It’s 1992 and you’re the hottest alt-metal band on the planet. After breaking out of the mid-80s US underground, your last album has gone platinum, you’ve played the MTV Awards and Saturday Night Live, and absolutely everybody is biting your style. What do you do? If you’re Faith No More, you record a straight-faced cover a 70s soul-pop ballad.

FNM’s breakthrough 1989 album The Real Thing was a glorious mash-up of funk, metal and everything in between. They’d recorded a cover as a bonus track for that album, a faithful version of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs. It looked like an obvious move, but maybe it was too obvious for singer Mike Patton, who would troll audiences by changing the lyrics to: “Generals gathered in their masses/Golly gee, I hate Black Sabbath.”

Follow-up Angel Dust was a reaction to the success of The Real Thing. From fan-testing songs such as Caffeine and the abrasive Jizzlobber to the image of dead animals in an abattoir that appeared on the back cover, it was darker, odder and more unsettlingly perverse.

Most perverse of all, at least on paper, was their version of Easy. The band had played it on their European tour before they went in the studio to record Angel Dust. Live, they would segue from War Pigs into a note for note version of The Commodores song. It didn’t go down well.

“It feels good to have a couple of thousand people flipping you off.” bassist Billy Gould told Billboard in 1993. “Just to see the amount of middle fingers go up when we go into Easy is amazing.”

It was Gould’s idea to record the song during the Angel Dust sessions. “We like the way we played it and we liked the way Mike sang it,” keyboard player Roddy Bottum told Kerrang!.

Aside from chopping the original’s second verse, they played it totally straight and irony-free, capturing the original’s easy-like-Sunday-morning vibe. The only flash of FNM-style mischief was came when Mike Patton offered an exaggerated “EUUGGHHH!” before the guitar solo, though even that was an OTT homage to the original.

The cover was held back from Angel Dust when it was originally released in June 1992, though a live version was included on the B-side of third single Everything’s Ruined. But when the album failed to instantly replicate the success of its predecessor, Faith No More’s parent label Warner Bros, began worrying.

“We recorded it as a B-side,” Bottum told Kerrang! in ‘95. “Then the record company had the brilliant idea to put it out as an A-side.”

It was a last throw of the dice, but it worked. Easy was released on December 29, 1992, as a non-album single, though in true Faith No More style, there was still a refusal to completely play the game. The video saw the band hanging out in a hotel room with a group of drag queens, interspersed with some chaotic live footage. The single cover was a picture of a pair of rhinos having sex.

“I honestly don’t think we’ve got a lot of easy listening fans from that song,” Bottum told Kerrang!. “Maybe it’s the video. Even though the execution of the song is pretty faithful you can see we’re up to something. The tongue is definitely in the cheek.”

Regardless, someone was buying the song. It became their second number one in Australia, hit the Top 10 in New Zealand, Switzerland, Norway and Holland, peaked at a career best No.3 in the UK and was the only song from Angel Dust to chart in the US. Inevitably, it was tacked on to later editions of the album, helping push it to Gold status in the US.

"For our own personal satisfaction, we like to do things that are left field,” Gould told Billboard in 1993. “Warner Bros. has been marketing us as a rock band; we like to think we're other things too. There was a little hesitancy to put the record out there, but it's just exploded.”

As committed contrarians, FNM declared soon after that they’d never play the song live again. “It’s a bit like stealing your own gun, and then shooting yourself with it,” Mike Patton told Kerrang!.

Faith No More being Faith No More, they did play it again of course. Following their 2009 reunion, both the band and their audience embraced it - crowds no longer flipped the bird en masse. Even former Commodores frontman Lionel Richie, the man who wrote the song in the first place, has praised FNM’s version. “I was actually quite flattered that much about the song,” he told the Washington Post in 2001. “Yes, I loved it.”

It's Friday the 13th and you know what that means - we're halfway through November, and just that little bit closer to the end of the year. As in previous years, we'll be wrapping up in the coming weeks and asking you to tell us what music ruled the roost for you this year, but there's still some great new tunes to enjoy in the meantime.

Speaking of which, the results of last week's vote! Third place went to the excellent State Of Mind by Future Static, but there was a real battle for top slot. In the end, Charlotte Wessels emerged as the queen of the week (again!), eking out a victory against Everdawn's Illusionist.

This week it's starting to look a lot like Christmas. Granted, depending on where you live you might've seen the decs going up as early as Halloween (blasphemy!) but even with Thanksgiving on the way and well over a month to go to the big day, clearly metal is getting into the seasonal spirit. Thankfully there's also offerings that aren't jumping the gun on advent, so feel free to pop a humbug and get something nasty in your ears.

Ice Nine Kills - Joy To The World

Of course Ice Nine Kills weren't just going to start dropping Christmas carols. Considering the shape of the Terrifier franchise it makes perfect sense to bring Art The Clown back into the fold, but even more surprising is how INK have dispensed with their trademark melodic choruses entirely for this brutish little beast, a minute flying by with some guttural snarls and deathcore like drops. Their new EP A Very Vicious Christmas is out now.

Avatar - Naughty List (feat. Zakk Wylde)

If you're a UK Avatar fan you might already feel like you're on the naughty list this week, with the Swedes announcing they've had to postpone the majority of their British dates. But to soften the blow, they've released a typically bombastic new single in Naughty List, a Christmas metal tune (yep, another one!) featuring Zakk Wylde and a gleefully daft chorus.

Bullet For My Valentine - I Don't Trust Tomorrow (ft. Will Ramos)

Let's hop off the seasonal sleigh. Bullet For My Valentine are eyeing up a March 19 for their new album Social Apocalypse, and new single I Don't Trust Tomorrow offers a rare guest feature with Lorna Shore's Will Ramos stepping up to the mic. BFMV haven't gone full deathcore though: there's a few moments of snarling heft, but otherwise this is their usual emotive anthemia with some added ferocity.

Kalandra - Animal

Norway's Kalandra often defy simple categorisation, but with Animal there's an air of the melodic prog metal of Leprous, albeit with their own unique spin. A skittering guitar flutters below  Katrine Stenbekk's vocals, the powerful and soulful delivery bringing to mind Nordic folk without fully giving over to that style. It's a sleek and forward-minded track (just check out those thrumming synths), with new album The Other Side out today and well worth a listen.

Tesseract - Crucible

Heroes of the UK prog metal scene, Tesseract will release a new EP in March. Titled Arc_One : Obscura, they've given us a taste of the direction they're headed in with new single Crucible, a morphing, techy track that delivers some gorgeous melodies before getting nasty in its closing moments.

Fear Factory - Detonizer

Just listen to that filthy riff. Detonizer feels like a classic Fear Factory tune, switching between furious intensity and big melodic breakouts that show vocalist Milo Silvestro has the full range of predecessor Burton C. Bell and this track feels like the most fired up and electric the band have sounded in at least a decade. New album Robiticist is due April 9 so we'll see how it shapes up.

Dragonforce - Neverending Nightmare

Alissa White-Gluz showed off how her melodeath stylings would fit in with Dragonforce on Hunger Of The Beast, but here we get to taste a more traditional power metal vocal styling, showing just how impressively diverse her voice is. Even so, we'll admit our favourite bit of this epic track hits around the halfway mark, where Alissa once again takes up her snarls alongside typically mad guitars from Herman Li and Sam Totman with some decided Dire Straits tones (Sultans Of Swing, we see you). It's brilliantly experimental and we can't wait to hear the rest of Dragonforce's self-titled album on March 19.

Bodysnatcher - No Funeral

If you spotted Bodysnatcher's name on the freshly announced Download Festival poster and thought, 'Who?' Consider this your introduction. No Funeral is thuggish, simplistic deathcore with an eye to battering you over the head until you submit. Think Hatebreed but with added Suicide Silence. New album Hell Is Here, Hell Is Home is due April 10, so keep your eyes out - or prepare to be blindsided.

Eternal Rin - 404notfound

What if Chelsea Wolfe were more heavygaze? That's the question that comes to mind hearing newcomer Eternal Rin and 404notfound, the British artist capturing the same split between atmospheric darkness and ascendant melody that also brings to mind Deftones (as do most heavygaze bands, let's face it). It's a brilliant introduction, and we can't wait to hear more.

Ater - Heart Of Glass

For a moment in Heart Of Glass, Ater drop a tone that sounds distinctly Sleep Token. It's a red herring however - and a bloody one at that, the Chilean band's extreme metal worlds away from the pop-bothering of baddiecore, albeit with its own sense of atmosphere and melody that makes it feel properly epic. The band's new album Everlasting is coming on January 29 and looks to be well worth a listen if you like your extreme metal cinematic.

1976 was a tumultuous year for Frank Zappa, as he fired longtime manager Herb Cohen and his ensemble was reduced to just himself and drummer Terry Bozzio. Zoot Allures was recorded for Warners, who asked him to slim down his original double album, titled Night Of The Iron Sausage (released in full here), to a single. The Mothers Of Invention moniker was dropped: Zappa was, in essence, always a solo artist, his musicians instruments of his will.

Zappa plays guitar and keyboards throughout, with guest faithfuls including Ruth and Ian Underwood making fleeting appearances. Zoot Allures is a powerful demonstration of his dexterity and stylistic range. Wind Up Workin' In A Gas Station could pass for proto-punk were it not for the mandatory guitar solo and Davey Moiré's munchkin vocals.

Black Napkins is a multi-spired edifice of guitar virtuosity, while The Torture Never Stops – dank, dripping, punctuated with screams and featuring a midget with a bucket to mop the blood into – is eerily dystopian jazz rock. Find Her Finer sees Zappa, the seasoned lech, deliver pick-up tips as "Donny Vliet" (Captain Beefheart) supplies discreet harmonica. The title track shows the beauty that Zappa and his ensemble were effortlessly capable of, proceeding like some wandering cousin of Fleetwood Mac's Albatross.

Only the condescending, supercilious Disco Boy, a mutation of Nutbush City Limits, lets the side down. There are older versions of tracks like Disco Boy, improved a little by their roughness. There's a live disc, which on Stink Foot and The Poodle Lecture captures Zappa's ability to meld surreal, spoken-word comic narrative with a tightly scripted facsimile of free jazz.

Outtakes from the original double album, such as Filthy Habits, an oozing, multi-faceted instrumental, or The Ocean Is The Ultimate Solution, with Zappa going ape on acoustic guitar, are fine in themselves, but would have taken away from the focus of the single album.

Completists, meanwhile, will enjoy Hofstra Segment, material captured on Zappa's tape recorder in a dressing room, and Son Of Canard Du Jour, an unreleased piece that would eventually become Outside Now on Joe's Garage, featuring a new bass part.

A decent collection, and more than mere barrel scrapings.

A strong candidate for the most consistently rewarding Talking Heads album, Fear Of Music remains an evergreen post-punk landmark almost half a century later.

It reunited the New York avant-rockers with producer and conceptual ringmaster Brian Eno for the second of three collaborations, and he made various key hands-on decisions: bringing Robert Fripp on board as guest guitarist, suggesting Hugo Ball's Dadaist poem as the lyric for opening track I Zimbra, and reportedly preventing David Byrne from binning the achingly lovely afterlife ballad Heaven, one of his most enduring signature songs.

Remastered for this deluxe box set, Fear Of Music is a richly layered collection of mostly successful experiments. Besides exploring slippery rhythms that borrow from Afrofunk and disco, the band began couching their angular art-rock sound in electronic treatments and airy pop melodies. Byrne's barking, jabbering vocal performances are also more playfully mannered than ever, while his lyrics are unashamedly funny, musing on ungrateful animals with no sense of humour, the invisible dangers of air, the futility of religion, and more.

Besides Heaven, future Heads classics include the nervy punk-funk travelogue Cities and the cinematic terror-cell thriller Life During Wartime. More obscure cuts stand out, too, such as Memories Can't Wait, a doomy goth-metal detour with faint Joy Division overtones.

Inevitably there's little fresh material in the Heads vaults, but this lavish repackage does include two previously unreleased full-disc concert recordings from 1979. While neither is essential, both are engaging documents of a band in mid-transition from arty hipsters to arena-filling new-wave royalty.

Besides the curiosity value of hearing preliminary road tests of the new album, stand-out early-career tracks include the fragrant, dreamy, offbeat nursery rhyme Love Goes To A Building On Fire, and two takes on Psycho Killer that extend the song into a seven-minute, Television-style jam. Also among the live tracks is an oddly stiff, bloodless plod through Al Green's Take Me To The River. Not their finest creative decision, but it gave Talking Heads their first US Top 30 hit, arguably opening a path to greater things.

The inspired fusion of cerebral avant-punk modernism with booty-shaking disco, funk and R&B that would later blossom into Stop Making Sense is not yet fully formed, but it's beginning to take shape in these genre-stretching, post-rocking, game-changing grooves.

Canadian chart-toppers and Platinum-sellers Alexisonfire have returned with Push The River, the lead single from their hotly anticipated sixth album Bleed It.

The Ontario five-piece, one of the leading lights of the 00s screamo revolution, have debuted their first track in four years ahead of the album’s release on March 19 via Dine Alone Records. Pre-orders are now live, and the artwork and tracklisting are below.

The Push The River music video, directed by Vanessa Heins, is also below.

The band comment: “Push The River is an anthem for the restless mind. It is about surrendering to the bedlam of one’s own thoughts and finding peace in the chaos of the everyday task that is living and loving.”

Co-guitarist/vocalist Wade MacNeill hints that Bleed It will be a genre-blurring effort: “We’ve always been interested in pushing the band in a lot of different directions, and our influences are all over the place. And because we've been a band for so long at this point, we're capable of pulling it off.”

Lead singer George Pettit adds that the lyrics explore “the general existentialist dilemma of being faced by the mystery of life, and being faced by brutality, but still choosing to partake in the world around you”.

“And then you start to see love as this really remarkable thing that exists in defiance of a seemingly brutal and uncaring world,” he continues. “Love is this anomaly of evolution.”

Produced by Kevin Ratterman (My Morning Jacket), Bleed It contains 14 tracks including the song Dogs Of Chernobyl, which Alexis debuted on tour earlier this year, at the RBC Amphitheatre in Toronto in August.

The new album announcement comes after Alexis spent much of the summer touring to celebrate 20 years of their album Crisis, which put them on top of the Canadian charts for the first time in their careers. Hammer attended their show at Wembley Arena in London in June and wrote that “the self-described ‘only band ever’ have once again proved why no one else matters”.

The band’s last album, 2022’s Otherness, came out to positive reviews and reached No.4 on the Canadian album charts. It was their first album since 2009’s Old Crows / Young Cardinals, and their first following a hiatus from 2011 to 2015.

Alexis will kick off a co-headline tour of North America with Poison The Well the week after Bleed It’s release, starting at the South Side Ballroom in Dallas on March 25. See the full list of dates and get tickets via the band’s website.

Alexisonfire – Bleed It:

1. Within Within Within
2. ⁠Push The River
3. ⁠What's Left To Know But Love
4. ⁠Dogs Of Chernobyl
5. ⁠Small Eternity
6. ⁠Forever Free
7. ⁠Congregation
8. ⁠Spider’s Dream
9. ⁠My Blood Is Yours
10. ⁠Holy Mother
11. ⁠Tread Lightly, Child
12. ⁠Milk
13. ⁠Iron Flowers For Suzie
14. ⁠Crushing Black

Bullet For My Valentine have teamed up with Lorna Shore screamer Will Ramos for their new single, I Don’t Trust Tomorrow.

The track, which features a rare clean vocal turn from Ramos, can be heard below.

It continues the build-up to the Bridgend metalcore band’s new album Social Apocalypse, due out on March 19 via Spinefarm. It’ll be Bullet’s first full-length album since their self-titled release in 2021, and preorders are now live.

Singer/guitarist Matt Tuck says of I Don’t Trust Tomorrow: “[It] felt like the perfect follow to [lead single and title track] Social Apocalypse. Lyrically, it’s about the fear of an uncertain future and the frustration of feeling trapped by life’s expectations.

“I really wanted to capture the struggle with anxiety, disillusionment, and the pressure of time slipping away. Beneath the anger lies a fierce determination to fight back, reject false promises, and refuse to be controlled by fear. It’s an absolute monster of a track and with the addition of guest vocalist Will Ramos the song is taken to intense new heights sonically. We absolutely love this one and we think you will too.”

Bullet announced Social Apocalypse and confirmed the Ramos guest spot back in September. As well as the Lorna Shore vocalist, the album will feature Chrissy Costanza of Against The Current, who’s lined up to appear on the track In The Absence Of You.

Tuck has explained that Social Apocalypse is about his struggle as a father to find positivity 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 Carl Bown, known for his past collaborations with Sleep Token, While She Sleeps and Malevolence. “Carl doesn’t let you settle,” Tuck said in September. “He is always ready to speak up, push and challenge you to be the best version of you.”

Ahead of Social Apocalypse’s release, Bullet will tour Europe and the UK in January and February. Support will come from Australian drum and bass group Pendulum and Florida metalcore young guns Dark Divine. Dates can be seen below and tickets are on sale now.

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 For My Valentine 2027 European 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

TesseracT have launched dynamic single Crucible – their first release via Nuclear Blast. It’s taken from upcoming concept EP ARC_ONE: Obscura, set to arrive in March.

And vocalist Dan Tompkins reports that their new approach to music is a result of what they learned from their most recent album, 2023’s War Of Being.

“We’re trying to approach this a little bit differently by not just dropping a full album,” he says. “We’re trying to work with how music is consumed in general, but also trying to deliver what we think our fans really want from us: a captivating story and a good concept.”

He continues: “War of Being was very much about ego and the masks we wear. The ending to that album was quite important – it was about tearing the mask away, which is a key lyric.

“As I made more music on the back of War of Being, I started to discover more about myself and my own being. I’ve started to really think about what direction we could take the next batch of music in. For me, it’s very much about understanding what’s left when you’ve exposed who you really are.“

The vocalist says Crucible explores “the pressure that shapes and distorts the individual – the fact that we’re being constantly measured and judged and refined until our real, authentic self is pushed further and further inside, and buried.”

Tompkins and bandmates Acle Kahney (guitar), James Monteith (guitar), Amos Williams (bass) and Jay Postones (drums) will hit the road in January across North America, with two dates in England four in Germany to follow in March.

Tickets are available now. ARC_ONE: Obscura is released on March 5 and can be pre-saved now.

TesseracT’s North American tour dates with Entheos and Sunborn:

Jan 7: New York City, NY — Irving Plaza
Jan 8: Boston, MA — Paradise Rock Club
Jan 9: Montreal, QC — Beanfield Theatre
Jan 10: Toronto, ON — Concert Hall
Jan 12: Baltimore, MD — Baltimore Soundstage
Jan 13: Charlotte, NC — The Underground
Jan 15: Atlanta, GA — Buckhead Theatre
Jan 16: Orlando, FL — Beacham
Jan 18: Houston, TX — House Of Blues
Jan 19: Dallas, TX — Echo
Jan 20: San Antonio, TX — Aztec Theatre
Jan 22: Phoenix, AZ — Nile Theater
Jan 23: Los Angeles, CA — The Belasco
Jan 24: San Francisco, CA — The Fillmore
Jan 26: Portland, OR — Roseland Theater
Jan 27: Seattle, WA — Neptune
Jan 29: Salt Lake City, UT — The Depot
Jan 31: Denver, CO — Summit Music Hall

UK and German tour dates:

Mar 11: O2 Ritz, Manchester
Mar 13: O2 Academy Brixton, London
Mar 15: Die Kantine, Köln
Mar 16: Batschkapp, Frankfurt
Mar 18: Markthalle, Hamburg
Mar 19: Täubchenthal, Leipzig

Is there anything more rock’n’roll than The Lord Of The Rings? Across J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium – and the multiple films, series and games which have sprung from it – there are black-clad warlords, light-devouring spiders, feuding wizards and fire beasts the size of a house. It’s no wonder, then, that bands since the dawn of heavy music have been fascinated with Middle-Earth.

As Amazon’s series The Rings Of Power once again hits Prime, hear Metal Hammer’s playlist of the coolest tracks to tip their hats to Tolkien. From Amon Amarth to Black Sabbath, it’s a broad array of badassery.

Led Zeppelin – Ramble On (Led Zeppelin II, 1969)

Ramble On is sonically closer to something you might hear on a late-60s Rolling Stones record than Led Zeppelin’s usual fare. It’s the third verse where it all goes ring-shaped" “Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor/I met a girl so fair/But Gollum, and the evil one/Crept up and slipped away with her.” It’s not the only song in Zeppelin's cache to doff its cap to Tolkien either; Misty Mountain Hop is pretty on the nose about it, while The Battle Of Evermore references Ringwraiths.

Black Sabbath – The Wizard (Black Sabbath, 1970)

Even though Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut is often hailed as the nexus point for heavy metal as we know it, The Wizard was more a bluesy jam than anything else. Not that you can tell explicitly by the lyrics, but the track was inspired by Gandalf himself, as bassist Geezer Butler confirmed in an interview with Metal Sludge in 2005. “I was reading The Lord Of The Rings at the time,” he recalled, “and I just based the lyrics on that. Gandalf.”

Rush – Rivendell (Fly By Night, 1975)

There’s an awful lot of prog inspired by Tolkien – we dare say almost as much as metal. So if we’re picking one from the bunch and moving on, it has to be the Canadian kings, Rush. Avowed Tolkien fan Neil Peart wasn’t above slipping references to The Lord Of The Rings into his work, whilst also using the songs to explore wider topics. Most explicit is Rivendell: a gentle, folk-style song that reimagined the home of the elves as a utopian paradise.

Sacrilege – Shadow From Mordor (Behind The Realms Of Madness, 1985)

Influential on the likes of Bolt Thrower and Napalm Death, early crust/grindcore innovators Sacrilege generally sang about the ills of this world, with poverty, environmental destruction and annihilation all frequent lyrical topics on their debut album. Shadow From Mordor used the titular hotbed of evil as an allegory for those themes, even slipping in a cheeky reference to Durin’s Bane, AKA the Balrog: “Like Durin’s Bane, rising up from the deep/There is evil at work while the people do sleep.”

Orange Goblin – Saruman’s Wish (Frequencies From Planet Ten, 1997)

It’s almost all in the name for Orange Goblin’s Saruman’s Wish, as beyond the white wizard popping up in the title, you could entirely miss the Tolkien reference. It wasn’t the only song on the stoner icons’ debut named for The Lord Of The Rings, however: instrumental Lothlorian took its name from the forest which housed a race of elves. According to frontman Ben Ward, the “Goblin” in “Orange Goblin” is also a hat-tip towards the world of Middle-Earth.

Blind Guardian – Into The Storm (Nightfall On Middle-Earth, 1998)

Blind Guardian are the absolute gold standard when it comes to metal bands singing about Tolkien. Their 1998 opus, Nightfall On Middle-Earth, is a concept album based entirely around The Silmarillion. Into The Storm summarises everything brilliantly OTT about the German power metallers: massive riffs and more cheese than a gorgonzola avalanche. The lyrics explore the confrontation between the characters Melkor and Ungoliant, thousands of years before the events of The Lord Of The Rings.

Amon Amarth – Amon Amarth (Once Sent From The Golden Hall, 1998)

Even the band that sings almost exclusively about Vikings couldn’t resist paying homage to Tolkien. Taking their name from the Sindarin (Elven) language for Mount Doom, Amon Amarth’s self-titled track more explicitly references the same volcano. This being Amon Amarth, though, they couldn’t resist sticking a few Vikings in. “Intestines cover the field, the defenders are weak in this brutal war!” snarls Johan Hegg. “The northmen have power and guts! A bloodshed like no one has seen here before!”

Reverend Bizarre – Cirith Ungol (In The Rectory Of The Bizarre Reverend, 2002)

Named after the fortress from which Sam retrieves a paralysed Frodo during The Return Of The King, Finnish doom merchants Reverend Bizarre afford Cirith Ungol the perfect level of dread for a fortress filled with orcs right on Sauron’s doorstep. The final song on their 2002 debut is unsurprisingly packed with references to Tolkien’s world, but it’s the reading of the inscription on the One Ring in its native Black Speech at the end that really drives the Middle-Earth lore home.

Cradle Of Filth – An Enemy Led The Tempest (Damnation And A Day, 2003)

At first glance, the lyrics to Cradle Of Filth’s An Enemy Led The Tempest are pretty straightforward: it’s about the fall of Lucifer, right? Only, it’s the mention of a Balrog in“Enraged, he raved in Balrog howl/Upon the storm firstborn of sin” that throws a curveball into the mix. Dani Filth uses his literary knowledge to suggest the song could as easily be about Morgoth, Middle-Earth’s own variant of Satan, as the fallen angel of Christianity.

3 Inches Of Blood – Destroy The Orcs (Advance And Vanquish, 2004)

3 Inches Of Blood were so passionate about slaying orcs that they recorded Destroy The Orcs twice. First released on the band’s 2002 debut, a much better quality version of the song came out on its 2004 follow-up, Advance And Vanquish: all galloping Iron Maiden riffs and glass shattering shrieks. It wasn’t as explicit with its LOTR-isms as many other Middle-Earth themed metal songs – in fact, the lyrics are almost entirely and expressly about destroying the orcs – but it still owed its inspiration to Tolkien’s creations.

Sabaton – Shadows (Metalizer, 2007)

Shadows wasn’t so much Sabaton taking a break from narrating the history of global warfare as a glimpse at what could have been. The first song Joakim Brodén wrote for the band, Shadows is about as explicitly Tolkein inspired as they come, its opening lyrics “Facing the wind as they ride through the sky/Shadows Of Mordor, black horses they fly!” It was also a vision of a very embryonic form of Sabaton that hadn’t quite figured out their craft yet, but still had a kernel of magic hidden away.

Battlelore – Orcrist (The Return Of The Shadow, 2022)

Battlelore are to fantasy fiction what Sabaton are to songs about battles, or Amon Amarth are to Vikings. So how did they announce their return after a decade away? With an album based almost entirely around Tolkien, of course! Orcrist – named for Thorin II Oakenshield's sword in The Hobbit – takes the cake when it comes to Middle-Earth worship, combining epic symphonic metal chops with a spoken-word passage lifted directly from The Hobbit itself.

Gentle Giant released one of their most daring albums in 1973. In A Glass House was written and recorded during what vocalist Derek Shulman refers to as an “emotional, dark time.” He tells Prog about the album’s creation, the technology that made the recent reissue possible, and the modern prog band for whom he has high hopes.

Derek Shulman will always be the genial, jovial pop star he became in 1967 when Simon Dupree & The Big Sound, his family’s R&B group, suddenly shifted direction and covered the hippy-dippy Kites, reaching the UK Top 10. He’s beaming on the screen from New York 59 years later as he tells Prog about In A Glass House, which his next band, Gentle Giant, released in 1973.

Their fifth album and their first for the short-lived WWA label is often seen as the one that got away in their canon; it’s never been as lauded as its predecessor, Octopus, or the record cited as their career best, The Power And The Glory.

To add to that, the events of the time – elder brother Phil Shulman leaving the band on tour, a rushed recording process, a new record label and underlying management issues – clouded opinions. It’s all coupled with the fact that, in recent years, the album’s master tapes couldn’t be found to give it the glow-up of their other releases, and left it somewhat obscure.

But no more. Using AI/ Demix technology, Brazilian producer Eber Pinheiro and Shulman himself worked on the album to give it a moment in the sun. “In A Glass House is a milestone,” Shulman says. “It was the first as a five-piece, without my brother Phil, and we had to refocus. It was hard to make. I’m glad we were able to find a way to make it sound the way it should have sounded back in 1973.

“This album was the one Steven Wilson really wanted to work on a decade or so ago, with Ray – rest in peace.” Derek’s younger brother Ray, integral to Gentle Giant as bassist, songwriter, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, died aged 73 in 2023. He worked with mix wunderkind Wilson, who first remixed Gentle Giant in 2014. The sticking point that had stymied them at every turn was the missing tapes. “We looked everywhere for the masters. We put out an APB: every studio, copy room, everywhere.”

But during that period the world turned and AI technology, used so transparently in The Beatles: Get Back, Peter Jackson’s salvaging of Let It Be, became widely available. Shulman found engineer/ producer Pinheiro in Brooklyn; he was able to split the mixed-down In A Glass House into stems of the various instruments so they could work as if it was a 24-track master.

In A Glass House was written, recorded and mixed in a four-to-five-week period of summer 1973, at Advision Studios in London with engineer Gary Martin and tape op Paul Hardingham. “We had an American tour lined up,” Shulman recalls. “We had no time to make it sound the way we wanted it to. And at the same time we were trying to refocus ourselves into a streamlined version of Gentle Giant. It was an emotional, dark time.”

Gentle Giant had been quite literally a band of brothers. Phil is 10 years older than Derek, and at their then-young ages, a decade is a quantum divide. But the gap didn’t seem to matter: “Our focus was completely on the band, and that was everything,” says Derek. “We all lived in Portsmouth and if we weren’t touring, we were rehearsing; if we weren’t rehearsing, we were writing. If we weren’t writing, we were recording.

“Phil did the right thing; I understand that his family was of number one importance for him, and we were working ourselves nonstop. It was weird, for Ray especially, as Phil had been there from the start of Simon Dupree.”

To draw a line and make a statement, the album crashes in with glass smashing, marking the opener The Runaway, which was soon to become one of the group’s most cherished songs. “We had a BBC recording of old sound effects of glass shattering. Ray and I thought it would be good to put it on. Paul Hardingham said, ‘What about making a loop of that crash?’ He literally had to splice pieces of tape to a five-four beat and then put them together.”

Immediately the group felt rockier, less restrained. “It loosened us up completely – I think this album was the one where we melded into the quintessential sound of Gentle Giant,” says Shulman. There were plenty of oblique references to Phil’s departure: he was the runaway, ‘lie low the wanted man’. “And,” he adds, “Way Of Life talks about what you want to do in your time.”

It’s a full-on album, broadly four rockers: the title track, Way Of Life, Experience and The Runaway, then the gentle A Reunion and the striking An Inmate’s Lullaby. The latter seems to be part of the pervasive presence of mental illness in popular culture in the 70s: psychologist RD Laing signed to Charisma; Stanley Kubrick adapted Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange; and Pink Floyd made The Dark Side Of The Moon.

“We were all realising that being in a band was stressful,” Shulman says. “There was an openness to write about it. Our band was pretty dramatic, generally, because we were workaholics. We didn’t really have time to take a breather or go on two weeks in Spain.”

Singing about wetting yourself wasn’t something other bands did. “Well, we didn’t listen to other bands,” Shulman says. “We were very secluded. Being in Portsmouth, we weren’t part of a scene – we didn’t hang out at the clubs in London. When we finished recording or touring we went home. We saw plenty of stuff that you could write about there.”

The irony was, when Giant arrived in the States, Columbia refused to release In A Glass House because they thought it was too uncommercial. Now, even the most casual Prog reader knows that every one of their previous four albums had been chock-full of hits… Not. “Exactly!” Shulman laughs. “Non-stop hit after hit! God almighty! So we went over there and it only came out on import, and became the biggest import that year, going gold, which is bizarre.”

It was with little surprise that they eventually won over their audiences in the US. “Phil’s departure focused us live, because six is a bit of a mess. Five, you’ve got the monkey in the front – me – and you’ve got four other musicians. Kerry Minnear was a classically- trained musician with a degree in composition. Ray was a classically-trained violinist. I loved R&B and soul, and Gary Green was a bluesman. John Weathers was a straight- ahead rock drummer. All these influences were melded together, and we always had fun onstage.

“We took our music seriously, but not ourselves. Whenever we changed instruments or we played recorders, our audience were smiling, and we loved that. I guess it was a carry-over from the days of our apprenticeship in a pop band. We wanted to be entertaining as well as being musical.”

Recent years have proven busy for both Shulman and Gentle Giant, whose legacy was cemented by the huge box set, Unburied Treasure, at the end of 2019. Since then a live US set, a souped-up Playing The Fool in-concert album, and his autobiography Giant Steps: My Improbable Journey From Stage Lights To Executive Heights have all arrived.

“The book took a lot of wind out of my sails, let me tell you,” he says. “I’m amazed that it’s been well received. I’m happy that I did it. It tells the truth about who I am and who we were as a band, and what I went on to do.”

After Gentle Giant split in 1980, he become a senior record executive and A&R for a variety of US record companies, signing and developing bands such as Bon Jovi, Cinderella, Slipknot and Nickelback. Were any starstruck by their A&R man? “A couple, yes. Dream Theater were fans. The other artist who knew everything about us was Ivan Doroschuk from Canadian off-kilter pop-rockers Men Without Hats: all the various albums and all the instruments. Not many bands went into details of my inglorious past. But then, we were big in Montreal.”

Always admired by the hip-hop community, Shulman Minnear and (posthumously) Ray, had the unexpected honour – and windfall – of Proclamation from The Power And The Glory being generously sampled at the beginning of Hyaena, the opening track from rapper Travis Scott’s double-platinum, 2025 album Utopia. In 2025 Giant were bestowed a BMI Award in recognition for radio plays for their contribution to the track. “I went to a couple of Travis’ shows,” Shulman says. “It was just unbelievable seeing 40,000 kids singing along to our song! We filmed it for a documentary that will appear at some point.”

Does this 79-year-old A&R guru and musician keep up with the current scene? “I’m dismayed with how music is heard and how little melody and creativity there is,” he says. “It’s all technology and analytics. Every hit pop song I hear, it’s that same computerised sound. It’s just a beat, with no change of chord or choruses. It’s all about five seconds of TikTok.”

He continues: “However, there is one band that I think are great, and that’s Angine De Poitrine. Apparently they’re Gentle Giant fans, which is even better.” It’s possibly the least surprising comment Prog has ever heard. “I hope this is the beginning of musicians playing well and interestingly, being fun and having a ton of creativity – uniqueness is a rare thing now.”

A bit like Gentle Giant were, then. His love of his own group is rekindled. “Sitting next to Eber and listening to In A Glass House, I got goosebumps,” he says. “I became a Gentle Giant fan for the first time ever. I thought, ‘How the hell did we come up with that? And that? And that?’ You can hear youthful creativity – creativity without boundaries.”

So, after all this, what’s next on the Gentle Giant bill of fare? “There’s going to be a new version of our live American box set coming out through Snapper, with four or so unheard shows. And after that...” Shulman pauses. “I think I’ll take a nap.”

The remastered edition of In A Glass House is on sale now.

Calling Slayer's Reign In Blood ‘the greatest thrash album of all time’ might sound like a convenient soundbite… until you hear it. With Rick Rubin producing, everything was taken to a height nobody would ever scale again.

The playing was world-class, the songs were stunning, the production balanced technology with the brute force of their live performance and, best of all, it came in at under 30 minutes, which meant that it never outstayed its welcome. From the moment the opening track Angel Of Death kicks in to the last chords of the closer Raining Blood, this is peerless.

"People come up and talk to me about Reign In Blood in the most random places," said drummer Dave Lombardo. "People yell out, ‘Slayer!’ or come up and say ‘Reign In Blood saved my life.’ That’s one thing I hear a lot. Although the music may have been intense and violent, people have told me that it’s helped them navigate the most horrible times of their lives. That’s just special."

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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 1986

• Eye of the Zombie - John Fogerty
• The Dark - Metal Church
• Reign in Blood - Slayer
• True Stories - Talking Heads
• Rock the Nations - Saxon
• Whiplash Smile - Billy Idol
• Dreamtime - The Stranglers
• Blah Blah Blah - Iggy Pop
• To Hell with the Devil - Stryper
• Skylarking - XTC
• Alive and Screamin' - Krokus
• Can't Hold Back - Eddie Money
• Fame and Fortune - Bad Company

What they said...

"Reign in Blood established Slayer's spot in metal, and probably crowned them the unofficial gods of thrash. The unfortunate thing is that it also establishes a very generic sound that Slayer sticks to almost religiously throughout the album, and leaves me wishing they had expanded their musical repertoire." (Sputnik Music)

"The obsessive pace is almost always the same, and even when a song seems, from the beginning, to be different from the others, it always ends up with the same hammering riff played at the same speed and in the same key, ending up seeming like a sort of reprise of the previous tracks. The album is pleasant to listen to, but it could also be more varied." (Dabaser)

"The album acts quickly and with clinical precision – 28.56 breathless minutes to be precise, and when the needle enters the run-out groove after the terminal thunderclap of Raining Blood the only conceivable thing to do is to play the fucking thing again. And again." (The Quietus)

What you said...

Adam McCann: Genuine masterpiece, a stone-cold classic of the genre.

Andrew Cumming: Arriving and departing in less than half an hour, Reign In Blood is an unbelievably intense ride. In 1986, the world had nothing like it in terms of sustained speed and intensity. It made Motörhead and Metallica (the previous benchmark setters) seem sluggish.

What sustains Reign In Blood, though, is the quality of the songs. Bookended by two timeless classics (Angel Of Death and Raining Blood), but then chock full of great songs. Individually and collectively, this is a great listen and sets the bar for the genre. Even now, just the "dum dum dum" sound of those drums at the start of Raining Blood is enough to get the heart racing. Best heavy metal record of all time? Anyone want to argue?

Michael Böcher: Come on… 10/10. It‘s the classic genre-defining thrash metal masterpiece. 28 minutes of pure metal craftsmanship. Influenced so many other bands. The title track was even covered by Tori Amos. Stellar production job by Rick Rubin. One of the definite genre-defining metal albums of all time.

Gary Claydon: Twenty-nine and a bit minutes of unrelenting brutality. Aural assault with a blunt sonic instrument. Totally lacking in subtlety and nuance, but surely that's the whole point? I'm hardly being original in saying that Reign In Blood's best tracks are its bookends, Angel Of Death and Raining Blood, bona fide thrash classics both. In between, things suffer from a discernible element of sameness, and there are some truly risible lyrics throughout. Fortunately, Rick Rubin's production keeps things sharply in focus, and the whole thing is short enough to prevent it from becoming wearisome. 7/10.

Mark Herrington: I gave this a good listen and tried to get under the skin of it, but in the end was glad it was quite short.

I like a lot of heavy metal, but I also like a degree of melody and drama to hook on to. So, with thrash, I prefer the Metallica version over a relentless sonic onslaught with less pattern.

I don’t mind a degree of harsh vocals if it is alongside clean vocals, as with Paradise Lost, or of the gravelly type as with Mastodon.

The first and last tracks here were more memorable, but overall it did very little for me, and I wouldn’t listen to it again.

Andy Aris: 10/10, any less is plain wrong

Neil Immerz: Love it. First got onto it when I was 12 years old on my second trip to Utopia Records - Home Of Metal with my dad when it was on Clarence Street, Sydney. I’d read about the album in Hot Metal magazine at the time. So naturally I bought it.

It was the fastest, most aggressive thing I’d ever heard other than Metallica’s Master of Puppets, but this was on another level entirely. It is still a gem of an album and a masterpiece of thrash metal.

Robby Jackson: My body does not move like that anymore, and when it did, it wasn't to that. Did not like this album at all. Because you can sing, strum and beat the drums real fast doesn't mean it's going to sound good.

Nigel Taylor: Simply one of the greatest, most intense acts of savagery ever recorded. It still sounds as fresh and exciting today as it did on its release. 10/10

Mark Paul: One of the greatest thrash and metal albums of all time. No way should it get less than 10.

Chris Elliott: It goes beyond horrible. It's difficult to express just how bad this is. I never got thrash or the endless depressing genres that followed (honourable exception to early Metallica).

This summarises pretty much everything that I dislike in 30 minutes.

It's the musical equivalent of what the UK press called video nasties - and just as tedious. In the same way that video nasties were just crude, trying too hard to be shocking – in the first five minutes, 15 buckets of fake blood, zombies, lesbian nuns, some Nazi uniforms – and you go past revolted into utterly bored.... exactly like this. And musically? 220 BPM: that's it.

Philip Qvist: So we have a 10-track album that isn't even 30 minutes long, and two of those tracks, Angel Of Death and Raining Blood (my picks on Reign In Blood), are both over 4 minutes long. That gives you an idea how short the other songs are. In fact, its brevity could be Reign In Blood's saving grace, because most songs sounded the same to me, and a 40-minute-long album would have been pushing things.

Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman are on fire here, for both their guitar playing and songwriting, while singer and bassist Tom Araya and drummer Dave Lombardo both ensure that the album remains at a high tempo from start to finish.

I can understand why Slayer's third album is regarded so highly by so many, and it is a classic. If I had bought it in the late 80s I almost certainly would have given it a 9 or 10, but that was then, and this is now. It's still a good album, but I feel that I have outgrown it somewhat. A 7, maybe an 8, from me.

Greg Schwepe: I've always seen Slayer's Reign In Blood high on any list of classic albums for this genre, but I've never checked it out. Thrash is generally not an everyday listen for me. But this is a timely choice, as the early darkness due to the recent time change has relegated my running to my treadmill versus outdoor running. So what better time to listen to something that should blast me through 60 minutes (listen twice!) of running in place and staring at a wall? Let's find out.

Typical frenetic thrash pace? Yep. Vocals spit and barked out? Uh huh. Enough down-stroked buzzsaw power chords to grind a guitar pick to shredded plastic? Correct. Drum heads pummeled and getting close to needing replacement from the pounding? You got it.

It's the chunky riffs that kept me interested and in the game here. I'm not listening to the lyrics for any deep insight or anything that will change my general outlook on life. Yeah, that's not gonna happen.

Basically, this is everything I thought it would be, and nothing more. Actually, a little better than what I expected. 7 out of 10 on this one for me. And yeah, the treadmill pace was a bit faster today.

John Davidson: I tend to view thrash metal like other people view prog rock. I can see that the playing is technically accomplished, but the vocals are not for me, and I just can't connect to the music most of the time.

The drum patterns on Angel Of Death (and indeed peppered through the album) are a case in point. I know people love and revere Dave Lombardo, but that skank beat double-kick machine gun drum style just doesn't work for me.

Again, I appreciate that it's part of the appeal, but as an album it is absolutely relentless. At least it's only 29 minutes long.

Mike Canoe: I like the idea of Reign In Blood more than I like the actual album. Ten songs played so blindingly fast that they clocked in at under 30 minutes! Who can argue with a legacy like that? But as far as the actual album content goes, I like follow-ups South Of Heaven and Seasons In The Abyss better.

Bookends Angel of Death and Raining Blood are still outstanding, but the only two tracks that stand out from the blur in between are Criminally Insane and Altar of Sacrifice. With the benefit of hindsight, this feels like an album that the band had to get out of their system to prove it could be done. Once the land speed record was established, I feel they added some light and shade and became a better band.

Final score: 8.28 (106 votes cast, total score 878)

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Tomorrow night, Hannah Wicklund will be performing at the excellently named Snug Harbor venue in New Paltz, a small town 80 miles north of New York City, and if she's short of things to say to the crowd, she can tell them about her triumph in our latest Tracks Of The Week contest. And then, perhaps, she could play her winning entry. Look, here it is.

Trailing in Hannah's triumphant wake were Sazon and Beaux Gris Gris & The Apocalypse, but those podium positions aren't to be sniffed at, so we won't. This week's great eight are below.

Royal Blood - Mother Never Told You

Combining the gnarly, heavy urgency of their debut with the swashbuckling confidence and life experience of the last few years, Mother Never Told You is the sort of loose yet tight, ferocious banger that fans will be genuinely delighted to hear in a setlist. Swaggering blues rock with noisy punk in its heart and fire under its skin. Need another reason to check out their new album Dead Company (which, incidentally, just came out) in full? This is your reason.

Steven Wilson - Murmuration

This is one of our favourite tracks on the modern-day progressive auteur’s new album, Requiem For A Village. A mellower moment in an album full of twists and dark shapes, its offbeat spookiness (the low, ominous opening synth notes set a wonderfully creepy tone) translates into something strange but extremely moving. Lyrics don’t quite make “sense” but that’s part of its poetic atmosphere. Beautiful.

The Courettes - Killer Kiss

Need a short, sweet and very stylish dose of 60s pop, doused in Ronettes/Spectoresque ambiance and even some jingle bells in the background? (Christmas ain’t far off, right?) Listen to this one. “We wanted to write a 3 minute song that could breathe out all the thrills and chills of a good night out,” the band (married couple Flavia and Martin Couri) reason, “passion and dangers, drinks and strangers, lust and city light and…a killer kiss! Play it loud and never mind the cherry red lipstick stain in your record player.” Saucy.

The Mission - Kindness Is A Weapon

Delayed from its planned 2025 release – while frontman Wayne Hussey had open-heart surgery – Songs For Kith And Kin begins its journey into the world with this first taste, full of cavernous shadows, hypnotic guitars and heavy mystique. “It’s definitely had an influence lyrically,” Hussey says of his recent experiences, “almost every song mentions ‘heart’. Really, the surgery has made me care even less what others think. I’m doing what I want to do in the new songs, what feels natural.”

Lovehoney - Audience

Enjoy some belated Halloween spookiness with the Brooklyn rockers’ latest – all B-movie blood, smoke and crystal balls wrapped in riffy, Hendrix-y psychedelia, haunted woodlands and sinister record crackles. Appetisingly evocative of the late 60s/early 70s (even if its slim runtime left us wishing there was more) for anyone craving something emphatically AI-free. More to come on their new album, which is due out next month.

Devin Townsend - Covered By Causes

Building through orchestral layers, choral swoops, keys and spine-tingling performances from Devin and co-vocalist Lynn Wu (from Chinese progressive metallers OU), Covered By Causes is a stunningly cinematic highlight from Townsend's ambitious record The Moth. Captured at its live premiere in Groningen, the Netherlands, this newly released video captures the storytelling, delicacy and emotional weight that Dev, at his best, combines so brilliantly.

Ann Wilson - Me and Comanche

In which Heart singer Ann Wilson and her band Tripsitter perform a live-in-the-studio(s) version of the epic Me And Commanche, one of the highlights of last month's Consecrated Ground album. It's the kind of spooky Americana Robert Plant does so well with Alison Krauss (Plant and Wilson? Now there's an idea!), with sharp but restrained musicianship, a high desert vibe, and Wilson's warm but powerful voice still setting standards by which others will be judged.

Twisted Teens - I Spend My Time Crying

Another pearl drops off the Twisted Teens production line, with this highlight from the New Orleans duo's third album of 2026 (their first for Sub Pop) continuing their habit of producing songs that could have been written by Ray Davies in the 1960s but are otherwise 100% weird America. Take pieces of punk, bits of blues, fragments of folk, a soupçon of soul and a ragged, almost other-worldly production, and you're left with something that's warm-hearted and strangely timeless. Lovely video, too.

The decade-long run of game-changing albums that David Bowie made from 1970‘s The Man Who Changed The World onwards remains unmatched by any artist. This hot streak came to an end with 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) - his last truly great album until 2016’s grand farewell, Blackstar.

Scary Monsters features one of Bowie’s all-time classic singles in Ashes To Ashes, a song that saw the singer moving on from his fabled ‘Berlin’ period and into a brand new decade. At the same it was also a callback to his breakthrough single, 1969’s Space Oddity, and the character at the centre of it, the astronaut Major Tom.

Musically, the inspiration for Ashes To Ashes came from an unlikely source: Inchworm, a song from the 1952 musical Hans Christian Anderse.

“I loved it as a kid and it’s stayed with me for ever,” Bowie told Classic Rock journalist Bill DeMain in 2003. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of my songs that have sort of spun off that one song.”

Bowie recorded the song in New York’s Power Station studio with guitarist Carlos Alomar, bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis, plus guesting pianist Roy Bittan (of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band) and guitar-synth player Chuck Hammer. Overseeing the session was producer Tony Visconti, who likened Ashes To Ashes to “a Swiss watch.”

“If you open up a Swiss watch, you see all those tiny little wheels and hammers going,” says Visconti. “But no matter what’s going on, it has to tell the time in the end. There was so much Swiss-watch business going on in the tracks for Scary Monsters. That’s why we loved it.”

Ashes To Ashes was released in August 1980, giving him his second No.1 (after Space Oddity) and becoming his first great single of the new decade. For Bowie himself, it was a bridge between his glorious past and a bold future.

“It was this sense of: ‘Wow, you can borrow the luggage of the past, you can amalgamate it with things that you’ve conceived could be in the future, and set it in the now.’

Read the full story behind Ashes To Ashes in the new issue of Classic Rock. Buy it online here.

In the 80s, it’s safe to say, Genesis changed.

“I do feel the strain,” confides Phil Collins, “because it’s said so many times that: ‘The pre-Collins era was the true Genesis’, and: ‘It all fucked up when he started singing.’ Because, really, we all changed. If you stay together as a band, what you wear changes, what you think changes, what you listen to changes, and what you want to do changes. It was a group decision. Well, not even a decision – a metamorphosis.

“Sometimes, when people say: ‘Oh, the early-70s period was better’, that’s because their lives were different in the early 70s. It’s nostalgia for that lived. It was always on the band’s to-do list to have hit singles, to be played on the radio. Even before I joined, that was the premise of the band. I think we got better at knowing when to stop, and when to say, okay, this song sounds great just like this.”

In 1975 the band’s lengthy search for a replacement lead singer after Peter Gabriel departed ended with the post being filled in-house. Phil Collins stepped up to the microphone, still playing drums live during instrumental passages. It worked. Their 1976 album A Trick Of The Tail and the following year’s Wind And Wuthering, the first two of the post-Gabriel era, remain among the band’s best. Genesis had grasped the nettle, and seized victory and longevity from the jaws of fizzling out. They nearly hadn’t, though.

“I remember being in Peter’s hotel room in Manchester when he told me he was going to leave,” Collins recalls 36 years later. “It didn’t occur to me carry on. But my idea of being a four-piece instrumental band went out of the window pretty much that same day. Tony [Banks, keyboards] and Mike [Rutherford, bassist] said: ‘Don’t be ridiculous. We need a singer, because we’re songwriters.’ They didn’t really sing live, and I’d sung all the back-up vocals. Peter and I had become a sort of… Chas & Dave or whatever, and I’d been his stooge on stage. So it became my job to teach the songs to the guys coming to audition. And I always sounded better than them.”

Who decided that?

“Well, I didn’t. This wasn’t something that had entered my head. A Trick Of The Tail was written, and we went into the studio and still didn’t have anybody. We had one guy that we thought might be okay. He came in to sing Squonk, and it wasn’t good. To give the guy credit, nobody in the band had even asked him what key he preferred, if it was too high. We just wrote the music in the key it sounded best in. It was the same with me after I became the singer. No one ever took any notice of what my range was, I had to make do with whatever we’d written.

“So this poor guy left, and we all looked at each other and I said: ‘Well, let me have a go. I think I might be able to do this one.’ I was going to sing a couple of the lighter songs anyway, but nobody knew if I had the balls to sing the heavier stuff. We did it, and it sounded okay. And one by one we just went through it, ticking the songs off the list. As far as I was concerned we’d finished the album, but we still didn’t have a singer. I figured we’d find someone; the album would come out and it would be what it was. In those days, that was sacrosanct – your record was the Holy Grail. What you did live was… as best you could. So we had another half-hearted attempt at finding a singer, but… “

Guitarist Steve Hackett has said he’d pitched his tent ‘firmly in the Phil camp’, after you’d sung on his Voyage Of The Acolyte solo album (1975), and that he and Jon Anderson of Yes encouraged you at your first wedding.

“I’ve read that my first wife suggested I did it, which is quite possible. I may have gone in and said: ‘Well, I guess I’m going to have to do it, as long as I can find a drummer I like.’ And that’s when Bill Bruford came into the picture. But I don’t think anybody thought I’d be able to pull it off. Least of all me.”

“He had a lovely voice,” Tony Banks says of Collins. “He’d obviously done plenty on previous albums. But we weren’t sure he’d want to do it – he was the drummer, after all. And at the time, he didn’t seem to have… the gravitas. But he sounded great. Which meant we had a more difficult decision, in many ways, regarding the live shows, because now we had to look for a drummer as well. So it was two changes where only one had been needed.”

“It was a tall order to ask somebody with real talent to come in and pick up my odds and ends,” says Collins. “I was playing on the records, and also on stage when I wasn’t singing, so to offer a job as a hired hand isn’t normally going to make a great drummer jump up and down with happiness. Bill had played percussion in Brand X with me. We were rehearsing in Shepherd’s Bush one afternoon and he said: ‘Why don’t you ask me?’ He’d been in this area before [musically], with Yes and King Crimson, so he’d be friendly fire to the fans, but I didn’t think he’d do it. For him it was a transitional period, a holding area. Fantastic drummer, but very stubborn and single-minded. I don’t know how happy a time it was for him, but he did it. Then he left and we found Chester Thompson. Bill got us over the bridge.”

Did you get the sense that Genesis fans wanted you to succeed after Peter Gabriel left?

“Coming from our underdog position, when nobody expected anything, A Trick Of The Tail was a bright light. Yes, they wanted the band to survive. And they preferred that we’d made it work within ourselves.”

Can you remember the first gigs where you were front and centre, in March 1976?

“Vividly!” Collins laughs. “Canada, because it was always strong for us. London, Ontario was the first show, then Kitchener. For me it was: ‘What do I wear? What do I do?’ I had big shoes to fill. I had the goodwill of the audience, but not the security blanket of my drums. Y’know, I could sing, but could I talk? Once we’d got a couple of songs out of the way at the first show, I felt: ‘I can do this.’ But it took me years to take the microphone off the stand. It became my drum kit, to hide behind.”

Your cloak of invisibility?

“Yes. Taking the microphone off its stand was what singers did. I wasn’t ready for that.”

The vocal transition may have worked perfectly, but you were certainly a contrast to Peter Gabriel visually. He’d had such a theatrical persona, whereas you were the definition of unpretentious.

“It wasn’t something I thought about. I do remember saying: ‘Okay, I’ll give it a go, but don’t expect me to put on the costumes.’ Which is funny, as I was the one that had come from an acting background. It wasn’t a conscious decision to not do what Peter did, I just didn’t feel I could pull it off. So I became the guy next door. If you don’t put on costumes, you just stand there and sing. And that’s what I did.”

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

After attending the band’s Hammersmith Odeon gig, Gabriel said: “I felt more at ease than I expected to. Except that I got some twitches during Supper’s Ready. It looked like someone else dressed up in my entrails.”

Collins has recalled: “Peter said: ‘You sing Supper’s Ready and Carpet Crawlers better than I do, but you’ll never sing them like I do.’ I know I sing it better than he does, but when he sings it it’s with more understanding.”

“We were lucky in a way,” remarks Tony Banks. “Despite what anybody might think of it now, The Lamb Lies Down, quite a difficult double album, sold less than [it’s predecessor] Selling England By The Pound. We were in debt. So we were able now [with A Trick Of The Tail] to come out with something more direct. Dance On A Volcano is a very arresting beginning to an album. It gets you in there. Then you have strong choruses like Ripples… It was a good place to be.”

“We’d started writing, and things just happened from the first day,” recalls Rutherford. “After two or three weeks we thought, this feels strong, feels good. It gave us the confidence to carry on. Phil singing happened in a very natural way, no forced pressure. And it wasn’t a whole new persona coming in. The audience liked that he was quite a character, but was one of us, one of them. We knew after half an hour in Canada that this was going to work. You don’t look for change, but when it happens it gives you a restart.”

Thus re-booted, the new Genesis saw A Trick Of The Tail – a winning, well-judged blend of yearning melodies (the title track, Ripples…), poignant narratives (Mad Man Moon), and mesmeric, velveteen sound-beds (Entangled) – sell well on both sides of the Atlantic. Left to their own devices, the quartet had got it very right. The next album, the melancholy Wind And Wuthering, consolidated the new line-up and sound, with tracks like One For The Vine, Your Own Special Way and Afterglow refracting the old, epic grandeur through accessible shapes.

The lyrics on both albums referenced a homeland both recognisable and mythologised – ‘a muddy pitch in Newcastle’, ‘dark and grey, an English film, the Wednesday play/We always watch the Queen on Christmas Day’ – which its residents love/hate. You could still escape into Genesis, but now you’d sometimes glimpse signposts from reality.

“It’s not one of my favourites”, Rutherford says of Wind And Wuthering. “It lacked balls, for me.”

“There’s a character about it,” offers Banks.

Steve Hackett decided it was his final Genesis album, and left the band as the live album, Seconds Out, was being mixed. “I didn’t leave because I was unhappy with the band’s music, I left because I was frustrated in my own ability to create a musical world of my own,” he told journalist David Buckley.

“Sometimes Steve would come in with stuff that we didn’t really like,” admits Collins.

“It was kind of weird, Steve’s leaving,” Rutherford says. “I don’t really know why he did. We were mixing the live album, and Phil passed him in Wardour Street. They nodded, said: ‘Hi. See you in a bit.’ Then Steve didn’t come in like he was meant to. It was an odd moment. A group needs a certain amount of communal energy to get a career on the road. You’ve got to get established before you do other projects outside it.

"Steve had made a move into solo work, which was fine, but he wanted to carry on with that. Not long after, we felt we had got established to the point where we could do solo stuff. So it came to him too early, I suppose. I took on the guitar role. I’m not a lead player of Steve’s calibre but, again, because we’re songwriting-driven, I was probably okay.”

And then there were three…

“Records became very easy to make then,” says Banks. “Although on [the next album] And Then There Were Three I did feel the lack of a guitarist who was fluent, as Mike was still learning at that point. Steve had his own character, which the album missed.”

“I don’t think it’s great,” says Rutherford. Follow You Follow Me turned out rather well, though. A nice little pop song, but not too sugary. I don’t know why it works but it does.”

Released as a single in March 1978, Follow You Follow Me gave Genesis their first UK Top 10 hit, their breakthrough into regular singles radio play.

“That album coincided with my marriage breaking up,” Collins remembers, “so really the writing there went between Tony and Mike. I wrote a few lyrics. I was preoccupied with other parts of my life, nothing to do with music.”

With Genesis now officially hit-makers, the three members felt they could venture securely into solo projects. Soon Banks and Rutherford were releasing albums (Banks first, with A Curious Feeling in ’79, Rutherford with Smallcreep’s Day in ’80; he would also later launch Mike + The Mechanics in ’85), while Collins worked on a little side-project album called Face Value, which opened with an understated song called In The Air Tonight. The songs he wrote were inspired by his divorce, live drums were largely replaced with programmed ones, and he brought in a horn section.

The album, released in 1981, went on to sell five million in the US, and go five-times platinum in the UK and 10-times platinum in Canada. The ‘drummer’s solo project’ became, unexpectedly, an international phenomenon. The shape, scale and feel of Genesis would never be the same.

“The two things cross-fertilised a bit,” explains Banks. “The problem was that having briefly escaped from the feeling that we were Peter’s backing band, suddenly there we were: Phil’s backing band. But I thought, what the hell. It would’ve been very difficult if Phil – or Peter, anyone – had had that kind of success when we were 21, but by then we were more like 31 and it was easier to take. We just went, ah, okay. It changed a lot of things. Phil, in a sense, had been the junior member of the group. By the end of all that stuff everyone was very much equal. I think we all benefited from it. We did get very good at writing hit singles.”

“We were one of the few bands who made it work,” Rutherford says of solo sabbaticals in general. “It probably kept us going a lot longer, because we had a great variety. After you’d been on your own, being responsible for a whole album, it made us appreciate each other. Because we’d been together since we were young men, there weren’t really egos within the band situation. Phil, having had huge solo success, came back to the band as it was before. He should be given more credit.”

Before 1980’s Duke gave Genesis their first No.1 album and Face Value made an unlikely superstar of Collins, there had been this awkward phenomenon called punk rock. It spat and roared that all the old established, indulgent dinosaurs must be swept away to make way for the new, three-minute, three-chord, all-rage anti-aesthetic.

The careers of many of Genesis’s peers suffered, never to fully recover, with musical proficiency labelled showy, and flights fantasy thrown of out with the bombastic bath water. Yet, somehow, Genesis survived again. In fact they grew bigger than ever. Further proof that in the peculiar case of this quietly strange band the normal rules do not apply. How did they avoid being razed to the ground?

“I think we were out of the country,” Rutherford answers blithely. “Because I don’t remember it happening. Of course, I knew it was going on, but I didn’t really feel it. Around ’76/’77 we did a huge tour, and then you don’t really follow England so intensely, or not as much as people who were here all the time. I was aware of it, and it was no bad thing, actually.”

Did it affect your thinking at all?

“By then we were too far down our own musical road. Also, we’d already rather simplified from the likes of Supper’s Ready to shorter songs. We’d made a big change, we’d moved along.”

“We’d adapted, become more straightforward, and that suited the times better,” says Banks. “It felt natural to us not to keep on doing complicated pieces and reprises and all the rest of it.”

“Being on tour such a lot,” says Collins, “we weren’t around to witness punk. We knew what was going on because we read the music papers, but didn’t feel too affected by it. I actually remember thinking, ‘Good – a lot of these bands I don’t like either will just disappear!’ I wasn’t a big fan of most of the bands who suffered anyway.”

Were you aware that you were suddenly proclaimed unfashionable?

“I think we were disliked by some, yes. But it’s like that John Cleese accountant sketch: ‘You’re perfectly boring, you’re perfectly normal, you’re perfectly suited to being an accountant.’ Cleese had an accountant’s meeting the following day, and suddenly realised this had been on television.

So he went to his accountant and said: ‘Did you see the show?’ ‘Oh yes,’ said the accountant. Cleese said: ‘Ah. I’m ever so sorry about that.’ The accountant said: ‘No, not at all. You see, I’m a chartered accountant.’ To me it was like: ‘Oh, they’re not talking about us, they’re talking about those virtuoso bands.’ We write songs, we’re not in that group. Although obviously a certain element of what we did was what they were trying to get rid of.”

As Duke showed, Genesis had done their own, voluntary curtailing and culling in time for the 80s. In fact what had originally been envisaged as a 30-minute suite of songs (including Duchess and hit single Turn It On Again) was separated into individual tracks. Meanwhile, Misunderstanding gave the band their first US Top 20 hit.

“I always say Duke is my favourite,” says Banks. “There’s something optimistic about that album, which I love. The way it starts. Bang! You’re in. That’s when we really gelled as a three-piece.”

“I was out with the mist with Duke,” says Collins, who made up for not being fully focused on its predecessor. “We rehearsed at my house while I was writing Face Value, too. We became more the band we used to be, writing stuff out of thin air, just from a guitar riff or a drum machine pattern or whatever. Working stuff up from scratch. And that became the way we continued. Because by that point I had a solo career.”

Indeed he did. After Duke, every subsequent Genesis album was perceived and judged differently. Phil Collins became one of the best-selling solo artists in the world, but continued to record and tour with Genesis until 1996, 16 years and four albums later. How did he manage to combine the two?

“Well, it’s what I did,” he shrugs. “By this time I was married for the second time and we didn’t have kids, although I had two from my first marriage and they came out on the road with us. On top of all this I got offered things where I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d be sitting at home and the phone would go and it’d be Robert Plant. I was living not far from Eric Clapton, and we became friends through John Martyn. Suddenly he calls me one day and asks me to produce his album. How could I refuse? I was being asked to play by the people I grew up listening to. I’d think: ‘I probably won’t get asked again,’ so…

“There was one year, ’87 I think, when…”

When Genesis became the first band to play four consecutive sold-out nights at Wembley Stadium?

“Yes. We had three weeks off after that tour and then I went on the road with Eric. And, you see, by the time we did a Genesis tour and went around the world and back, I’d feel I could do an album again. Or I’d do the same thing and tour with my album, and then it’d be time for a Genesis record.”

Did the lines between Phil Collins albums and Genesis albums ever get blurred?

“No. The way we’d developed, from Duke onwards, we all had outlets for our individual material. Rather than, say, Tony coming in and us learning his song the way he wanted us to play it, he’d do it as he wanted it done on his own album. Some of my things would never have had so much space if I’d put them in with Genesis. It’s a question of growing up and knowing what you want to do. And in the end I left the band after I’d done the album Both Sides, where I played absolutely everything. Because I thought: ‘I don’t know if I can go back now.’”

The end for Genesis wasn’t nigh yet, though. As if to show there were no hard feelings between frontmen old and new, in 1982 there was a one-off reunion performance with Gabriel and Hackett at a muddy Milton Keynes Bowl, under the moniker Six Of The Best. It was arranged (hastily) to raise funds for Gabriel’s WOMAD project, which was then struggling financially.

Karma thus ensured, Genesis, with Collins now (against all odds) a household name, spent the rest of the 80s growing absurdly big. Abacab (’81), Genesis (’83) and Invisible Touch (’86) outdid each other, before We Can’t Dance (’91) saw the final studio hurrah of the Collins/Banks/Rutherford line-up. The first of those, another UK No.1, was self-produced and another watershed. Recording it, they discarded an entire album’s worth of material as they thought they were becoming, in Rutherford’s words, “a caricature of ourselves”.

With evangelical new-wave-era zeal, they threw out any songs that sounded like anything they’d done before. It firmed up their move towards radio-friendly pop-meets-AOR, although the albums generally still featured concessions to longer-form structures. As Collins had done on Face Value, they used Earth, Wind & Fire’s horn section – an unthinkable move to fans of Genesis albums like, say, Nursery Cryme or The Lamb.

Even the album’s title was the polar opposite of the fantasies-and-fables days of yore. Rutherford told an American radio show: “There were three bits of music in Abacab, and we referred to them as Section A, Section B and Section C. At different times, they were in different order… and at one point it spelled ‘ABACAB’. On the final version, it wasn’t that at all, it’s more like ‘ACCAABBAAC’.”

Rolling Stone magazine praised the band for dropping their “ivory-tower artistry” and embracing “highly rhythmic interplay” and pop hooks, and compared Genesis to The Police and XTC. “Truly modern art rock,” said another review.

Thus the new incarnation was encouraged and confirmed. The music became increasingly clinical, ruthless, effective, 80s. Topical issues were sometimes touched on, and the dreamy meanderings of the past were gone. Genesis (the band members all refer to it as ‘the Mama album’) included Mama (concerning an obsession with a prostitute, and inspired by David Niven’s autobiography), That’s All and Home By The Sea, and was another No.1.

Invisible Touch was by far the biggest album of their career, selling more than 15 million copies worldwide and birthing no less than five US Top 5 hits, with the title track giving them their only No.1 single.

In American Psycho, the serial killer Patrick Bateman calls it their “undisputed masterpiece. It’s an epic meditation on intangibility. It deepens and enriches the meaning of the preceding three albums… Listen to the brilliant ensemble playing… you can practically hear every nuance of every instrument.” Satirist or not, he wasn’t their worst critic. As Collins has said:“In the later years there were people coming to our concerts who didn’t know I played drums.”

After a hiatus, Genesis reconvened in 1991 for their fourteenth – and what would be their final studio album with Collins – We Can’t Dance. “For me,” says the singer, “we sounded really good on that album.” Inevitably it was huge in both the UK and the US. The trio stress again that this wasn’t a case of chart-magnet Collins imposing hits upon the others.

“I can understand why people might assume so,” Banks says, “but it really did come from all three of us. The emphasis changed.

“Once, maybe, Steve and I had wanted to steer it a little more left-field, but after Steve left I lost that bit; I was quite happy. I’d come into the business to write pop songs. When we got it right, when it all fitted together, like on Land Of Confusion I’d feel a sense of satisfaction. And we were still able to do more ambitious pieces, like or Tonight Tonight Tonight. The live show was still perhaps heavier than the records.”

Genesis’s early-90s live album The Way We Walk divided the tracks into separate volumes: ‘the shorts’ and ‘the longs’. It was all a far cry from the trippy days of ‘Me, I’m just a lawnmower, you can tell me by the way I walk…’

When Phil Collins did cut the cord, it was down to geographical, not musical, differences. He recalls: “We met at [manager] Tony Smith’s house and sat round the kitchen table, and I said: ‘Well, I gotta go, guys.’ And they said: ‘Okay, fair enough. We’re surprised you stayed as long as you did.’ Which I thought was fantastic. When they actually announced it, they said: ‘After 25 years, we’ve decided he’s not the right guy.’ They had a wonderful attitude towards the whole thing. Then they said they were going to carry on, and I was pleased as punch, because the music touches so many people who have no control over it.”

It was the end of an era. Did you feel in any way sentimental about it?

“I felt some relief,” says Collins. “You do get into a situation where you’re a slave to the band. ‘Slave’ is probably the wrong word.

“I remember a conversation after my first marriage broke up, and Tony and Mike said: ‘Well if you’d just told us, we’d have cancelled some things.’ And I wouldn’t have thought of that! Because this was our job. I didn’t want to let the guys down. Or the roadies. At the same time, my life had pulled me to Switzerland, and I didn’t see at the time how we could carry on. I was becoming far more independent. The more you find yourself, the harder it becomes to sing other people’s thoughts.”

And you’d had so much validation as a writer at that stage of your career.

“But I’ve always erred on the insecure side, I must admit. That might sound difficult to believe, because I’ve been very lucky with the success rate of what I’ve done. Still, if there’s 100 people in the room and one guy doesn’t like it, I’m more interested in why that guy doesn’t like it than why the other 99 do. So I end up whipping and questioning myself. But I’ve had a charmed life, which Genesis has been a huge part of. We wouldn’t be sitting here talking if it wasn’t for Genesis.”

And so the glory years wound down. There was nothing left to prove, yet Banks and Rutherford brought in Ray Wilson (formerly of Stiltskin) as vocalist, along with other musicians, and released 1997’s Calling All Stations album. Sales were, by Genesis standards, disappointing. And while one imagines nothing would irk Banks and Rutherford more than it being described as a footnote to the Genesis saga, that’s what it was.

“It didn’t do badly, but not as well as one hoped, so it has a slightly tainted feeling with me,” says Banks. “And having to cancel an American tour was frustrating. The audiences that came to shows enjoyed it, but it was difficult to persuade them to come.”

Over the next decade, Genesis reconvened only for various archive box-set launches. In 1999 the ‘classic’ line-up of Collins, Banks, Rutherford, Gabriel and Hackett re-recorded Carpet Crawlers for a compilation. That might have been that. But in 2007 there came the Turn It On Again reunion tour.

At first the idea had been to gather the 70s line-up with Gabriel and Hackett to perform The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. When Gabriel couldn’t commit, Collins, Banks and Rutherford thought it would be more appropriate to bring back Chester Thompson and Daryl Stuermer (who, respectively, had played drums and guitar/bass live with Genesis after Gabriel and Hackett left, right up until Collins left) from the later era. Hackett had no problem with this.

“Peter was actually the one who’d suggested doing The Lamb,” reveals Banks. “We gave that serious thought, because we’d assumed he’d be the difficult one. But then he did become the difficult one. And I can’t blame him. Did he really want to go back into a situation where we all have an opinion? Phil is obviously more used to it, we have an easy relationship.

“It was a lovely tour to do. I enjoyed it. I was sad we didn’t play more in England. We didn’t know where we stood, to be honest. The group always got slightly strange press here, so we played it fairly safe, and played a lot in Germany, where we knew they liked us. It was a very ambitious show, and had to be financed that way.”

“We weren’t sure how it’d sell in England,” agrees Rutherford. “Of course, we should have done more nights at Twickenham. That was a shame. We made a mistake there.”

A free open-air concert at Rome’s historic Circo Massimo drew an immense crowd, estimated at around half-a-million.

“It was a pretty bullet-proof show, even though torrential rain followed us around,” Collins says of that tour. “It sounds corny, but it was fantastic to see parents telling their teenage kids: ‘Now this is a band!’ The fact that it was sold-out everywhere told us we were doing something that people still like to hear and don’t see much of any more. It was hard work, to try to play like you did 30 years ago, on some things. And, basically, that was the tour that fucked me up as a player. I did my neck and my back and my arm. Somewhere, doing the drum duet, something waved a white flag and just gave in. And now I can’t play any more.”

You’re definitely ruled out for good?

“Yes. I’m out of the whole thing. It’s fun to talk about, but I’ve got my kids, and I’ve written a book about Texan history and the Alamo. No, I can’t play now. A year ago, at the Prince’s Trust thing, I did Crossroads with Eric [Clapton] and I just couldn’t hold the sticks well enough. Really, I’ve done it all my life and it’s no surprise I’ve run out of air miles. I remember on stage in LA, at the end of the last show, I told the guys, in front of the audience, that I loved them. It was my way of saying I can’t do any more. We’re great friends, and that’s what’s so nice in the end, when you’ve been with people for such a long time. It’s been a great journey.”

Genesis were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2010 (Collins, Banks, Rutherford and Hackett attended, Gabriel was in rehearsals for a solo tour). Gabriel and Hackett both released albums in 2011. Rutherford maintains his Mechanics, but “of course I miss it. It was a powerful machine when that band kicked in. Being on stage was the most wonderful feeling.” Banks loves writing, “so if the group’s not available, I do it some other way”. Collins has a place in history, along with Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, as the only musicians ever to sell more than 100 million albums as a solo act and another 100 million as a member of a band.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” he laughs. “Spot the odd one out. I had no idea until Going Back, my last album, came out. And of course that will always stay that way, because records don’t sell those sort of figures any more.”

Does it bother Genesis that they’ve never had the acclaim from the gatekeepers of criticism and cool that they must feel they’ve earned? (Particularly when you consider that there are more than 50 Genesis tribute bands in existence.)

“It’s not a big thing, really,” says Banks. “I am surprised, though, that we’ve slipped into this position – we had a lot of success at one point. No one minds being adored, do they? We didn’t get press, we didn’t get awards. We slip through the cracks somehow. The problem may be, a little, that Phil’s star has done funny things, because of his solo career and life. It’s perhaps affected how people perceive the group. Some people wouldn’t know which were Phil tracks and which were late-Genesis tracks. But those earlier albums are starting to be thought of a little more kindly.

“I can’t complain. I’ve had a fantastic career. And I can be on the Tube, go anywhere, live a totally normal life, so I think I get the best of both worlds. Besides,” he adds, “never being cool meant we never had the problem of suddenly not being cool; we’ve always been just not very cool.”

“Genesis was always a little ahead of the times,” reckons Rutherford. “We just kept changing. And that was good for us, but maybe not for the Grammys. I heard someone refer to Take That as a ‘heritage band’ the other day. I thought: everything’s relative. Also, because of the music’s intensity, people always saw us as rather serious. Actually we had the most amazing fun, a huge laugh, living our lives.”

“We started to get good reviews on the reunion tour,” recollects Collins. “I’d forgotten what that was like! Because, you know, I’ve lived under this umbrella of abuse for many years now. But it feels like a few slates are being wiped clean, credit being given where due. And the body of work will be remembered, not what someone felt at the time. Forty years of Genesis – that’s a lot of music. Bands don’t last that long now because of the media environment. Everything burns out quicker.

“My younger kids have just discovered what dad did. They listen to Genesis in the car. And it’s only when they listen to it that I do. It reminds me of the van breaking down on the way to gigs. Obviously that was in the early days, and not in the last 30 years. It was all experience and it’s all worth remembering."

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 168 (March 2012)

If ever there was a song made for Steven Tyler to climb on top of a grand piano to, it’s Dream On. Aerosmith’s 1973 debut single was at the heart of the Boston band’s six-song mini-sets at their two Hollywood Bowl comeback shows. And there was Tyler, 78 years young, standing astride his white piano with the fearlessness of someone a third of his age as guest drummer Dave Grohl added just a little too much mustard behind him.

Kiss will disagree, but Aerosmith were America’s greatest rock’n’roll band. The run of albums they made between 1973’s self-titled debut and 1978’s clammy, spiral-eyed Draw The Line positioned them as a homegrown Rolling Stones, their riffs filthier than a used hypodermic, their auras vibrating with malevolent juju.

Yet one of their greatest artistic contributions is also their most overlooked. With their 1973 debut single Dream On, Aerosmith inadvertently bequeathed the Great American Power Ballad to the world. This whisper-to-a-scream showstopper brought Broadway dynamics to hard rock and nailed the bad-boys-with-sad-faces trope that guitar bands, rappers and X Factor contestants alike would subsequently exploit whenever they needed a guaranteed heartstring-tugging hit.

That it was written by Steven Tyler, a man who once bragged that he had snorted Colombia and probably wasn’t exaggerating, isn’t as surprising as it sounds. The singer came from a musical family. His Italian grandfather, Giovanni Tallarico, had been a classical cellist, and his father, Victor, was a Juilliard-educated pianist. He may have pushed back against classical music when he discovered rock’n’roll, but it stayed in him.

The beginnings of Dream On predate Aerosmith, who got together in Boston in 1970. “The music for Dream On was originally written on a Steinway upright piano in the living room of Trow-Rico Lodge in Sunapee, maybe four years before Aerosmith even started,” Tyler said in Stephen Davis’ 1997 ’Smiths biography Walk This Way, referring to the resort his family owned in New Hampshire. “I was seventeen or eighteen… It was just this little thing I was playing, and I never dreamed it would end up as a real song or anything.”

Tyler did most of the heavy lifting when it came to songwriting in their early days, and one of the tracks he brought to the band was the song he’d started more than half a decade earlier on his parents’ Steinway piano. He fleshed it out on an RMI keyboard he always claimed to have bought with $2000 he’d found in a suitcase left outside the band’s apartment, which may or may not have been drug money (the story goes that money’s original owners apparently burst into the apartment brandishing guns and demanding their property back before being tackled by the band’s neighbour, an ex-Marine).

Tyler knew the song was promising, but it was only when he workshopped it with Perry and fellow guitarist Brad Whitford that he realised how special it was. “When I transposed it to guitar, Joe played the right fingers and Brad played the left hand on guitar,” the singer recalled. “Sitting there working it out on guitar and piano I got a little melodramatic. The song was so good it brought a tear to my eye.”

Just as the music was at right angles to the crackling, Yardbirds-indebted boogie-blues that made up the rest of their early sets, so Tyler’s lyrics swerved the lip-flapping, sexually-charged jive-talk. “Every time that I look in the mirror/All these lines on my face getting clearer,” sang the frontman, a world-weary early 20-something worrying about the passage of time he’d yet to experience. The song ended with Tyler repeating the phrase that gave it its title, an exhortation to believe himself: “Dream on, dream on, dream until your dreams come true.”

“It’s about hunger to be somebody,” he said. “This song sums up the shit you put up with when you’re in a new band.”

Joe Perry wasn’t as convinced by Dream On as Tyler, but he knew it would be good for his band. “To me, rock’n’roll’s about energy and putting on a show,” he told Classic Rock in 2002. “I didn’t really appreciate the musicality of it until later, but I did know it was a great song, so we put it in our set.”

It was a shoo-in for Aerosmith’s self-titled debut album, recorded at Boston’s Intermedia Studios in late 1972. When it came to laying down his big ballad, Tyler opted for a little chemical assistance. “I put the string section on Dream On sitting at this Mellotron while a friend of mine kept laying out lines of crystal THC that I was snorting while I was playing,” he said in Walk This Way.

The finished song still sounds terrific today. The decorative, weirdly medieval-sounding opening soon breaks out into something much grander, as Tyler’s old-beyond-his-years weariness is overtaken by hope, or at least the anticipation of it. The strangulated croak he adopted for the rest of the album is dialled back here. Instead, the song’s feverish climax is a teaser of what was to come: the Demon Of Screamin’ is in the house.

Aerosmith shimmied onto the shelves in January 1973, with Dream On released as a single in June. The song reached an underwhelming No.59 first time around, but it was a different story three years later, when it was re-released on the back of the success of their third album, Toys In The Attic. (’73 really was Year Zero for the power ballad – Styx’s superhumanly soppy Lady followed Dream On out of the gate a few months later, though it likewise took a couple of years to become a national hit).

Of course, Aerosmith knew they were onto a winner right away. The big tearjerker would become part of their arsenal, and everyone else’s too – no self-respecting rock band through the late ’70s and beyond could resist turning up the dial marked ‘emotion’ to show just how vulnerable they really were underneath it all. It wasn’t just hair-swishing dudes either – Eminem sampled it on his 2002 song Sing For The Moment, you could throw a stone at a random crowd and probably hit an American Idol singer who performed it on the show, and it was memed to high heaven a few years ago when it soundtracked a clip from the God Of War video game (You can’t say the same about Lady. Sorry Styx).

Just as they inadvertently created the Great American Power Ballad, so Aerosmith themselves killed it with 1999’s I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing, a Diane Warren song so ridiculously, meteor-destroyingly over-the-top that no one else could follow it. But the original remains the most significant – a message from the young, (comparatively) innocent Aerosmith to their older selves, with little knowledge of the wild, crazy turns their lives would take in between.

“When I wrote Dream On, I went, ‘Where did this come from?’” Tyler told Rolling Stone in 1994. “I didn’t question it. When I read the lyrics back now, for a guy who was stoned, stupid and dribbling, I got something out of there.”

Steven Wilson wrote a set of rules for his band before they recorded new album Requiem For A Village, in a bid to avoid what he describes as “vanilla prog” appearing on the record.

In February he told Prog of the follow-up to The Overview: “I decided I wanted to remain in the realm of the conceptual and large scale, but I want to get back to a more quirky musical vocabulary. I’m very keen on keeping the little quirks and imperfections.”

In a more recent Prog interview he explained his ninth solo release – featuring contributions by XTC’s Andy Partridge and actor David Tennant – contains “moments when harmonies, intervals and notes occur that most trained musicians would find offensive, which I love the idea of.”

Now Wilson tells Now Spinning: “First of all was the idea of embracing dissonance, and instruments not being in tune. One of the rules I had with Randy, my guitar player, was: ‘you play the guitar as you find it. If we come into the studio in the morning and the guitar’s drifted out of tune, you’re not allowed to tune it.’”

He notes: “Most guitar players, if you said that to them, they’d just storm out in disgust and resign on the spot! But I think Randy got it.”

He continues: “The other aspect was playing instruments that I don’t normally play – or that I can’t play; approaching an instrument in the way a child approached an instrument. What does a child to when presented with a piano? Just makes a noise!

“There’s a lot of that on this record. I play violin – I can’t play violin! But I found something interesting to do on it. I play drums; I can’t play drums! Ditto on oboe, ditto on other things. It’s that Eno thing of embracing limitations, imperfections and the unexpected.”

Wilson expresses a continued desire to explore his own themes rather than doing what might be expected of him. “There’s always going to be a market for what you might call ‘vanilla prog rock,’” he says, “and there are bands out there doing that very well – bands that make records that Genesis might have made in 1973.

“And that’s fine. I don’t wish to be patronising about that. I made a record like that with The Raven – it was my homage to a 70s prog rock record. But it was a one-off for me. I’m more interested in creating my own music palette and vocabulary, and put them together in a way that doesn’t sound like a hotch-potch but sounds seemlessly, organically hopefully very creative.”

While Requiem started out as a standalone work, he confirms: “I’ve talked with Andy about maybe there being a sequel to this record – in true prog rock style! We’ve created this really fascinating world, and I think there’s potentially more to be said with the village concept.

“When you describe it to people, there’s a temptation to imagine it’s this very all-over-the-place incohesive bolting together genres that shouldn’t go together. it isn’t that at all. It feels like a Steven Wilson record; at least I hope so.

“I’m not self-consciously putting these things together – I just like these things and I think it’s interesting to put them together, and not to overthink it in a way.”

Requiem For A Village is on sale now.

Geoff Downes says he felt lost after the death of Asia bandmate John Wetton, calling him the best collaborator he’d ever had.

Wetton died in 2017 while work was underway on the follow-up to 2014’s Gravitas. The pair had been developing a suite, now titled Tattoo Indigo, which has finally found a home in new Asia album Indigo.

“We had been working on another album after we released Gravitas – the last album that I made with John,” Downes tells Glide. “Around 2015 and 2016, Tattoo Indigo was pretty much in the making – but sadly we never got to finish it because John got sick with cancer and then passed away.

“I lost my greatest writing partner of all time. I didn’t know what to do with this unfinished track after the loss of John. When we had the opportunity to record this album with the new lineup, I thought the track shouldn’t be locked away in a box for ever.”

Downes dug out the files and took them to new Asia member Harry Whitley, who’s taken Wetton’s place on bass and vocals. “I think John would have been proud that I actually did get it together and finished it,” he adds.

He accepts the track has a 70s feel, with references that could include Uriah Heep and ELP. “The middle section has a mix of The Moody Blues and The Beatles nostalgia,” he adds.

“John Mitchell did a great job on the guitar ending. He was in John Wetton’s solo band for quite some time. When it came time to put Asia back together again a few years ago for a John Wetton tribute show, John Mitchell was my first choice as a guitarist because he knew our music.”

Indigo features guest appearances by former member Steve Howe and Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy, and also includes another of Wetton’s unfinished collaboratons. Prog said of the record: The fact that it works so convincingly is testament to the quality of Asia’s current incarnation.”

Indigo is on sale now.

2026 is on its last legs. Thankfully. It's been a long old year, but with just two months left to go - and some of that will be eaten by the holiday period - we're starting to cast our eyes ahead to what might come next year. Festivals aplenty have already started announcing (Bloodstock and Wacken got in early, but we've also had Sonic Temple, Welcome To Rockville, 2000 Trees and Mystic dropping their line-ups), meaning the time is right to discover some wicked new music.

That in mind, here are the results of last week's vote. NWOBHM legends Saxon landed third place with their tale of the Gorgon Medusa, while newcomers Wulfgang took a healthy second place with their second single You Mean Nothing To Me. The overall winners for the week though were France's Sunborn, proving that people haven't yet tired of the Sleep Token-induced wave of masked genre-mashers whilst adding their own fine entry to the canon with Silent Attraction.

We've got a mix of established bands and newcomers for you to dive into this week, as we bring new singles from Sabaton, Death Angel, Distant, Charlotte Wessels, Comeback Kid and more. We've also finally got the debut single for Burn Eternal, the new band that reunites Adam D and Howard Jones, plus a few new discoveries for you to stick your teeth into. Let us know which songs excite you most by voting in the poll below, and use the comments to suggest any bands we should be keeping eyes out for. Have a great weekend!

Burn Eternal - Wounds I’ve Made

It feels like an age has passed since Howard Jones and Adam Dutkiewicz announced they were working on new music together. It's wild to think that almost 20 years have passed since Howard's last record in Killswitch, but the magic is clearly still there in Burn Eternal as the pair fall on old habits of making emotionally driven, riffy metalcore which makes great use of Howard's powerful voice. Burn Eternal's self-titled debut is due February 26.

Death Angel - The Never Was

Death Angel have had their eyes firmly locked on the past for most of this year, looking back at 1990's Act III for tour dates across America and Europe. That hasn't stopped them cranking the dials for new music though, and The Never Was maintains the thrash revivalist energies of the group's 2010s output. It doesn't have the funky low-end of their initial comeback albums but if you're in the market for speed and old school thrash, Death Angel are bringing the goods.

Charlotte Wessels - Incubus

Seems we can't go a week without a symphonic metal icon popping up lately, but when the music is this good, we can hardly complain. Charlotte Wessels is really coming into her own with her band The Obsession and new single Incubus has the familiar not-quite power metal melodies alongside some impressively technical guitars, Wessels' voice soaring atop it all to make the whole song feel epic and fantastical. New album Mute Swan Empire is due February 5.

Sabaton - Berserker

Not-quite power metal? Best to break out the big guns then. Sabaton will be back on the road in 2027 for the next leg of the Legends tour, and the Swedish band have just announced an expanded edition of that album for a March 5 release, commemorating the fact by going full Amon Amarth (thematically at least, though that's definitely a tour we'd love to see). If you've followed Sabaton for a while, you know exactly what to expect with Berserker, but if you've not prepare to be swept away in hale, chest-beating anthemia ripped right from the pages of classic heavy metal.

Cult Of Luna - Sadness Will Reign (ft. Joe Duplantier)

Sticking within the Swedish borders, Cult Of Luna have this week released new album In The Shadow Of Your Shadow. The post-metal giants have celebrated with the release of Sadness Will Reign, a thundering song that features guest contributions from Gojira's Joe Duplantier, and some surprisingly jazzy sax backing against their usual crashing-monolith of riffs. You can also catch the band at Damnation Festival this weekend (if you're in the UK, at least), which is always a bonus.

Raised By Owls - My Optician Called Me A Poser Because I Couldn’t Read The Sanguisugabogg Logo

After all that emotional heft, it can't hurt to have something utterly fucking daft. Raised By Owls have become masters of the online skit, and their satirical death metal gets hookier by the day. There will doubtless be purists who get pissed off by the UK band's prodding of the metal world, but its done with such clear love and devotion we reckon you're best just cranking it up and enjoying the fact we're all in on the joke.

Comeback Kid - Shedding Season (ft. Courtney LaPlante)

Another new record loosed into the world this week, Comeback Kid prove reliable as ever on Chosen Hell. New single Shedding Season is a typical pinball of fleshy hardcore violence, stomping and bounding off the walls, the Canadians flexing by getting Spiritbox's Courtney LaPlante on to provide guest vox.

Future Static - State Of Mind

Sometimes a voice just grabs you by the ears and drives your face through a wall. That's where we're at with Future Static's State Of Mind, the track's impressively clattering, rampaging riffs somehow fading into the background against some serious throat-acrobatics from singer Amariah Cook, who really puts her voice through its paces on a track that is both brutal and agonisingly harsh, and sublimely melodic at points. Their new album Ornaments & Memories is out today.

Everdawn - Illusionist

Symphonic power metal has generally been more of a European and Japanese phenomenon than something that's caught on in the States. But alongside a few other North American groups like Unleash The Archers and Seven Spires, Everdawn are helping to shift that perception. New single Illusionist is a powerhouse of sublime guitar work and stirring melodies, spelling exciting things ahead for new studio album Kalli on January 15.

Shevils - The Force Of Water

Hailing from Norway, Shevils generally deal in high-octane hardcore. But there's a tinge of their county's biggest metal export on The Force Of Water, the group exploding into a blackened frenzy that brings to mind the likes of Harakiri For The Sky or Svalbard in its incorporation of melody and black metal bluster. The group's new album Sect Resurrection is coming February 19, and clearly they're pushing their sonic boundaries if these recent singles are anything to go by.

After experiencing Motörhead work up 1986’s new songs (while strapped to a chair, at Lemmy’s behest) in rehearsal, then hearing rough mixes on his home stereo, Orgasmatron promised to be Motörhead’s wildest, possibly even best album yet. Bringing in unknown guitarists Würzel and Phil Campbell, Lemmy had seen his original vision of the UK’s MC5 manifesting 10 years after forming Motörhead, catalysed by the dexterous playing of drummer Pete Gill (formerly with Saxon).

But he hadn’t counted on NY avant-funk producer Bill Laswell, coming from PiL’s Album, now helming his first heavy rock set with Jason Corsaro, king of the era’s booming drum sound applying hip-hop studio techniques at the mixing stage. For Overkill-like peak barrage classics, Orgasmatron was up there with Ace Of Spades, Mean Machine one of their fastest, all somewhat neutered when mixed in NYC without the band present. As Lemmy declared in White Line Fever: “It was a much better album when he took it to New York than when he brought it back."

There was much hanging on Motörhead’s first full album with the lineup unveiled on 1984’s No Remorse compilation and first studio album since ’83’s Another Perfect Day. Orgasmatron was released on the GWR label after two years of legal wrangling with Bronze and getting turned down by most major labels. Ain’t My Crime, Claw, Nothing Up My Sleeve and Ridin’ With The Driver still packed a stonking punch but, as shown by this 40th anniversary remaster and late-period producer Cameron Webb’s new remixes, the album had fallen short of full mayhem potential.

Thankfully, the new mixes and mastering reinstate the full marauding glory that enough diehards knew was in there to send it to No.21, relishing Deaf Forever (about a corpse), Built For Speed, Dr. Rock and the cataclysmic title track with Lemmy sounding like some demonic fate manipulator lacerating global hypocrisy (“‘Orgasmatron’’s not a bad word, I just thought of it one day,” he explained, trouncing Woody Allen Sleeper references).

Extras include one-play-only backing track workouts and out-takes, bolstered by a live Castle Donington set recorded for Radio 1’s Friday Rock Show.

Even the Orgasmatron Machine stage prop proving too big for most venues backed up Lemmy’s declaration to this writer: “We’re Motörhead, man. One thing we are is unique. No one else does it” now ringing louder and clearer than ever on this consummate package.

There’s something rather lovely about Kings Of Leon seeming to be no longer particularly bothered about what people want them to sound like. Twenty-three years into their career, the multi-platinum group and family members have reached that privileged point where they can make a record they actually want to make, rather than trying to write the next Sex On Fire.

O My Beloved, their tenth studio album and first to be entirely self-produced, sounds like a band finally giving themselves permission to do just that. It’s a personal collection of songs, almost like a bundle of letters passed between the Followills, with fans given permission to read over their shoulders. Centered on family, fatherhood and the life they’ve built together, there’s an inoffensive intimacy here that they have rarely allowed to sit so comfortably at the front of their intentions

Kings Of Leon once gave us southern rock with a gravelly and endearingly mumbled delivery. Then came examples such as Only By The Night and a decade of fans wondering when the band might return to the unique chaos of Youth & Young Manhood or Aha Shake Heartbreak. The answer, increasingly, seems to be that they won’t. And perhaps they shouldn’t?

On O My Beloved the southern roots remain, but they’ve softened around the edges, taking on a country hue. Feel The Love brings some of Caleb Followill’s gentlest vocals yet, revealing a romantic side that hasn’t always had much room among the band’s early-days hooks and arena-sized choruses. Cold Blue Down carries a slight feel of Frank Black’s Honeycomb, while Warm Company wanders into Pink Floyd-adjacent territory.

It’s not ground-breaking (but that hardly seems to be the point). In fact the second half is where O My Beloved really settles into itself as they’re simply documenting where four family members are now.

Kings Of Leon’s intimate Nashville show at Basement East felt like a fitting preview of this quieter chapter. O My Beloved belongs in smaller rooms, on quiet Sundays, with people you actually want to spend them with. This album might be the confirmation that the band’s rugged days aren’t coming back any time soon (don’t worry, we can still pop on Youth & Young Manhood to scratch that itch). But if we want Kings Of Leon exactly where they seem happiest, then O My Beloved is the ticket.

It seems appropriate that at a time when Canada is coming under financial and verbal attacks from the Trump administration, Canadian Bryan Adams returns to the metaphorical ramparts to create a collection of songs that pay homage to the place where he grew up and still sometimes calls home. It began simply enough, writing a song for the documentary Canada’s Wild Eastern Edge, but by Adams’s own admission, he suddenly found himself writing more songs about Canada that took him “somewhere a little different, which made the whole thing exciting”.

It’s certainly a sudden left that feels right, but having a subject matter close to his heart has made for one of Adams’ best and most inspired albums in years.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the polished pop-rock veneer of his last few records – very few people do radio rock like the ageless Adams. But this record, a mix of roots, folk and rock, proves that he can write in almost any form (we await his unlikely jazz fusion double album with bated breath), and it’s in the writing of songs for home that has ignited something in Adams that resonates beyond mere boundaries or borderlines.

That said, he can still spin the most sublime of power ballads, although on How’s It Goin’ he isn’t writing about the archetypal cars and girls, instead choosing to sing, in Handful Of Gold, about the Klondike gold rush in northwest Canada in the late 1800s, and the frozen and cruel fate of thousands of the would-be miners who headed there in the hope of striking it rich.

Similarly, the tragedy of the Second Narrows Bridge collapse that caused the death of 19 men and remains the worst industrial disaster in Vancouver’s history is picked over for the elegiac-sounding The Bridge. They might sound like odd starting points, but Adams builds them into something magical and artful.

The resounding thrum of Iron Ribbon - which sounds like Adams doing his best Pete Seeger – takes its cue from heavy industry and the formation of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Which sounds like the driest puddle of inspiration, but with the backing of Bryan and his band, it thunders along merrily. And the punchy 51st State is an edgy riposte to the would-be critics of the Canadian way of living; all are welcome, but maybe just watch your step.

Pallas’ newly-released album, A Song For Tomorrow, is likely to be their last. It comes three years after 2023’s The Messenger and arrives a year after singer Alan Reed revealed he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

“I’m one of those guys that says, ‘Never say never,’ because there are lots of things we’ve said in the past that we’d never do again – and we did,” keyboard player Ronnie Brown tells Prog.

“But this feels different. Towards the end of making it, Niall Mathewson [guitarist] and I felt like it was maybe as far as we could go with the band.”

If the Scottish prog veterans’ ninth album since forming in 1976 does prove to be their last, it’s a fine swansong. Largely written by Brown and Mathewson, the 10-track record shifts between shorter, punchier songs such as dramatic opener Reset and the knotty Rushing Headlong, to more traditional epics like the moody Avenue Of Broken Dreams and the stirring Inside Out, the latter pair sung by Mathewson and Brown respectively.

All four members, including bassist Graeme Murray, pitch in with lead and backing vocals, and it also features a guest appearance by singer Natasha O’Neil.

“It sounds like Pallas always have, but more modern,” says Reed, who recorded his vocals over four days at his home in Stirlingshire. “There are parts that are moody and atmospheric, there are parts that are much heavier, and there are parts that sit everywhere in between. It really repays repeated listens.”

Brown and Mathewson are also responsible for the album’s lyrics. “It doesn’t have an overall concept,” says Brown, “but if you listen to individual tracks, it’s all about technology, conflict, references to Biblical events.

“Niall sees quite a lot of it as being about the wrongs of the world – wars happening and the feeling that the human race is collapsing in on itself. For me, it’s more about people and their characteristics, what drives us, what gets us out of bed in the morning; it’s a journey through that.”

Sadly, a tour or even one-off shows in support of the album are off the table. Pallas’ most recent gig took place in 2015, and Reed formally announced the end of the band as a live act at the end of 2024, citing the cost of touring plus the fact that Mathewson now lives in Cambodia.

The singer’s health has also meant bringing the curtain down on his own live performances. He bowed out following a short solo tour in September with his other band, The Daughters Of Expediency.

“It’s going to be very difficult,” says Reed of his decision to step back from playing live. “I’ve done this since I was young – it’s hard to let go. But because of my situation I need to stop.”

Reed isn’t completely done with music; he has a solo album in the pipeline, duesoon. And Brown says there’s a possibility he’ll continue writing with Murray and Mathewson regardless.

“It is slightly emotional,” says the keyboardist of his band’s apparent end. “We’ve had such a long time together and done so much, and we have so many happy memories. But it certainly feels like we can move on and look at other things in our lives.”

A Song For Tomorrow is on sale now.

Former Killswitch Engage collaborators Adam Dutkiewicz and Howard Jones have put out the first single from their new band, Burn Eternal.

The track, Wounds I’ve Made, is out now and precedes the release of the duo’s self-titled debut album via Metal Blade on February 26. Watch the music video below. The album’s tracklisting and artwork are also below, and preorders are now live.

Singer Jones comments: “Wounds I’ve Made is about both acknowledging mistakes and regrets of the past, while also constantly evolving and moving forward. Sometimes change hurts, but it’s necessary for self-growth and to avoid being stuck in the past. Some relationships aren’t meant to be.”

Guitarist Dutkiewitz adds: “We are glad to finally release Wounds I’ve Made. It’s crazy to think that this was one of the first songs I wrote for this project… six years ago! I really hope you guys dig it.”

After years of teases and studio updates, Burn Eternal officially launched last month, with the announcement of their Metal Blade record deal.

Jones first revealed that he and Dutkiewicz were in the studio together in 2023 via social media. “1st song down, 11 to go,” he wrote on Instagram. That December, the singer shared that vocal recording for Burn Eternal had been finished. It was confirmed in December 2024 that the album had been mixed.

Dutkiewicz co-founded Killswitch Engage, one of the biggest bands in modern metalcore, in 1999, and Jones joined their lineup in 2002, replacing Jesse Leach. With Jones upfront, the band made a series of era-defining albums, including 2004’s The End Of Heartache and 2006’s As Daylight Dies. The singles My Curse, The End Of Heartache and Holy Diver (a cover of Dio’s 1983 heavy metal anthem) were smash hits which enjoyed extensive MTV airplay.

Jones departed Killswitch in 2012 due to personal struggles and was replaced by his predecessor Leach. The exit was amicable, and the singer temporarily reunited with the band as a guest at select live shows in 2018, before handling co-lead vocals on 2019 single The Signal Fire.

Killswitch continue to tour and record with Leach. The band released their latest album This Consequence via Metal Blade last year and are currently playing across Australia and New Zealand. They’ll take the stage at Enmore Theatre in Sydney on Friday. See further dates and details via their website.

Burn Eternal – Burn Eternal:

1. Wounds I’ve Made
2. No Escape
3. Blackheart
4. To Bear The Cross
5. Scared Of Shadows
6. Bitter Pill
7. Learning To Let Go
8. Born Again
9. Fell Silent

Pink Floyd's long-awaited, much-delayed reissue of Animals will finally arrive on January 22, when the album is released across a variety of formats through Sony Music, including a Deluxe Box set, various vinyl formats, CD and digital.

The band have shared a 1977 promotional radio edit of Sheep, which has never been commercially available.

The album has a convoluted release history: a planned box set, in line with similar releases for The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, The Wall, and The Division Bell, was scrapped over an issue with some of the liner notes. In the end, the album was released as Animals 2018 Remix on vinyl, CD, Blu-ray and digital.

The Deluxe Box Set contains 3 LPs: the original 1977 album, the 2018 Remix (remixed by James Guthrie), and a disc of five rarities that includes an unheard Roger Waters track titled Young Nicholas Jon and previously unreleased early versions of Sheep and Dogs. It also has five CDs mirroring the LPs, plus a two-disc set of the May 9, 1977 Oakland show recorded live at the Oakland Coliseum Arena by a then 19-year-old bootlegger, Reinhard Hohlwein, and the single-disc Blu-ray, which includes all of the above audio, with the 2018 Remix being available in 5.1 and Dolby Atmos

It also features a 64-page hardback book comprising new sleeve notes from New York Times best-selling author and lifelong Floyd fan Jonathan Lethem, an interview with Reinhard Hohlwein, and an excerpt from Hipgnosis’ Aubrey “Po” Powell’s memoir about the making of Animals’ iconic album art.

The LP release contains the original 1977 album in orange and sandstone colour variants. The 2LP and 2CD sets contain the original 1977 album plus rarities, as does the digital release, which also features the Oakland show, while the Blu-ray features both mixes, rarities and the live material.

“The mood in music was changing in ’77," says David Gilmour. "Punk music was hitting everything and I suspect that had a little bit of an influence on the way we were working on the Animals album. I mean it’s quite an aggressive, stripped-back album. It was moving away from the sort of soundscapes that we had on Wish You Were Here. This album is more in your face and more rough and ready. And definitely the lyrics are a lot more aggressive from Roger. We had a lot of fun making it.”

"There were all sorts of differences beginning to surface within the band but in some ways Animals was a remarkably cohesive enterprise," Nick Mason adds. "The big thing was the development of Britannia Row. Britannia Row was this building we’d bought some few years before in which we’d actually started building our own recording studio. We tried to design the studio in such a way that any of us could operate it and all the trunking was labelled clearly so anyone could plug in a set of headphones without someone else having to do it for us.”

Pre-order Animals 50.

Animals 50 Tracklisting & Formats:

DIGITAL
“Disc 1” - Animals (Original album)
Pigs on the Wing 1
Dogs
Pigs (Three Different Ones)
Sheep
Pigs on the Wing 2

“Disc 2” - Animals (2018 Remix)
Pigs on the Wing 1 - 2018 Remix
Dogs - 2018 Remix
Pigs (Three Different Ones) - 2018 Remix
Sheep - 2018 Remix
Pigs on the Wing 2 - 2018 Remix

“Disc 3” - Rarities
Dogs - Early Version, Rough Mix*
Sheep - Original Radio Edit*
Sheep - Early Version, Rough Mix*
Studio Jam*
Young Nicholas Jon*

“Disc 4” - Live from the Oakland Coliseum Arena, 1977
Sheep (Live)*
Pigs on the Wing 1 (Live)*
Dogs (Live)*
Pigs on the Wing 2 (Live)*
Pigs (Three Different Ones) (Live)*
Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pts. 1-5) (Live)*
Welcome to the Machine (Live)*
Have a Cigar (Live)*
Wish You Were Here (Live)*
Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pts. 6-9) (Live)*
Money (Live)*
Us And Them (Live)*
Careful With That Axe, Eugene (Live)*

2 LP
LP1: Animals (Original album)
LP2: Rarities

2 CD
CD1: Animals (Original album)
CD2: Rarities

Blu-Ray
Animals - Original Stereo Mix (1977)
Animals - Remix: Stereo + 5.1 + Atmos (2018)
Rarities (Stereo Mix)
Live from the Oakland Coliseum Arena, 1977

Deluxe Box Set Includes:

5CD
CD1: Animals (Original album)
CD2: Animals (2018 Remix)
CD3: Rarities
CD4: Live from the Oakland Coliseum Arena, 1977 Disc 1
CD5: Live from the Oakland Coliseum Arena, 1977 Disc 2

3LP
LP1: Animals (Original album)
LP2: Animals (2018 Remix)
LP3: Rarities

Blu-Ray
Animals - Original Stereo Mix (1977)
Animals - Remix: Stereo + 5.1 + Atmos (2018)
Rarities (Stereo Mix)
Live from the Oakland Coliseum Arena, 1977

* never before officially released

Ghost’s Mary On A Cross has been streamed on Spotify one billion times.

The 2019 single is the latest addition to the 10-digit club, joining such heavy metal hits as Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters, System Of A Down’s Chop Suey!, Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train and Evanescence’s Bring Me To Life.

The song was originally a deep cut on the B-side of Ghost’s two-track release, Seven Inches Of Satanic Panic. In the mythology of the Grammy-winning Swedish hard rock band, it was recorded by a late-60s precursor to the current lineup.

This ‘proto-Ghost’ was fronted by Papa Emeritus Nihil – who, like every other masked singer in the group’s history, had the singing voice of creative leader Tobias Forge.

Mary… didn’t get a standalone release or tie-in music video, with the band’s attention instead going to Seven Inches’ A-side Kiss The Go-Goat, but that changed once the track went unexpectedly viral on TikTok. A music video, featuring animation inspired by Scooby-Doo! Where Are You?, finally premiered in July 2024, to promote the band’s feature film Rite Here Rite Now.

Currently, Mary… has 160 million views on YouTube, while a live version from 2022 has 120 million and the music video has 41 million. It’s become a mainstay at shows, having been performed 250 times according to setlist wiki setlist.fm.

Forge, who co-wrote the song with collaborators Salem Al Fakir and Vincent Pontare, has been loath to disclose what Mary… is about. He told Mastodon drummer/singer Brann Dailor on a live stream: “There are multiple layers in the lyrics that it might be important for people to understand. The chorus is written very tongue in cheek of course. ‘Go down’ doesn’t necessarily mean as in a 69 sense of the word… it can also mean go down as in go down in history, your own ascent.”

Forge added that the titular Mary could be either Mary, the mother of Jesus, or Mary Magdalene, one of the apostle’s close followers. He explained that he was fascinated by Magdalene being “miscredited”, due to the common conception of her being a repentant sex worker, despite the idea having no biblical basis.

After Mary…, Ghost’s most popular song on Spotify is 2016’s Square Hammer, which has been streamed 299 million times. It’s closely followed by 2018’s Dance Macabre, with 264 million.

The band are currently on hiatus following the completion of their globe-trotting Skeletour in February, but it’s been reported that Forge is preparing to revive his pre-Ghost death metal band Repugnant and play live shows. A poster in Stockholm seemingly teasing a Repugnant reunion show was spotted earlier this week.

‘Hiraeth’, a Welsh word, translates roughly as a deep, melancholic longing for a lost place, person or time which perhaps never even existed. Steven Wilson uses it as a track title here, but that feeling permeates the entire journey. It’s another twist in the career of an artist who, once categorised somewhat reductively as prog, is now uncategorisable. Yes, his last album, The Overview, was card-carrying prog, but prior to that his 2020s albums mashed up genres, often draping his thoughts on life, the universe and everything over electronica and neo-disco.

Requiem For A Village redraws his map again. It’s a spooky, sinister, Poe-faced creation coloured by Gothic folk and Sabbath-ish doom, infused with the spirit of The Wicker Man, the stories of M.R. James, and those creepy 70s kids’ TV shows which seemed unaware that they were flirting with the occult.

There’s also a hint of Under Milk Wood in the narration, written by XTC's Andy Partridge and delivered with quiet relish by David Tennant. This might give dated echoes of David Hemmings orating over an old Rick Wakeman album, but it’s carefully gauged as an ancillary, not predominant, flavour.

We’re transported to a vague, tiny British village (it feels Welsh), where time’s arrow is warping in a curious chill. The set is more mysterious than macabre, but ghosts, it’s implied, run wild. We’re introduced to “the cast of our masque”. “Each actor’s house filled with giggles and tears,” Tennant testifies. “Although you can’t see them - they’ve been here for years…”

Wilson endeavours to recapture a sense of innocence in his playing – more human flaws, less software – and that relatively organic approach serves the atmosphere he’s going for. With regular collaborator Randy McStine, drummer Russell Holzman and (on the mesmerising Murmuration) vocalist Katherine Priddy, the album coheres into subtly dramatic shapes. Obscured by clouds in parts, wilfully, but that bolsters the mystique.

The heavy riffing of the title track is balanced by the profound patience exhibited on On Chapel Slope; the whisper-to-a-scream build of A Basket Of Bees is followed by the closing 11-minute suite, where prog’s back in town (with its metal mates) and means business. It can switch from the Alan Parsons Project to Tindersticks within seconds. The church bells linger, as does the eerie chanting – presumably of those villagers as they lurch nearer and nearer. Wilson’s detour to the dark side will, gratifyingly, haunt you.

Ivar Bjørnson says Enslaved pushed themselves into a new way of writing songs when he decided the material he’d witten for new album Mið wasn’t good enough to use.

The follow-up to 2023’s Heimdal came about when he suggested they should start studio work without any material ready to track. He took inspiration from an ancient Norse saga – which in the end framed Mið (pronounced “Myth” and meaning “Middle”), described by Prog as “a wonderful, psyche- cleansing antidote to the drudgery and gloom of everyday life.”

Bjørnson tells Blabbermouth: “I felt like a lunatic when I presented it to the guys – ‘We’re going to book the studio.’ ‘Do you have the songs ready?’ ‘Not exactly… We’re going to record it as we come up with it.’” But it worked out: “They said, ‘Yeah, sure; sounds great!’”

He said the experiences was “a bit of an evolution” as the music came together, until the time came to focus on lyrics. That’s when he recalled a saga with the translated title Missing Your Head.

“This bard was so eloquent that, at some point, he did something to piss off a king,” Bjørnson says. “As they put his head on the block and raised the axe to rid him of his head, he started reciting a poem – he improvised it. The king couldn't get enough of it, and he ended up getting out of it since he made up this fantastic song.”

Reflecting that “the lyrical process can be good, doing it sort of at gunpoint,” he explains that the situation Enslaved had put themselves in became the concept behind Mið. “What’s the album about? We are storytelling creatures. That’s what science is telling us: our strand of humans succeeded because we’re good at telling stories.

“As a function of gathering and common goals, loyalty, we won because we like to be in groups and all that stuff. That also gave us the desperate need to understand or seek connections and explanations.”

As Prog notes, Mið features “everything from Indigenous American chants to the music of the Arctic region. And lots of crushing heaviness.”

Bjørnson reflects: “It was really something special for us – it brought out a lot of ‘heads on the chopping block’ good ideas; things that really felt good as a group, working together.” He adds: “It’s not like we have to do this on the next album; or, ‘Next time we’re going to write songs as we parachute out of a plane.’

“It’s not that. It’s more like, if you’re open to challenging yourself and sometimes being inspired, don’t think too much about stuff. Just be a band and it’s going to work out.”

Mið is on sale now.

Less than a month after returning to the stage with Alice Cooper at an NFL game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Las Vegas Raiders, Nita Strauss has resumed her role as the official guitarist of the LA Rams.

Strauss took to the stage at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles on Sunday, accompanied on drums by her husband, Josh Villalta, to play a short set of covers during the Rams’ Salute to Service halftime show.

The duo's extremely lively medley included the theme from Top Gun, Metallica's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Godsmack's Awake, Iron Maiden's The Trooper, Kenny Loggins' Danger Zone, Foo Fighters' My Hero and a closing mashup of Queen's We Will Rock You and Metallica's Sad But True.

"It was an absolute honour and a privilege to provide the halftime entertainment for this past weekend’s Rams' Salute to Service game, and even more special to get to do it alongside my husband on stage and our son and my mom in the front row!" says Strauss. "I will never forget this experience ever! So grateful to the Rams for the opportunity to make some magic on Sunday!"

Strauss first performed at a Rams game in 2018, playing America the Beautiful at the Salute to Service game, and became the team's official in-house guitarist in 2020 when they moved to SoFi Stadium. In 2022, she received an official Super Bowl ring from the franchise following their Super Bowl LVI win against the Cincinnati Bengals.

Villalta, who drums with New Orleans metal band Choleric and played on Strauss's solo records, 2018's Controlled Chaos and 2013's The Call of the Void, was brought in to augment her halftime performances this season.

"To be brought in this year is an incredible honour," Villalta said in a statement. "The Rams have been amazing to Nita and I over the years, so having the opportunity to officially join her makes this even more special."

Strauss, who left Alice Cooper's band early this year to go on maternity leave, will return when Cooper resumes his Welcome To My Nightmare Las Vegas residency with magician Criss Angel later this month.

Gojira frontman Joe Duplantier has returned and lent his growl to a new single by Swedish post-metal luminaries Cult Of Luna.

The Umeå band released their track Sadness Will Reign, featuring Duplantier, earlier today (November 4), as part of their build-up to new studio album In The Shadow Of Your Shadow, out on Friday.

The song, the fourth single from the upcoming album, sees Duplantier and singer/guitarist Johannes Persson roar in unison over five minutes of dense heavy metal riffing. Listen below.

The guest performance will hopefully tide fans over as Gojira continue to work on their as-yet-unannounced eighth album, the long-awaited follow-up to 2021’s Metal Hammer album of the year, Fortitude. Drummer Mario Duplantier told Bloodstock TV last year that a new album will arrive in 2026, although that now seems unlikely, and that they’ve recorded some drum, guitar and bass parts.

“We needed that time, I think, just to make sure we are all on the same page: make sure what Gojira is bringing next is strong enough,” he explained.

“Also, we don’t have that much pressure. We are not a young band anymore… We’ve been a band for 30 years, so Gojira is already an established band. It doesn’t mean that we can be lazy – it doesn’t mean that – but it's very crucial to take the time to bring something fresh and new and powerful.”

Gojira have had a vigorous touring cycle since Fortitude’s release, supporting such superstar bands as Metallica and Korn, headlining multiple tours and headlining such festivals as 2025’s Bloodstock Open Air. In 2024, the band played a new song – Mea Culpa, a reworking of French Revolutionary anthem Ah! Ça ira! – at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games.

They currently only have two live shows on their slate, supporting System Of A Down at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California on June 10 and 12.

Meanwhile, Cult Of Luna have a European tour in place to promote In The Shadow Of Your Shadow. Supported by Bruit ≤ and Youth Code, the band will kick things off at Les Docks in Lausanne, Switzerland on February 26 and conclude at Archa + in Prague, Czech Republic on March 13. The sole UK date will take place at London’s O2 Forum Kentish Town on March 6. Get tickets.

As well as Duplantier, In The Shadow Of Your Shadow will feature a guest performance by David Eugene Edwards of 16 Horsepower and Wovenhand, who appears on the song One More Day. The band have previously collaborated with Mark Lanegan, Julie Christmas and Hereditary composer Colin Stetson, among others.

n a musical era when almost anything could and did happen, Pentangle rose to great heights with their experimental take on folk rock. Their peak came with revered 1968 album Basket Of Light – but as singer Jacqui McShee told Prog in 2009, it didn’t last long.

Pioneers from a time before labels like ‘progressive rock’ had assumed common coinage, Pentangle made music that really was impossible to categorise. A self-consciously arty hybrid of blues, folk, jazz, classical and something unnameable that could only be produced when the five individuals in the group stood – or, more usually, sat – in the same room together. “It was all down to chemistry,” agrees singer Jacqui McShee.

These days Pentangle tend to get lumped in with the folk-rock of the late-60s; and certainly the roots of the group’s main creative voices – McShee and guitarists Bert Jansch and John Renbourn – lay within that then-thriving UK scene. But as the vocalist points out: “We all had much broader musical backgrounds. I brought most of the traditional songs into the band, but I didn’t actually own any folk records! I was into jazz: Miles Davis, John Coltrane. It was about experimentation. We all had an equal say in every song, jamming along, working on each tune together. Nobody was told how to play or sing. You just did what you liked.”

Although Jansch and Renbourn had several highly-regarded if uncommercial solo albums between them – including Bert And John, recorded during their time sharing a flat together – the almost instant success Pentangle achieved could not have been foreseen when its principle members first came together, playing for free at the Horseshoe Hotel in Tottenham Court Road in the spring of 1967.

Once described as “a man who seems in silhouette even in daylight,” Jansch was a disciple of fellow Scot Davey Graham, whose modal tunings, learned on travels to Morocco, would also influence Jimmy Page (a man “absolutely obsessed with Bert Jansch” in the mid-60s). Described by Neil Young as “the Jimi Hendrix of the acoustic guitar,” Jansch took folk and added baroque, jazz, blues and rock. “I used to get thrown out of folk clubs for not singing the right songs,” he said in 2006. “I was too influenced by all the non-folk music.”

Renbourn was more traditionalist though no less experimental, looking beyond folk to medieval and early classical music for his inspiration, and taking the acoustic guitar to inscrutable new heights as he weaved in and around Jansch’s enigmatic improvisations. As McShee says: “Nobody plays like Bert and nobody plays like John; put them together and it shouldn’t work, but it just does. Sitting with them while they play, it always made me smile, it’s so hypnotic.”

The other pieces of the jigsaw, drummer Terry Cox and double-bassist Danny Thompson, were equally catholic in their musical influences. Both shared a love of improvisational jazz, had been part of Alexis Korner’s blues band, and jammed with future Mahavishnu Orchestra leader John McLaughlin.

Thompson was also a larger than life character who liked to party. “We were all drinkers,” McShee recalls. “Going to New York for the first time, we were outrageously drunk all the way over on the plane. We arrived at the hotel and it was all expenses paid by Warner Brothers. We were like kids in a sweet shop.”

Given the arty, free-flowing nature of the music and the era it was made in, one wonders if there was more to Pentangle’s offstage mien than mere drinking? More laughter: “There was some dope smoking and stuff, but nothing drastic. As a kid I’d be sat in the pub with a brown ale hoping no one would ask me my age.”

McShee, who’d sung with John and Bert at London folk haunts like Les Cousins, had also appeared on the former’s Another Monday album. When Thompson and Cox began joining in at the Horseshoe, “it just seemed natural.” It was the quietly-spoken but fiercely determined Jansch who suggested they make a permanent alliance. Pentangle’s name came from Sir Gawain’s shield in the Middle English poem Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, and represented the five members (points) of the line-up. “That came from John,” says McShee, “who knew about that sort of thing.”

The idea of becoming rock stars had never entered their minds, though. As Jansch once said, “I was never interested in being famous; never interested in anyone else who was.”

Enter legendary managerial svengali Joe Lustig. “Joe had big plans for us,” McShee says, “which definitely worked for a while.” They certainly did: launching the band with a showcase concert at the Royal Festival Hall, Pentangle found themselves “starting at the top and working our way down again,” as Jansch only half-jokingly described it.

By the time third album Basket Of Light reached Number 5 in January 1970, Pentangle were TV and radio regulars. The album even yielded a minor hit single with Light Flight, an earlier version of which had been the theme to the TV series Take Three Girls. How a piece of music that switched between 5/8, 7/8 and 6/4 time signatures became a chart hit remains a mystery – even to McShee:

“We were really shocked at having a hit record. Joe said it would have been a much bigger hit if we had expanded on [the subject of the TV show] but I stamped my little foot and said no, because it wasn’t really Pentangle style. Joe got a bit cross about it, but none of the rest of the band were bothered.”

Basket Of Light was not only their biggest hit but their most cohesive musical statement – a beguiling blend of traditional Olde English songs given fresh stylings – such as Once I Had A Sweetheart (to which Renbourn added a sitar solo) and originals credited to all five members like Train Song (ostensibly a blues with added sumptuous layers, evoking the rhythms of a train before melting into a dream-like middle section where McShee’s voice becomes a fifth instrument, giving the album its title in the line, ‘Love is a basket of light; grasp it so tight’).

She admits: “The previous album, Sweet Child, had been a double – half live, half studio stuff, but only because we didn’t have enough stuff to fill it. Basket was the album that really summed up what we did.”

Produced by Shel Talmy, until then best known for his work with The Who, it was also the album that introduced the band to the rock-buying crowd, bowling over audiences with its seemingly bizarre mixture of heady originals like Hunting Song – based on the story of a magic drinking horn sent to the court of King Arthur by Morgana le Fay – and inspired covers like Sally Go Round The Roses, a 1963 pop hit for early girl group The Jaynetts.

“I remember the studio was a big room with a clanky old lift,” says McShee. “We would try things out; but I was terrified of Shel because he was blind. One time were doing four-part harmonies, all standing around one mic and Shel said, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding!’ We’d never had a producer before!”

The band became even bigger in the US, regarded in the same light as groundbreaking UK acts of the era like Cream and Led Zeppelin. “We would be advertised as this big rock group, which we weren’t. But we would play ever so loud and it would go down really well.” A shy person, McShee could “hide behind these other four big egos, which suited me down to the ground.”

During their debut at New York’s Fillmore East “the dressing room was several floors above the stage, but the floor would thump up and down with the noise.” Sandwiched between the Sir Douglas Quintet and Canned Heat, they only survived, says McShee, because “Bill Graham came out and said, ‘Right you lot, this is a group from England and they play acoustic guitars, so listen!’ And they did!”

Playing four nights at the Fillmore West in San Francisco with the Grateful Dead
was “slightly different because everybody was so stoned. We went quite smart but came back as hippies. Suddenly John’s got the dust-bowl jacket on and Terry’s got the fringe-jacket.” When Jerry Garcia later credited them with inspiring the Dead to adopt a more acoustic approach, “I thought, how could you remember? Because they were pretty off their faces at the time.”

Not that the rest of Pentangle was immune to such ideas. Jansch admitted that he too began to live the rock star life, “drinking way too much, smoking more than ever.” In America, there was also cocaine. “Not a good drug,” he admitted.

In the wake of Basket’s success, by 1970 Pentangle had appeared at the Isle of Wight festival, headlined Carnegie Hall, and recorded a soundtrack for the film Tam Lin. But their next album, Cruel Sister, released in October 1970, was not a hit. A collection of traditional material given ambitious progressive twists like the 20-minute-plus version of Jack Orion, McShee now admits now the group was “running out of steam.”

The writing was on the wall; and within three years Pentangle were no more. “The last full year we were together we went to the States three times, we went to Australia; we went to parts of Europe,” says the singer. “There was no time to record. Joe would have us on the road constantly and we just got tetchy with each other. We weren’t working on new stuff and Bert wanted to do more on his own anyway. You start to think, ‘I can’t stand it any more.’”

Fortunately, the story didn’t quite end there. When they reunited to receive a Lifetime Achievement award at the 2007 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, it was as if they’d never been away – a fact brought home when Terry Cox fluffed his way through Bruton Town. “Keep going, I thought,” laughs McShee. “People will just think we’re trying out something new!”

Avenged Sevenfold vocalist M Shadows says the release of 2016 album The Stage taught him a handful of important lessons.

The band launched the record without previous notice on October 27 that year, intending to make an artistic statement with the approach. As a result it sold significantly fewer copies than 2013’s Hail To The King – but Shadows argues that, over time, the pros have outweighed the cons.

“We continually do this – we do something a little too early,” he says. “We always want to be first to do things that excite us. So the positive is that we're always artistically satisfied; we’re getting to do things that get us up in the morning and really pump us up.”

He continues: “So here’s the things I learned. At the time – and it’s even worse now – the Internet moves fast. If there’s no long drawn-out campaign, it simply misses a large portion of people. Because if it doesn’t show up on your feed, and if it doesn't show up within that first week, people are on to something else.

“So what we didn’t plan for was that. We thought the record would just grow; we thought radio would get behind it. Radio said they want nothing to do with it ‘cause there’s no buildup, and, ‘We feel shafted by you guys. You didn’t let us know.’ The news cycle’s already turning over.”

Despite those negatives, he continues: “The positives are that it has significantly grown as lore within our catalog. If you liked The Stage in the beginning, you were on the outside. Now, if you don’t like The Stage, people don’t listen to your opinion – like, ‘You either haven’t listened or you don’t get it.’”

Shadows still believes A7X made “something really cool happen” with a challenging album that, on top of being launched secretly, confounded many fans’ expectations. “It’s dense, and when it clicks for people, that thing becomes like the crown jewel in the catalogue,” he says.

“The first song’s nine minutes. But once it clicks you’re, like, ‘Oh, this is my favorite one!’ It’s cool to have that in the catalog, especially since we survived it all. It’s not like the band’s doing worse because of that. It’s just a part of the lineage of the band – it’s a cool thing.“

Fifteen months on from Black Sabbath's historic Back To The Beginning show in Birmingham, Tony Iommi emerged with his first solo album since 2005's Fused.

The album finds Iommi joined by frontman Jørn Lande, the Norwegian singer who joined Sabbath spinoff Heaven and Hell in paying tribute to the then recently-departed Ronnie James Dio at the UK's High Voltage festival in 2010. Completing the lineup are bassist Becky Baldwin, drummer Karl Brazil and longtime ally keyboardist Mike Exeter, who also co-produced the album.

Throughout, Iommi reminds us why that "Riff Lord" moniker isn't seriously challenged. Over The Violent Sun is a pedal-to-the-metal opener, while World Alone is powered by a brutal boogie. Beyond The Dead benefits from a marvellously funereal tempo, and Stormwatcher chugs along on a superior riff. It's business as usual: Tension, menace, and riffs.

"The thing is, I don’t have to do this,” Iommi told Classic Rock. "It’s not about the money, because we don’t need the money. But this… this is what I do. I just can’t get away from it. I have things I want to say."

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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 2026

• Amon Amarth- The Allfather Awakens
• Butcher Babies - Nightbloom
• Kavus Torabi - October by Name
• Lenny Kaye - Riot on Oxford Street
• Sponge - Recuerda Tu Muerte
• Twin Atlantic - Separation from the Animals
• Enuff Z'Nuff - Live at the Whisky A Go-Go
• Graveyard - Fever
• Greta Van Fleet - Palace for the People
• The Pineapple Thief - Far and Wide
• Sheryl Crow - Pick You Up
• Twin Temple - Doomed Lovers
• Devin Townsend - Harmonic Dharma
• Fontaines D.C. - Dopamine Chamber
• Richard Thompson - Hippies, Thugs and Heroes
• Rick Wakeman - Return to the Red Planet
• Kid Rock - Halfway 2 Jesus
• Bernie Taupin - The Sea Has No Mercy
• Brothers Osborne - Watertown
• The Flower Kings - Hope
• Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible Live
• Polyphia - Be Not Afraid
• Wolves In The Throne Room - Estuary
• Ministry - Hate to Go – Take Out or Delivery
• Nickelback - Everything Under The Sun

What they said...

"The rhythm section of bassist Becky Baldwin (Mercyful Fate) and journeyman session drummer Karl Brazil adds little but at least doesn’t detract from Iommi and Lande’s interplay. The only real letdown is that the guest leads from Queen’s Brian May on Death Wake feel anonymous. We might as well have gotten one more solo out of Iommi instead." (Pitchfork)

"This is a splendid album, brilliantly performed and recorded; it is forward-looking and completely able to hold its own in the contemporary metal world. It has of course been subject to much anticipation, and it can be said convincingly that it doesn’t disappoint." (Louder Than War)

"What makes From The Dark even more interesting, though, is that it isn’t simply an exercise in nostalgia. Yes, the riffs are unmistakable, the atmosphere is often wonderfully oppressive, and there are moments when you could close your eyes and imagine Ronnie James Dio stepping up to the microphone. But there’s something else here too. Something reflective, almost philosophical, running through these eight songs." (The Rockpit)

What you said...

Evan Sanders: Listening to the start of this album was an immediate pleasure, as the opening three songs hearkened back to Dio-era Black Sabbath. Iommi's guitar tones are the dark minor chords of classic Sabbath, the lyrics are filled with doom, and Jorn's growling voice is a stand-in for Dio. Some of the guitar riffs remind me of songs such as Hand Of Doom and War Pigs. The album lost steam in the next three songs, before picking up for the final two, Return of the Arbalist and Legacy.

It's satisfying to hear a solid solo effort from Iommi, since when I went back to listen to past efforts, it seems that he never quite found the balance of lyrics, guitar riffs, and dark tone that put him on the guitar pantheon with Sabbath. If this turns out to be a farewell, he indeed has raised his legacy. 7/10.

Andrew Cumming: As someone who grew up in the 80s, this is quite a familiar and nostalgic feeling. My first "new" Black Sabbath album was Seventh Star. A Black Sabbath album? Well, not really. Iommi's iconic riffs, of course and a flavour-of-the-month vocalist (sorry, Glenn Hughes). It was the follow-up to Born Again, chock full of Iommi riffs and Ian Gillan on vocals. And the predecessor to Eternal Idol, this time with Tony Martin on vocals and a chock load of Iommi riffs.

So an album of Iommi and a random vocalist feels very familiar and nostalgic. The debate raged at the time about whether this amounted to Black Sabbath. A valid and sensible debate, and the answer really is no. Were they good albums? Well, some were, some weren't. If Iommi had followed the path of, say, Slash, and released the albums under his own name, I think there would be a lot more affection for those records.

And the same applies here. It's a good record. Jorn Lande does a good job as a vocalist, and Iommi brings the riffs. There are even echoes of Ronnie Dio in Lande's vocals to continue the familiar vibe. It's a good listen and a decent record. It probably lacks genuine standout tracks. But nothing's a disaster. Iommi owes nobody anything and has nothing to prove. If he wants to release an album, good on him. I'm in.

Chris Downie: Without wishing to gloss over the incredible history of the man's musical pedigree, there is little if anything that can be said about Tony Iommi's legacy that hasn't already been said, multiple times. The burning question here is whether this is a late-career gem on par with the RJD swansong The Devil You Know, or a forgettable 'diehards only' endeavour akin to Black Sabbath's 13. Thankfully, it's the former.

Many fans of contemporary metal were enthused when news broke that Jorn Lande was recruited to front Iommi's latest solo project, given his hugely impressive CV (Ark, Masterplan, Avantasia, to name just a few), and he doesn't disappoint here. Renowned for his Coverdale-style melodic hard rock inflexions, he brings a melodic touch to an otherwise doomy album that, musically speaking, sits somewhere between the criminally underrated Tony Martin era of Sabbath and the aforementioned final curtain call with Dio.

That said, the whole band shines here; Becky Baldwin, fresh from her stint with Mercyful Fate, is in impressive form, while Karl Brazil provides a performance Vinny Appice would have been proud of.

From the impressive opener of Over the Violent Sun to the impact of closing track Legacy, this is an album that once again affirms Iommi's status as perhaps, along with the late Malcolm Young, the greatest riffmaster in rock and metal history.

If there's only one criticism at this stage, it's the mysterious exclusion of the two instrumental tracks from the main album (Scent of Dark and Deified are available on the limited edition CD), as they are solid musical workouts, the former somewhat reminiscent of Supertzar from Sabbath's iconic Sabotage album. The inclusion of one, or even both, would have added a change in pace to an otherwise fairly uniform album. Minor gripes aside, this is a fine effort from a man with nothing left to prove, but does so regardless. 8.5/10

Gary Claydon: This is what the young people of today call 'a proper banger'. Jorn Lande invokes Heaven & Hell-era Sabbath without descending into RJD mimicry and a special mention to Becky Baldwin, whom I've watched with various bands over several years and who has now developed into a seriously good bassist. But, of course, this is all about the great man and is a fine addition to the Iommi legacy.

Martin Cross: Heavy riffs and drums all the way through, Dio and Bruce in my head with the vocals. No tracks really stand out; actually, all sound the same. A lot of 8/9s in the reviews, but 6 from me.

Mike Canoe: No surprises here. It sounds like a Black Sabbath album with a new lead singer. And why not? Tony Iommi has been the only consistent member of Sabbath for the past 40 years. But while each new Ozzy release was treated like an event, a new release from Sabbath felt like the increasingly futile flogging of a horse that refused to die.

Odds are that most of those albums are better than you remembered or realised, especially in terms of how much they sound like part of the modern metal scape. From the Dark fits well into the greater Sabbath timeline, albeit with the cleaner and sharper production of now. Jorn Lande has a classic metal voice with just enough grit to not sound too clean. If there's a fault with the album, it's that the songs tend to ride the same heavy mid-tempo groove, but that's Iommi (and Sabbath) for you.

Philip Qvist: It's not often that we get to review a current album, but when we do, they tend to be pretty special releases, and From The Dark is no exception. But then again, it should come as no surprise to anybody when the artist is one of Rock's Greats, who practically gave heavy metal to the world.

On From The Dark, Tony Iommi has proved that there is life after Ozzy and Black Sabbath, while confirming that at age 78 he is still the riff master. Needless to say, his guitar playing dominates the album.

Brian May makes a cameo appearance on Death Wake, while singer and lyricist Jorn Lande is more than up to the task, even if he is a singer who needs to develop his own identity. The rhythm section of Becky Baldwin and Karl Brazil does a more than competent job, without drowning out the guitars.

My picks were Over The Violent Sun, Stormwatcher and Legacy, but in truth the eight-song, 41-minute-long album was definitely an enjoyable listen from start to finish.

Yes, I agree, no new rock boundaries were set here, but hey, this is Tony Iommi that we are talking about here. He doesn't have to prove anything to the world, but thankfully he has still produced a goodie here. I am definitely considering buying this album. My initial ranking is 8, but it could increase after a few spins.

Nick Tedds: Make no mistake, From The Dark is the heavy, doom-laden album that you would expect and most likely want to hear from the indisputable master. Opening track Over The Violent Sun is instantly recognisable Iommi, all mid-paced riffs of gargantuan stature. It's a strong start and very easy to imagine being directly born out of Sabbath's Dio period.

Black Times follows with an atmospheric and moody beginning prior to suddenly shifting gear, whilst World Alone sports impressive solos and nightmarish lyrics. And so it goes on... and whereas Iommi's guitar playing is obviously the key feature throughout the album, Jorn Lande's soaring vocals should not be underestimated.

Greg Schwepe: Being a pretty decent Sabbath fan, I’m surprised I’ve never checked out any of Tony Iommi’s solo or side projects. I’ve had some favourite bands where I’ve grabbed each and every one of the extracurricular releases of every member. And then some favourite bands where I’ve had no interest at all in the solo/side projects of any of the band members. So Mr Iommi, we’re going in with no preconceived notions!

And of course, I will be curious to see how many times the word “riff” (there’s one) is used in all the reviews this week. Because when you’re the architect of the heavy metal guitar sound, that’s your calling card.

I found Jorn’s vocals to be eerily close to Ronnie James Dio’s on the Heaven & Hell release The Devil You Know.” But with a little more gravely growl. But the riffs (that’s two) were there in every song.

To be honest, while I liked the first five tracks (you can’t argue with that guitar tone), it wasn’t until Death Wake that the album really, really grabbed me. That track, Return of the Arbalist, and Legacy are the ones that finally got my attention and stuck with me.

Am I glad I’m still able to hear that guitar? Absolutely. Is it going to make me forget Vol IV or Heaven and Hell? No, but I guess I should be happy to hear those metallic riffs still (and that’s three). 7 out of 10.

Nigel Mawdsley: By my own admission, I'm not a massive fan of Black Sabbath, but I can appreciate their – and Tony Iommi's – body of work over the decades. Black Sabbath fans should love this album with its excellent musicianship and production. It would be churlish of me to give this album less than an 8.

Mark Herrington: Iommi has produced a solid album in From the Dark that treads in familiar territory and echoes the style of the Dio years of Sabbath and the Heaven and Hell group.

For a legend who is nearly 80, has been performing for over 60 years, and with all that has transpired recently, Iommi has great tenacity and has delivered a satisfying slab of dark, doomy and varied songs, with his characteristic lead and riffing. It easily sits alongside Dehumanizer and Devil You Know, but perhaps not as lofty as Mob Rules and Heaven and Hell.

There is a familiarity to it, but it has its own character too. I’ve listened to it four or five times over the weekend since its release, and it definitely grows on you with repeated plays.

The lead singer, Jorn Lande, has all the vocal theatrics of Dio, but deftly avoids mimicry, and instead has far more of the gravel of Coverdale and Dickinson. Many of the songs, which Lande co -wrote, have their own memorable lyrical elements.

So, to the songs. Opener Over the Violent Sun’s bludgeoning riffing sets the tone for the album, raising a smile when Iommi’s anticipated solo starts. Black Times has an air of the original Sabbath, with mood changes throughout and a doomy pace. World Alone has a great addictive riff accompanied by immediate lead phrases; can’t get this one out of my head.

Beyond The Dead is another track with earworm lyrics, a sing-along, almost Nordic battle hymn. Stormwatcher is a hark back to earlier songs in this style with great soloing. Death Wake has some of Lande’s best vocals with memorable song sections, and even a guest solo from Brian May. Return of the Arbalist (a medieval heavy-duty crossbow) is a metal song of history and battle. Legacy is a great brooding song to close the album, a real highlight.

Overall, an easy 8. This is a satisfying album that will probably grow on me even more over time.

John Davidson: By Heaven and Heck, Tony Iommi has returned, not from the dead perhaps but from a musical limbo that stretches back 13 years to Black Sabbath's final album with Ozzy Osbourne (coincidentally called 13).

From The Dark sees Iommi collaborate with Jorn Lande, who is a decent singer in the RJD model, that I know only from his work with power metal operatic collective Avantasia. Jorn's phrasing drifts between Dio, Bruce Dickinson, Rus Allen and David Coverdale's at times – all of whom are excellent singers – but I'd have preferred someone with a bit of identity rather than a chameleon.

The album itself leans more towards the heavy, powerful metal end of Iommi's oeuvre. It's largely slow, grinding riffs with melodic vocals, but it's not ponderous, with hints of orchestration and choral arrangements in the background. My only criticism really is that it lacks a bit of light and shade.

The bass and drums are perfectly fine, but the bass in particular seems overwhelmed by the layered guitars. Standout tracks are the opener Over the Violent Sun and Stormwatcher. The solo in Legacy lifts it above the pack, too. Overall, I'd give this a 7 if it wasn't Tony Iommi at the helm. Might stretch to an 8 with repeated listens.

Adam Ranger: Life after Sabbath? Life after Ozzy? There's certainly life in Iommi yet! This album feels like a proper band effort and has only one guest appearance (Brian May on Death Wake.)

Vocalist Jorn Lande is something like a cross between Dio and Dickinson, with more of a low-end growl, and generally does a great job (he also co-wrote the songs with Iommi)

Reviewing a new release is novel for this group, but If Tony Iommi does not qualify as Classic Rock, not many will! You don't get anything new. Dark riffs, great solos, brooding build-ups. But hey, Iommi invented this sort of music, so you can't argue with it at all.

A good album with some really great tracks. Highlights for me are Over The Violent Sun, World Alone and Legacy. Legacy has an interesting lyrical theme about leaving your mark and moving on. If this is Iommi's last record, it will be a very good legacy indeed.

Final score: 7.57 (82 votes cast, total score 621)

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

They'll be dancing in the streets of Llanelli as news breaks that local heroes Scarlet Rebels have triumphed in our latest Tracks Of The Week contest, with their smashing recent single God’s Honest Truth defeating strong competition from a pair of stellar guitarists, Joanne Shaw Taylor and Ayron Jones. So congratulations to them, and to the vanquished.

This week, eight more rock titans are ready for your votes. We hope you enjoy them.

Beaux Gris Gris & The Apocalypse - The Rougaroux

Drawn from old Cajun folklore about a sinister werewolf character (an intrinsic part of Louisiana-born singer Greta Valenti’s childhood), The Rougaroux has been doing the rounds in BGG&TA’s live set for a while. Now it’s getting its own sparkly single/video treatment, for which we are glad. Teamed with a killer blues rock shuffle and blistering solo from guitarist Robin Davey, and you have yourself a dark, swampy, very delicious cocktail that begs to be danced to.

Saxon - Medusa

If Medusa is anything to go by, we can expect Saxon’s next album, Gods Of Thunder (out in January), to be a bit good. It chugs. It gallops. It shifts and soars. High on riff-caked drama and cackling mythological tales of Gorgon antics, it has everything you want from an epic piece of classic heavy metal. “A step into the world of Greek mythology ‘Medusa’, a god who could turn you to stone with a glance!” mic-wielder-in-chief Biff Byford enthuses. “Epic metal, epic story! Enjoy”.

Steven Wilson - A Basket Of Bees

It’s hard to not think of the Wicker Man (yes the bees are only in the Nic Cage remake, but still…) in this latest piece of Wilson’s compelling new album, Requiem For A Village – heavy on 70s British folk-horror and lo-fi discordant ingredients. Captured on analogue gear with guitarist Randy McStine, drummer Russell Holzman and singer/engineer Shelby Logan Warne (also in alt/prog rockers Kyros), it hops deftly between sprinkles of piano, gnarly guitars, acoustic flourishes and gauzy vocal harmonies. Another striking move from one of rock’s most interesting creators.

His Lordship - Nadine

The Chuck Berry banger as you’ve never heard it, Nadine gets a dirty, fuzzed up makeover in the adept hands of sharp-dressed power duo His Lordship – fronted by current-generation Pretenders guitar star James Walbourne. If Berry downed a strong coffee, stuck his hand in a toaster and played this, it may’ve come out thusly. And that could only be a good thing, surely?

Hannah Wicklund - The Pier

Sung with the bone-deep commitment and feeling of a true music lifer, The Pier is billed by Wicklund as “a song for anyone who has ever lost someone they loved to the darkness.” That plays out to raw, impassioned effect in its moody, heavy blues rock chops and big-hearted melody. More to be found on her 2026 album (written, recorded and released under her own steam, on her own label), War On Women; Calling All Good Men, which is out now.

Green Lung - Ozymandias

Adapted from Percy Shelley’s poem “musing on the futility of human empire-building” (and newly released here with a desert- and time-traversing video, courtesy of illustrator Richard Wells and animator Joseph Brett), the London metallers’ latest cooks strains of Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath up into a righteous, rocking stew – all fat riffs and 70s organ vibes. It’s punchy, it’s nostalgic, it breaks unexpectedly in the middle for a slightly proggy twist (before diving into a splash of flashy soloing). Tasty.

The Chats - Off It

On this opening taste of their next album, the Aussies’ signature gobby punk’n’roll comes with a zingy AC/DC kick. Punk but sunny. Tearaway but super-tight, with a brilliant driver/alter-ego character in the accompanying video – in which the band hurtle round a racetrack in a generously graffitied caravan. And just to really cement that none-more-punk status, it’s all over in about a minute.

Cats In Space - White Knight

The second single from Cats In Space's upcoming album Suit Of Armour walks a shimmering tightrope between West End musical and uncaged rock bombast, with soaring choirs of celestial, Brian May-style guitars giving way to a chorus that's bigger than the average data centre but without the downstream harm to the natural environment. Guitar cat Greg Hart says the new record is the band's finest to date, and on this evidence we're inclined to assume he knows what he's talking about.

It was the abrasive metal sub-genre that shot out of the early 80s like a punch to the gut.

Fast, heavy, and blatantly in-your-face, thrash metal was a fierce antidote to glam metal as well as a big ‘fuck you’ to the conservatism of the Reagan era. Thrash had its roots in myriad influences, from NWOBHM to Motörhead to punk rock, but in the end the sound was all its own, and as the thrash movement grew scenes began to develop around the world from the Bay Area to Brazil.

From the ‘Big Four’ of Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax and Megadeth to the newer crop of thrashers like Evile and Municipal Waste, here are the 50 greatest thrash albums of all time as voted for by Metal Hammer readers.

50. Evile – Enter The Grave (2007)

49. Forbidden – Forbidden Evil (1988)

48. Dark Angel – Darkness Descends (1986)

47. Sodom – Agent Orange (1989)

46. Slayer - Divine Intervention (1994)

45. Exodus – Fabulous Disaster (1989)

44. Possessed – Seven Churches (1985)

43. Exhorder – Slaughter In The Vatican (1990)

42. Kreator – Endless Pain (1985)

41. Death Angel - The Ultra-Violence (1987)

40. Sabbat – History Of A Time To Come

39. Blood Tsunami – Thrash Metal (2007)

38. Overkill – The Years Of Decay (1989)

37. Slayer – Christ Illusion (2006)

36. Celtic Frost – To Mega Therion (1985)

35. Testament – Practice What You Preach (1989)

34. Sepultura – Morbid Visions (1986)

33. Exodus - Tempo Of The Damned (2004)

32. Kreator - Violent Revolution (2001)

31. Slayer – God Hates Us All (2001)

30. Destruction – Eternal Devastation (1986)

29. Annihilator – Alice In Hell (1989)

28. Municipal Waste – The Art Of Partying (2007)

27. Megadeth – So Far, So Good… So What! (1988)

26. Kreator – Pleasure To Kill (1986)

25. Celtic Frost – Into The Pandemonium (1987)

24. Overkill – Horrorscope (1991)

23. Voivod – Dimension Hatröss (1988)

22. Testament – The New Order (1988)

21. Anthrax - Fistful Of Metal (1984)

20. Slayer – Show No Mercy (1983)

19. Megadeth – Killing Is My Business… And Business Is Good (1985)

18. Slayer - World Painted Blood (2009)

17. Sepultura – Beneath The Remains (1989)

16. Anthrax – Spreading The Disease (1985)

15. Slayer – Hell Awaits (1985)

14. Testament – The Legacy (1987)

13. Power Trip – Nightmare Logic (2017)

12. Metallica – …And Justice For All (1988)

11. Slayer - South Of Heaven (1988)

10. Sepultura – Arise (1991)

9. Metallica – Kill ’Em All (1983)

8. Slayer – Seasons In The Abyss (1990)

7. Megadeth – Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying? (1986)

6. Exodus – Bonded By Blood (1985)

5. Anthrax – Among The Living (1987)

4. Metallica – Ride The Lightning (1984)

3. Megadeth – Rust In Peace (1986)

2. Metallica – Master Of Puppets (1986)

1. Slayer – Reign In Blood (1990)

Who are the Big 4 thrash metal bands?

The bands known as The Big 4 of thrash metal are Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax. They never all appeared on the same bill until June 16, 2010, where they performed together at Warsaw's Bemowo Airport in Poland as part of the Sonisphere Festival.

What is the heaviest thrash metal song?

Clocking in at 4 minutes and 51seconds, Slayer's controversial Angel of Death – a hellish retelling of concentration camp atrocities by SS doctor Josef Mengele – is fast, brutal and heavy in every sense of the word.

Who is the most popular thrash metal band? 

Although they're no longer considered a thrash band, Metallica are the most commercially successful band to emerge from the thrash scene and have sold over 125 million albums.

Who is the godfather of thrash metal? 

If you ask erstwhile Exodus guitarist Rick Hunolt, he will point to Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine as the Godfather of thrash metal. Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian is inclined to agree. "Without Dave Mustaine, maybe thrash metal never would have happened," wrote Ian in his memoir I'm The Man: The Story Of That Guy From Anthrax.

Who is the heaviest of the Big 4?

Have you seen the video of the metal fan screaming "Slayer" until he looks like he's about to pass out? He's just told you the answer in the most emphatic of ways.

Venom’s 1982 album Black Metal is one of the most influential records in history, detonating a chain reaction that would result in thrash, death metal and, of course, black metal itself – even if it was roundly mocked at the time. In 2011, Venom singer and bass-bludgeoner Cronos looked back on the making of a twisted masterpiece.

It may feel like the genesis of heavy metal should have been sparked when a lightning bolt hit a mountain, but in reality, the birth of the song Black Sabbath would not have made for a great fly-on-the-wall documentary. As momentous as this event was, something that happened over a period of several weeks punctuated by many arguments over who was making the next round of brews and interminable conversations over exactly which take of the line ‘Oh, no, no! Please God help me!’ was the most convincingly terrifying and how loud the bell should be in the final mix, would not have made for great cinema.

This is one of the reasons why full credit should be given to Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant, the mainstay of extreme metal pioneers Venom for refusing to mystify the making of their iconic second album, Black Metal, in 1982, no matter how influential and important it went on to become. He’s quite candid about what is arguably the most important album in the birth of extreme metal ever recorded.

“We had no idea what we were doing was going to become such a big thing. So many bands were in the studio at the same time as us. How the hell could I have presumed that it would be my band who would be the lasting name? We weren’t trying to be the next Iron Maiden or the next this or that. We just wanted to do what we enjoyed. You had a band like [fellow Geordie NWOBHM outfit] Tygers Of Pan Tang always dropping Purple references; you know, ‘We want to be the next Deep Purple.’ Well, Venom never did that. We never said that. We said, ‘We are now, we are new, we are Venom.’

Venom formed in Newcastle in 1979 and coalesced into their early classic lineup of Cronos on bass and vocals, Tony ‘Abaddon’ Bray on drums and Jeff ‘Mantas’ Dunn on guitar the following year. There were several key environmental factors at work during this unholy conception. Newcastle in the late 1970s was a hard bitten, industrial city, destabilised and depressed by high unemployment and a profound lack of meaningful choice available to the majority, working-class inhabitants who lived there. It was a city where you “put on your father’s clothes when you were old enough and then went and did his job”.

Except, according to Cronos, “That wasn’t an option in 1979 – there were no jobs left.” Everything from the dark Satanic Mills of the English industrial revolution to the once-mighty ship yards had been forced to shut up shop, leaving most of the erstwhile sons of toil signing on and pissed off. The city was, in many respects, similar to Birmingham, the home of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and half of Led Zeppelin, all favourite groups of the bassist. Except a decade later, many young Geordies had fallen under another spell as well as metal:

“Growing up in the 70s in the north of England, punk meant everything to me. The whole industry was dying, the ship- yards, everything. There was no future. There was no hope. Punk music was a way for the real people in this country to get a voice. It was the great unwashed getting a say for once, shouting, ‘Fucking hell, we’re not happy about this.’”

Seeing his desire to be in a metal band as a mission, he was drawn to work with Abaddon and Mantas simply because they struck him as the only people he had met who were as driven as him. Their chops were the last thing on his mind. And in return, the other two were keen to work with Cronos because he had access to a studio. Ironically, the only place they had played with any great regularity before they recorded their debut album, Welcome To Hell, was a church.

“Our practise room was a church, our first ever gig was in a church and our first demo was recorded in a church – I’ve still got the tapes; we sounded fucking terrible,” he says with a laugh. “There was this Methodist vicar who liked the idea of putting a few bob in his pocket, so we would set up on the altar just in front of the pulpit and away we went. The Vicar used to let us in and then fuck off. So we ransacked the place basically... ha ha ha! I’ve still got some of the big old candles and crucifixes that we nicked off him.”

Another influence on Black Metal was a feeling that they’d been misled by their record label, Neat, during the recording of their debut; an experience they were keen not to repeat. The frontman had worked overtime at the studios where he worked for months until he could afford to pay for a heavily discounted three-day period when it wasn’t in use. After blagging help and tape they were ready to roll. There was just one problem.

“We recorded Welcome To Hell in three days and they were just demos,” says Cronos. “We thought that if the label liked them we’d be given a green light and we’d have the chance to record them properly as a great new album over a week or so. But then when the record company heard the tapes they said, ‘No, we like it the way it is, we’ll put it out like that.’ We must have looked horrified... there were timing issues, there were tuning issues but they just said, ‘No, it goes out like that or not at all.’ They had our arms forced up behind our backs because there was no way in hell we were going to turn down an album. No fucking way at all. There was that kind of feeling, ‘Fucking hell. We’re going to blow this before we’ve even started.’”

The following year Venom still had everything to prove and the little that they had achieved to lose. The fact that their biggest supporter in the press, the legendary Geoff Barton, described Welcome To Hell as having “the hi-fi dynamics of a 50-year-old pizza”, really showed that they had their work cut out for them... and this is where Cronos’s tenacity revealed itself fully for the first time.

“We knew we had to record this one properly,” he says. “We knew what kind of tricks might be played on us, so we made sure all those songs were nailed before we went into the studio. And for me, Black Metal is our first proper album, because Welcome To Hell is just demos.”

He laughs as he describes the sheer luxury that was offered them during the week-long extravaganza. “We got the chance to overdub some solos. We got the chance to redo some vocals. Welcome To Hell took three days to record and mix and Black Metal took seven days. But we had our shit down so tight we knew all we had to do was to get a sound on the kit and a sound on the back line and BANG!, just nail the fucker.”

Black Metal opens with a literal assault on the listener. There isn’t even a run-in groove on the original vinyl album – the first sound you hear is a horrible noise the second the needle hits the groove (if you’re listening to the original vinyl it does this anyhow). It seemed that punk nihilism, the heavy industry of the area, a real desire to shock the listener out of complacency and a vicious sense of mischief were coming together in a screeching sonic scree.

“That is literally a chainsaw cutting into metal,” says Cronos. “Abaddon used to work in a steel factory. I was saying to him, ‘We really need to find this annoying sound to go at the start of the album.’ And he said, ‘Fucking hell, if you’ve ever heard metal grinding on metal, it’s a sound that will go right through you.’ We took huge chunks of steel into the studio, put them into a vice and away we went. It was a fucking incredible sound, menacing.”

This was simply one of many strategies that he was using to make the record lively, unexpected and unique. Cronos took a more literal approach to spooking out the listener on the track Buried Alive.

“I came to the studio with all these buckets of mud, sand and flour and we put some microphones inside some cardboard boxes in a stairwell. Then we got all these spades and slowly started filling in the boxes with the mud and soil. There were a load of guys into the studio when we did the whole, ‘We came into this world with nothing and with nothing we shall depart’ bit. They were doing the crying and whimpering as if they were at a real funeral, and the funny thing was we had to do this a lot of times because no one was whimpering or crying, people were actually trying to hold back laughter. And when we came back to listen to the tape the weird thing was that the actual laughter actually sounded like crying, and that’s what you can hear.”

Black metal as a genre would go on to mean many different things to many different people over the next three decades, but to Cronos it means exactly the same thing today as it did then.

“It was our way of distinguishing our music from the run-of-the-mill heavy metal that was coming out back then. When people were telling me that rock was dead at the end of the 1970s, I couldn’t help but wish that most of it was because it was that fucking lame. ‘Black metal’ was coined because I wanted to describe how different we were to other bands of the time, even how different we were to most ‘heavy metal’ bands of the time.”

The influence of Black Metal is so vast it can barely be measured. As well as providing the name and many of the conventions for one of the healthiest sub- genres of metal still thriving today, it also set the foundations for much of what we now call extreme metal, in particular thrash, death, speed metal.

If many in the UK sneered at a perceived lack of technical prowess in Venom, this was easily offset by their growing legion of fans in the US. And it really didn’t hurt that some of them were in bands such as Metallica, Slayer and Exodus.

But of course, if we had to boil down the significance of this album to one time and place it would probably be to Oslo in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Everything about Venom was sacrosanct to the second wave of BM, or the practitioners of True Norwegian Black Metal, from the lo-fi aesthetic, the Satanic imagery, the desire to alienate the listener and even the style of dress.

“I was sent early demo tapes by acts like Burzum and Mayhem,” says Cronos. “They reminded me of early Venom in that it was guys who cared more about the passion of the music than the accuracy of it. It reminded me of our first two albums and how I was 10 years earlier, that enthusiasm and hunger. Of all the bands who came up after Venom – not Metallica and not Exodus – they were the only ones who had that ‘looseness’, that punk rawness, the piss, the shit, the snot, the vomit that we had. I could hear it in those young Norwegian bands who were going Hell for leather. Those guys still cite Venom as a big influence but they need to take more credit for what they did. They evolved the sound. I just think it was a shame that it was overshadowed by that church-burning bullshit.”

He’s keen to point out that the influence can often be felt in unexpected places: “I think the lasting impact of Black Metal for me is that it has earned us respect in areas that you wouldn’t expect. When you hear someone like Dave Grohl say how important it was to him when he was in school then that’s a big deal. Also it’s further-reaching than you think. It’s like when you meet a lawyer in a suit and he’s asking you for a Black Metal shirt. The secret Venom fans. Those are the kinds of things that last because you realise how important it was for a lot of other people as well.”

But ultimately, the strength of Black Metal is its raw, ugly sound - the noise you make when you genuinely don’t give a fuck and have nothing to lose.

“Absolutely. I think it’s about the intensity and conviction that you put into the recording. If you play with fire and vengeance you can get away with dodgy production because people pick up on the actual vibe of the performance in the studio and that’s how I think the first Venom records did OK. Because people weren’t going, ‘Oh I think there’s something wrong with the production,’ they were saying, ‘Fuck me!’ They got where we were coming from. They got the fact that we were young and full of ‘ARRRGHHHH!’”

Originally published in Metal Hammer magazine issue 225, November 2011

Mike Oldfield’s 26th album, Return To Ommadawn, would prove to be his last. Six years after its release in 2017 he announced his retirement. But he’d left his fans with a record many of them had asked for, as he told Prog just before its release.

“When I first began to think of what I should do for my new album, I went on social media and asked the fans for their opinion,” Mike Oldfield says. “So many of them seemed to want me to go back to the acoustic style of the first three albums, and Ommadawn appeared to be their favourite one.”

His decision was clinched by a comment from synth pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre. “He was doing a live Facebook chat with his fans and I went online to follow what was being said. One person asked him if he might ever collaborate with me, and his answer was interesting.

“He said that he loved my music, but that I was too acoustic for him. It got me thinking: if someone like him believes I’m an acoustic musician, it shows how important that part of my career has been. So with all this overwhelming evidence, I felt it would be very exciting to do a project again along those lines.”

Oldfield is keen to stress that this is a pure solo work. “I’m the only musician who is involved. I play everything. There are no guest appearances whatsoever.” Actually that’s not strictly true – those with keen ears will notice a very brief choral burst from children’s choir Penrhos Kids at the end of the record.

“I did wonder if people might be disappointed that the album doesn’t have a follow-up to On Horseback, the final song on Ommadawn,” he explains. “So I took one line from the choir who sang on that track and inserted it here. It’s a way of linking these two albums across more than 40 years; it’s not a new recording.”

He readily admits that he specifically designed the album for vinyl. There are just two tracks, titled Part I and Part II, each of which is around 20 minutes long. “I love vinyl and the way it brings people closer to music. As far as I’m concerned, if you listen to downloads, that has the same impact as what you hear in a lift! Of course, the album will be made available in all the usual formats. But for me it’s the vinyl one that matters.

“The cover is very elaborate and there’s a gatefold sleeve with photos I’ve taken of the instruments I used in the sessions. The aim is to give everyone hours of enjoyment as they try to identify all of them and what roles they played.”

However, Oldfield doesn’t have any plans to perform Ommadawn and Return To Ommadawn in the live environment: “It would just be too difficult. I’d have to find musicians who could play the parts in the way that I believe fits best, and that would be almost impossible to achieve.

“There are very talented people around who could duplicate what I’ve done, but it could never have the same emotional connection. The only way I could see this working is if you have 15 or more clones of me onstage!”

Every October, the coffin lid of Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s career used to creak open and out would come his one, cobwebbed, hit. The Monster Mash, a novelty song about a monsters’ dance party, sold over four million copies, charted three times, and 60 years on remains the most popular Halloween tune ever.

“The whole thing was a complete fluke,” Pickett told me in 2005. “I never even wanted to be a singer. I was an actor.” He said he’d got the movie bug as a kid growing up in Somerville, Massachusetts, where his dad managed a local theatre. “I loved the horror films.”

When he moved to Hollywood in 1961, Bobby Pickett’s budding résumé included a penchant for celebrity impersonations – the best of which were scaremeisters Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. As he hustled around for acting jobs, he picked up extra cash on weekends by singing at an Italian restaurant with a group called The Cordials. “We literally sang for our supper - spaghetti on Friday nights,” Pickett said with a laugh.

One of the songs they covered in their set was Little Darlin’ by The Diamonds. For a lark, in the middle of the song, Pickett would recite a monologue in his Karloff voice. “The audience loved it,” he recalled. So much so that fellow band member Lenny Capizzi suggested they should write a whole rock’n’roll song about monsters. “Lenny said: ‘Novelty records sell!’” said Pickett.

He continued: “So one day, in the summer of 1962, he and I wrote this song about a monster who gets up off his gurney and does the latest dance craze, which I thought should be The Twist. But Lenny said: ‘No, it’s Mashed Potato Time by Dee Dee Sharp.’ That was a big number one. So we called our song The Monster Mashed Potato. We shortened it later, but that was the original title. The whole thing took about two hours to write.”

Capizzi suggested they take it to Gary Paxton, best known for producing Alley-Oop by the Hollywood Argyles. This was a moment for Paxton, an eccentric music-biz character, right up there with Kim Fowley and Phil Spector.

During our conversation, Pickett told me a story about a now-forgotten novelty record Paxton had produced called Elephant Game, by Renfro & Jackson. When a local radio station refused to play it, because it was “too black”, Paxton organised some cheerleaders and a live elephant pulling a Volkswagen Beetle convertible to parade past the station in protest. He got arrested after the elephant began pooping in the street. But he did build a solid discography, later working with The Association, Tommy Roe and Paul Revere & The Raiders.

Of course, Paxton loved The Monster Mash as soon as he heard it, Pickett remembers. “He said: ‘This is a hit! I want to produce it!’”

They recorded it in one session at Gold Star Studios. Although a novelty song, it had a hard-swinging groove. Why? The backing band, dubbed The Crypt-Kicker Five, included Leon Russell on piano and Mel Taylor, drummer for The Ventures (dig that fill borrowed from their classic Wipeout). Then there were the sound effects. For the coffin opening, Paxton pulled a nail out of a piece of wood. For the bubbling cauldron, he and Capizzi blew straws into glasses of water.

“And to top it off, the three female backing singers were The Blossoms, with Darlene Love,” said Pickett.

When I asked Pickett why The Blossoms repeatedly sang ‘wa-ooh tennis shoe’ during the bridge, he laughed. “I never did know why they did that.”

The Monster Mash was released August 25, 1962. By October it was No.1 on the Billboard singles chart.

“I thought it was a lark, something horror movie freaks would enjoy,” Pickett said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Aside from its catchy chorus and daffy charm, could there have been another reason it hit so big? “Well, it was the height of the Cuban missile crisis,” Pickett said. “So maybe it relieved people of the tension.”

The BBC banned the record upon its original UK release. “They said it was ‘too morbid’,” Pickett recalled. “But then it became a hit in England in the early seventies.” It did prove to be something of a perennial, charting again in the US in 1970 and 1973, and getting reliable airplay every October.

Pickett had a No.29 hit with its Christmas follow-up, Monsters’ Holiday. But over the years, spin-off singles Monster Swim, It’s Alive and Monster Rap failed to scare up any further chart action. He told me that his biggest champion was Dr. Demento, the underground radio personality who helped make Weird Al Yankovic a hit.

“Dr. Demento plays anything I record,” Pickett said, “which is a wonderful thing. He considers my discography to be important, so that makes me feel like it is.”

As for Pickett’s acting career, it peaked with a low-budget cult film called, appropriately, Frankenstein Sings! Meanwhile, Capizzi went on to be a successful screenwriter, with Must Love Dogs and Silver Linings Playbook.

Bobby Pickett passed in April 2007 at the age of 69, but he remained active until his final months. An environmentalist, he wrote two spin-off songs – Monster Slash, protesting against the exploitation of the rainforests, and the global warming-related Climate Mash, which envisioned George W Bush and Dick Cheney getting down with zombies and vampires at a party thrown by Exxon Mobil.

Over the years, The Monster Mash has been covered by everyone from the Beach Boys to Alvin & The Chipmunks to Bruce Springsteen. It also appeared on an episode of The Simpsons. In the end, Pickett’s “fluke” song was the trick that kept treating. He told me: “The Monster Mash paid my rent for over 40 years!”

The nights are dark, the veil is thin, and suddenly we're not the only people on the street wearing black. Yes, it's Halloween, so in celebration of every metalhead's favourite holiday, we've brought you a list of the spookiest tunes to soundtrack your festivities.

Whether it's haunting your local graveyard, shaking your bones at a metal club, tricking your neighbours or treating them to the sound of your speakers blasting this playlist, the fun starts here. Plus, each track has been handpicked by some of our favourite rock/metal bands, including London doom heroes Green Lung, 'wannabe witch' Taylor Momsen from The Pretty Reckless, British-Iranian prog metallers Lowen and plenty more. Happy Halloween and happy listening.

Shocking Blue - Daemon Lover

"Everyone will be picking Type O Negative so I’ll take the original slinky, seductive spook rock legends from the late Sixties - Daemon Lover is the perfect soundtrack for a romantic Halloween night in with a bottle of red wine, some black candles and a ouija board. Samhain blessings all."
Tom Templar, Green Lung

Cradle Of Filth - Lord Abortion

"There’s regular Cradle and there’s extra spooky Cradle, so this is hard! Let’s go with Lord Abortion, because it has that whole mid-section that’s extremely spooky. It’s an incredible song. It’s from the Midian album, which is how I discovered Cradle: when I was a kid, I’d stay up really late watching metal music videos, and Her Ghost In The Fog came on TV. It shifted my perspective a little bit."
George Clarke, Deafheaven

Bobby Pickett and The Crypt-Kickers - The Original Monster Mash

"I can’t remember who sings it, but it always gets me: The Monster Mash. And you’ve got to watch Carry On Screaming on Halloween, as well. Many, many moons ago, as a child, I remember that coming on TV, watching it, going to bed and absolutely shitting myself. Now I watch it and go, ‘How the hell could I have been scared of this thing?’ It’s ridiculous, and you’ll go, ‘Benji Webbe, you fucking saddo!’, but it’s brilliant, mate! Carry On Screaming and The Monster Mash: two things that have to happen on Halloween."
Benji Webbe, Skindred

Ozzy Osbourne - Steal Away (The Night)

"Honestly, the whole of Blizzard of Ozz is kind of perfect for this time of year, but something about Steal Away (The Night) by Ozzy Osbourne feels like what wild kids dressed up as ghouls in the early 1980's would be listening to as they ran around the neighbourhood trick-or-treating."
Chelsea Wolfe

Jimmy Page - Lucifer Rising

"This was intended as the soundtrack to the occult film of the same name by Kenneth Anger. The film took ages to make, and before Page got involved, Mick Jagger had done a load of music as well, also very weird. This ended up not being in it after Page and Anger fell out, but it's incredible. It's really atmospheric and haunting, and if you focus it gets really trance-like. Definitely one for if you're spending Halloween getting evil on your own."
Nick Ruskell, Witchsorrow

Opeth - Sorceress

"I love how uniquely evil this song sounds, and that it’s about a uniquely evil woman with unholy power. Whoever wronged Mikael Åkerfeldt so deeply to have inspired these lyrics has alchemised one of the best riffs in Opeth’s mighty discography. Witches are a Halloween staple, but Sorceresses are underrated - and far more threatening due to their innate blood-sprung power. Women can forge life with their bodies and take it just as easily. What a dark and beautiful reminder of our abilities." Nina Saeidi, Lowen

Type O Negative - Black No. 1

"On Black No. 1, Peter Steele says ‘every day is Halloween’, and that’s the vibe I get from Type O Negative. I love gothic music, because it’s a celebration of the purity of sadness. It feels good! There are tribes in the world who have a designated day, every year, where they are just really sad for having left childhood behind, for moving towards death, for things decaying… That’s the thing that Type O give me: it’s nostalgic, but more than that. Sometimes, it’s good to just be sad."
Ivar Bjørnson, Enslaved

Meshuggah - Future Breed Machine

"It's just so creepy! There's the machinery [sound effects] and then that riff comes in. The Swallowed By The World breakdown is very much a Meshuggah-inspired breakdown. There's always a time for Meshuggah in Cenobia's life, no matter what she's doing. They've always stuck with her."
Cenobia

The Cure - Lullaby

"The gothic atmosphere of The Cure, combined with the haunting lyrics 'Spiderman is having me for dinner tonight', makes this the perfect Halloween song. The wonderfully creepy music video captures the mood perfectly. It feels like you’re floating through a nightmare, but somehow, all you want to do is dance."
Eivor

Ghost - Satanized

"I mean, if we’re talking metal songs that are Halloweeny, pretty much anything by Iron Maiden should qualify. But I absolutely love Ghost. Satanized is perfectly spooky though, you could basically put that on or anything from their first album and have an instant Halloween party. It sounds like The Addams Family went, ‘Let’s make a band.'"
Luke Caley, Unpeople

The Pretty Reckless - Witches Burn

"I am a huge Halloween fan, maybe people don't know that about me, but it is my favourite holiday. We have a Halloween song on almost every record. Witches Burn is about the oppression of women through history, but also using witchcraft as the metaphor to get through oppression. So it's actually a deep song, but for a Halloween playlist, it's totally about witches. If I could be a witch in real life, absolutely I would. I watch Buffy and I just go, ‘I wanna float pencils. I wanna be Willow [Rosenberg]’. Like, fuck yes."
Taylor Momsen, The Pretty Reckless

Cradle Of Filth - Cruelty Bought The Orchids

"I think it's their best song. Big leads, the big Iron Maiden dual guitars - I love it when Cradle of Filth go a bit Thin Lizzy! And Cradle, they've got that vampiric essence to them. I love that album, Cruelty and the Beast, and what a song. That keyboard sound is genuinely spooky."
Serena Cherry, Noctule

“Darling, he’s far too busy in the studio. That’s what happens when you get sick in Queen – you have to make the time up.”

In the South London offices of his band’s PR company, a characteristically flamboyant Freddie Mercury is entertaining the press. It’s the autumn of 1974, and Queen have almost completed their third album, Sheer Heart Attack. Almost. For Mercury’s bandmate Brian May there’s still work to do. It’s just a few months since the guitarist was felled by a virulent bout of hepatitis mid-way through their debut US tour, and subsequently hospitalised for a second time with a stomach ulcer, forcing him to miss initial sessions for the album. May is currently holed up in the studio, finishing off his guitar parts, hence his absence today.

It’s typical of Queen’s ferocious drive that they haven’t let a pair of potentially fatal medical conditions get in the way of the job in hand. Their first two albums – 1973’s Queen and follow-up Queen II, released earlier in 1974 – set them up as a unique proposition: one part Zeppelin-esque rockers, one part glam dandies, one part fantastical Aubrey Beardsley illustration made flesh. Their music, along with their billowing silk blouses and Mercury’s outrageous, 1,000-watt personality, has earned them as much scorn as admiration. Both responses have only fuelled their ambitions.

But now those ambitions are coming into sharp focus. Like its predecessors, Sheer Heart Attack is the product of an intense work ethic that stems from a desire to be bigger, bolder and better than everyone else. It’s a watershed for the band: this album will lay the groundwork for future success.

There are solid economic factors, too. The album needs to be a success to boost their ever-decreasing finances. Their management, Trident Productions, have put them on a wage that barely pays the bills, while seeking a return on their hefty investments in recording and studio costs. Combined with May’s illness, it’s fair to say, there’s a lot riding on it.

“The whole group aimed for the top slot,” says Mercury. “We’re not going to be content with anything less. That’s what we’re striving for. It’s got to be there. I definitely know we’ve got it in the music, we’re original enough… and, now we’re proving it.”

“I first met Queen in November 1973, when Mott The Hoople were rehearsing for their tour,” recalls Peter Hince, then a 19-year-old Mott roadie (and later one of the key members of Queen’s crew). “We were in Manticore Studios in Fulham, a converted cinema. It was freezing cold, everyone in scarves and coats. Then Queen came in in their dresses, their silks and satin. Even then, Fred was doing the whole thing, running up and down and doing his poses. My first thought was basically, ‘What a prat.’”

It wasn’t an uncommon reaction. Formed from the ashes of May and drummer Roger Taylor’s old band Smile in late 1970, Queen initially struggled to make a name for themselves. When eventually they did, they found themselves polarising opinion. While they had their admirers, they had also inadvertently become whipping boys for some sections of the British music press.

“We were just totally ignored for so long, and then completely slagged off by everyone,” Brian May acknowledged. “In a way, that was a very good start for us. There’s no kind of abuse that wasn’t thrown at us. It was only around the time of Sheer Heart Attack that it began to change. But we still got slagged off a fair bit even then.”

The opprobrium heaped on them may have hurt them individually, but it only strengthened their collective resolve. Where their first album owed a debt to Led Zeppelin, the follow-up raised the bar immeasurably. Divided between ‘Side White’ and ‘Side Black’ to reflect what Mercury called “the battle between good and evil”, it brought both operatic bombast and ballet-pumped daintiness to their heavy rock thunder – often in the same song.

“They planned everything in their heads,” says Gary Langan, then an assistant engineer at Sarm Studios in East London, who worked on two Sheer Heart Attack tracks. “Nothing was left to chance. That’s what separated them from other bands. You had to earn Freddie’s respect to get close to him. He used to scare the pants off me. The aura around that guy was astonishing.”

Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara, to Indian Parsi parents, on the island of Zanzibar, just off the eastern coast of mainland Africa. His formative years were spent at boarding school near Bombay, where he learned to play music and formed his first band, the Hectics. In 1964, when he was 17, civil war broke out in Zanzibar and the Bulsara family fled the island to settle in the altogether less dangerous environs of Feltham, Middlesex.

It was here, in the chrysalis of suburbia, that Farrokh Bulsara would ultimately transform himself into Freddie Mercury. The latter was an entirely self-created character, as camp and outrageous in public as he was shy and driven in private. By the time of Queen II, Farrokh Bulsara was a ghost known only to his family and closest friends; to everyone else he was Freddie Mercury.

Not that the rest of the band were content to exist in Mercury’s shadow. Three very distinct personalities, they each brought a different aspect to the band: May the studios intellectual, Taylor the louche rock’n’roller, Deacon the quiet man whose musical contribution would often be overlooked. It was a frequently combustible combination, albeit one with a shared vision.

“Do we row?” said Mercury in ’74. “Oh, my dear, we’re the bitchiest band on earth. We’re at each other’s throats. But if we didn’t disagree we’d just be ‘yes men’. And we do get the cream in the end.”

Fittingly, it would be Mott The Hoople who taught Queen how to be a rock’n’roll band. In October 1973, the foursome embarked on a 24-date UK tour with Ian Hunter’s survivors. Queen had released their debut album the previous July; the follow-up was already recorded, although it wouldn’t be released for another four months (a source of growing tension between band and management).

The two bands couldn’t have been more different. Mott were veterans of the rock’n’roll wars: they’d had their ups and downs, and had even split up before David Bowie threw them a lifeline in the shape of All The Young Dudes. They’d been there, done that, and rolled their eyes in wry resignation at the thought of it all. By contrast, Queen were young, hungry and at least striving for something approaching glamour. The rocks thrown their way hadn’t dented their drive for success in the slightest.

It quickly became apparent that Queen weren’t the usual makeweight support band. “They were quite pushy from day one,” says Peter Hince. “They demanded more space on stage, they were quite arrogant. They’d got this very clear idea of what they were going to do: ‘We’re gonna go for it.’ But you could see that they were already very good.”

For Queen, the tour was an invaluable lesson. They studiously watched the headliners. One of the songs in their own set was a prototype version of Stone Cold Crazy, a song that would later appear on Sheer Heart Attack.

“On tour as support to Mott, I was conscious that we were in the presence of something great,” said Brian May. “Something highly evolved, close to the centre of the spirit of rock’n’roll, something to breathe in and learn from.”

Typically, Freddie Mercury found playing second fiddle harder to swallow. “Being support is one of the most traumatic experiences of my life,” he would later pout.

The Mott tour finished with two shows at Hammersmith Odeon on December 13 and 14, but there was no rest for Queen. The next day they kicked off their own short tour at Leicester University. Shortly afterwards they flew to Australia to play their first show outside Europe; less happily, it ended with the band getting booed off by the roughneck audience.

By the time Queen II was released in March 1974, the band were finally matching their own self-belief. With a following wind behind them from the Top 10 success of Seven Seas Of Rhye, they kicked off their first proper UK headlining tour, starting in Blackpool, taking in such glamorous rock’n’roll destinations as Paignton, Canvey Island and Cromer, and peaking with a prestigious gig at London’s famed Rainbow Theatre.

There was a riot at a show in Stirling, when 500 audience members refused to leave the venue after the final encore, forcing the band to barricade themselves in the dressing room (the next night’s show in Birmingham was cancelled when the band were detained for questioning by the disgruntled Stirling police force).

For Freddie Mercury it was proof that Queen’s destiny was in their own hands. “You have to have confidence in this business,” said the singer. “It’s useless saying you don’t need it. If you start saying to yourself: ‘Maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe I’d better settle for second place,’ it’s no good. If you like the icing on the top, you’ve got to have confidence.”

While Queen’s star was rising in the UK, America was another matter. Barely known beyond a few Anglophile hipsters, they would need to start from scratch to build up anything resembling a Stateside following. Handily, their friends in Mott The Hoople were there to help them out again.

“We went out on tour with them. They were very nice people,” says Mott’s Ian Hunter. “Very intelligent. So we said, ‘Okay, do you want to come to America as well?’”

On April 16, Queen played their first US show, in Denver, Colorado as support to Mott. Remarkably, despite the band’s name and Mercury’s stagecraft, the more macho sections of the American audiences didn’t take against them.

“They were more like a normal group,” Hunter recalls. “They were playing rock songs, but with their own slant on it. They did say that they picked up a lot of their stagecraft from Mott, you know? You’ve got to pick it up from somewhere.”

This big-brother-little-brother dynamic was evident off stage, as was the support band’s desire to be successful. At one point the two bands found themselves staying in a set of apartments owned by Spartacus star Kirk Douglas.

“There was a bit of a do in my room,” says Ian Hunter, “and Fred’s marching up and down saying: ‘When are these silly bastards going to figure it out?’ Meaning the Americans. I said to him: ‘It’s a big country, you’ve got to go around three or four times before it happens. It’s not like England, where you can conquer it in a day!’ He was very, very impatient. It was hilarious.”

The lavish offstage behaviour that became synonymous with Queen were a few years away, but there were still some memorable moments. Not least when the tour crossed paths with Bette Midler, then a brassy singer who’d made her name on New York’s gay bath-house circuit.

“She was doing a theatre in the same town as us,” Hunter remembers. “She latched onto Luther (Grovesnor, aka Mott guitarist Ariel Bender). And then we had Bette’s mob come back to the hotel with us. There was us, Queen, Bette and these seven-foot guys in feather head-dresses and what have you. Ha ha! It was so much fun.”

On May 7, Mott and Queen began a six-night residency at New York’s Uris Theater. But disaster struck the morning after the final show, when Brian May fell ill. The guitarist was diagnosed with hepatitis, possibly picked up from a dirty needle when they were inoculated before that ill-fated Australian show. Distraught, the band were forced to pull out of the tour, and May, against doctor’s orders, was flown home. Their plan to conquer America had been derailed. At least for the time being.

“To us it was out of the blue,” says Ian Hunter. “They were on the tour and then they’re not. Next thing we knew, they had the album out and it was doing extremely well.”

“I felt really bad at having let the group down at such an important place,” Brian May said in 1974. “But there was nothing to do about it. It was hepatitis, which you get sometimes when you’re emotionally run-down.”

Laid up in hospital after returning from America, May was feeling guilty and frustrated at inadvertently curtailing his band’s American ambitions. Understandably keen to rejoin his bandmates who had started work on their next album without him, he’d already begun writing while convalescing. One of the songs he was working on, Now I’m Here, reflected the disconnect between touring the US with Mott The Hoople and his living in a pokey bedsit in West London with his girlfriend. “It came out quite easily,” said the guitarist. “Where I’d been wrestling with it before without getting anywhere.”

It was a six weeks before May recovered from his bout of hepatitis. After being discharged he immediately rejoined the others in the studio. But something was wrong. May was constantly being sick, and he couldn’t eat anything. He was taken back to hospital, where doctors discovered that he had an undiagnosed stomach ulcer, which had been aggravated by the hepatitis.

“I was stuck in hospital for a few weeks, and they did some stuff to me which was like a miracle,” said May. “I thought I was dead. Being ill like that may even have been a good thing at the time, because although it was pretty hellish going through it, I felt glad to be alive and I became able to hold things in perspective more and not get so wound up and worried about them to make myself ill.”

By the time May returned to the sessions for the second time, work was properly under way on the new album. It was a strange experience for the guitarist, although not a negative one.

“It was very weird, because I was able to see the group from the outside, and was pretty excited by what I saw,” he later said. “We’d done a few things before I was ill, but when I came back they’d done a load more, including a couple of backing tracks of songs by Freddie which I hadn’t heard, like Flick Of The Wrist, which excited me and gave me a lot of inspiration to get back in there and do what I wanted to do.”

Sheer Heart Attack was recorded between July and October 1974. As with its two predecessors, the album was produced by Roy Thomas Baker, a larger-than-life character who could more than match Mercury in the charisma stakes.

“Every one of our musical and production frustrations came out on Queen II,” said Baker. “The idea for the third album was to get together and do some ‘simpler’ songs for a change; real little, short songs. And it was very successful on that level.”

Unlike Queen and Queen II, Sheer Heart Attack was conceived in the studio, albeit through necessity rather than by design. “Nobody knew we were going to be told we had two weeks to write Sheer Heart Attack,” said Mercury. “And we had to – it was the only thing we could do. Brian was in hospital.”

Despite the setback of the cancelled US tour, there was no doubt among the band that Sheer Heart Attack would take them to the next level. The black-and-white approach of Queen II had been reigned in, replaced by a kaleidoscopic range of sounds and styles. Leading this new approach was Killer Queen, an outrageously camp ditty that was closer to Noël Coward than to Robert Plant.

“That was the one song which was really out of the format that I usually write in,” said Mercury. “Usually the music comes first, but the words, and the sophisticated style that I wanted to put across in the song, came first.”

Many have claimed to be the inspiration behind Killer Queen, most notably Eric ‘Monster! Monster!’ Hall, the future football agent who then worked as Queen’s radio plugger. According to Mercury, the title chartacter was pure fantasy.

“No, I’d never really met a woman like that,” he explained after the album’s release. “I can dream up all kinds of things. That’s the kind of world I live in. It’s very flamboyant.”

If Killer Queen was the best-known song, it was hardly representative of the album, largely because the band didn’t chain themselves to one style. No band other than The Beatles had dared throw as many different styles into the mix with as much confidence. That state of affairs in Queen was helped by the fact that all four members pitched in with the writing.

A convalescing May delivered the rockers, including Now I’m Here and opener Brighton Rock (working titles: Bognor Ballad, Southend Sea Scout and Happy Little Fuck). Bookended by a picaresque tale of two seaside lovers sung in high and low registers by Mercury, it was a showcase for an extended May guitar solo dating back to Blag, a song by his old band Smile.