyrics that now have the backdrop of ancient Rome - but act more as a metaphor for modern-day power play. Every nation and every leader/president wants to shine and be remembered as the greatest - expansive dreams often tend to implode, however.”

WARRINGTON-RUNCORN NEW TOWN DEVELOPMENT PLAN - THE MACHINE

If Kraftwerky, Kosmische sounds are your bag, then Gordon Chapman-Fox's brilliantly named Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan are the band for you! He's been exploring the modernist utopian aesthetic of the UK’s post-war new town development programme through timeless retro-futurist electronic music since 2020 and will release his latest album, Industrial Growth, through Castles In Space on October 30. The brooding The Machine is a most appetising starter.

“My music has been getting heavier and heavier over the years”, says Chapman-Fox. “As my music often reflects my feelings on the outside world, this is very much a visceral response to our current times. There’s always been a darkness to my work, but this felt like the time to unleash it all."

SHY, LOW - PALMISTRY

Shy, Low are an instrumental post-rock quintet hailing from Richmond, Virginia, who will release their forthcoming album Purity Spiral through Pelagic Records on October 16. New single Palmistry shows a mastery of restraint whilst still managing to capture the emotional grandeur that great post-rock delivers, which bodes well for the upcoming album.

"Whether constructing intricate layers of harmony or driving songs toward explosive climaxes, there is a deep understanding of pacing, atmosphere, and the power of restraint," the band confirm. "Momentum is at the heart of this album; through intricate rhythmic detail and explosive bursts of energy, drums become the anchor and catalyst, supporting the expansive arrangements while pushing them toward moments of cathartic release."

RAINBURN - CONFESSIONS

Bangalore progressive rock trio Rainburn's third album, thirty seven, due for release on November 4, is woven from a near-death experience that frontman Vats Iyengar endured and survived while stranded at sea. Across nine connected songs, the record explores faith, humanity’s perceived superiority over nature, love and mortality, while pushing Rainburn’s sound into new territory through industrial rhythms, electronic textures and stark acoustic guitar

"We wanted the video to tell a story of its own, independent of the album’s narrative, while staying true to the song’s central themes," says Iyengar. "The sonic template for this record was very different from what we've had in the past - we were referencing bands like Depeche Mode, Rammstein and Nine Inch Nails far more than bands that are usually classified as prog. Of course, all these new elements were pulled into the ambit of the Rainburn sound, so this is very much a deeply conceptual progressive rock album, albeit with some unique twists.”

Tom Morello has spent decades as one of rock’s greatest guitarists, but instead of leaning on his trademark riffs, his latest solo album pulls together every chapter of a career that stretches from Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave to The Nightwatchman and his recent run of high-profile collabs, with 15-year-old son Roman sharing songwriting credits on five tracks.

It’s a ride with many twists and turns. The title track lumbers in on a bluesy groove, Tom’s weathered baritone recalling Johnny Cash at his most worldweary, while Adjourn It pairs Serj Tankian with the closest thing here to classic Tom Morello riffing. Date Night tears through a World War II resistance story with punk fire, Soldier In The Army Of Love smashes gospel, country and rap together before Tom fires up the fretboard, while Unconquered slams The Prodigy’s electronic pulse into Kneecap’s confrontational flow and Everything Burns, featuring Beartooth, lands one of the album’s biggest hooks.

By the time Tom reaches the Dylan-esque folk of The Last Rung On The Ladder and They Can’t Kill Us All, the album feels almost naked, leaving his convictions to speak for themselves. His politics haven’t softened with age, either. Serj Tankian’s righteous fury, Kneecap’s confrontational energy and Beartooth’s arena-sized punch all strengthen the songs while reinforcing themes of anti-fascism, immigrant rights and solidarity, all delivered through storytelling, punk energy and protest folk rather than sloganeering alone.

Tom’s playing remains unmistakable, yet it’s his versatility that leaves the strongest impression. Every side of his musical identity finds a place here, resulting in an album from an artist refusing to be defined by the instrument that made him famous.

Everyone Gets Everything They Want is out now via Mom & Pop.

By the time Fish’s final album Weltschmerz arrived in September 2020, it had been subject to delays for several years. In late 2018 – when he was still hoping for a release in a few months’ time – he was confident it would achieve what he wanted it to, and compared the experience to writing his final album with Marillion 31 years previously.

Retirement may be part of life, but for those who’ve had four decades’ immersion in an artist’s music and polished lyrics, the thought of a final album comes with an overwhelming sadness. For Fish, that album is the long-touted Weltschmerz, which – if his plans come to fruition – would already released and bookending his catalogue. Indeed, his December 2019 live expedition was billed as a Weltschmerz & Clutching At Straws Tour – the only problem being that Fish and his band hadn’t written a note of the new record.

“Yeah, last year I was really worried about it,” he admits. “There’s been so much that’s happened. My dad died in May 2016; and six months later, I kind of woke up in the garden and went, ‘Where has the last six months gone?’ I also had a lot of health problems and I just couldn’t get my head into writing. I was in a state of perpetual recovery.

“It was really only around February this year that Steve [Vantsis, bassist] and I had that one spark that just set the control room ablaze. Finally, things just started to come together. I mean, this is tagged as my last album. I just want to do what I want to do and it’s like a ‘damn the torpedoes’ kind of vibe. I’m just going to feel the whole thing through. Whatever it demands will be done.”

Certainly, there was a slight but nagging doubt that writer’s block might blight the project. But once a firm direction had been formed, ideas began to speedily morph into tracks. Within six weeks the duo had four songs in demo form, with two of those running to around 15 minutes each. With another two lengthy epics also in development, Fish began to consider a double album. Yet with the original intention for the album to be released by September, that was adding unnecessary pressure to his schedule.

“I realised it would really screw things up – I knew I’d never be get a double written,” he recalls. “Around March, I got a call from Mark Wilkinson, who told me that he had some issues he had to deal with and there was no way he’d get the artwork ready for September. He and I had been talking for the year previously about how we wanted to put together a great packaging layout, similar if not better to A Feast Of Consequences.

“I said, ‘Look, you’ve worked on every project that I’ve ever been involved with since 1982 and there’s no way I’m going into my last album without you.’ So I thought, ‘Fuck it – let’s find the silver in the dark cloud and put the album back to May 2019.’ I could have put my head under a pillow and had a good sob ,but I just thought, ‘Let’s find a way round it. There’s always a solution to everything.’”

For Fish, there’s a need for the lyrics to dictate the album’s flow – or as he calls them, “rock flicks moments” – where he can effectively draft a short story, then translate it onto a musical backdrop. It’s often been a tricky process. His plan was to bring his band to his Haddington home studio and filter ideas through a process of lengthy jams.

That provided difficult: guitarist Robin Boult was on tour with Howard Jones, and keyboardist John Beck “wasn’t answering his phone.” That left the singer to nurture his relationship with Vantsis, leading to the revisiting of a technique that dates back to Marillion’s early days.

“It’s really quite strange – I’ve kind of gone back to writing in the same way we did between 1982 and 1985,” he laughs. “It’s that kind of vibe. We’re taking bits and putting bits together, but they’re the right bits. It’s like Marillion used to trust me. I could say that I thought one bit works well with another bit, or that I needed a section to go from one piece to another. It’s all about letting the drama and the dynamic rule it with a very strong lyric.”

Anyone who’s followed his career, or seen the interviews which accompany the recent reissues of Marillion’s 80s catalogue may spot an irony. He’s been pretty outspoken about the band’s writing technique of piecing together tracks “with sticky tape.” Return to that method appears to be a pretty dramatic turnaround.

“Well yes, but that’s because I came to loathe it,” he says. “Back in the Script… and Fugazi days, I think they trusted me, and there were a lot of ideas around that we could sift through. Clutching At Straws was when we moved into songwriting. When we moved on to the album that was supposed to come after Clutching At Straws, I was getting presented with loads of bits – but they didn’t make sense. It was like having different scenes from different movies and trying to construct a story amongst it, you know?

Steve trusts me and trusts my vision on the lyrical side in the same way that the guys used to do in the old days. When you listen to the song we’ve just completed, Waverley Steps, there’s definitely a throwback to that period – it reminds me of Fugazi in the way the tempos move. It was like, ‘This is the story; this is what I need to put across, and I need so many bars to go into the next section.’ It really was like making movies for people’s ears. That’s been commanding all the songs.”

The German word “weltschmerz” refers to a sense of world-weariness and ennui; so it’s obvious that the album possesses an overriding sense of darkness. Yet Fish was keen to avoid clichés, and determined that the lyrics would be far removed from the more obvious protest songs delivered over the decades.

“I got the idea for the title over two years ago, when I was watching the news, and also becoming more aware of people’s feelings,” he explains. “There was a lot of sadness and world-weariness. It wasn’t apathy – it was that people were feeling browbeaten. The last thing I wanted to do though was talk about corporations, kings and queens or corrupt governments. That’s been done so many times by other people, right the way back to Queensrÿche in the 80s. I feel that I’m good at observations of people and observations of things happening around me. So it’s become a collection of songs, in the third person, that are all about people dealing with the world they live in.”

At face value, those subject matters may sound impenetrably gloomy. Waverley Steps delves into male suicide, C Song is written from the perspective of someone diagnosed with cancer, and Market Garden discusses dementia. There are also songs about self-harming and refugees. It’s by no means easy listening – but then Fish has always covered similar subjects in a researched and cerebral manner. Marillion’s Punch And Judy and his solo track Family Business covered domestic violence, and the likes of He Knows You Know referenced drug misuse. Yet for all the preconceptions that could be made about this new material, it’s far from being depressing collection.

“The subjects are really, really heavy,” he accepts. “But the approach I’m taking is something like the movie American Beauty. It deals with really dark subject matters, but it’s done in such a beautiful way. I’m not going out there to try and bring people down. There’s a melancholy to it – but it’s a beautiful melancholy. I took a whip to my own back as well, in that I gave myself a challenge to have a reference to a plant or a garden in every song. That’s all to do with being in the garden for six months after my dad died.”

The delay in writing the material led to the hatching of another masterplan. His current tour features the premiere of songs from Weltschmerz, with an EP and downloads of selected tracks released simultaneously, included Waverley Steps, Little Man What Now and Man With A Stick.

“I felt that I could really approach this in a completely different way,” he says. “Rather than the old-fashioned fanfare of ‘here’s the album,’ let’s release a bunch of downloads first. On tour we’re playing 40 to 50 minutes of Weltschmerz along with the Clutching At Straws material – which we intended to do the previous year. I was aware that the fans needed to hear it otherwise there will be some very awkward silences.

“So we’ve recorded 30 to 40 minutes of music already, and then in January, February and March 2019, we’ll record the rest of the material, ready for the album release next May. Next year, it’s the 30th anniversary of Vigil In A Wilderness Of Mirrors, which we’ll tour with Weltschmerz at the end of the year. Then in 2020, that will be the farewell tour.”

It’s evident that Fish intends the album to be a career peak, yet he feels free to enjoy the final writing and recording process. He’ll depart the recording studio with an eloquent, musical swagger rather than a nervous whimper.

“I really want to make it special. I’ve got Dave Jackson from Van der Graaf Generator coming to play saxophone on it – that’s going to be a real teenage dream for me. We’ve got string sections; we’re putting real brass onto Waverley Steps. This isn’t getting made for the money. No; I have to make this something really, really special. I want to be a recording that I can be proud of.

“When I left Marillion, Clutching At Straws had been the best album I did with them. It was my favourite album. One of the problems I’ve had is that people always ask what would have happened next. That’s the way I want to leave my solo career: I want to write an album where people are going to ask what would have happened next? Which is always the end to a good film.”

In the middle of legal disputes over their name, Pink Floyd created a personal and emotionally exposed album. The Division Bell defiantly went against the Britpop zeitgeist to top the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Prog explored its history in 2014.

"Why is that bloke singing like Syd?” asked Rick Wright. It was May 1994, and Pink Floyd’s keyboard player had just heard Blur’s new album Parklife. Floyd were on tour in America and had gathered in guitarist David Gilmour’s hotel suite to listen to the album that had just supplanted their latest, The Division Bell, at the No.1 spot.

Wright might have been concerned that Damon Albarn sounded like his ex-bandmate Syd Barrett, but his was the only dissenting voice. “We wanted to hear what all the fuss was about,” bassist Guy Pratt said. “Most of us thought Parklife was very good.”

Pink Floyd could afford to be gracious in defeat. The Division Bell, released in March 1994, became the band’s first album since 1975’s Wish You Were Here to reach No.1 in both the UK and US. Their 14th studio release also went multi-platinum and turned out to be a lone victory for prog rock in the boom years of Blur-style Britpop and dance music.

The Division Bell should be remembered for its music rather than the intra-band bickering that had blighted the previous nine years.

In October 1985, three years after Floyd’s The Final Cut, founder member/bass guitarist Roger Waters took out a High Court application to try to prevent the band name being used again. Weeks later he informed the group’s record company that he was leaving the band, and that the group were no more.

Unfortunately for Waters, Gilmour had no intention of laying Floyd to rest. “Dave absolutely saw red, and finally got it together to go back to work,” wrote drummer Nick Mason in his memoir, Inside Out. A year later, the Waters-less Floyd made their debut with A Momentary Lapse Of Reason.

Wright, who’d left under duress in 1979, had returned midway through the sessions, but wasn’t made a full-time member again. Instead, his name topped a list of 16 session musicians deployed to help bring the band back from the dead. Gilmour worked briefly with several outside songwriters, and the process was frequently interrupted by calls from lawyers tasked with defending his decision to continue. Waters even tried to stop the new Floyd from touring – but failed.

He went on to describe A Momentary Lapse as “a fair forgery,” but it still reached No.3 in Britain and America, and was promoted with a tour that turned Floyd into the second highest grossing act of 1987.

“I didn’t think it was the best Pink Floyd album ever made,” Gilmour admitted. But it proved that Floyd could still be a commercial success without Waters, the man who’d devised the concepts for The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall.

The first steps towards making The Division Bell began in January 1993 with Gilmour, Mason and Wright jamming in their Britannia Row Studios in North London. Before long, Pratt, who’d played on the Momentary Lapse tour, joined them. It was a dream come true for the bassist who, as a teenager, had watched his colleagues play The Wall at Earls Court. “It was thrilling to know you were playing on a Pink Floyd record,” he said Pratt, recalling that Gilmour gently instructed him to lose “90 per cent of the notes I was playing”.

By spring, Gilmour had moved the operation to his houseboat-cum-studio, Astoria, on the Thames, and he brought in The Wall and Momentary Lapse co-producer Bob Ezrin. Having amassed around 65 of what Mason described as “riffs, patterns and musical doodles,” Gilmour reported that "we had what we called ‘the big listen,’ where everyone voted on each piece of music.”

Ideas were merged or discarded; but so much material was left over that the band briefly considered, then rejected, the idea of releasing some of it on a separate album, including a set they dubbed The Big Spliff – which was, Mason explained, “the kind of ambient mood music being adopted by bands like The Orb.”

The voting system was abandoned when the others discovered that Wright was awarding his ideas the highest possible score, and everybody else’s the lowest. Part of the problem was that he wasn’t a full band member: “It came very close to a point where I wasn’t going to do the album, because I didn’t feel that what we’d agreed was fair,” he said. Soon he was fully reinstated, and scored credits on four of the album’s 11 tracks.

Shortly before the summer, Floyd – joined by Pratt and fellow touring members Tim Renwick Gary Wallis and Jon Carin – entered Olympic Studios in Barnes, West London, and recorded a handful of new songs. They later reconvened on the Astoria and began developing those tracks further. But Gilmour now faced the hurdle of writing lyrics; and unlike Waters, he wasn’t a confident lyricist. Ex-Slapp Happy songwriter Anthony Moore – who’d co-written on A Momentary Lapse – and former Dream Academy singer-songwriter Nick Laird-Clowes would both contribute to The Division Bell. But Gilmour’s then girlfriend, journalist and author Polly Samson, would end up co-writing the lion’s share of the words.

“I started writing things and looking to her for an opinion; and gradually, as a writer herself and an intelligent person, she started putting her oar in, and I encouraged her,” explained Gilmour, who’d spend the day working on the music on the Astoria before going home to write with his soon-to-be wife. “There was,” he said, “a whole invisible side to the process.”

Not everyone was comfortable with the situation. “It wasn’t easy at first,” Ezrin admitted. “It put a strain on the boys’ club, and it was almost clichéd to have this new woman coming in and then get involved in the career. But whatever David was thinking at the time, she helped him find a way to say it.”

Between them, the couple wrote the album’s strongest song, High Hopes. “It pulled the whole album together,” said Ezrin. “It also gave us an idea around which to hang some of the broader concepts.” Partly inspired by Gilmour’s childhood and adolescence in Cambridge, its beautiful lap steel guitar solo evoked Shine On You Crazy Diamond, while composer Michael Kamen’s orchestral arrangement flashed back to the strings and woodwind he’d used on Comfortably Numb.

In the meantime, Floyd dragged some of their vintage keyboards out of storage and sampled their sounds for Take It Back and Marooned. Wright was delighted: “My influence can be heard on tracks like Marooned. Those were the kind of things that I gave the Floyd in the past – it was good that they were now getting used again.”

In fact, the whole album was full of familiar motifs. Dark Side and Wish You Were Here saxophonist Dick Parry returned to the fold. So too did Dark Side mixing supervisor Chris Thomas, who helped oversee the final mix instead of Ezrin. “That was disappointing,” understated the producer.

High Hopes’ themes of nostalgia and reflection were reprised in the Gilmour, Samson and Laird-Clowes composition Poles Apart. Its first verse was inspired by Barrett; its second by Waters. What Ezrin called “the broader concept” of The Division Bell was communication and the difficulties thereof: between friends, wives and lovers, and former bandmates.

The clues were there in titles such as Lost For Words and Keep Talking, the last of which sampled scientist Stephen Hawking’s voice. “It’s more of a wish that all problems can be solved through discussion, rather than a belief,” said Gilmour, who was well aware of the irony considering Floyd’s poor track record in communicating with each other.

However, The Division Bell also seemed to have a subtext: rebirth. On Wearing The Inside Out, Wright cast himself as a man venturing back into the world after years of isolation. “There’s a lot of emotional honesty there,” said Ezrin. “Fans pick up on a sad and vulnerable side of Rick.”

Wright wasn’t the only one being emotionally honest. Gilmour talked about ‘killing the past’ on Coming Back To Life. Many took this as a reference to embracing his relationship with Samson and rejecting the hedonistic lifestyle he’d been enjoying for the previous few years.

Revisiting The Division Bell now, the angst and tension remains clear. On What Do You Want From Me, supposedly inspired by good old fashioned marital strife, Gilmour sounds fired up and frustrated as he dishes out some heavy blues guitar. Play it alongside 2006’s charming if very contented-sounding solo album On An Island, and you can hear the difference.

The album was complete by the new year, and the band began casting around for titles. Nick Mason favoured ‘Down To Earth’; others preferred ‘Pow-Wow’. In the end band friend and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy author Douglas Adams, spotted the words ‘the division bell’ in the lyrics to High Hopes, and suggested that instead.

Although the record suffers from what Pratt calls some “80s production hangovers,” it’s compensated for by Gilmour’s sense of tension and urgency, along with Wright’s welcome presence. Unlike Momentary Lapse, The Division Bell feels like a group effort; and Gilmour was soon telling interviewers that he thought it was the most Pink Floyd-sounding album since Wish You Were Here. Everything from those spaced-out keyboards to the languid guitar solos and Storm Thorgerson’s grandiose cover art compounded his theory.

Waters called it “an awful record,” and Melody Maker likened it to “chewing on a bucket of gravel” – but Floyd’s fanbase disagreed and the album soon topped the charts in 10 countries. Naturally, you can’t help wondering what a follow-up might have sounded like. Bob Ezrin feels the same. “I wish it wasn’t the last Pink Floyd album,” he said. “But I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

No one would have predicted in 1976 that The Alan Parsons Project – a duo made up of a songwriter and a studio boffin – would become a huge commercial success. It’s been 50 years since the release of Alan Parsons’ and Eric Woolfson’s still-astounding debut album, Tales Of Mystery And Imagination (Edgar Allan Poe). Prog tells the story of a most unlikely phenomenon.

You wouldn’t immediately label Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson as future rock stars if you saw them in 1974. In photos from the era, they look like regular people with, perhaps, a slightly introverted edge that revealed their preferred activity – writing and recording music in the comfort of a studio. In those early pictures, they look like music fans, Prog readers in fact, and yet they went on to sell 50 million albums, something that few modern artists are unlikely ever to do.

The greatest of tales often have humble beginnings, and in the case of The Alan Parsons Project, the initial meeting of minds took place in the rather municipal surroundings of the canteen at Abbey Road Studios in London. It occurred in the summer of 1974: Woolfson, a songwriter and artist manager who was at Abbey Road to produce young artist Darren Burn, approached Parsons, a successful studio engineer and producer, with a compelling proposal. At 6’3” and 6’6” in height respectively, Woolfson and Parsons quickly saw eye-to-eye in more ways than one.

Parsons, born in London in 1948, had begun his career with a brief stint as a folk rock musician before landing a job at EMI then moving to Abbey Road in the late 60s, where he found himself working on The Beatles’ record named after the studio. “I’ve still never quite got used to the fact that I was involved in recording a Beatles album,” he later said. “That euphoria has always been there. You never shake it off.”

He went on to engineer Wings’ Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway and worked with The Hollies, notably on their 1974 hit The Air That I Breathe; but his biggest score at that point was an engineering role on Pink Floyd’s era-defining The Dark Side Of The Moon in 1972, for which he received a Grammy nomination – his first of 13 to date.

Woolfson, born in Glasgow in 1945, had been a session pianist before writing songs covered by Marianne Faithfull, Chris Farlowe and others; he also worked for the Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, and once recalled Mick Jagger asking him for piano lessons. He was managing Kung Fu Fighting singer Carl Douglas at the time of his meeting with Parsons. His idea was to form a musical partnership to record songs he’d written years previously about the works of American author Edgar Allan Poe.

He’d been inspired by a marketing course he’d attended in the 60s, at which the lecturer had mentioned that no cinematic adaptation of Poe’s works had ever made a loss. “This struck a chord with me,” ruminated Woolfson, “and I thought to myself, ‘If no film of Poe’s work has lost money, why should a musical album be any different?’”

Furthermore, he had vivid memories from his youth of seeing Poe posters in Glasgow cinemas. He’d been too young to see gothic classics The Fall Of The House Of Usher, The Pit And The Pendulum and The Raven at the time – but that only added to their unnerving allure.

The idea appealed to Parsons, a literary man himself, and as the pair talked further the discussion extended to the suggestion that Woolfson should become Parsons’ manager; despite his successes with Wings, The Hollies and Pink Floyd, he was not being recompensed suitably. “I had two consecutive No.1 records on the UK charts, and I had no money in the bank, so I thought something was wrong,” as he puts it.

Woolfson, experienced in chasing down overdue payments on Douglas’ behalf, soon rectified the situation, and the partnership was established. The idea of a manager also being his client’s musical partner raised a few eyebrows at Abbey Road, but that didn’t stop Woolfson securing a single-album contract for the Poe LP with 20th Century Records, the Fox studio label spinoff run by Russ Regan, to which Douglas was also signed. A UK deal was also signed with the Charisma label, run by entrepreneur Tony Stratton-Smith.

The record, Tales Of Mystery And Imagination (Edgar Allan Poe), was recorded primarily at Abbey Road, with earlier demos recorded at Pathway Studios. Woolfson wrote the songs with Parsons engineering and producing; he also contributed musical pieces, primarily instrumental. The music would be recorded by session musicians and vocals laid down by guest vocalists.

As Woolfson told this magazine’s editor: “Neither of us wanted any permanent members other than the two of us… I saw an opportunity to combine the roles of manager, songwriter and lyricist with Alan’s skills as an engineer and producer, allowing us to make records much in the same way as Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock made movies – where the directors, rather than the artists, were the focal point.”

Recording sessions at Abbey Road were booked with guitarist Ian Bairnson, bassist David Paton, drummer Stuart Tosh and keyboardist Billy Lyall from the Scottish pop band Pilot recruited to lay down the backing tracks. They were elite talents, with the best-known of them nowadays probably the late Bairnson – who went on to play the solo that you know (whether you think so or not) from the outro of Kate Bush’s 1978 single Wuthering Heights.

Bairnson recalled his band’s contact with Parsons had come after “EMI presented Pilot with a list of 10 engineers working in Abbey Road who wanted to graduate to producing. David recognised Alan Parsons as the engineer on The Dark Side Of The Moon, so his name stood out on the list. We’d noticed Eric Woolfson chatting to Alan in the canteen at Abbey Road, and Eric told us he would be managing him.”

With Andrew Powell, formerly of Henry Cow, on board as arranger and ad hoc keyboard and organ player, guest lead vocals came from John Miles, Arthur Brown, former child actor Leonard Whiting, Terry Sylvester of The Hollies and Parsons’ then-wife Smokey. Two choirs – The English Chorale and the Westminster City School Boys Choir – were booked; Parsons played synth and recorder; and Woolfson played piano, keyboards, harpsichord and organ, as well as singing backing vocals.

That’s an advanced dramatis personae by any standards; but it became even more so when Parsons landed on the idea of recruiting none other than renowned film director Orson Welles to read the spoken-word introduction to the first song, A Dream Within A Dream. “We said, ‘How about getting a really good narrator to introduce the album, and making him the voice of Edgar Allan Poe?’” Parsons recalls. “Somebody at the label knew how to contact Orson Welles, and he agreed to do it. I said, ‘Oh, fantastic – when would he like to do the recording?’ and the record company guy said, ‘I’ll find out.’ Literally the next morning, there was a tape on his desk.”

Unfortunately, Welles’ contribution – speedy though it had been – was a little too late in the process to be included on the original album. “It was very disappointing that we couldn’t use it for the release,” says Parsons. “I went through 11 years of being unhappy about it, but fortunately we had a chance to include it when I remixed the album for CD in 1987.”

Another recording session took place in Hollywood when Parsons invited rock band Ambrosia – fellow 20th Century Records signings whose second album, Somewhere I’ve Never Travelled, he’d just produced – to contribute to The Raven. Bassist Joe Puerta remembers now that “Alan asked us if we’d do him a favour and cut a track before they went back to England. Of course we agreed, because we were delighted to be doing something for Alan. But the subject was a complete mystery. When we went into the studio we weren’t told what the album was going to be about.”

It led to a fortuitous creative moment: “I asked, ‘What’s this song about?’ Eric said, ‘Well, it’s called The Raver.’ I said, ‘What’s a raver?’ He said, ‘A raver is what we call a streetwalker [sex worker] in London.’ I said, ‘Oh, well, if it’s a streetwalker, shouldn’t it be a little more funky?’ and I played the bass part that ended up on the album. He said, ‘Yeah, that’ll work!’ So, interestingly enough, had they not lied about what the song was about, I might not have thought of that bass part. If he’d said, ‘It’s called The Raven’, I don’t know what kind of arrangement that would have inspired.”

So what is Tales Of Mystery And Imagination actually like? Well, as with most advanced music, it’s hard to do justice to it in words; but one general observation is that in 2026 it doesn’t sound like a record made in the mid-70s. The irresistible hooks of its songs, combined with the impact of their production, gives it common ground with a whole range of modern sounds, from prog to synthpop and beyond. At the same time, the sheer volume of instruments and the richness of their arrangements gives the music huge dimensions, although Parsons maintains full control of the production, reining in the backing musicians to allow the orchestral elements the room they need.

The Raven is notable for an electronically treated vocal from Parsons via a vocoder: it’s a strings-heavy, chorale-driven composition, highly dynamic, falling almost silent at points. Bairnson delivers a searing guitar solo at the song’s midpoint, and unnerving chants of ‘Nevermore!’ finish up the song. Leonard Whiting – otherwise best known for starring in Franco Zeffirelli’s controversial 1968 film Romeo & Juliet – delivers a rather more introverted performance than that of Arthur Brown, who makes The Tell-Tale Heart his own with all the eccentric gusto that fans of his theatrical character would expect. Listen out for Parsons’ added ingredients: a harmonised guitar solo, layers of smooth vocals, guitar swells and even timpani as the song reaches its peak.

The highly accomplished John Miles – best known then and now for the Parsons-produced 1978 single Music – lends his golden pipes to The Cask Of Amontillado, a sombre, piano and strings-driven composition that builds to a full orchestra, but there are pauses for silence to punctuate the track. (On that note, Parsons always maintained that true silence was impossible to achieve on recordings that use analogue tape, because the tape contains nearly inaudible artefacts: it was only with the advent of CD, six years or so after the release of Tales, that real silence was present on audio recordings.)

Side one, if you’re listening on the original LP or one of the sumptuous vinyl reissues that have appeared since 2007, ends with (The System Of) Doctor Tarr And Professor Fether, which you won’t forget in a hurry because of the expert three-note hook in Bairnson’s guitar solo, and also because it has another set of superb vocals from Miles. The song ends with a fusillade of guitar harmonies and a threatening bass drone – something of a recurring motif on Project albums.

All this songwriting, arranging, performing and producing expertise is merely the appetiser for side two, the five-part suite The Fall Of The House Of Usher. Largely orchestral in nature and symphonic in structure, it moves from the cinematic Prelude to Arrival via the sounds of a thunderstorm, recorded by Woolfson and Paton when the skies unexpectedly opened over Abbey Road. A church organ, nippy synth notes and drum rolls combine with reverberating guitar for a lustrous feel, making the short Intermezzo that follows a chance to take a breath, if a tense one: it’s a minute of horror-movie strings.

Here’s where Andrew Powell really earned his fee, as he recalls: “We used unusual seating layouts for the orchestra for stereo effects on some titles. Most of the orchestra was recorded at Abbey Road, although the very large orchestra used on the Fall Of The House Of Usher suite was done at the old Kingsway Hall in central London, which had a great acoustic – even if one could occasionally hear the underground trains during quiet passages.”

Woolfson and Parsons really flex their songwriting and production muscles on the next two tracks, Pavane and Fall. The former builds via a double bass solo to a full-band groove, while the latter is a dramatic, full-orchestra experience that ends suddenly, leaving a final, unhurried To One In Paradise as the calm after the storm. It’s sung by Terry Sylvester with supporting vocals by Parsons and Woolfson.

Although the album had a title, Woolfson and Parsons didn’t yet have a name for their collaboration, referring to it until the last minute as “the Alan Parsons project” (note the lower-case second ‘P’). Regan liked the working title, though, and insisted on using it – much to Parsons’ surprise. As he says: “I thought it was going to be ‘Various Artists, produced by Alan Parsons.’ The name ‘The Alan Parsons Project’ was invented literally just before the release.”

Artwork was commissioned from Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis, best known at that point – like Parsons himself – for their work on Dark Side. “Alan and Eric wanted something which was very simple and plain as a graphic,” says Powell, “so our photographer, George Hardie, worked with us to create the symbol that you see on the cover. We also shot images that would be associated with Poe: you get the ravens in there, you get the ghostly, ethereal figure of the girl standing on the stairs and so on. We chose to do it at St Pancras Station, which in those days was very old and run-down. It was just a series of corridors and staircases full of cobwebs and grime. It was very fitting for that sort of spooky atmosphere.”

Tales of Mystery was released in the US in April 1976 against some tough competition – although had it appeared six months later it would have faced an even more powerful adversary in the Sex Pistols. As it was, huge-selling rock albums such as Frampton Comes Alive, the Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) and Wings At The Speed Of Sound were doing extraordinary business – not that Parsons and Woolfson gave a damn about any of that when they launched their LP at the Griffith Park Observatory planetarium in Ll. The event came with one of the very first laser light shows, Orson Welles’ taped commentary and a huge afterparty: Woolfson and Parsons were evidently not planning to let their new masterpiece escape anyone’s attention.

“That was a terrific show, a huge spectacle,” recalls Joe Puerta. “You knew they were thinking big. It was obvious this wasn’t just going to be an album that they would toss out then go out and play a few clubs and see what happened. They definitely broke the mould of the music industry.”

However, an unpleasant surprise awaited: the record failed to make a major commercial impact, reaching only No.56 on the British album charts on its release that August – although it did make some inroads overseas. Reviews were generally civil but lukewarm, although an early fan was Harry Doherty of Melody Maker, who wrote: “I’ve played this album almost constantly for three weeks,” and the NME’s Fred Dellar wrote a florid appreciation in the style of Poe himself.

Both Parsons and Woolfson were disappointed by the relative commercial failure. The latter’s daughter, Sally – who now manages the Project catalogue – recalls: “Dad talked about the excitement of the album coming out, and then the shock when it wasn’t successful, which is why 20th Century Records didn’t offer them a contract for the next album.”

Still, the Project were just getting started. A glittering future lay ahead of them. What’s more, its legacy is intact, with the genius in the grooves of the LP long acknowledged. Modern analyses define the album as an essential part of music history, an example being Classic Rock magazine, which included Tales in its 50 Albums That Built Prog.

The last word goes to Parsons: “If I had to nominate a Project album as my favourite, I would choose Tales. There is something about it that’s unique to this day.”

“The Alan Parsons Project Book (hardback) is published on Rocket88 Books in November: https://alanparsonsprojectbook.com

Bullet For My Valentine have announced their first album since 2021.

The Bridgend metalcore favourites have detailed Social Apocalypse, the follow-up to their self-titled effort, due to come out on March 19 via Spinefarm Records. Pre-orders are now live, with the artwork and tracklisting available below.

Two guest spots have been confirmed: Lorna Shore screamer Will Ramos is set to appear on I Don’t Trust Tomorrow, while Chrissy Costanza of Against The Current is lined up for In The Absence Of You.

Bullet have also released Social Apocalypse’s lead single and title track. Watch the music video below.

Singer/guitarist Matt Tuck says of the new album’s themes: “Everything in life is changing at such a rapid pace, and it is hard to find a great deal of positivity when you look at events in the world.

“People are being pitted against each other. The world is full of conflict instead of unity. As a father, I look at what the world is like for younger people, and how completely different it is now.”

The album was produced by longtime collaborator Carl Bown, also known for his work with Sleep Token, While She Sleeps and Malevolence. “Carl doesn’t let you settle,” says Tuck. “He is always ready to speak up, push and challenge you to be the best version of you.”

To accompany the news, Bullet have detailed a new European tour for January and February 2027. The band will play arenas across the continent and in the UK, with support from Australian drum and bass group Pendulum. Florida metalcore young guns Dark Divine will open. Tickets go on sale on Wednesday, September 30, at 9am local time. See the dates below.

Drummer Jason Bowld spoke about Social Apocalypse last May, saying that the band intend to release a new single every month from the album’s announcement until its release. He promised “five singles, maybe, before it comes out”. In December 2025, Tuck said that Social Apocalypse will musically be a cross between their breakthrough 2005 debut The Poison, 2010’s Fever and the self-titled record.

Bullet attracted controversy in May 2025, when they announced that they’d cut short their co-headlining tour with Trivium to focus on making their new album. The Poisoned Ascendancy run was initially promoted as a world tour set to last from January to December; it ended up lasting just four months, with legs on two continents.

After Trivium’s Paolo Gregoletto and Corey Beaulieu blamed Tuck for the premature end via social media, Bullet issued a counter-statement saying that they wanted to focus on writing new music. Still, Bullet went on to play further shows in Australia, Asia and South America later that year.

Bullet For My Valentine: Social Apocalypse

1. Social Apocalypse
2. In The Absence Of You (feat. Chrissy Costanza of Against The Current)
3. I Don’t Trust Tomorrow (feat. Will Ramos of Lorna Shore)
4. Here Without You
5. Acid Rain
6. Fragile
7. CVLT
8. Masquerade
9. Read Between The Lines
10. Enough Is Never Enough

Bullet For My Valentine 2027 tour dates:

• Jan 21: Lisbon Campo Pequeno, Portugal
• Jan 22: Madrid Palacio Vistalegre, Spain
• Jan 23: Barcelona Sant Jordi Club, Spain
• Jan 25: Milan Forum, Italy
• Jan 26: Zurich Hallenstadion, Switzerland
• Jan 27: Dusseldorf Mitsubishi Electric Halle, Germany
• Jan 29: Hamburg Sporthalle, Germany
• Jan 30: Copenhagen KB Hallen, Denmark
• Jan 31: Stockholm Annexet, Sweden
• Feb 02: Helsinki Ice Hall, Finland
• Feb 04: Katowice MCK, Poland
• Feb 06: Munich Zenith, Germany
• Feb 07: Paris Zenith, France
• Feb 09: Luxembourg Rockhal, Luxembourg
• Feb 11: Frankfurt Festhalle, Germany
• Feb 12: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
• Feb 13: Vienna Stadthalle, Austria
• Feb 15: Budapest Budapest Arena, Hungary
• Feb 16: Prague O2 Universum, Czech Republic
• Feb 17: Berlin Velodrome, Germany
• Feb 19: Amsterdam AFAS Live, Netherlands
• Feb 20: Brussels Forest National, Belgium
• Feb 23: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
• Feb 25: Birmingham BP Pulse Live, UK
• Feb 26: London The O2, UK
• Feb 27: Manchester AO Arena, UK

In her recently deactivated post-metal band Svalbard, singer/guitarist Serena Cherry’s lyrics tackled such hard realities as mental health and abuse. You can’t blame her for retreating to fantasyland every now and again. Her solo outlet Noctule offers her refuge in videogames, and this second album takes the perspective of the bosses from Elden Ring, the hit RPG that helped Serena through her depression.

Noctule’s debut, 2021’s Skyrim-obsessed Wretched Abyss, was a raw introduction written during the Covid lockdowns and a promising start – Serena played every instrument herself, as she does again here – even if much of it sounded similar to Svalbard’s heaviest parts. It was a side-quest for fans of her then-main pursuit.

On Extinguish Thy Flame, there’s a musical identity as well as a thematic one. Although the pained Goddess Of Rot would have fit in on Svalbard’s 2023 swansong, The Weight Of The Mask, the rest combines the slicing guitars of Serena’s heroes Arch Enemy with the apocalyptic textures of Emperor.

Starting with a demented war cry over death/thrash riffing, opener proper Devour The Gods explodes forward. The titanic imagery – ‘Teeth like daggers, throne of flame! Reject the order and say my name!’ – scores high on the holy-fuck-o’meter, and Grafted doubles down on that epic scope. It’s an unencumbered symphonic black metal rager, where stabbing strings and ominous keys give way to frostbitten tremolo picking.

Everything else, from Lament Of The Omen King’s melodeath tapping to Age Of The Stars’ tower of vocal tracks, is dedicated to that same blend of exhilaration and grandeur. If you were to battle a 12ft colossus, sword in hand, this is the soundtrack you’d choose. It’s the first time Serena’s truly shone beyond Svalbard – and, released just one month after their final set, it’s come at the perfect moment.

Extinguish Thy Flame is out September 25.

What’s the adage? You can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Not to compare Europe to an ageing bloodhound enjoying its dotage – although they did rock a few poodle perms in their time – but in the nine years since they last released a new album, something vital and new has shaken Europe up. Forget the ethereal noodling that made The Final Countdown a worldwide hit and phenomenon; Come This Madness is a much steelier proposition – harder, faster, and with a Mike Fraser (AC/DC, The Cult) mix it glimmers like a fresh paint job on a classic car.

Handing over the producer role to Tom Dalgety – who’s worked with Pixies, Ghost and Rammstein, among others – has also helped reinvigorate the band’s energy with a punchy veneer that recalls Scorpions in their pomp and latter-day Whitesnake before the wheels came off

It says something of Europe’s pedigree that both Tobias Forge and Mikael Åkerfeldt, of Ghost and Opeth respectively, turned up to sing backing vocals on the record, although both would have to go some to overshadow Joey Tempest’s pristine vocals, which have held up as well as if not better than his celebrated jawline.

It might be the Scandinavian talking, but the exemplary This Time Of Year, which manages to be somehow forthright and yet brittle at its heart, could have made it into A-ha’s live set. A pitch-perfect rock-pop song full of regret and longing, it plays out like a short black-and-white movie.

The Angels Must Have Flown is pure Europe bombast, with a marching riff interwoven with a tricksy synth line as Tempest’s vocals soar above it all sounding, strangely, like a young Ian Gillan. The Cult Of Ignorance comes rattling in, all elbows and attitude, the band dissatisfied and railing against the world, which, surprisingly, suits them. It’s indicative of the album’s taut energy; needles in the red, bristling with passion.

The album’s last note belongs to Nothing Can Follow This, which wrings that musical rag similarly dry, Deep Purple-like in tone; stabbing strings, washes of keyboards, the feel of endless motion; a car racing through the city streets at night; John Norum’s elongated and elegant guitar solo carrying the song towards the horizon and home. Welcome back, Europe.

Here’s a tale about a rabble of underground rock visionaries turning a thriving local music scene into a global phenomenon, putting the world’s spotlight onto the US’s Pacific Northwest and prompting teenage Herberts as far afield as Chelmsford, Essex to suddenly have the urge to own a corduroy shirt (yes, that was me).

Along the way there were those who turned their back on it, those who lost their way, those who died and those who turned their back on it, but turned round again with a new set of rules and ended up staying really big anyway and everything was fine (okay, this bit pretty much just refers to Pearl Jam).

What remains is the music, most of which still sounds vital today, artefacts from an era that dramatically reshaped what rock music could be.

Green River - Rehab Doll (1988)

Rehab Doll is definitely not the first grunge record – it’s not even the first Green River record, preceded by the previous year’s mini-album Dry As A Bone and 1985’s Come On Down EP – but no band best sum up the different directions in which grunge would twist and turn than this Seattle five-piece. Stone Gossard’s gnarly riffs would be honed into anthemic classic-rock in Pearl Jam, as would the guitarist’s rhythmic interplay with bassist Jeff Ament, whilst frontman Mark Arm and lead guitarist Steve Turner would use the punkier moments as the template for the spikier, Stooges-y sound that underpinned Mudhoney. As a standalone record, this still thrills though, if only for all the possibilities you can hear that lay ahead.

Nirvana - Nevermind (1991)

The record that needs the least amount of explaining, the story of grunge is right here in Nevermind’s 42 minutes and 36 seconds – where sweatbox venue attitude meets burgeoning ambition, where perfect pop melodies slide off crunching four-chord riffs. It was the sound of grunge going mainstream, to the point that you could split the genre into two distinct sections: before Nevermind, and after Nevermind. Two very different worlds.

Singles: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1992)

Is it cheating to have this in here? Tough, I’ve already written it, it’s on the internet, the time to try and stop me has passed. But the truth is that, as the very excellent soundtrack to a pretty decent film, the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe’s Seattle-set rock-rom-com perfectly captured almost all of grunge’s key players at a point when they were about to go interstellar, containing non-album classics from Pearl Jam, Chris Cornell and Smashing Pumpkins, whilst Alice In Chains wrote their masterful Would? specifically for inclusion. I say almost because, obviously, there’s no Nirvana here, the planned inclusion of their song Breed nixed by Kurt Cobain.

Pearl Jam - Vs. (1993)

Pearl Jam were pulling in different directions when it came to making their second record. Eddie Vedder was trying to wrap the whole thing in barbed wire and avoid the band being pulled into MTV’s bosom, whilst his bandmates were thinking ‘what’s the problem? We’re huge, everything’s great!’. Nodding to this, Vedder wanted to call the record Five Against One, and it’s that tension that makes Vs. such a startling, exhilarating listen. But if he didn’t want it to be massive, maybe Vedder should’ve written some crapper choruses. As it was, he laid down a series of era-defining angsty singalongs for the masses to savour. It was so huge that Vedder saw no choice but to take them on a diversion for 1994’s Vitalogy. It would be almost a decade until they came back into the light.

Alice In Chains - MTV Unplugged (1996)

It wasn’t easy trying to decide which record to end this on. It could’ve been something that demonstrated the bandwagon jumpers who followed in grunge’s wake, terrible bands devoid of the risk-taking and adventure of the scene’s pioneers. Yes, I’m talking about Creed. Or it could’ve been Smashing Pumpkins’ epic Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, which triumphantly blew the whole thing wide open, or Hole’s 1998 album Celebrity Skin, a brilliant poppy rock record that hit at a time when everyone else had ran out of ideas. But really the story of grunge ends in tragedy and loss, and no record captures that better than this poignant, stripped-down live set, featuring one of Layne Staley’s final performances. The excitement of those early days was a long time ago. Here was when reality bit.

Daevid Allen died of cancer in March 2015, aged 77 – but he’d had no intention of Gong dying with him. Tasked with taking up the baton, Kavus Torabi and his next generation began their new era with 2016 album Rejoice! I’m Dead! – and told Prog how they’d done it.

Kavus Torabi is addressing the somewhat incredible situation in which he and his Gong bandmates find themselves. “You really have to not think about it because otherwise you become too reverential,” he says. “We’re going to have to do this our way.”

Gong fans will be familiar with the situation, and it’s quite a story. Over the past few years, the band have been undergoing something of a musical renaissance, with leader Daevid Allen assembling a new line-up including Brazilian guitarist Fabio Golfetti (from Violeta de Outono) and bassist Dave Sturt (whose credits include Jade Warrior and Bill Nelson). In 2014, Allen recruited Torabi as an additional guitarist, despite having never heard the Knifeworld, Guapo and ex-Cardiacs man actually play.

But only a few months later, Allen announced that he had been diagnosed with cancer and would be unable to fulfil the world tour booked to promote latest album I See You. Reluctantly, but with his full encouragement, the rest of the band agreed to do the shows without him. And to their surprise, a new chemistry developed.

“Each night we sent Daevid recordings or links to YouTube, and from his sick bed in Australia, he wrote gushing praise about what had happened to the band and how this was exactly what he had hoped,” says Torabi. “By the end of the tour, and with the full blessing of Daevid, we decided to carry on.”

Allen had clearly been planning his legacy carefully, and had every intention that Gong should live on without him. “For the last few years, he was always talking about a continuation; he was always looking for a new direction,” says Sturt.

The people he’d entrusted had been well chosen for their strong identification with Allen’s ethos and its unique sound. Sturt was attracted to the “craziness mixed with musical complexity,” while for Golfetti, hearing Gong in his teens had made him want to be a musician in the first place.

Torabi was another teenage obsessive. “When I first heard Flying Teapot, it was everything I’d been looking for,” he says. The outsider, countercultural stance was also hugely important. “Absolutely! It’s only when you start meeting bands that you realise how few actually think that way.”

“It’s never conformed, which is probably why it’s never made any money,” comments Sturt, with characteristic dry wit.

Gong’s decision to continue without any original members isn’t without precedent – Golfetti cites the Sun Ra Arkestra; Torabi mentions Napalm Death – but what’s different is their commitment to respect the band’s heritage but to take it somewhere new.

“We were all fairly sceptical,” Torabi admits. “But we’re not one of those bands where you’ve got one original member and a load of young dudes playing the old material. It’s kind of a brand new band, but with this blueprint to draw from and create stuff in the style of. It’s more like a political party… one that’s getting more extreme!”

There’s no question that it’s still Gong. “As a fan, I know for a fact that the version we do of Master Builder is outrageous,” says Torabi. “It’s so out there – Steve Hillage loves it,”

Sturt agrees: “There’s been lots of discussions with the old guard. They all want it to carry on. They appreciate where we’re taking it. Steve has been very supportive.”

“And [former bassist] Mike Howlett was incredibly flattering about the new album,” adds Torabi.

The record in question is Rejoice! I’m Dead!, a stunning hour of modern psychedelic/ progressive music that affirms the new Gong as a serious creative force in their own right. While there are connections back to the classic Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy from the mid-70s, and particularly to the heavier sound of Planet Gong’s Floating Anarchy, it’s a vital and exciting piece of work with brilliant playing throughout from Torabi, Golfetti and Sturt, plus returning sax and flute player Ian East and new drummer Cheb Nettles.

“As soon as we started playing with Cheb, a new dynamic was created,” says Torabi. “During the big improvisational parts in the middle of things like You Can’t Kill Me, we really started feeling, ‘We’ve got something here.’ The music started going in directions it hadn’t done previously. So we knew that if we got to make another record, it was going to be really good.”

Yet despite their self-belief, the pressure to deliver was still high. “We all knew this had to be an amazing album, because otherwise that’d be the end of it. If it had just been Angel’s Egg 2, or even I See You 2, people weren’t going to buy into it.” Perhaps inevitably, nerves kicked in. “I’m always the stressy one, and once we got locked into it happening, I had a bit of a meltdown,” he confesses. “I was so worried because, having signed a record deal, we didn’t have any songs. Dave got it in the ear – I rang up and was just freaking out!”

Sturt adds: “But just from the first session between myself, Kavus and Ian, loads of ideas came out, many of which ended up on the album. And then Fabio sent through a demo of five or so ideas, and everything coalesced within a few weeks.”

Allen’s presence was still being felt by the band, as Sturt elaborates: “I could absolutely imagine Daevid dancing round the rehearsal room, because it really felt like he would have loved what we’d done. We were firing on all cylinders, which is what he would have wanted.”

Allen is also literally present on the album, with old recordings of his voice popping up on a couple of songs. Beatrix in particular sounds like a poignant dispatch from the afterlife (where, naturally, everybody speaks French). But while retaining the charm and eccentricity of Gong, Rejoice! I’m Dead! is a good deal less whimsical than previous releases, with the band emphasising the more radical agenda that Allen was increasingly pushing in his lyrics. There’s certainly no mention of gnomes or pixies.

“The Pot Head Pixies thing was Daevid’s vision – it would have been bogus to take that on and write another chapter,” says Torabi. “But with the more radical thing, that was something we could all take on. It was nice that Daevid was steering the ship this way because we all get that.”

“He thrived on the whole Occupy movement, and he loved the idea of standing up to The Man,” adds Sturt.

Allen had tapped into this growing feeling of popular discontent on I See You with lines such as: ‘This revolution will replace all those greedy capitalists who so fucked up.’ On the new album, the Sturt-penned Model Village shares the sentiment, being a Floydian vision of suburban hell where ‘Power and riches reside in the hands of the few.’

Even more strident, and perhaps the most un-Gong-like song on the album, is the predatory sturm und drang of Kapital, which comes on like a demonic cross between Sabbath’s Children Of The Grave and Eno’s Blank Frank. Even more surprising, it’s the one song on Rejoice! I’m Dead! that’s an Allen composition.

“When we heard Kapital, we all wanted to do it,” says Torabi. “It’s like, ‘My God, this is Gong’s most metal tune! And if we’re going to go metal, let’s go metal up the ass!’ But at the core of it, it’s a Daevid Allen song. It’s not like we took liberties.”

The other overriding theme of the album, from the title onwards, is, of course, Allen’s death. “As this is the transitional album, it felt important to make it about Daevid, like this was handing over the baton,” says Torabi. “Daevid seemed to have a certainty about death – he certainly embraced it.

“One night in Brazil, he had become convinced that this was the night he was going to die – he had his body painted all white and had a death ceremony. Then the following morning, he found out that [former drummer] Pierre Moerlen had died. He said he realised he’d had a premonition, but it was about the wrong person.”

Yet despite this talk about death, the mood in the Gong camp is exuberant – it’s the confidence of a band who know they’ve pulled off something special.

“All my experience before joining Gong feels like it was building up to this point,” says Sturt.

Torabi is equally upbeat: “It’s like we’re in a teenage band, only everybody’s really good now! I just want us to make another record, and I really want to go out and start playing this music.”

On September 23, 2016, following another successful crowdfunding campaign, Marillion released 18th album Fuck Everyone And Run. The 68-minute, six-track production reached No.4 in the UK chart – the first time they’d hit such heights since 1994’s Brave. Ahead of the launch, vocalist Steve Hogarth gave Prog a track-by-track rundown.

Tucked away in a rather anonymous business park in the Buckinghamshire countryside, the Racket Club has been Marillion’s headquarters and recording studio for over two decades.

At its core is a control room, decorated in eastern drapes and artefacts that provide the comfortable feel of a Mongolian yurt. It’s here, as singer Steve Hogarth delights in explaining, that “all the magic happens”.

It's July 2016 and the band’s 18th studio album F.E.A.R (Fuck Everyone And Run) has recently been completed, and Hogarth is visibly enthralled with results. It’s a beguiling work, with three of the tracks extending to over 15 minutes.

It’s beautifully layered, and as guitarist Steve Rothery neatly puts it: “It really embraces who we are and what we do.” With that thought, Hogarth talks us through the lyrical themes that provide an astute and salient take on the state of the world.

El Dorado

Split over five segments and extending to over 16 minutes, the track possesses the sublime musical passages that Marillion have always been known for.

Hogarth: “It’s really about a sense of foreboding and a feeling that everything is going to change in this country. I was trying to paint a picture of someone mowing their lawn in a quiet garden as a storm comes towards them.

It’s an ecological storm, a financial storm, it’s a humanitarian storm. It’s a feeling that there’s a sort of watershed coming. I don’t know what it is, but there’s just a foreboding. If there is a central theme to the record, it’s that, and the fact that we brought this about on ourselves and a sense of shame.

El Dorado is for me about the fact that there’s a sense of shame over the migrant crisis. It’s about the way that this country has responded to the refugees spilling over from Syria, which is a war that we’ve stoked the fire in, even if we haven’t created it.”

Living in FEAR

Ostensibly a song about peace, with archetypal 60s sentiments of disarmament, it’s a polished, succinct track that also has a sublime earworm of a chorus.

Hogarth: “That was one of the tracks that we worked on at Real World Studios [owned by Peter Gabriel]. They’ve got this big screen in the studio because they occasionally do soundtracks for films, so we can drop the big screen in the evening and just put a movie on, with the sound off and just have that running while we’re jamming.

So we’d be in the dark and there would be a vibe going. We were able to work late, stop and have dinner and then go back in to the studio space at nine or 10 at night, and there’s always a different atmosphere than there is during the day.”

The Leavers

An expansive song that contains five distinct, seductive sections. With soaring Rothery guitar solos and opulent keyboards, it’s one of the finest tracks that the band have released over recent years.

Hogarth: “The Leavers is a totally different animal. I wrote it really as a response to the corrosive effect that travel has on you. When you’re in a touring band, or even more so in a touring band’s crew, you’re hardly ever home; you wake up in a new city every day. There’s a repetitive thing of the process of putting a show together – perform a show, you take it down, get on the bus, go to sleep and go again. For crew that’s the life.

When you get home if you’re off, you’re not being paid and you feel like you’re unemployed. It’s also about how these gypsy, thrill-seeking people seem to arrive, do their thing and then are gone. You can’t trust them because they’ll forget you as soon as they’re gone.”

White Paper

Another shorter song, there’s a distinct sadness to the lyrics that’s neatly equalled by the authoritative musical backdrop.

Hogarth: “It’s about several things. It’s a sort of sister story to The Leavers in some respects. It’s about trying to settle into domestic life, about wanting to live passionately and in the moment. There’s also the thing about slowly coming to terms with the fact that you’re getting old, and you better get used to the fact that what you are railing against is very beautiful and natural.

There’s a line in the song: ‘I used to be centre stage, time I should act my age’, and that really is what this song’s about – at one time feeling you were the most important person in the equation, then having to come to terms with the fact that you’d better stand at the side and watch something beautiful going on, rather than try and occupy that space yourself, with your own ego.”

The New Kings

A powerful lyrical statement on the general state of the world, the track runs to almost 20 minutes of luscious progressive rock.

Steve Hogarth: “This is really a song about how the old systems of democracy have become overwhelmed and compromised by money and corporations – along with the fact that the division between rich and poor is widening all the time.

In 1989 there wasn’t any money in Russia, as everybody owned it all. Within 10 years, there were some people who were ludicrously rich. I mean, how can you do that legitimately?

The only people in Russia who had the cunning and sharpness to become businessmen were the politburo scumbags at the top. They controlled everything and had the keys to the locked doors where the money was. There’s also a healthy sprinkling of tax evasion, and a kind of overall loss of faith in what this country represents to me.”