A prog legend’s daughter and The Clash’s former bassist aren’t the most obvious collaborators. But in 2023 Galen Ayers and Paul Simonon released Can We Do Tomorrow Another Day? which featured a laidback Mediterranean vibe reminiscent of Galen’s late father, Kevin.

Produced by Tony Visconti and featuring guest spots from Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz) and others, the album had its roots in a Mallorcan fishing village, where Simonon stayed during lockdown. Just before its launch the pair told Prog its story.

How did the collaboration come about?

Galen Ayers: After the hard Covid lockdown, Paul was just coming back to London from Spain and I was coming back from Greece. We’d both been writing songs. We started chatting and realised we were in the same place. The fun thing, I think, is this third space that opens up in any good collaboration, because you’re being pushed in ways that you wouldn’t necessarily go if you were just alone.

Paul Simonon: It was quite intense in a way, because you open up completely. We both agreed from the beginning that we should be totally honest with each other. That seemed to be the best way to move forward: going by gut instinct.

So is Mallorca a key place for both of you, creatively?

GA: Sure. I grew up there with my dad, I lived there with my stepfather and my mum and I went to school there. I was practically a Spanish girl and spoke the local dialect, Mallorquin.

PS: The record really started off there, after I’d gone to Mallorca to paint. I had a guitar with me as well, so it was an alternative way of being creative. It’s the same thing – the element of thought and feeling and expression. And I’ve always been open to European music. Jacques Dutronc and people like that. My dad used to play things like Francoise Hardy and Jacques Brel.

But you wanted to be a painter rather than a musician, right?

PS: Yeah. I got to art college, met Mick Jones [Clash co-founder] and somehow ended up playing bass. Mick said, “You’re a bit like Stuart Sutcliffe.” I went, “Who’s he?” He said, “The one that was in The Beatles. He couldn’t play bass either, but he was a good artist.” So that was sort of my inspiration in the very beginning.

Was it always going to be a musician’s life for you, Galen?

GA: No. I rebelled against it. At first I was always singing and I toured a bit with my dad. But then I saw the human cost of the life and I didn’t want that. I was quite a strong academic – I have two masters – and I was adamant to find a different path. But eventually it just came naturally that, as a writer, adding music is another form of expression. Now you have a whole other layer of emotion.

Was prog ever on your radar, Paul?

PS: My brother used to be into Yes and things like that, but it just didn’t speak to me. It didn’t represent anything that I felt. They knew too many chords, that’s the problem! Galen and I are really from two different worlds

GA: But we did find some middle ground. You enjoyed the early Syd Barrett albums I played you.

PS: Yeah – it’s like your dad’s stuff.

GA: It’s more song-based. When I started getting interested in songwriting there were progressives in my house at all times.

Didn’t Daevid Allen used to be your babysitter, Galen?

GA: They all were! I went to see King Crimson a few years back and met Robert Fripp. I said, “I’m sure you were our babysitter at some point.” He goes, “Well, you didn’t look like that!” Sometimes I dread it when I go to these get-togethers of like-minded people, because it’s either, “Your dad owes me money!” or “Your dad slept with my wife!” or something. I’m like, “It’s not my fault! I didn’t do anything!” But it’s always said with a smile, y’know? He was well-loved. I think Kevin was just way too sensitive to be a business person. There was this burning fire, with no compromise.

What kind of things did he teach you?

GA: He wasn’t very fatherly in terms of giving advice. But he wrote this beautiful letter to me, where he likened being a songwriter or an artist to being a tightrope walker. You just have to live a life where you don’t have a safety net. If you get scared or stop, you fall; so you just push forward.

PS: I love the story Galen told me about him. There was a guitar on the floor and he just shoved it over towards Galen and said: “There you go, you’re on your own now.” I think that says quite a lot. That’s a great attitude!

GA: Kevin was unconventional in terms of presents. On my 21st birthday he was playing his J200 Gibson that Jimi Hendrix gave him. It’s the guitar I’d grown up with, a beautiful-sounding guitar. He just put it in the case, closed it, kicked it softly across the floor and his exact words were: “Take over, kid!”

Flamenco, tango, disappearing people and a Red Hot Chili Pepper? Those unlikely ingredients combine on the heaviest album yet from Tarja Turunen. Finland’s symphonic prog metal queen tells Prog about swimming away from the shore, finally getting to know her former Nightwish bandmate Marko Hietala, and writing without fear on Frisson Noir.

“I want to bring back the riffs,” says Tarja Turunen. In that case, mission accomplished. Frisson Noir is the heaviest release yet from the Finnish soprano, whose return to riffage was born from the desire to replicate the energy of her live performances in the studio.

“When I perform live with my guys, my band sounds heavy,” she says. “I have a big voice, so I want them to sound heavy to support me. I feel comfortable in that wall of sound. I’ve been missing that sound.”

It’s been seven years since Turunen’s last foray into prog metal with In The Raw. After self producing that album, she wanted someone who could build that wall of sound she hears onstage. The right man for the job was Neal Avron, whose production and mixing credits include Fall Out Boy, Linkin Park and Serj Tankian.

“It was the best decision ever,” says Turunen. “Neal did an amazing job. It was challenging for him to work with a symphonic orchestra and choir; all these symphonic songs, progressive songs, but he loved it.”

Turunen’s symphonic and progressive proclivities are fully displayed on the first single, the 10-minute epic At Sea. “When I’m writing the songs I’m not really looking at the timer: I’m really letting myself go nowadays, which is a very beautiful feeling,” she says.

Pushing her label to release the longest song first was a gamble that paid off.“The fans really sat down to listen, which people do not do nowadays. We do not have the patience any more to listen or pay attention. It’s like everything is fed to us. The whole world, we miss so much because we don’t take the time, so I felt like I wanted to give my fans an experience, let’s call it, to feel a bit.”

As the title implies, At Sea was inspired an environment where Turunen, a keen scuba diver, can leave her worries behind. “It’s a majestic, powerful, eternal, incredible thing. I feel like I’m somehow connected with it,” says the singer, who lives near the coast in Marbella.

“I feel I need it, and I miss it when I’m gone. In At Sea, the story is about leaving the safety of the shore and facing the storm without knowing the outcome – whether you’ll survive or not – but nevertheless you go for it. I wanted to make people think, even though the risks might be horrifying, you should still take that leap. It’s a sign of the internal strength that we all have. We just need to find it. I feel like I’m like the song itself; I put it out without knowing the outcome.”

The full progressive scope of Frisson Noir can be appreciated in the array of guest performers, from Cradle Of Filth’s Dani Filth on I Don’t Care to Apocalyptica, who bring their strings to Tango. “We Finns love tango,” Turunen says. “I remember, in my youth, dancing tango with my dad at summer parties; it’s a very important part of Finnish culture.”

She invited viral shamisen sensation Sayo Komada to play on The Trace Outlives, a song inspired by jōhatsu, the Japanese word that describes people who choose to vanish from their established lives, often due to a sense of shame. “Some organisations help people disappear,” Turunen says. “It caught my attention; I wanted to write about the effects when something like this happens, and the emotions involved.

“I wanted to find something from Japan to include in the song, then I discovered the shamisen, which is and incredible instrument – it’s like a percussive guitar. Komasa is insanely talented, playing heavy metal with the shamisen in Japan. It was beautiful that she took part.”

Anemoia – meaning nostalgia for a time or place that one has never experienced – showcases the playing of flamenco guitarist Julián Bedmar.“Who the hell uses flamenco guitars in a metal album?” Turunen asks. “I do! The fact is, why not?”

While Sayo Komada was halfway round the world, Bedmar was much closer to home. “I found him 10 minutes from my place here. I sent him the piano demo and he played insanely beautiful guitar over it. Why flamenco? This is my 10th year in Spain; my family found a beautiful home here, people that we love and care for. Flamenco is a huge cultural aspect of Andalucia, and I wanted to say ‘thank you.’”

Against The Odds is a song a decade in the making. It was originally in contention for 2016’s The Shadow Self, an album that features Chad Smith guesting on drums. He was brought into the sessions by bassist Kevin Chown, his fellow funkster in Chad Smith’s Bombastic Meatbats.

“Back then I felt, ‘Hm, it’s not the time for this song,’” says Turunen. “When I write a song on piano, I start producing it, I send it to my musicians, they come with their input; the song changes and then we mix it. Then we go to the live performances and the song is changing all the time. My emotions also change – so the song lives; it evolves naturally.

“During the years since The Shadow Self I’ve grown. I’ve moved around, met beautiful people. Everything in my art is about my life, where I am, how I feel. I found that song and I feel it now. Why not then? There must have been a reason; but now it feels like ‘Yeah, let’s go!’”

Leap Of Faith reunites Turunen with fellow Nightwish alumnus Marko Hietala for the second time, after they duetted on Hietala’s song Left On Mars last year. She says collaborating has presented the chance “to get to know him for the first time ever. He’s not the same guy he was; neither am I. We are somewhere else now in our lives, and it’s been really nice to reconnect.” They’ve toured together, “supporting each other like never before, I mean, seriously.”

Frisson Noir is an album of grand drama, rich colours and textures, unafraid to take risks emotionally and stylistically. For Turunen – who studied at The Sibelius Academy in Finland and Germany’s Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe – the journey has been about embracing the freedom to follow her instincts and realise her vision.

“That’s what I’ve been struggling with: to free my mind when it comes to compositions,” she says. “I’ve learned so much. finally I feel it’s happening; that I’m becoming free with my music; it’s a feeling I don’t need to be afraid of. There are no mistakes I can make here.

“I hope I can come up with something great in the future, but for now I’m just happy with the album. Let’s see what people think – whether they like it or hate it. But I’m happy with everything.”

Frisson Noir is on sale now.

In 1973, with their music already labelled as ‘what The Beatles might have done if they hadn’t split up,’ cheeky Bristol prog band Stackridge found themselves in a studio with their production hero George Martin. In 2024 we asked: were they about to lose their heads for The Man In The Bowler Hat?

Rising from the ashes of the Goon Show-inspired Griptyte Thynne and morphing from Stackridge Lemon to just Stackridge, by 1973 the knockabout Bristol pop-proggers had racked up some serious milestones in four years of existence.

Initially comprised of Andrew Cresswell-Davis (sometimes credited as Andy Davis) on guitar, keyboards and vocals; James Warren on guitar and vocals; James ‘Crun’ Walter on bass (Crun was also a Goons name); Michael ‘Mutter’ Slater on flute and vocals; Mike Evans on violin; and Billy ‘Sparkle’ Bent on drums, the band members had met in the clubs and bars of Bristol, such as Acker Bilk’s Old Granary and The Dug Out.

The players’ chemistry went from performing pop and blues covers to original songs infused with a Bonzo Dog Band playfulness and eclecticism, taking in classical music, tea dance and music hall, rock, pop, folk and anything else that took their fancy culturally, created with humour and heart. They soon positioned themselves as a slapstick alternative to the popular rock du jour.

“We drew from every imaginable source,” James Warren tells Prog. “It was a weird mixture of Beatles, Frank Zappa and The Incredible String Band, and a healthy doze of musical theatre and humour.

“We were determined to not be denim-clad like Free, Status Quo or Black Sabbath,” Mutter Slater says. “We wore waistcoats, grey flannels and braces. James wore slippers.”

Stackridge opened and closed the first Glastonbury Festival in 1970, recorded two well-received albums on MCA (1971’s Stackridge and 1972’s Friendliness), toured with Wishbone Ash and Renaissance, appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test, and recorded a Radio 1 session for John Peel. After playing more than 300 shows, they’d garnered a battalion of enthusiastic and rather nutty fans, known for bringing props to gigs to join in with numbers that required participation, such as Marzo Plod with its rhubarb-thrashing, or dustbin lids for Four Poster Bed (Let There Be Lids).

Following the Cockney-Edwardiana dance-craze single Do The Stanley, a UK tour saw them supported by Camel, and their next big achievement was just over the hump. As avid Beatles and Goon Show fans, it was almost too much for the fluctuating five-, six- or seven-piece: the recording of album number three, The Man In The Bowler Hat, would be with The Goons’ label manager and fifth Beatle himself, George Martin.

Stackridge’s creative life was almost ‘easy’ by today’s standards: most band members and their roadie Pete Donovan shared a flat in Clifton, Bristol, living on a shoestring (and the dole). Later, as they got more popular, three nights a week they had digs in Bayswater, London, secured by their dedicated agent-turned-manager Mike Tobin. Each day was filled with writing, playing gigs and recording the means to their modest ends.

“I think back and wonder how the hell we ever managed to stay under the same roof for a year or two because we were incredibly different people, but we had a fun Monty Python-ish sort of time,” says Warren.

Promoting Friendliness, the band were frequently in the capital, or playing nearby towns. George Martin’s sons Greg and Alexis were often in the audience. “They loved us,” says Warren. “We’d see them at gigs and get chatting, and around the same time our manager Mike was offered a job with George Martin’s AIR Enterprises, a band agency and producers’ agency.”

Tobin was an effective businessman with a good ear and had been successful at Bristol’s Plastic Dog agency and London’s John Sherry Enterprises. He didn’t directly deal with Martin, but he was in the perfect location to approach him with an idea.

“Because George was coming into the office regularly, Mike got friendly with him,” Warren says. “One day he had the temerity to say, ‘Greg and Alexis have been coming to my band’s gigs and they absolutely love them. Would you be interested in listening to some demos they’ve done for their next album?’

“George agreed, and he obviously much liked what he heard, because – to our utter astonishment and amazement – he agreed to record and produce an album. It was a total dream. Being the huge Beatles fans that we were, it just didn’t seem possible that we’d somehow join that sort of world.”

In preparation for the sessions, Stackridge were invited to Martin’s place in Paddington, and most of the band – Warren, Slater, Walter and Evans, but not Cresswell-Davis, who had married – were relocated to Stansfield Road, Stockwell (the street where David Bowie was born). “And two girls from the Bayswater flat moved in, too,” laughs Warren.

“We spent about a week or two going to George’s. We had to plan all the tracks that we were interested in recording. George would cogitate a bit, going, ‘We could do this or that and that would work quite nicely,’ and so on. He was earmarking songs that he could do some orchestral arrangements for, and then a big production number on.”

“We were a bit starstruck and didn’t know how meeting George would go,” says Slater, “but he’s an avuncular man and one of his gifts was putting you at ease.”

With a title inspired by Magritte’s surrealist painting – a man in a bowler hat isn’t on the cover, but there’s a young woman in some sort of titfer, wearing an apron – the album tracks were as wide-ranging in style as in the past two records. Each member was encouraged to come up with musical ideas, and much lyric writing was done by a partnership of Warren, Jim Walter and Mutter Slater, which would occur “late at night, after coming back from gigs, over copious cups of tea and bowls of muesli,” says Warren – or “the burning of the midnight cornflakes,” as Slater puts it.

These compositions would be credited to the charmingly named ‘Smegmakovitch,’ while whole group co-writes went under ‘Wabadaw Sleeve,’ an anagram of letters from the members’ names.

The band had 10 days for recording and two for mixing at AIR Studios, which was then right in the centre of the West End, in Oxford Circus. “George was away quite a lot as he was working with Mahavishnu Orchestra or Jeff Beck, and he’d be flying to New York for meetings,” says Warren. “We had Geoff Emerick and Bill Price engineering the album, and these extra musicians that George brought in for the orchestral parts of the album, and that was really exciting.”

Opener Fundamentally Yours has Martin on keys and was “a lovely tune by Andy Davis,” says Warren. It’s followed by the nostalgic paean to village life Pinafore Days, written by Slater, who was now composing on piano as well as flute. Pinafore Days was also the title of the North American version of the album.

“On Stackridge I just did flute parts,” he says. “But I really liked what everyone else was doing and knew I had to up my game to have a song accepted. By the third album I was one of the major contributors.”

The power-poptastic The Last Plimsoll is a standout, with gangsterish lyrics. “Because of the music we thought the lyric should have a dark underbelly,” says Warren. “But we always tried to not be too literal and wanted to introduce strange, stream-of-consciousness phrases into the songs, too.”

To The Sun And Moon was written by Slater using a poem by his friend Deno, from his hometown of Yeovil. Abbey Road-esque, Martin’s orchestral hand is strong here, and the track finishes with Spanish guitar that leads into a Latin-flavoured, violin-powered The Road To Venezuela.

Slater recalls Martin’s aid in the studio with his track The Galloping Gaucho. “We started on the first chord and bashed our way through! George said, ‘I think we can make this more interesting. Let’s have a Hammond organ and a triangle on the intro; we’ll build it from there.’ He taught us about dynamics and properly using the range of instruments in the band.”

Warren’s ideas surfaced in the gentle “ecological plea” Humiliation and the McCartney-esque Dangerous Bacon. “Dangerous Bacon was a Smegmakovitch tour-de-force, named by Jim who would say that meat-eating wasn’t just bad for animals but for the eater, too.” It featured Andy Mackay on sax as Roxy Music were playing in AIR at the same time. “George or Geoff set that up – we didn’t get to know them,” says Warren.

Cresswell-Davis and his friend Graham Smith – from his time playing in bands in Weston-super-Mare – came up with folky hymn The Indifferent Hedgehog, with Martin on piano. Then comes the Slater-led group finale, God Speed The Plough. Mutter had noticed the phrase while leafing through a magazine in a hotel in Shropshire; it belonged to some verse next to an illustration of a mug of cider. “George obviously thought, ‘Here’s something I can get my teeth into,’ and came up with this fabulous orchestration,” says Warren.

“I was there for that overdub!” laughs Slater. “Watching George work with a group of string players... the mutual respect was tangible. It was done in two, three takes. Very impressive.”

With the recording finished, a political situation threw a bin lid in the works: the OPEC oil crisis – where the resources for manufacturing vinyl quadrupled in price and export was prohibited to some territories – meant the western record industry ground to a halt. The release of The Man In The Bowler Hat was delayed until February 1974, by which point the personality differences meant a different Stackridge line-up would tour the record; and to some members its release came as a bit of a shock. “We had a new manager and factions emerged,” says Warren.

“I got fed up and went back to Yeovil and got a job as a petrol pump attendant,” says Slater. Each week he got the Melody Maker, reading it from cover to cover. “One day I’m sat in the station with my feet up ’cos there’s not much to do, and I see The Man In The Bowler Hat is at No.23 in the chart! I was living at my parents, with no phone. The last I’d heard of it was at a playback in AIR studio.”

Although the studio experience had been exceptional and his childhood dream of being in a band had been realised with Stackridge, Slater was disillusioned. The band would dissolve after 1976’s Mr Mick, reviving briefly for 1999’s very creditable Something For The Weekend.

However, Stackridge did reunite from 2006 to 2015, and their catalogue is beloved by many. The Rhubarb Thrashers Club lives on – on Facebook and certain forums – with some of our favourite acts – Big Big Train, Schnauser, Steve Hogarth – being Stackridge devotees.

For Warren, the record lived up to his expectations and presented new opportunities. “We learned the possibilities of what the studio can offer. You can create magic there, but you have to pay attention to details,” he says.

“We took that on board with the first self-titled album by The Korgis, formed by myself and Andy Davis in 1979. We thought, ‘Let’s follow Buggles’ example and be a really good studio band, and not tour.’ Part of that came from The Man In The Bowler Hat.”

Steve Earle has never been just a country singer. Throughout his life has read like a rock’n’roll parable: the bacchanalian rebel with a taste for booze, bad drugs and run-ins with the law.

From his rural Texas childhood through a career in Nashville (and now New York City), Earle has survived six tumultuous marriages, heroin and crack addiction, jail, rehab and near-death. He’s also produced a stream of genre-defying records – welding honky-tonk to rockabilly, bluegrass to punk and, as on 2007’s Washington Square Serenade, country to trip-hop.

He’s also a novelist, playwright, DJ, political activist and, with his role as recovering drug addict Waylon in HBO’s The Wire, a TV actor. “I didn’t have to act,” Earle quipped.

Earle began playing guitar at 11. By 14, he’d left home for Houston, where he met like-minded rebel Townes Van Zandt, another hard-living songwriter. Earle later called him “a real good teacher and a real bad role model.”

Earle landed in Nashville in the early 70s, taking blue-collar jobs in the day and playing bass with Guy Clark at night. After years of aborted record deals, MCA picked up the free-spirited 30-year-old in 1985.

His sensational debut Guitar Town marked him down as a workingman’s troubadour à la Bruce Springsteen / John Mellencamp. 1988’s anthemic Copperhead Road was an international success, yet Earle was already heavily into a self-destructive lifestyle.

By 1994, he was arrested for drug possession and landed a jail sentence. Post-rehab, he returned stronger than ever. Both the all-acoustic Train A Comin’ and I Feel Alright were raw, thrilling albums that sounded, literally, like a man reborn. Earle’s gift for rousing narratives and driving rock’n’roll, tempered by artful ballads, were fully to the fore on 1997’s El Corazon, a record that also captured his catch-all appeal.

Recent years have found him railing against the death penalty, attacking America’s “war on terror” and calling for a tolerant new kind of patriotism. The resulting albums, particularly Jerusalem and The Revolution Starts…Now, are as impassioned as anything he’s ever done.

He's also paid tributes to fallen friends: 2009's Townes celebrated his old buddy Townes Van Zandt, while 2019's Guy did the same for former boss Guy Clark. In January 2021 he released J.T., a collection of songs written by his late son, Justin Townes Earle, and followed it a year later with Jerry Jeff, celebrating the music of folk singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker.

His art, it seems, still lives in extremis. “I’m into pain and joy,” he once said, “and the in-between doesn’t interest me.”

...and one to avoid

At the end of 1974, Kiss were in trouble. Their self-titled debut album had shifted just 75,000 copies. The follow-up, Hotter Than Hell, had stalled at No.100 on the US chart. Kiss needed a hit, and they needed one fast.

Their label boss, Casablanca Records owner, Neil Bogart told frontman Paul Stanley, in precise detail, what kind of hit this should be, using Sly & the Family Stone's euphoric I Want to Take You Higher" as a model. “He said, ‘You need something that your fans can rally behind – a song that embodies what you’re about,’” recalled Stanley.

The singer chose the right place to write it – in his room at the famous Hyatt House hotel on Sunset Boulevard. This joint became known as ‘The Riot House’ after all the wild parties that had been staged there, one of which involved Led Zeppelin’s hard-drinking drummer John Bonham riding a motorcycle along the corridors. Paul took out an acoustic guitar and within a few minutes he had it.

“Right away I had the lyrics: ‘I wanna rock and roll all nite and party every day,’” he said. ‘It was very primal in that it really wasn’t anything that I pondered. At that time I don’t believe people talked about wanting to party. It was just a one-word description of a way of getting loose. Rocking and rolling all night and partying every day isn’t so much a physical action as much as it’s an attitude. It’s a way of looking at life. It’s a mindset – a mindset about liberation and celebration of the individual.”

The song was completed with a verse from a work-in-progress Gene had, Drive Me Wild. “I never had the chorus,” Gene said, “but I had this notion of a car as an analogy to a woman, the idea of, ‘You drive me wild, I’ll drive you crazy.’ So the pieces were basically stuck together. Take my verse and attach it to Paul’s chorus and you’ve got a song.”

When Neil Bogart heard Rock And Roll All Nite, he was ecstatic. But for all its populist genius, Rock And Roll All Nite, only made it to No.68 on the Billboard Hot 100 when it was released in April 1975. But it took on another life when a live version was extracted from the blockbusting Alive! album later that same year, reaching No.12 in the US. Just as Neil Bogart had instructed, it was the anthem that defined the band. For the members of Kiss – and for rock’n’roll partiers everywhere – things would never be the same again.

"Rock and Roll All Nite is astounding, in that every night we play it, it brings on a euphoria and a feeling of abandon in the crowd, everything that it was supposed to do," Stanley told Classic Rock. "It was meant to be a rock anthem that would sum up the philosophy and common point of view between Kiss and our fans."

It's done more than that. Rock and Roll All Nite has become part of the cultural furniture, referenced in everything from The Simpsons (in the famous Homerpolooza episode, Homer says, "I used to rock and roll all night and party every day, then it was every other day. Now I'm lucky if I can find half an hour a week in which to get funky.") to the Winter Olympics (where Katarina Witt and Kristi Yamaguichi skated to it at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City).

It's also become a soundtrack staple, featuring in the movies Dazed And Confused, Why Him?, The Nice Guys, Gulliver's Travels, Role Models and Less Than Zero (where it was covered by Poison), and in the TV series Family Guy, Friends, The Dangerous Book For Boys, Ugly Betty, Dharma & Greg and Full House.

Tellingly, it was also referenced by Kiss themselves, on their 1976 album Destroyer. During the intro to Detroit Rock City, after a newscaster (played by producer Bob Ezrin) reports a tragic automobile accident, Rock And Roll All Nite can briefly be heard playing on a car stereo. Kiss needed to set the scene for what would become their first platinum album, and they knew just how iconic the song had already become.

Be honest: who else is sick of summer? Don't get us wrong, long sunny days can be lovely, but after a few months we'll admit we're getting itchy for those cool nights and the things that go bump in them.

Speaking of which, here are the results of our last poll! Clearly we're not alone, as there's a definite spooky vibe going on in the winner's from our end of July round-up (we missed last week because we were being roasted alive at Bloodstock). In third place was the debut single from Sheri Moon Zombie, while all-round metal legend Tony Iommi took second. But our winners for the week - by some distance - were Silvertomb, the doom metal project featuring former Type O Negative alumni Kenny Hickey and Johnny Kelly, two musicians who clearly know their way around the Autumnal season.

We've got a diverse mix this week as we bring you new tunes from the likes of Green Lung, Mastodon and Godflesh, plus (potentially) newer bands to check out like Gradience, Netherwilds and Noctule. Don't forget to tell us which song excites you most by casting a vote in the poll below - and stay hydrated and cool out there. Halloween beckons.

Mastodon - In The Ruins

There's only a couple of weeks left to go before we get Mastodon's new album Marrow Deep (Aug 28, to be exact). It might be their first album without Brent Hinds, but the sound that's turned them into one of the 21st Century's most critically hailed metal bands is still very much present and correct in new single In The Ruins, a track that makes great use of tonal shifts to explore the space between heft and gentle melody.

Noctule - Goddess Of Rot

Next week Svalbard will play their final show at ArcTanGent festival. But while there's definitely sadness at losing one of the UK's most talented blackened post-hardcore bands, we aren't losing them entirely. Vocalist Serena Cherry unveiled her video game themed solo black metal project Noctule back in 2020 and second album Extinguish Thy Flame is due September 25. Latest single Goddess Of Rot definitely taps into a familiar sound that fans of Svalbard will recognise - furious, majestic and impossibly emotional.

Green Lung - Black Magick Radio

Green Lung know their way around a catchy tune. Spooky season might still be a few weeks off, but Black Magick Radio is practically dripping in ectoplasm, the Londoners clearly having a lot of fun with old school keyboard sounds as they evoke the dark magical appeal of the late 60s and early 70s. New album Necropolitan is due September 11. "In praise to the Sabbath" indeed.

The Cartographer - Griefworn

Newcomers out of Derby, there's something oppressive and hackle-raising about The Cartographer's Griefworn. Sure, it's got the kind of pummelling, relentless aggression we've come to expect of modern metal, but there's also a sense that pressure is mounting and it'll properly explode at any moment. Keep your eyes out for their debut The Collapse Of A Bitter End on September 18.

Godflesh - Living/Ending

For almost 40 years Godflesh have been the epitome of crushing, claustrophobic industrial metal. Justin Broadrick might be retiring the project in the near-future - a hernia surgery has left him unable to perform the band's characteristic bulldog snarls for long periods - but before they bow out we've been promised two more albums. Living/Ending comes from Decay, due September 25 and perhaps unsurprisingly, given everything Broadrick's been through, it's a nihilstic vision of a future you hoped would never come to pass. Naturally, we love it.

Zilqy - World’s End

A new group emerging out of Japan, Zilqy features former members of Aldious and Lovebites, though feels decidedly more contemporary than either of those groups. There's something almost industrial about the clattering low-end, balanced with clear radio sensibilities. World's End comes from the band's debut album Birth Of Riot, due October 7.

Battlesnake - Mud Apocalypse

They were the vomit, and they killed satan, now Battlesnake are harbingers of the Mud Apocalypse. The colourful Aussies have become first festival mainstays here in the UK over the past couple of years, and debuted this latest single at Bloodstock last weekend, delivering it with the typical po-faced, trad metal glory that all of their songs have championed thus far.

Gradience - Undone

Nobody is blending genres quite like Denmark's Gradience. Undone starts out like a post-black metal rager complete with blast-beats, only to give way to modern hip hop flows and melodies. It's a stark contrast of styles, but works incredibly well, the snarling blasts of heaviness only highlighting how well the band can fuse two disparate elements together. The group's debut album Anomaly is out September 4.

Netherwilds - Helm Yeah

Who says its only folk and black metal bands who can enjoy a bit of renaissance fair dress-up? Netherwilds sound like they come from New York in the early 90s and look like they're fighting their way out of the 16th Century, Helm Yeah a very tongue-in-cheek tune all about cutting loose and aspiring for more. We'll be honest, we're looking forward to debut Peasant Rising on October 9.

Hippotraktor - Oblivion Walker

Sounding like a fender bender in an asteroid belt, Hippotraktor have the remarkable ability to bridge the djenty technicality of Tesseract with the gorgeous, cosmic melodies of Mastodon. At least, that's what we've got with Oblivion Walker, a brilliant cut taken from new album Annihilist, due October 2.

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

A reminder that Dutch proggers Lesoir came out on top in a very tight race last week with the thought-provoking Is It Nothing? with US proggers Pattern-Seeking Animals in second place and with Arthur Brown's effusive Bursting The Bubble in third.

The premise is simple - we've collated a batch of new releases by bands falling under the progressive umbrella, and collated them together in one post for you - it makes it so much easier than having to dip in and out of various individual posts, doesn't it?

The idea is to watch the videos (or listen if it's a stream), enjoy (or not) and also to vote for your favourite in the voting form at the bottom of this post. Couldn't be easier, could it? We'll be bringing you Tracks Of The Week, as the title implies, each week. Next week, we'll update you with this week's winner and present a host of new prog music for you to enjoy.

If you're a band and you want to be featured in Prog's Tracks Of The Week, send your video (as a YouTube link) or track embed, band photo (please, don't forget the photo!) and biog with quotes to us here.

ASIA - ECHO OF YOU

After the punch of their first single, The Traveller (Into The Light), the new offering from the melodic proggers Asia, Echo Of You, drips with melody (is that a hint of Toto-esque vocal melody we hear?), reminding everyone of just what a classy songwriter Geoff Downes is. And with new bassist and vocalist Harry Whitley, he seems to have found a new writing partner that recalls the glory days of Downes/Wetton era Asia. The band release nbew album, Indigo, through Frontiers on November 6.

"This song was part of the main writing sessions between Harry and I. It took on a whole different angle in the latter stages of development, with more of a focus on electronica and a spacey production. It’s a happy, uplifting tune, despite the nostalgic overtones of the lyrics, a love song with a twist. It all ends in a chaotic mix of counter themes, chord changes and features a good old-fashioned fade-out as a nod to nostalgia, and I believe is a very fitting conclusion to the album – Indigo, hopefully leaving the listener on a high.”

JONAS BJERRE - HIKE TO THE SUN

Jonas Bjerre was singer with Danish prog poppers Mew, who sadly called it a day in 2024, although their ensuing farewell tour took another two years! Bjerre is back with a soundtrack album for a new Korean-Danish movie, Hana Korea, directed by Frederik Sølberg, about the challenges a North Korean girl faces in exile in South Korea, out digitally on August 21 and with a full vinyl release on November 20 through Invisible Hands Music. A duet with a Korean artist called YeoHee, A Hike To The Sun is the only vocal track on the soundtrack, a gentle piece that will likely find favour with fans of both Mew and Sigur Rós.

"I knew director Frederik Sølberg from his documentary films, and from his musical career," Bjerre explains. "His initial brief was electronic and especially ambient-style music, with the key word “alienation”. I worked primarily with modular synths and vintage analogue and early digital synths. We wanted to capture the feeling of our protagonist arriving in this new hyper-modern world, and her struggle to fit in. To incorporate a warmer-sounding, more melancholy, and emotional side, I started introducing string instruments, choir, and we even wrote a singer/songwriter style song together, based on a guitar figure that Frederik came up with, which became the duet between myself and Yeohee Kim. I also really enjoyed dabbling in K-pop for a scene, and working out Spanish flamenco-style guitar pieces."

MAIAH WYNNE - SEE THE WATER

US musician Wynne is the singer with art rockers Envy Of None, best known for featuring Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson and Coney Hatch's Andy Curran, so she's come under plenty of scrutiny, now largely redirected towards a certain German drummer! With Lifeson duly preoccupied, Wynne releases her new solo album, Into The Waves, for new label Kscope (conveniently home to Envy Of None). Lifeson makes an appearance on the new album, as do cellist Bethany Joyce, violinist Avelyn Reynolds, guitarist Brooks Berg, drummers Adam Brzycki and Randy Cooke and flugelhorn player Henry Sheppard.

“I wrote See The Water in a handful of minutes when I was 16," says Wynne. "I had just been gifted a dulcimer and found my hands quickly dancing around a folky melody in D minor. What came out was the manifestation of my inner critic. That voice inside my head that always told me I wasn't enough, no matter how hard I tried. I decided to create a character out of her to represent the feeling of being hunted and haunted by that voice everywhere I went. The imagery of water and drowning in those feelings kept coming up and in a moment of quick inspiration, the song came out fully formed and has only changed slightly in the years since. It's nice to finally have a studio version of it out in the world close to how I always pictured it in my head.”

DUALISIS - THE DEEP

This is the first time we've heard French quintet Dualisis, but then seeing as this is a precursor to the band's debut EP, Us, which is out later this month, that's not very surprising. The Deep is a lengthy and musically complex piece, which suggests great things ahead of the band.

The prog metal tag might be something of a hindrance to the band, given how some now view the genre, as there's so much more going on here musically than that tag suggests. The cheesy, acted-out segments of their video might raise a smile, but we'll definitely be keeping our eyes on Dualisis from now on.

HIPPOTRAKTOR - OBLIVION WALKER

Belgian prog metal quintet Hippotraktor are an intense young group, but their new single, Oblivion Walker, captures everything that's great about them in just over four minutes. They can be crushingly heavy, beautifully gentle and melodic, darkly intense and progressively inquisitive, and that's just the new single!

It's taken from the band's third studio album, Annihilist, which the band release through Pelagic Records on October 2. The brutal intensity of some of the music may scare off fans of gentler prog, but that's a pity, as the package as a whole is so rewarding.

EXIST IMMORTAL - AFTERGLOW

Great to see and hear the return of London prog metal quintet Exist Immortal, who return with a new EP, Afterglow, through Seek & Strike on September 11. They've always packed a hefty punch, allied with a big slab of melody, and the EP's title track is no different. Prog metal fans will simply love this, and although some older prog fans may be wary of the odd heavy vocal sections, the song's emphatic impact wins out.

"Afterglow is the sound of us finding out what this band actually is," the band explain. "We wrote and rebuilt it through a period of real upheaval, a lineup change, personal challenges, health challenges and a stretch that tested whether we'd keep going at all. Somehow it came out the most assured, most deliberate thing we've ever made."

END OF ABYSS - VULTURES

Vultures is the second single from Finnish prog metal sextet End Of Abyss and is taken from the band's upcoming debut album, Escape To A New Empire, which will be released through the Inverse Record label, although the actual release date is TBC. They might be tagged with the prog metal label, but there's more heavy rock mixed with prog, not a million miles from Norway's Green Carnation. We'll be keeping our eye on them; that's for sure

“Vultures explores the many possibilities of musical interpretation," explains composer Petrus Syvänperä. "In addition to traditional band instrumentation, the track incorporates industrial‑styled synth textures, and the chorus appears in three distinct variations throughout the journey."

This is where it all started. The groundwork had already been laid with the musical cross-pollination of Faith No More, the rap-rock polemic of Rage Against The Machine and the concrete-heavy grooves of Helmet and Prong, among others. For good or ill though, the movement that would come to be known as nu metal was birthed with the release of Korn’s monstrous first single and debut album opener Blind.

The sinister, skittering cymbals, that jagged, repeated slash of guitar and its counterpoint riff. Frontman Jonathan Davis growling, ‘Are you ready?’ like an invitation to a riot – which in a way it was. The song launched Korn and a thousand follow-the-leader wannabes into the musical mainstream, but its genesis goes back a little further.

A version of Blind had been written and played live in the clubs in the early 90s by Davis’ pre-Korn outfit SexArt. The band also featured guitarist Ryan Shuck who would go on to co-found Orgy and play with Julien-K and Dead By Sunrise – the latter with Chester Bennington.

“When my first band broke up, I asked my friend Ryan, who went on to join Orgy, if I could keep the song. The way we did it was completely different to the original version anyway,” Davis added. “What was I going for lyrically? I have no fucking idea, brother! This was just a stream-of-consciousness thing; it was all over the place. I think it’s about being blind to your reality; blocking the shit out that you don’t want to see or hear.”

“The riff came from Jonathan’s old band, SexArt,” guitarist Munky told Metal Hammer in 2020. “Head and I saw them play at some little club and I remember thinking the riff was pretty cool – it was in a different key, but still really heavy. It felt like new territory; like something I’d never heard before.”

How much of the song was actually rewritten and how freely it was given to Korn remains a matter of debate. The main songwriter in SexArt was drummer Dennis Shinn and neither he nor Shuck were originally credited for Blind (or Daddy, which also originated with SexArt) when it appeared as the opening track on Korn’s self-titled debut album, released in October 1994.

In a 2006 interview with God Is In The TV under his pseudonym Menace, Shinn alleged that Davis “had actually stolen the songs that I had written in SexArt”. It was only after the pair took legal action that they were credited on Korn’s Greatest Hits Vol. 1 a decade later, as well as all subsequent releases featuring the songs.

“Despite the old drama, egomaniacs and their politics brought forth, I am always very proud of what I wrote, and thankful for Korn, doing such a great job representing the music for all these years,” wrote Shinn on Instagram.

For his part, guitarist Head claims the song had “many writers”, while acknowledging that Shinn and Shuck wrote the original before Korn changed it up. “We came in with the cymbal part, and Munky came up with the 'Dan-a-nan-na,' then we decided after it kicked in we were going to bring it all right down. That was all Korn rewriting it,” he told Head told Metal Hammer.

And whatever the exactitudes of the original composition of the song, there’s no doubting that it was Korn’s delivery – along with the eerie-to-hulking sonics captured by producer Ross Robinson – that made Blind such a visceral gut-punch of a song.

According to Davis, the demo version of Blind was recorded using a purloined guitar belonging to hair metal/shock rock troupe W.A.S.P. "When we were doing the demos, I think it was W.A.S.P. was doing their record or some shit," the singer told Rolling Stone. "So when W.A.S.P. went home at night, we'd sneak in and use their shit, so we'd be up all night. And [Robinson] gave us wheatgrass to keep us up. Yeah, the demo of 'Blind was one of Blackie Lawless' guitars, I believe. Fucking funny, huh?"

The recording process as the band moved onto the debut album was unconventional. Davis has said he recorded Ball Tongue while high on crystal meth and his breakdown at the end of Daddy was genuine – with Robinson having motioned at the rest of the band to keep jamming as the singer wept.

“He’s a fucking sadistic bastard, that motherfucker,” Davis told Rolling Stone as they looked back on the 20th anniversary of the album. “I love him, though; don’t get me wrong. But yeah, I think it gets him off. He had his way and was digging in to me and pulling shit out. I was already writing stuff about it, but to get the performance out, he really just poured salt on the wound.”

The version of Blind that made the album, ushering in one of the most impactful debuts in metal history, as well as serving as the lead single, was reworked once more from the cut on the Neidermeyer’s Mind demo. It was also a slowburner. Initially released as a promo single, it never bothered the charts and the album never rose above No.72 on the US Billboard 200 chart. It made a big noise in the underground, however, and served as an introduction to Korn and their new breed of metal.

“It was a powerhouse, that was such an important song for us, we started playing it around Los Angeles, and we always opened with that song, because we were saying, ‘Get ready, because this is a new thing, this is a new sound, you’re going to be seeing some freaky looking dudes going nuts onstage!’” Head recalled.

By the time the end of the century approached, Korn were global stars who transcended the metal ghetto and Blind had taken on its own monstrous life. The band’s set at the infamously chaotic Woodstock ’99 event was one of the weekend’s highlights, providing a safety valve outlet for an increasingly agitated crowd. It was one of the moments that didn’t descend into outright anarchy but the energy was immense throughout – starting with the response to that instantly recognisable intro.

“I remember the intro,” Davis said on the Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 documentary. “We’re walking out, I come walking out and I see that fucking crowd. I’m like, ‘What the flying fuck?’”

Speaking of the sheer volume and energy of the crowd, he continued: “When you see it with your own eyes it’s just 10 times more shocking… I look over and I see just waves as the sound travelled all the way to the back… there’s no drug, there's no nothing on this planet that can give you that fucking feeling of having a crowd in your hand like that.”

More than two decades on from that. and three from its original conception, Blind still stands as an all-time classic and a seminal moment in metal history.

Godflesh leader Justin Broadrick plays electric guitar on a new song by pop hit-maker Phoebe Bridgers.

The industrial metal and post-metal pioneer performs on Bobby, a track from Bridgers’ long-awaited third album Lost Weekend, out today (August 14). Listen to the team-up below.

Broadrick, 56, makes the guest performance as Godflesh build up to the release of their penultimate studio album next month. Decay will come out on September 25 via Relapse, and lead single Living/Ending is now streaming.

It’ll be the two-piece band’s first effort since Broadrick announced his intention to end the project back in March, as the effects of a recent hernia surgery make it unsafe for him to scream onstage again.

The Birmingham-born musician wrote on social media: “I had a huge hernia, and for it to be repaired, I had to endure a six-inch incision in my groin. This unfortunately was not keyhole surgery. I have a very weak abdominal wall, which at being 57 years old this year, is not going to improve.

“If I continue to perform and shout/scream as I do with Godflesh, then I am at high risk for more hernias, and blowing out my abdominal wall entirely. Godflesh live ended the day of my surgery, and upon the surgeon making this statement.”

Godflesh will not play live again, but Broadrick has written one last album for the project. He said in his announcement that he hopes to record it at the end of this year. After the band’s dissolution, Broadrick will continue to make music with his shoegaze project Jesu and electronic solo project JK Flesh.

Broadrick formed Godflesh together with bassist B.C. Green in 1988, shortly after he stepped down from grindcore legends Napalm Death. Their first EP, 1988’s Godflesh, and debut album, 1989’s Streetcleaner, were cult hits, noted for their extreme heaviness and the use of a drum machine, unprecedented in heavy metal.

Broadrick explained to Whynow in 2023 that the drum machine was inspired by hip-hop stars Run-DMC and their 1985 single King Of Rock, while their industrial sound was a reflection of what he heard growing up in Birmingham.

“Birmingham, at that time, was the Detroit of fucking England,” he said, “and I immediately connected with, and was extremely sensitive to, that environment. At the council estate we lived on, at night you could hear factories. In summer, with the windows open, you could smell factories and hear the grinding of sounds.”

Despite Godflesh’s underground status, they have a host of high-profile admirers, including members of Korn and Faith No More. Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett has praised them as “unbelievably crushing”. The band sought out artist Andres Serrano to make the covers of their Load and Reload albums after seeing that Serrano had directed the music video for Godflesh’s 1994 single Crush My Soul.

While Godflesh’s career winds down, Bridgers’ is reactivating following a hiatus. Lost Weekend is the US musician’s first album since 2020, and her recent spring tour was her first since 2023. She’s currently preparing for North American and European tour dates later this year, kicking off in Indianapolis on September 14 and 15.

Roxy Music have shared a previously unreleased 1971 demo of Grey Lagoons as they announce a new Deluxe Edition reissue of their 1973 second album, For Your Pleasure.

The band will release a four-disc Super Deluxe Edition of the album, as well as a 2LP (black vinyl and blue pearl vinyl as a D2C Exclusive), 2CD, Digital, Blu-Ray and Dolby ATMOS, available through UMR/Island EMI on November 6.

The Super Deluxe Edition includes the original album, singles and instrumentals; unheard songwriting demos, rehearsals and live sessions; TV and live performances from 1972–1973; plus a 116-page book with new essays and rare photography, while the two-disc set features the original album plus AIR Studios outtakes, singles and BBC sessions, presented in a hardcover digibook with a new essay and unseen images.

The vinyl versions feature the original album plus AIR Studios outtakes on 140g vinyl in a gatefold sleeve, while the Blu-ray features Steven Wilson's 5.1 mixes alongside Atmos and stereo mixes of the album and Pyjamarama, plus instrumentals and extra content

“It was a good pressure," singer Bryan Ferry recalls of the era. "Realising, now there’s an audience to write for. An intelligent audience. I felt a responsibility for the work that I hadn’t for the first album, certainly with regard to the lyrics. There was a hunger in the whole band to do more: a very strong urge to get back into a recording studio and make a better record than the first one. Nick de Ville had a cottage in Derbyshire, and offered to let me have it for a few days. So I went up there with the sole purpose of writing songs. I had this great little Renault 4, and I filled the car with stuff: keyboards, a guitar, an amp, tape recorders, pads of paper and pens.

"I remember driving up in this crammed car with its very interesting gear stick. The cottage was quite remote, out in the Derbyshire Dales – I had to call in to some local farmer to get the key, then on up a track – and very basic. I must have taken provisions, because I couldn’t cook, but I was full of energy. I was completely alone out there, and just really focused on writing this stuff. I remember sheets of paper all over the floor, working on things like In Every Dream Home A Heartache and Editions Of You. Those few days in that cottage were crucial to the making of For Your Pleasure.”

The Super Deluxe Edition also premieres two additional unheard recordings of the song, Grey Lagoons - Air Studios Outtake and Grey Lagoons - Live at Montreux, April 1973 as well as two accompanying BBC performance clips.

Pre-order For Your Pleasure.

Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure

3CD+DVD Super Deluxe

CD1 – The Album
1. Do The Strand
2. Beauty Queen
3. Strictly Confidential
4. Editions Of You
5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache
6. The Bogus Man
7. Grey Lagoons
8. For Your Pleasure

CD2 – Demos, rehearsals & studio outtakes
1. Pyjamarama - guitar & vocal
2. Do The Strand - piano & vocal
3 . Beauty Queen - tremolo piano
4. Beauty Queen - electric piano
5. Beauty Queen - piano & vocal
6. Strictly Confidential (segue into)
7. Editions Of You - electric piano
8. In Every Dream Home A Heartache - farfisa & guitar
9.In Every Dream Home A Heartache - tremolo guitar
10. For Your Pleasure - electric piano
11. Pyjamarama - Rehearsal 1973
12. Bogus Man - Rehearsal 1973
13. Grey Lagoons - 1971 Demo (Original title The Bogus Man Part 2)
14. Pyjamarama - AIR Studios outtake
15. Beauty Queen - AIR Studios outtake
16. Strictly Confidential - AIR Studios outtakes
17. Editions Of You - AIR Studios outtake
18. The Bogus Man - AIR Studios outtake
19. Grey Lagoons - AIR Studios outtake
20. For Your Pleasure - Eno tapes

CD3 – Live sessions, singles & instrumentals

Live Sessions
1. Grey Lagoons – BBC Paris Theatre (London) August 1972 (first live performance)
2.For Your Pleasure – Peel Sessions November 1972
3.Do The Strand – Peel Sessions March 1973
4.Editions Of You - Peel Sessions March 1973
5.Pyjamarama - Peel Sessions March 1973
6.In Every Dream Home A Heartache - Peel Sessions March 1973
7.Pyjamarama A side single
8. The Pride And The Pain B side single
9. Do The Strand (instrumental)
10. Beauty Queen (instrumental)
11. Strictly Confidential (instrumental)
12. Editions Of You (instrumental)
13. In Every Dream Home A Heartache (instrumental)
14. The Bogus Man (instrumental)
15. Grey Lagoons (instrumental)
16. For Your Pleasure (instrumental)

DVD – TV & live performances
1. Pyjamarama – Top of the Pops (lost tape)
2. For Your Pleasure – Full House November 1972
3. Grey Lagoons – Full House November 1972
4. Do The Strand – Old Grey Whistle Test April 1973
5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache - Old Grey Whistle Test April 1973
6. Do The Strand – Live at Montreux April 1973
7. Grey Lagoons - Live at Montreux April 1973
8. Beauty Queen - Live at Montreux April 1973
9. The Bogus Man- Live at Montreux April 1973
10. In Every Dream Home A Heartache- Live at Montreux April 1973
11. Editions Of You- Live at Montreux April 1973
12. Do The Strand – Musikladen 1973
13. Editions Of You – Musikladen 1973
14. In Every Dream Home A Heartache – Musikladen 1973

2CD Deluxe
Disc 1
1. Do The Strand
2. Beauty Queen
3. Strictly Confidential
4. Editions Of You
5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache
6. The Bogus Man
7. Grey Lagoons
8. For Your Pleasure

Disc 2
1 .Pyjamarama - AIR studios outtake     
2.Beauty Queen - AIR studios outtake  
3.Strictly Confidential - AIR studios outtake     
4.Editions Of You - AIR studios outtake     
5.Bogus Man - AIR studios outtake     
6.Grey Lagoons - AIR studios outtake  
7.For Your Pleasure - Eno Tapes 
8.Pyjamarama - 2026 remaster
9.The Pride and the Pain
10. Grey Lagoons - BBC Paris Theatre, London, August 1972
11. Pyjamarama - Peel Sessions March 1973   
12. Do The Strand - Peel Sessions March 1973 
13. Editions Of You - Peel Sessions March 1973     
14. For Your Pleasure - Peel Sessions Nov 1972   

2LP Black Vinyl + 2LP Blue Pearl Vinyl (D2C Exclusive)
Side A
1. Do The Strand
2. Beauty Queen
3. Strictly Confidential
4. Editions Of You
5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache

Side B
1. The Bogus Man
2. Grey Lagoons
3. For Your Pleasure

Side C
1. Pyjamarama - AIR Studios outtake
2. Beauty Queen - AIR Studios outtake
3. Strictly Confidential - AIR Studios outtakes
4. Editions Of You - AIR Studios outtake

Side D
1. The Bogus Man - AIR Studios outtake
2. Grey Lagoons - AIR Studios outtake
3. For Your Pleasure - Eno tapes

Slipknot’s former producer has revealed why he recorded the Iowan nu metal nine-piece’s second album with a broken back.

Ross Robinson, who worked with the band on their landmark 1999 self-titled debut, returned for 2001’s Iowa but broke his back in a motocross accident midway through production. He took only one day off before resuming his duties.

In the new issue of Metal Hammer, Robinson, 59, is asked why he continued and didn’t relinquish his role on Iowa to another producer. He explains that his injury reminded the members of their raw metal roots and early determination.

“No, that’d be impossible,” he answers. “It was actually really good for the record because the guys were being taken out in Hollywood, hanging out with all these big stars and shit. When I broke my back and showed up anyway, it put a very next-level diligence into those guys.

“Joey [Jordison, then-drummer] said to me later, ‘It was the greatest thing that ever happened to us.’ It was really tough – I’d get home and just lie there watching The Big Lebowski until I passed out. I was in so much pain, but I’d get to the studio and it’d be, ‘Let’s get it the fuck on!’”

Elsewhere in the interview, Robinson is asked what the toughest part of recording Iowa was. He surprisingly doesn’t say it was recording with a broken back, instead mentioning the vocal overdub process and how it drew out personal demons within the band.

“Vocal overdubs could be tough,” he says. “The bar was set so high with the band slamming together – when you’re that extreme, it gets difficult, especially when you’re on your own and trying to get back into the zone. There was a lot going on with Corey [Taylor, vocals] at the time too – he’d be going out pretty much every night and had this little fanbase of people he hung out with.

“Weirdly, the easiest one to get in the zone was when Sid’s [Wilson, turntables] grandfather passed away, and I’d asked him to do some overdubs for the background of People = Shit. He was so distraught, sad, hurt and was just crying. I was like, ‘You’re doing backgrounds today’ and he nailed it.”

Slipknot released Iowa on August 28, 2001, and consolidated the commercial success of their debut. It topped the UK album chart and reached number three in the US. It has since been certified Platinum in both markets, as well as in Canada.

Despite Iowa’s critical and commercial success, the band were in disarray during its production and release, burnt out by touring and using substances.

Singer Taylor told Loudwire in 2015: “We fought every cliche leading up to getting signed, going out and playing shows, and then, all of a sudden, we had everything: double-Platinum album, we were one of the biggest metal bands in the world, we were headlining because nobody wanted us to open for them. We were making a hugely, hugely anticipated album, so we just started getting fucked up.”

Due to these issues, Slipknot went on hiatus in 2002. They returned in 2004 with their third album, Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses, which charted number two in the US and later also went Platinum.

Slipknot are currently recording their as-yet-unannounced eighth studio album. Guitarist Jim Root recently revealed that they’ve been tracking with Faith No More producer Matt Wallace, with more than 50 song ideas stockpiled.

TMZ reported earlier this month that turntablist Wilson had left the lineup after 28 years, but the band have yet to comment on the matter.

Read the full interview with Robinson in the new Hammer, which you can order now and get delivered directly to your door.

June 28, 2002, was one of the most emotional nights in Rush’s long and illustrious history. The band were kicking off the tour in support of their 17th studio album, Vapor Trails, at the Meadows Music Centre in Hartford, Connecticut. Vapor Trails was the Canadians’ first since 1996’s Test For Echo; this show was their first live appearance in over five years.

The build-up of emotion was intrinsically tied to the reasons for their lengthy absence. On August 10, 1997, drummer Neil Peart’s teenage daughter, Selena Taylor, had been killed in a car crash. Less than a year later, on June 20, 1998, his wife Jackie succumbed to cancer. Devastated by this double tragedy, Peart effectively quit music. “Consider me retired,” he told Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. He underlined his point by embarking on an 14-month, 60,000-mile North American solo road trip on his BMW R1100GS motorbike.

“As the years went by, both Geddy and I thought it was unlikely that we would be working together as Rush,” admitted Alex Lifeson in 2002. “I felt that we had a terrific run, this wonderful experience that’s very unique even in the rock world, and if that’s the way it’s going to end, then I have to accept it and move on.”

Yet here Rush were once again. Peart’s re-emergence from solitude and grief had sparked the band’s own resurrection. And it wasn’t just onstage that emotions ran high. Some members of the audience were in tears before the show had even started, while an ovation greeted the mere unveiling of Peart’s mammoth drumkit.

The 29-song setlist that night mixed up classics such as Tom Sawyer, The Spirit Of Radio, Distant Early Warning and By-Tor And The Snow Dog with more recent tracks, including several from Vapor Trails. To add to the poignancy of the occasion, their 1993 song Between Sun & Moon was dedicated to The Who bassist John Entwistle, one of Geddy Lee’s idols, who had died the previous day.

As grand finale Working Man crashed to a close, several thousand people found themselves caught up in the significance of the moment. “I remember looking out at the audience and there were people crying,” Alex Lifeson told Vinay Menon, author of Rush: An Oral History. “It was so emotional. I guess it was their chance to purge some of their emotions.”

However the audience felt, it was nothing compared to what was going through the minds of the three men up onstage. For Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart, this was more than just a comeback gig – it was an act of healing. The rebirth of Rush was truly underway.

Rush hit the 1990s with renewed intent. The ‘keyboard phase’ that had alienated many of their older fans during the past decade was receding in the rear view mirror. If 1991’s Roll The Bones was hardly a return to the grandiose prog epics of old, it at least presented Rush as something approaching the power trio they were at heart.

Still, Roll The Bones hadn’t been an unalloyed triumph in the eyes of the band that made it. “[The songs] sounded much tougher live than in the studio,” Alex Lifeson told M.E.A.T magazine in 1993.

Rush’s gradual drift back to basics mirrored that of the broader music scene. The grunge movement that exploded at the start of the decade had flipped the superficial gloss of the 80s for grit and intensity. Lee, Lifeson and Peart weren’t unaware of the changes happening.

“We were loving that whole energy from Seattle and the Northwest,” Lee told Vinay Menon. “That pushed us in a different direction. That made us want to be a rock band again.”

After two albums with producer Rupert Hine, the band brought back Peter Collins to work on what would become Counterparts – ironic, given that the Englishman had been involved on 1985‘s synthesiser-heavy Power Windows and the equally slick Hold Your Fire two years later. But Rush were determined to dial the electronics right back this time irrespective of who was sitting at the studio console.

“When Alex and I started writing this record, we kind of looked at these mountains of synthesizers that were being brought into the writing room, and we kinda had this reaction; it was almost like an allergic reaction: ‘I think it’s time maybe we stepped back from this stuff,’” said Geddy Lee in 1993. “So, we went back to a more simpler, basic way of writing, which meant just guitar, bass, vocals, and drums.”

Counterparts was released on October 19, 1993. While it wasn’t a ‘grunge’ record, it was certainly a creditable modern rock record, one that acknowledged the new musical landscape without embarrassing itself trying by to pretend it was something it wasn’t. Even longtime art director Hugh Syme’s cover image - a seemingly simple diagram of a nut and bolt set in a wide blue frame – was pared down in comparison to some of the heavy duty symbolism of previous works.

The approach worked. Counterparts hit No. 2 in the US, the band’s highest-ever chart position (only Pearl Jam’s record-breaking second album, Vs, released the same week, sold more). They even notched up their very first No.1 song with Stick It Out, which reached the top spot on the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart.

The band carried the stripped down approach of Counterparts into their 16th album, Test For Echo, released three years later. Geddy Lee had used the interim period to spend time with his newborn daughter, Alex Lifeson released a solo album, Victor, which doubled down on the more direct, rock-orientated approach of Counterparts, and Neil Peart published a book, The Masked Rider, about a bicycle trip he took around Africa in 1988, and spent a few years re-learning how to play the drums in completely different manner, taking lessons from jazz great Freddie Gruber.

For all that, Test For Echo was a relative letdown. Lyrically, it was as watertight and conceptually thought-provoking as any past Rush album. “It’s about the numbing process that happens when we are exposed to great tragedies and then we’re exposed to moments of hilarity,” said Geddy Lee of the record’s over-arching theme. “I feel that that’s the condition of contemporary man now – when we read the paper or when we watch TV, we’re not sure if we’re supposed to laugh.”

But musically, it was the sound of a band on simmer rather than bubbling away at full heat. “Test for Echo was a strange record in a sense,” Lee later told Vinay Menon. “It doesn’t really have a defined direction. I kind of felt like we were a bit burnt creatively. It was a creative low time for us.”

Still, Test For Echo was another commercial success. The accompanying tour lasted nine months, and even found the band playing the song 2112 in its entirety mid-set for the first and last time in their career. They may have dropped the pace a notch or two since the heady days of the 70s and 80s, but their path remained as steady and straight as it ever was. And then tragedy struck, and suddenly the lights went out on Rush’s future.

On the morning of August 10, 1997, just a few weeks after the Test For Echo tour ended, Neil Peart saw a police car pulling into the driveway of his house in rural Quebec. The officers were there to deliver some terrible news to the drummer and his wife, Jackie Taylor. Their 19-year-old daughter, Selena, had been killed in a single-car traffic accident while driving back to college in Toronto.

Their daughter’s death hit Peart and Jackie hard. Their friends rallied around them. “I just felt so hollow,” Alex Lifeson later recalled. “Neil’s daughter was 19 when she was killed and it just broke everybody’s heart to such an extent that nothing seemed beautiful anymore.”

The loss inevitably impacted on those in Rush’s inner circle: Alex Lifeson later said he didn’t pick up a guitar for a year. But there was more tragedy to come. In January 1998, during an extended stay in London, Jackie was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She died on June 20 that year. “I had no reason to carry on,” wrote Peart in his cathartic 2002 memoir Ghost Rider: Travels On The Healing Road. “I had no interest in life, work or the world beyond.”

He told Lee and Lifeson that he was done with Rush, and with music. Lost and grieving, he had no idea what he would do. Then he remembered something his wife had told him while she was ill: “Oh, you’ll just go travelling on your motorcycle.” So that’s what Neil Peart did.

For 14 months, he rode the length and breadth of North and Central America on his BMW motorbike, from chilly Alaska to blazing Mexico, “lost in my own sorrows.” He travelled alone, stopping off at diners and gas stations, observing the people he encountered yet largely unrecognised by them. Music – his own and other people’s – was the last thing on his mind.

He met up with his bandmates occasionally, though mostly he stayed in touch via postcard. Lee and Lifeson knew him well enough to give him space. Neither had any expectations that Rush would reconvene. “The longer it went, the more I believed that we would not get back together,” Lee told the Mercury News in 2002. “I just thought it was a place that he was not going to be able to go back to emotionally. Neil obviously was not quite the man he used to be.’’

It was Rush’s longtime photographer, Andrew MacNaughton, who played a key role in nudging Peart back onto the road to happiness and, ultimately, reuniting Rush

“Andrew was determined to find a ‘match’ for this crusty old widower,” wrote Peart on his blog in 2012, shortly after MacNaughton’s death at the age of 47. The photographer sent the drummer Polaroids of a photo assistant he had been working with named Carrie Nuttall. “I was reluctant, gruffly telling him, ‘Not interested.’” recalled Peart.

But something about the “pretty, dark-haired girl” hooked Peart’s attention. When he next visited Los Angeles on his motorbike, MacNaughton arranged a double date so the pair could meet. They hit it off. By the end of 1999, Peart and Nuttall had embarked on a relationship. Within a year, they were married.

Lee and Lifeson were elated that their friend had found happiness once more. “He fell in love and saw that there was beauty in the world,” Lifeson told The Costa Times. “He started to rebuild his life based on that.”

It was Nuttall, too, who steered Peart back towards music. “She didn’t know anything about the band,” Lifeson told Rush: An Oral History author Vinay Menon. “But one day she said to Neil, ‘It’s my understanding that you are a really good drummer and you had this long career and you’re about to throw that away at a time when you need that more than anything.”

Something shifted in Peart. He contacted his bandmates. As Alex Lifeson put it: “He came to us and said, ‘I’d like to try it. I don’t know if I can do it, but I’d like to try.’”

Work began in January 2001 on the album that even Rush themselves weren’t sure would ever happen. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson hadn’t been idle during the latter part of their band’s enforced absence. The pair contributed a rock version of Canadian national anthem O Canada to the 1999 movie South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, while Lee released a solo album, 2000‘s My Favourite Headache, and Lifeson composed music for TV ads and collaborated with hard rockers 3 Doors Down on three tracks from their second album, Away From The Sun.

But this reunion was something else entirely. Not only was it freighted with heavy emotion, but the three men at the centre of it had to recalibrate their relationship as musician after so many years of not playing together.

“It was a very delicate beginning for all of us,” Lifeson told The Costa Times in 2002. “We kind of needed to find our place, our positions. The first couple of weeks we spent really just talking, hanging out and getting to know each other again. But once we did, it settled in, in a way that was far beyond anything that we’d done in the past.”

Still, Rush resisted the urge to plunge headlong into the creative process, preferring tentative steps. The seeds of the songs emerged from Lee and Lifeson jams, which they passed on to Peart to work out his drum parts. It was time consuming and laborious, but then it had to be.

“The first two months I don’t think we wrote anything that we were really crazy about,” said Lifeson. “We took a break for a week, then came back in and had sudden clarity. We knew what was working and what wasn’t. From that moment on, things started to come together. The record really took on a life of its own at that point.”

The writing and recording process took 14 months – significantly longer than any previous Rush album. This was a decision made out of both choice and necessity. “It required patience,” said Lee. “I felt that I didn’t want to come back after all that and put out something that wasn’t as strong as it could possibly be. I thought it was time for us to be as intimate as we could be with our music, just go with our guts.’’

Despite the lengthy gap, Vapor Trails continued the musical trajectory that began with Counterparts and Test For Echo. Where those albums pared back the keyboards that had defined Rush‘s sound during the 80s, this time they dispensed with them completely.

“Leaving the keyboards off this record was very important to me, and Geddy was open to that because he knew that I’d often worried about their presence in the band,” said Alex Lifeson, who had felt notably sidelined at points during the late 1980s.

Vapor Trails was released on May 14, 2002. Taken as a whole, it was a good Rush album but not a truly great one, partly let down by an uncharacteristically flat mix from the band and co-producer Paul Northfield. Still, One Little Victory, Earthshine and the moving Ghost Rider sat comfortably in the top tier of late-period Rush songs, the latter finding Peart detailing his literal and emotional journey in the wake of the tragedies of the previous decade.

Yet, it was easily the most significant album Rush had made since 2112 – if only because that brought these friends back together as a unit, healing their pain through music. Tellingly, at 13 tracks and 67 minutes, Vapor Trails was their longest album to date. It was as if a dam had burst and all the emotion and music that had built up over the past few years had been released.

That the album opened with a brief but instantly recognisable Neil Peart drum barrage wasn’t accidental. This was notice, as if anyone needed it, that The Professor was back where he belonged. And with him, so were Rush.

The Vapor Trails tour which began with that night of high emotion in Hartford, Connecticut lasted five months - moderate by previous epic standards, but wholly understandable given the circumstances leading up to it. It concluded with three huge shows in South America – the first time Rush had visited the continent. Equally notably, it featured a trio of industrial-sized Maytag washing machines onstage behind the band, which a roadie periodically fed with Canadian dollars.

The washing machines were more than just an amusing and surreal stage prop. They showed that the events of recent years hadn’t dented Rush’s sense of humour or joy in the music they made.

That joy was never more evident than in their next project, 2004’s Feedback covers EP. This was Rush saluting the legends who had inspired them when they were starting out all those years ago: The Who, Cream, The Yardbirds, Buffalo Springfield, Love.

“It was short and sweet and it came up quickly,” Geddy Lee told Classic Rock. “We’ve always talked about throwing cover songs into our shows for fun, but we’ve never really followed through on it. Then a friend of mine suggested that if we weren’t going to do a [proper, all-new studio] album then maybe this was a good way we could pay tribute to our past.”

After the trials of the late 90s and the careful labours involved in making Vapor Trails, Feedback felt like a sigh of relief. The darkest period in Rush’s career was over. Now it was time to turn the page and begin the final chapter.

Queen drummer Roger Taylor has released a second single from his upcoming solo album Violence Insane In A Beautiful World. The album's first single, Come On Summer (It’s Party Time), featuring The Ndlovu Youth Choir from Limpopo, South Africa, was released in June, and Taylor has followed that with the reflective I See You Now.

"It's a love song, it's really about my wife," says Taylor. "We've been together for quite some time, and I think when you really get to know someone, at first you really don't see everything about them, but when you really get to know someone, it's ‘oh, I see you now, that's it."

The song is accompanied by Taylor's longtime collaborator Simon Lupton, who also worked on the longorm Queen videos Greatest Video Hits 1 and 2, and The Show Must Go On: The Queen + Adam Lambert Story.

Taylor's new album, his seventh solo release and his first since 2021's Outsider, will be released on September 18 via Columbia, and finds Taylor pondering the state of the world.

“It's in the title really," he says. "What a beautiful world we live in, don't fuck it up. There seems to be all this insanity at the moment. The violence in the world seems to be as bad as it ever was, at any point, and certainly in my lifetime. It's just horrific, a lot of insane violence. And we do seem to be fucking up the world, plastics in the sea, and all these awful wars everywhere, and hatred born of different religions.

“It's a beautiful world, you know. And kindness is very important, I think, it seems to be forgotten quite a lot.”

Roger Taylor: Violence Insane In A Beautiful World tracklist

1. A Beautiful World feat. The Ndlovu Youth Choir
2. Violence Insane
3. What Really Matters
4. Don’t Photograph Food
5. I See You Now
6. Chump
7. Spit In His Eye
8. Jealous Guy
9. Come On Summer (It’s Party Time) feat. The Ndlovu Youth Choir
10. A Great Big Beautiful World (reprise) feat. The Ndlovu Youth Choi

Roger Taylor: 2026 UK Tour

Sep 21: Newcastle O2 City Hall
Sep 22: Edinburgh Usher Hall
Sep 24: Birmingham The Alexandra
Sep 25: Manchester Opera House
Sep 28: London Roundhouse
Sep 29: Swansea Building Society Arena

Find Roger Taylor tickets.

Bring Me The Horizon frontman Oli Sykes and Spiritbox singer Courtney LaPlante are collaborating on a new, original track called If The Sun Burns Out Tonight.

The song is due to come out at an unspecified date in the autumn and was written and produced by American DJ/composer Grabbitz. It will serve as the theme of this year’s Valorant Champions Tour, an annual esports tournament where teams compete on 2020 first-person shooter videogame Valorant.

It will mark LaPlante’s second collaboration with developer Riot Games, after she lent her voice to the electro-metal track Ties That Bind for their fighting game 2XKO last year. Grabbitz has worked with the company on three previous singles, including collaborations with Ashnikko and bbno$.

Grabbitz teases that If The Sun Burns Out Tonight “sits effortlessly between my electronic world and the heavy landscapes of Bring Me The Horizon and Spiritbox. The three of us just clicked – and the result is what I believe to be the best Valorant anthem to date.”

Sykes comments: “I’ve always been drawn to projects that blur the lines between storytelling and music, so working with Riot Games, alongside Grabbitz and Courtney, and becoming part of the Valorant world felt like a really natural fit.”

LaPlante adds: “I cannot wait to release this song! Oli has given me the opportunity to perform live with BMTH many times over the years, and we’re finally debuting something we worked on together. Grabbitz produced such a great atmosphere and a song tailored to all three of our voices, and Oli went in right away and made it a true collaboration.”

LaPlante has been a guest at multiple Bring Me shows. In May 2022, she joined the British pop-metal band at their self-curated festival in Malta and sang their song Chelsea Smile. The following year, she appeared during a gig in Budapest for 2020’s One Day The Only Butterflies Left Will Be in Your Chest As You March Towards Your Death (singing parts originally performed by Evanescence’s Amy Lee) and 2019’s Nihilist Blues (filling in for Grimes).

Bring Me released a re-recorded version of their 2006 debut album, Count Your Blessings, last month. They will wrap up their European festival tour with a show at Sziget festival in Budapest on Friday (August 14) and will play Rick In Rio in Brazil on September 5. They’ll play a run of US and Canadian shows from September to October.

Spiritbox released their second album, Tsunami Sea, last year. The Canadian metalcore band will headline a tour of Europe, supported by Jinjer and Dying Wish, from September to October. They’ll support Metallica at an intimate show at Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun Arena on November 21 before touring Australia in December.

The 2026 Valorant Champions Tour is currently in its second stage. The final, champions’ stage will take place in Shanghai from September 24 to October 18. The grand prize money is $2,250,000 (£1,666,226).

Riot Games have previously worked with such metal titans as Polyphia, who performed the official 2XKO theme song Let’s Go, and Linkin Park, whose single Heavy Is The Crown was the theme for the 2024 League Of Legends World Championship.

Easily the biggest album in heavy metal history, Metallica’s fifth, self-titled release (AKA the Black Album) is surrounded by monumental stats. It reached number one in nine different countries. It’s since been certified 16 times Platinum in the US. And – today, exactly 35 years after it came out – upwards of 30 million people have it in their record collection.

However, the golden number right now is 12. That’s how many songs Metallica needed to go from the momentous thrash metal stars they were on …And Justice For All to bona fide, stadium-cramming immortals. Below is the story of every single one of them. From Enter Sandman to The Struggle Within, here’s your track-by-track guide to the monolithic Black Album.

Enter Sandman

One of Metallica’s greatest all-time anthems, Enter Sandman showcases producer Bob Rock’s influence with simpler, impactful lyrics, aligning with James Hetfield’s throaty vocal style. Kirk Hammett’s riff, inspired by Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love, became the backbone of the song. “I tried to write the heaviest thing I could think of,” said Kirk. Initially written about crib death, the theme was broadened, at Bob and Lars Ulrich’s suggestion, to describe a child’s nightmarish torments while sleeping.

Sad But True

Bob’s reluctance to work in L.A. dissolved upon hearing this song’s rough demo. “I could see his eyes light up,” said Lars Ulrich in Mick Wall’s Enter Night: A Biography Of Metallica. The band recorded the hefty track live in the studio, generating a raw, coursing energy and backbreaking heaviness by tuning their guitars one step lower. The resulting, seismic riff quickly found eternal life, pumping up fans in sports arenas for more than 30 years now.

Holier Than Thou

A broadside against moral hypocrisy, this blistering sleeper track quickly became a band favourite during the Black Album sessions – so much so that Rock nominated it to be lead single. Lars’ pick prevailed, however, and Enter Sandman got the nod. In Paul Brannigan’s Birth School Metallica Death, Vol. 1, Bob concedes, “Every time I see the band, they always say the same thing: ‘Holier Than Thou, huh?’ They'll never let me live it down.”

The Unforgiven

His vocal style inspired by Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game, James based The Unforgiven’s lyrics on his tumultuous childhood. After Kirk ran through several attempts at a fitting solo, Bob chastised him for not living up to a recent “guitarist of the year” award. Kirk responded with a fresh solo on the spot: a single, masterful take that appears in the final version. Unforgiven soared to number 10 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart in 1991.

Wherever I May Roam

Released as a single in October 1992, this anthemic paean to life on the road represents Metallica’s commitment to writing more concise, radio-friendly songs. James plays the iconic intro on a Coral: an electric guitar that mimics the sound of a sitar. Enhancing the song’s exotic feel, Jason Newsted contributed to the ambience with a 12-string Hamer Mandocello, blending captivating Eastern sounds with pulverising metal grooves that made this standout instantly memorable.

Don’t Tread On Me

A contrast to the anti-war sentiments of 1988’s One, Don’t Tread On Me incited scathing criticism from some fans, who viewed it as a jingoistic celebration of US military force. James later denied the song was political, saying, “We never labelled ourselves as an anti-war band. Anti-this or pro-anything.” Despite that defence, the frontman later dismissed the track as “probably not one of my favourite songs musically” during a 2001 Playboy interview.

Through The Never

For this mid-tempo punch about exploring the dimensions of the human mind, Bob had James try playing his parts on a host of vintage amps, before agreeing that the frontman’s standard rig was the best option. In his book, Metallica: All The Songs, Benoît Clerc quotes James as saying: “We sure as hell weren’t making Led Zeppelin I.” The band later named their 2013 concert film, Metallica: Through The Never, after this track.

Nothing Else Matters

James never envisioned this emotive power ballad as a Metallica track. Speaking to Classic Rock, he rhetorically asked, “What was it about not wanting to write a love song? That’s pretty easy. It’s a huge sign of weakness. You’re in Metallica. This is hardcore. What the fuck are you doing?” But, at the Black Album’s 1991 release party at Madison Square Garden, James noted, with palpable relief: “People were really into it, which was pretty amazing.”

Of Wolf And Man

Of Wolf And Man’s title was inspired by John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men, but Bob found the concept of writing about a big dog borderline absurd. As the producer delved deeper into James’ vision, though, he saw that the track’s essence celebrated humanity’s primal connection with nature. Initially, the riff, written by Kirk, was inverted: James and Lars suggested that he flip the parts around, which is what everyone now hears in the final mix.

The God That Failed

On The God That Failed, James channels his deep-seated grief and resentment over his mother’s death into powerful lyrics and crushing fretwork. He attributes the tragedy to her Christian Science faith, which prioritised spiritual healing over medical treatment. The piledriving riffs and swaggering tempo amplify that emotional intensity, and the sound effect of James cocking a hunting rifle in the final verse only underscores his violent opposition to Christian Science ideas in his adulthood.

My Friend Of Misery

A significant moment for Jason: this track earned him a rare songwriting credit. Although originally intended to be an instrumental, James and Lars added vocals as they developed the initial bass riff into a full-fledged track. Nonetheless, Jason’s pride in this song endured well beyond his Metallica departure. Speaking to Billboard in 2016, the bassist said, “That was a moment where those guys kind of bowed and said, ‘Here you go, man, put your song on there.’”

The Struggle Within

Played live only 20 times, this closing track explored James’ waning creative energy in Metallica’s final days in the studio. Its inclusion on the Black Album unleashed not just a powerful sound, showcasing Kirk’s enduring love of the wah pedal, but a raw, introspective glimpse into Metallica’s singer/guitarist’s fraying psyche at the time. “I’m no psychiatrist, but it’s right there,” he has since said, speaking to the anger coursing through the song.

The highly-anticipated documentary Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear has arrived for streaming today – just a couple of months after it debuted at the Tribeca Festival in New York City.

The Justin Krook and Michael Dwyer-directed 90-minute film is available to watch on Disney+ and Hulu and chronicles the talented Blink-182 drummer’s life before he joined the band, his incredible rise to fame and his brutal recovery after the 2008 South Carolina plane crash that claimed the life of four of the six passengers onboard.

In the film, Barker says: “Why am I here when everyone else isn’t? I had to ask myself who I was going to be after this accident. I had this burning desire to become the greatest person and father I could be. Knowing how close I got to not being here, my appreciation for life is something I can’t even explain.”

How to watch Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear

If you want to watch Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear, you'll need an active Disney+/Hulu subscription. I've broken dow the latest prices below:

Monthly price 🇺🇸: From $9.99 (Disney/Hulu bundle), from $19.99 (Disney/Hulu Premium bundle)
Monthly price 🇬🇧: £5.99 (Standard with ads), £9.99 (Standard), £14.99 (Premium)
Free trial? There's no free trial currently, but look out for special offers throughout the year

Once you have your subscription set up, you'll be able to watch the documentary straight away.

• Read our full Disney+ review

How to watch from anywhere

If you're going to be out of the country but still want to catch Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear while it's still fresh, you'll need a VPN to help you.

Virtual Private Networks are used to change the location of your IP address, enabling you to watch the film no matter where you are. Nord VPN is Louder's service of choice and it's currently available with 75% off the usual price - and there's a 30-day money back guarantee.

How to use a VPN

1. Install a VPN. As we've mentioned above, Nord VPN is Louder's favourite.

2. Choose the location you wish to connect to in the VPN. If you're currently outside of the country and don't want to miss the Travis Barker film, just select your country from the list, then log on to your Disney+/Hulu account.

3. Kick back and relax: That's it - you're all set to watch this highly-anticipated documentary on the Blink-182 drummer.

Watch the trailer

Need to know

Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear features interviews with Barker, alongside artists including Motley Crue's Tommy Lee and late Foo Fighters' drummer Taylor Hawkins.

The film is described as a "raw and redemptive journey" with a press release adding: “Once a trash collector in Laguna Beach, his life changed when he stepped in as a replacement for Blink-182’s drummer – igniting a meteoric rise that would make him the driving pulse of a generation.

“Yet beneath the spectacle of fame, the film reveals a complex man battling pain, grief and the thin line between survival and surrender.

It continues: “Featuring appearances from collaborators, cultural icons and those closest to him, this is the story of the man behind the tattoos and a tribute to those who keep going when the music almost stops.”

Want to know more about Travis Barker?

If you want to dive deeper into the drummer's life, his excellent 2016 memoir Can I Say: Living Large, Cheating Death, and Drums, Drums, Drums which he co-wrote with author Gavin Edwards is well worth a read.

Travis also has his own line of Vans merch, including a pair of Old Skool black and white Vans complete with barbed wire design. There’s also a black long-sleeve t-shirt, and two short-sleeve t-shirts - available in black and white which have a back graphic with tattooed fists and “Dues Paid, Self Made” on the knuckles.

What else is on Disney+

Disney+ is one of the many TV and film streaming services available, but while I'd like to see more music-related content, there's still plenty to get excited about.

The service is home to the likes of Peter Jackson's Beatles doc Let It Be, and the three-part series Get Back. Other musical highlights include Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, Summer ’82: When Zappa Came To Sicily, Abbey Road: If These Walls Could Sing, Hip-Hop And The White House, and the 2024 biopic The Beach Boys.

For me, the real draw of Disney+ and the reason I've had a subscription for years is that it's home to the entire Star Wars universe – all the classic movies are here, alongside spin-offs such as The Mandalorian, Andor, The Book Of Boba Fett and The Clone Wars animated series. There's even an option to watch everything in timeline order.

Marvel content is another draw, and like the Star Wars content, it's crammed with flicks, series and shorts – and the ability to binge on the entire MCU complete timeline.

There's also all the classic Pixar movies and shorts, the National Geographic Channel, and the Hulu network (featuring the excellent comedy crime drama Only Murders In The Building starring Steve Martin, Selena Gomez and Martin Short.

In 2010, producer Youth (aka Martin Glover of Killing Joke) connected David Gilmour with The Orb, and result was the album Metallic Spheres – which was rebooted in 2023 as Metallic Spheres In Colour. Youth told Prog how it all came about, and couldn’t hide his enthusiasm over the idea of a live show, featuring the Pink Floyd guitarist.

There’s an undeniable synchronicity at play in that The Orb and David Gilmour’s Metallic Spheres In Colour – the remix of their 2010 album Metallic Spheres – can be traced back to the activities of Scottish systems administrator Gary McKinnon, who in 2002 was accused by the US government of “committing the biggest military hack of all time.”

McKinnon pleaded harmless motives by claiming he was looking for information on UFOs. As he faced extradition, decades in jail and a potential $2m fine, Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour stepped up to the fundraising plate with the release of Chicago – Change The World, a cover of Graham Nash’s 1971 single Chicago, which in turn was later remixed by The Orb and producer Martin ‘Youth’ Glover with the full participation of Gilmour, to become Metallic Spheres. Now it’s been given a whole new lease of life.

“It’s a remix of a remix of a cover!” Youth says with a laugh, as he ponders the long road from the Nash cover to Metallic Spheres In Colour. Gilmour instigated the 2010 album after he and Youth – best-known as the bassist with pioneering post-punk band Killing Joke – had been working on another project.

“David suggested this Gary McKinnon remix,” Youth recalls, “and I just developed that into, ‘Well, let’s do some extra guitars,’ and then you’re in the same room working together. You take it from there, really. I thought that was more interesting than just doing a straightforward remix.”

It wasn’t the first time Youth had worked on such a project with an artist of such a huge global stature. “The Fireman project with Paul McCartney started when he asked me to do a remix,” says Youth. “I said, ‘Well, rather than do a remix, let me just sample sounds off your album, construct a new track, and maybe you do a couple of overdubs.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, has anyone done that before?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s good! Let’s do that, then.’

“McCartney and Gilmour are artists, and they want to do things that are creative and edgy as well as appealing to their own sensibilities. Part of my job as a producer is to encourage the artist to do that.”

Given the cosmic nature of both The Orb’s succession of albums and Pink Floyd’s back catalogue, the biggest surprise with Metallic Spheres isn’t that the collaboration took place at all, but that it took so long to come to fruition – especially as The Orb’s Alex Paterson and Youth had been huge Pink Floyd fans since their schooldays together in the 70s. “We’ve wanted to work with David Gilmour since the beginning,” Youth says with a grin.

Consequently, Floyd’s influence had left an indelible mark on The Orb’s expansive music, while the sleeve of their Live 93 album gives a sly wink to the iconic artwork of Floyd’s Animals. But why has Metallic Spheres been given an overhaul now? “The original was much leaner and cleaner,” explains Youth, “but it was a bit Marmite for a lot of The Orb’s fans – some really loved it and some thought it was wasn’t really The Orb. It wasn’t exceptionally The Orb and it wasn’t exceptionally David Gilmour.

“It was more between the two. There was talk of remastering it. I said, ‘Why don’t we just remix it?’ I could get Alex Paterson and his bandmate Michael Rendall to apply their genius into re-envisioning it with a more classic Orb aesthetic. I think it’s benefited from becoming more of a definitive Orb record.”

The resulting album, Metallic Spheres In Colour, gains from a greater warmth and depth in sound that was absent from the gloss of its predecessor. Here, The Orb’s characteristic deep throbs, pulses and ambient washes coalesce more strongly with Gilmour’s beautifully cosmic guitar playing. Over the album’s two extended tracks – Seamless Solar Spheres Of Affection Mix and Seamlessly Martian Spheres Of Reflection Mix – the parameters of space rock, prog, dub, psychedelia, ambient and electronic music aren’t just pushed further into the outer reaches, they’re actually woven to create a whole new entity.

But what is it that binds these threads together? “That’s an interesting question,” ponders Youth. “It’s an attitude, I think, and a philosophy. I’ve done my own deductions of what that is. It’s the legacy and lineage of all of what I do and everything I’m involved with, whether it’s [sound system] Spiral Tribe, The Orb, David Gilmour and so on.

“It all goes back to this Dionysian, bohemian underground current that has always been there, going back to the earliest shamanic rituals in caves. All the way through history there has been this Dionysian element, and that’s what I’m attracted to. It’s Triple Goddess-orientated. It’s timeless, it’s transgressive and it’s shamanic in its essence.

“Its role is to rebalance and counterpoint the more established elements of society, and it facilitates a kind of primal energy we all have of emotional expression and celebration, and, to a greater or lesser degree, liberation and a certain amount of ecstatic losing yourself. It’s a rave aesthetic and sensibility without the 160 bpm kick drum. All of these scenes have a psychedelic element, which is the soul of shamanic trance states, and the intention is to gain transcendence.”

But surely the greatest way to gain transcendence would be to put all of this into a live setting? The prospect of seeing The Orb and David Gilmour bring their collaboration to the stage in tandem with the increase in audio-visual technology is a tantalising one, but is there any realistic possibility of such an event happening? “I want to believe there is,” says Youth, “and I hang on to the rainbow of that because I can just imagine it would be the most mind-blowing event.”

According to Youth, a number of possibilities concerning live performances have been mooted. One idea certainly runs close to the original cause of Gary McKinnon’s plight – staging an outdoor event close to Area 51 in the Nevada desert. Popular among UFOlogists and conspiracy theorists the world over, this is where – according to them – the United States Air Force holds evidence of extra-terrestrial life and interplanetary travel.

“I had this idea of building special quadrophonic sound system stacks and burying all the sub-bass into the sand, so that whole desert sand would be like a boom box,” says Youth. “Basically, there’d be four quad stacks, and then you’d have to go full Atmos and have 36 speakers and have things flying around, and you’d do it outside in the desert and you have, like, my most amazing visuals.

“That could still be the most amazing gig I could ever witness. I think that would be even more amazing than U2’s recent triumph in Las Vegas [their opening show at The Sphere], which was pretty mind-blowing. I think you could even blow that out the water by doing that.” Youth’s imagination isn’t limited to just that concept. “The other idea is to do a show outside the pyramids in Giza, which is a possibility as well,” he offers.

The prospect of these locations – as well as a mooted show at the Sierra Navada Observatory, close to Youth’s studio in Spain – are indeed tantalising. Each location would bring a unique visual characteristic of their own. But just how close are they to actually coming to fruition?

“Well, you’ve got to be realistic,” Youth sighs. “David Gilmour is going to be 80 in a couple of years’ time. And he’s reached a degree of success where he really doesn’t have to do anything. But David does want to do this live. He’s keen and I wouldn’t rule it out.”

After a 32-year run, Barclay James Harvest split into two different bands in 1998. Bassist and vocalist Les Holroyd leads one while John Lees fronts the other. In 2016 Holroyd looked back on their early days, including one moment involving The Moody Blues that he’d rather hadn’t happened.

Les Holroyd remembers the time when he, John Lees, Mel Pritchard and Stuart ‘Woolly’ Wolstenholm were left to develop their own style without interference.

“Harvest, to whom we were signed at the time, really didn’t have much of an idea of what to expect from us,” he says. “The idea of progressive music was totally new, and we were right at the forefront of what was happening.

“So we were left to our own devices to write songs and create albums. We stayed in our farmhouse and just got on with the job of writing.”

He feels the music business wasn’t prepared for the progressive explosion. “The labels were all used to dealing with commercial, mainstream artists. There were so few who appreciated how to handle a band like us.”

While a lot of musicians in the late 60s and early 70s had a strong bond, BJH were a little removed from any notion of a movement. In fact, Holroyd recalls, there was just one band with whom they had any rapport.

“We got on really well with Argent. We did a lot of gigs with them. But we had very little to do with others like Yes, Genesis or any of the names getting attention at the time.

“We were often regarded as a cross between Genesis and Pink Floyd. Personally I never quite got that comparison. We were also seen as being close to The Moody Blues – but a lot of that was down to the fact that both bands used the Mellotron.”

BJH were sometimes referred to as a second-rate version of the Moodies. That led to the writing and recording of 1977 song Poor Man’s Moody Blues.

One of prog rock’s few diss tracks, it lampooned elements of the Moodies’ Nights In White Satin, with a similar pace and feel. The lyrics referenced nights, missing and loving someone – just as the 1967 song had.

Poor Man’s Moody Blues appeared on BJH’s eighth album, Gone To Earth, whih became their biggest-selling release. Eventually, perhaps predictably, there was a reckoning over the song in the form of Holroyd’s uncomfortable encounter with the other band’s vocalist, Justin Hayward.

“I met Justin a long time after we’d done that song and we had a chat about it. He wasn’t too pleased about that song. I can understand why.

“For me, it was never funny or clever in the first place. John Lees wrote it, and I was uncomfortable recording the song. I wish we’d never done it.”

Still, Holroyd regards that period as being highly successful. “We followed our own musical journey. Being commercial never worried us. All that mattered was being true to our vision.”

Teenagers arrested in connection with the murder of a 37-year-old man in Bulgaria have incited controversy by wearing heavy metal t-shirts in court.

Four of the five teens accused of beating Georgi Kuzev to death in Plovdiv on August 4 appeared at their hearing on Friday (August 7) sporting merch by metal bands – namely Powerwolf, Mayhem, Pantera and Sepultura.

The fashion choice has become national news. Tabloid paper 24 Chasa (24 Hours) published a story with the headline, “Satanic black metal brings together teenage killers from Plovdiv” (translated from Bulgarian via Google). The article alleges that the bands “send aggressive messages and set an example of brutal violence for their fans”.

It focuses in particular on the past violent actions of Mayhem’s former bassist Varg Vikernes. In 1994, Vikernes was sentenced to 21 years in prison (Norway’s then-maximum prison sentence) for murdering guitarist Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth and burning down Christian churches. He was released on parole in 2009.

On Facebook, 24 Chasa’s reporting has stirred up debate about whether or not heavy metal encourages violent behaviour.

One user comments (translated via Meta): “The problem is not with the t-shirts. It’s not with the music. The problem is much deeper – in moral values, in upbringing, in parental control, and most of all, in the absence of parents from their own children’s lives.”

“Neither Pantera nor Sepultura has anything to do with Satanism,” adds another. “Mayhem is a different story. But the music has absolutely nothing to do with it.”

Another commenter disagrees, writing: “This metal band [Mayhem] is quite crooked. I used to listen to them. Well, I didn’t become a murderer, but the group is definitely extreme and is associated with unpleasant things for normal people.”

Another adds: “It’s no coincidence that I don’t like rock, rap, metal and similar genres. Ever since my sister translated the titles of songs by Metallica and similar artists for me, I was horrified.”

Bulgarian TV channel Nova reports that the shirts have “led to many speculations that it was the children’s musical interests that prompted them to show aggression”.

The Plovdiv District Court ruled on Friday that the five teens had to remain in custody. A judge said that there was sufficient evidence to reasonably assume the defendants attacked Kuzev and that there was no evidence to suggest the victim provoked them. Two of the accused are making appeals which will be heard in court on Thursday (August 13).

According to prosecutors, the teens imitated an online far-right “paedophile hunter” group and set up a meeting between Kuzev and a 17-year-old girl posing as a 15-year-old. Kuzev was assaulted for an hour at Youth Hill, Plovdiv and sustained serious injuries. He died several hours after being taken to hospital.

Kuzev had never been charged with a sexual offence and prosecutors said he did not lie about his age during the online interactions with the girl.

None of the bands whose t-shirts were worn by the accused have commented on the matter.

Multiple heavy metal artists have been accused of encouraging violent behaviour before, though none have ever been found legally responsible for a crime committed by one of their fans.

In 1990, the parents of a young American man who attempted suicide took civil action against Judas Priest. They alleged that the band subliminally included the phrase “do it” in their 1978 song Better By You, Better Than Me, which encouraged the man and one of his friends to try and take their own lives. The case was ultimately dismissed.

Similarly, following the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, right-wing politicians and media outlets targeted shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, alleging that his music influenced the two shooters’ actions. In 2005, Ashley Bird, then-editor of Kerrang!, told The Guardian, “[Manson’s] songs are not about murdering people – his message is that there are a lot of people out there who feel forgotten and misunderstood.”

Trivium shot to fame with 2005’s breakout album Ascendancy and a star-making appearance at that year’s Download festival. But the following year’s The Crusade saw a backlash hit. In 2006, Metal Hammer caught up with the band on their first US tour to talk success, snobbery and the blessing of metal’s biggest bands.

The desert sun is blazing in a cloudless sky, turning your heavy breastplate into a furnace and boiling your brain in the heated metal confines of your helmet. Your coarse woolen tunic tears at your flesh while you struggle to keep your spear steady and your aim true. You drop the encumbering weight of your shield but your cape still tugs at your neck, belabouring your breath and making your fear of heights all the more unbearable as you stand atop a cliffside wondering whether the tiny holes dotting the landscape really are home to poisonous snakes.

It’s only noon, but your head screams with pain as you contemplate whether pounding over a dozen shots of Crown Royal whiskey and Jägermeister until 6am this morning was such a good idea. You smile faintly at a couple of joggers who wave as they pass by. They might just be wondering whether you’re the first human being in the 15 million year history of Phoenix, Arizona’s Papago Park to turn up dressed like a Spartan warrior. You’re Matt Heafy, 20-year-old frontman of Trivium, and for you, life has just gotten seriously weird.

If you were one of the thousands of metalheads on hand to witness Trivium’s slot at Download 2005, you might have some idea why. Just a few weeks before, the Floridian upstarts’ rapturously received UK tour was enough to propel a last minute change from a tent show to Donington’s centre stage. And it was also enough to make many believe that Trivium, this previously unknown dynamo of the live circuit, had suddenly arrived. Not even slightly.

Nearly 18 months have now passed, and in that time they’ve played nearly 400 shows. 2005’s Ascendancy has sold over 300,000 records worldwide, and the follow-up The Crusade has swiftly topped that with over 400,000 units shifted – 90,000 passed over the counter in the UK alone. 60,000 of those moved on the first day of release. Impressive stuff for a band that only formed in 2000 and whose average age is a mere 22.

But forget about numbers for a moment. Download 2006 also saw Trivium on the main stage at Download – twice. First, in the middle of the afternoon, and later on alongside none other than Sunday headliners Metallica. Kirk Hammett was wearing one of their shirts. Talk about your stellar ascents and golden stamps of approval.

You might wonder why it is then that Trivium are only just now playing their first headlining tour of the United States. Or why, in some circles, their album’s received a swift dismissal as a mere facsmile of Metallica riffs and, perhaps cutting closer to the bone, James Hetfield’s trademark vocal style. It would seem that being in the good graces of one of the biggest bands of all time has become something of a poison chalice.

“Look, it’s probably not what people think,” says bassist Paolo Gregoletto, kicking his snakeskin boots into the dust in the direction of drummer Travis Smith, who’s nursing the worst hangover from last night’s drunken late night festivities judging by the kill-me-now grimace on his face. “Metallica approached us, so it wasn’t like we were all, ‘hey, we want to talk to them’. They dug what we were doing and that was an honour. Besides, we made The Crusade before we even met them.”

Read that last sentence again and ask yourself why the diminuitive four-stringer would say such a thing. It would seem the M-word strikes a nerve. But there’s more to the latest chapter in Trivium’s story than once favourable comparisons to their idols transforming into the basis of derision. Or their crusade to gain acceptance in their homeland after receiving such a warm embrace in the UK. For that, we quick-march off to a waiting cab, kicking up dust in the setting sunlight of Papago Park, trying to remember the lyrics to that odious but diabolically infectious Paul Stanley song and dodging the tiny holes in the ground.

“Metalica are YouTube fanatics,” laughs Paolo. We’re just boarding the air-conditioned splendour of Trivium’s tour bus outside the arse-end of Phoenix’s Marquee Theatre where they’re due to play tonight. Perhaps tellingly, the 1,000 capacity venue isn’t sold out. Someone’s fingered ‘I love you Corey!!!’ and a big heart into the behemoth’s desert-dusted side. Travis and Matt immediately collapse in their bunks.

“They were like, ‘yeah man, check this shit out,’” continues Paolo, taking a seat in the lounge. “They already knew about us when we met at [Germany’s] Rock Am Ring…”

“What was cool was, we gave Kirk a copy of The Crusade when it wasn’t mixed, just the rough tracks, and he was like, ‘yeah it fucking kicks ass, old school’. He was really digging the primitive sounding stuff.”

But it’s no mystery that Trivium have, and not for the first time, suffered something of a critical backlash despite their impressive sales. And not least of all, because of a peculiar similarity between Matt’s voice and James Hetfield’s. You sound like Metallica.

“That’s better than a lot of things people have called it,” chuckles Paolo. “I’d be more mad if they called it metalcore. Of course there’s a huge Metallica influence in our albums. That’s a negative thing? We’re such huge fans. That’s a huge part of our lives. How is that not going to show?”

It seems a diplomatic response to what has dogged the band from the moment their follow-up to Ascendancy hit the shelves. Certainly, the similarities seem like no accident, but Paolo and Corey seem slightly offended at the suggestion. As they see it, listen a little more deeply to The Crusade and there’s far more than those similarities.

“You’re going to hear all of our influences on there!” blurts Corey. “Your mom, your dad, whatever the hell it is. Wherever you get that, whatever it sounds like it always sounds like something. Always. I don’t care who you are. Is anyone saying it sounds like Annihilator? I’ve been listening to them a lot too.”

Just then Matt emerges and takes a seat, and mutters something about the greatness of riding in a proper touring vehicle. It’s the first time Trivium haven’t been in a van Stateside. He’s picked up on the conversation. A detached smile reads across his face.

“We’ve got approval from Metallica and Iron Maiden,” he says, referring to Trivium’s latest support tour. “I don’t give a fuck if anyone else doesn’t. That proves that we’re metal. We’ve got too much else going on to worry about whether some people are ever going to accept us. Even I used to be a snob.”

The hungover frontman explains how bands like Emperor, Lord Belial, Aborym and Dark Funeral were what he grew up listening to. For him, it was about drawing a line in the sand as much as it was the music. The parallel makes sense.

“I don’t think the underground or extreme metal scene will ever dig us,” he continues. “It’s elitist. People are free to be into what they like, but in school everyone was into emo and hardcore, so I’d listen to the most Satanic and terrifying black metal I could find. Whatever scared them.”

So you were a snob?

“I was, but that culture just isn’t my personality. We’re going to be supporting Iron Maiden soon. They’re one of the biggest metal bands in history.”

Of course, this is only your first headlining tour of the States. You’d think it’d work the other way around seeing as you’re from this country.

Paolo says: “Everything develops at its own pace. The UK just happened to be the first place where it blew up, but slowly but surely, all the hard work we’ve put in has been paying off. You can’t go around the world and expect to do the same things everywhere at the same time. We want to be a worldwide headlining band, that’s our ultimate goal.”

That’s ambitious!

“Yeah, but it’s always like that for us. We’ve got to think that way. If you have nothing to prove, you have nothing to work for. Playing Download in 2005, on the main stage, was the ultimate high for us, but that’s just one step we had to take.”

“The States just isn’t ready for us yet,” adds Corey. “When we started out we were a band with no sales, so we’ve just been touring as much as possible to get the word out. You’ve got to get out and go and not think about the big picture all the time. As it is we’ve just got a couple of hours to get ourselves together. But it’s part of being in a band, it’s part of doing what we do.”

It’s an interesting point, because despite the thrilling success of Ascendancy, it won Trivium no luxurious studio time or stays in stately manors. But if you’re guessing that’s because of their record label Roadrunner cutting corners, then you’d be wrong. All of The Crusade was written on the road in the spare minutes and hours afforded to Trivium between interviews, load-ins, load-outs, shows, and whatever social lives granted them.

So why didn’t you have more time to write The Crusade?

“I wish!” says Matt. “Hopefully on the next record, but some bands do take too long. I’d like three or four months to write an album but last time we didn’t get the opportunity to do that.”

Why not?

“We wanted that, but we wanted to stay out on the road,” says Corey. “We all figured there was no point in sitting on our asses in a studio for a month. If we’d taken three or four months off, we would have fallen out of sight. If people don’t hear the name all the time the next band comes in and picks up your crowd. It’s like, ‘why stop?’”

That sounds a little paranoid. Do you really think that you’d lose all this in just a few months?

The guitarist takes a moment to think about it. He’s the quietest of the group, often opening his mouth to speak at the precise moment that Paolo begins speaking. But perhaps his is the best assessment of Trivium’s current predicament.

“When you’ve worked this hard for something you don’t want to risk anything. We’ve still got a very long way to go.”

“And we’ve made some mistakes too,” says Matt, “when we first started we were going crazy trying to inebriate ourselves, just mask ourselves from everything. When we first got into it we were just the young cocky kids that thought it was all about partying, but I think it was nice because the four of us are all pretty normal, pretty humble dudes. I mean, there are a lot of bands that are twice our age that act like idiots, but that’s not me. I prefer this way.”

What was your vice?

“It was totally sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. Briefly.”

How briefly?

“Briefly.”

How long is ‘brief’?

“About a year,” he hesitates. “OK, a year and a half. It definitely wasn’t drugs so much, but it was us drinking every night and being new and naïve and really into it and having a good time. I’m having a good time now, but it’s me having a good time, not this person I thought I was having a good time.

“I look at interviews and I think, ‘man, I just sound like an asshole’. People praise that, they think that’s interesting, and a lot of bands crave that, but they’re going nowhere. They end up being a bunch of alcoholics playing crappy shows while they’re hungover every day.”

You’re ashamed of how you were?

“Not so much,” he says. “None of that really matters now. I mean, shit happens, and on top of that people will make up shit about our character. You’re not really doing well until people talk shit about you. Defamation and lies will happen no matter what you do. I used to worry about it.”

Do you regret all that now?

“Actually I’m glad that I did it,” he says. “There’s never been anything I’ve said that I’ve regretted, unless it was a complete misquote. But the shit where I’m probably fucking smacking my head, where I’m thinking ‘why the fuck did I say that?’ I’m not denying anything I’ve said, but I’ve learned from that so I’ll take responsibility for it. But then stuff gets written where you’re getting criticised for politeness. That’s actually the kind of person that I am!”

He’ll go on to describe how the mistake people make with him is that they expect him to be the same person offstage as when he’s on it, about how terrified he is at the thought of losing himself, being subsumed in the limelight. You just got out of school, do you stay in touch with your friends much?

“No,” he says. “Maybe I’ll see them at a show or something, but it’s mostly just the band, crew, mom, family, girlfriend…”

That’s a pretty small world, and certainly a pretty isolated one.

“I love the attention we get in the shows, I love making the videos and I love to see the fans out there but I would never knowingly act like a rock star. If I’m out at a mall, I’ll sign everything I’m given because even though I’m reserved I wouldn’t want to let my fans down. To be honest, I think I have mild social anxiety disorder sometimes.”

It sounds like a flippant self-diagnosis, but when really pressed on anything during this interview the newly long-haired frontman seems strangely ill-at-ease. He breathes deeply before replying, shifts uncomfortably in his couch and has the demeanour you’d expect of someone you were interviewing for a job. Heafy the frontman simply isn’t present.

“I’m fine at shows, but when I’m out with billions of people, from record companies, the press… being in those social situations, my brain sometimes just starts freaking out, and that’s happened a lot lately. There are days where there’s so many people involved in this thing called Trivium… I don’t know how the other guys are with it, but I’ve just noticed this problem recently. I want to be cordial, to say hi to everyone who’s hanging around but I’ve got problems and shortcomings just like everybody else. I’ve only freaked out a couple of times though, when it’s all just too much sometimes. I’m like, ‘fuck, what do I do here?’ but when that passes it’s fine. I’m fine on stage, but outside of that, I’m a dweeb. Video games and TV. That’s me.”

If you spend a little time with Matt you get the definite sense that the little shift in character he goes through when he’s on the stage and off is more than subtle. In real life he’s a completely different, unrecognisable guy from the one who’s known to conjure circle pits in the crowd, play blazing solos and seems, to many fans, superhumanly talented. But right now Matt rubs his left arm with other thngs on his mind. He’s just had a massive piece of tattoo work completed that’s currently wrapped up in cling film but clearly causing him discomfort.

“It’s late 1800s Japanese,” he says. “It’s from Japanese mythology where there was this demon terrorising Rashomon gate, and there was one samurai that was able to chop off the demon’s arm, but I’ve got the pre-battle scene where the samurai’s just about to go and chop the demon’s arm off.”

He’ll explain how it’s only very recently that he’s had a real awakening of curiosity in his heritage – Heafy’s mother is Japanese and used to relate that very same demon story to him when he was a child. According to Heafy, his was an idyllic upbringing. His mother and father are still together, he did well in school, he didn’t do drugs, and the worst problems he had were related to girls. Like many in their late teens, he went through a string of ‘stupid post school relationships’.

“All these young kids who are straight-edge now, a girl’s going to break their heart and they’ll start drinking,” he says, laughing. He’ll smile as he recalls the days when it was he who was outside of the mainstream. “That’s why I never give myself rules like that. When I was younger and I’d go to shows just so I could see the bands I liked, and I wouldn’t smile the entire time. If it wasn’t my band on stage, I’d just stand there and ignore it but we’re not about that now.”

So what drives you?

“What do you mean, why am I doing this?”

Yeah.

“It’s weird,” he says with a crooked grin. “I was gifted according the staff at my school, I wasn’t this nerd kid but I always did well. I’ve never had a job. This is my first. Maybe it’s because I don’t know anything else, or how hard this is supposed to be. It isn’t like touring’s easy, we’re up against it all the time. You don’t have any real comforts, there’s a lot of people who want to bring you down, but it’s getting past that kind of shit that makes a band big. We’re here to conquer. There’s no halfway for us.”

Later that night, with a packed crowd reciting his every lyric, Matt Heafy again becomes the frontman he’s recognised to be, like the geeky Peter Parker turning into the superhero Spiderman. He goads his audience, shouts, grunts and shreds his way through a 90 minute set as if he’s been doing this his whole life.

Wherever they go from here, it seems that Trivium’s story is only now just beginning.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 161. Trivium tour North America from October to December.

Free began as a serious-minded bunch, each member steeped in the spirit of the British Blues Explosion. Most of their 1969 debut Tons Of Sobs and the eponymous follow-up consisted of meaningful blues tracts, and their concerts ticked along to a medium tempo. The story goes that after a particularly lacklustre college gig in Durham, Free headed for the dressing room to the audible indifference of the crowd.

“The applause had died before I had even left the drum riser,” recalled drummer Simon Kirke. “It was obvious that we needed a rocker to close our shows.” A tune that always got the room shaking was their take on The Hunter, a raunchy, upbeat blues recorded by Albert King.

“We couldn’t drop it because it was too popular,” remembered Paul Rodgers. “We knew we had to write a song with all those same qualities and a singalong chorus.”

That night in Durham, Fraser consoled his bandmates, reassuring them things would be okay by riffing on a consolatory line, ‘All right now, it’s all right now’. It stuck, and their biggest song was pieced together from there. Fraser wrote the timeless riff on piano, with Paul Kossoff then arranging it for guitar. If there were similarities with the Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Women, Fraser claimed he was actually trying to channel the era’s chord-meister, Pete Townshend.

If All Right Now showed Free’s more frivolous side, it was driven home by their unparalleled musical pedigree. Kirke’s cowbell-studded beat is rock solid, Fraser adds flamboyant, high-up-the-neck fills to his low-end bass groove, and Kossoff – besides that crunching riff – plays his heart out through the song’s soaring guitar solo, cut short for the single edit by Island’s Chris Blackwell, who could smell a hit.

Meanwhile, Rodgers takes the of-its-time ‘boy-pulls-girl’ lyric and pours soul all over it. The lyric, the frontman revealed to Free biographer Steven Rosen, was inspired by an unplanned encounter with actress Marsha Hunt (then in a relationship with Mick Jagger) on a London street.

"I used to live near Oxford Street and Hair was playing right there on the corner," said Rodgers. "And I remember seeing this girl and she may have triggered the idea for that, because there she stood in the street, and she seemed to be smiling from her head to her feet. She obviously had a presence, do you know what I mean? Because there were a lot of people around and she just stood there and I thought, ‘Wow – look at her’."

First charting in June 1970, All Right Now peaked at No.2 on the UK singles chart and at No.4 in the US. Its parent album Fire And Water also landed at No.2 in the UK, its momentum maintained by Free’s turn at the Isle Of Wight Festival that year, where Free headlined for a crowd estimated to be between 600,000 and 700,000.

In reaching that commercial high-water mark, one of the all-time great British rock bands gave us an enduring anthem. With 380 million Spotify hits and counting, it’s still played on radio daily worldwide, still lovingly murdered by countless pub bands every weekend, still imitated by the legions of groups Free inspired.

"I never bought a yacht on the Riviera off it, but it’s been very handy," Rodgers told Classic Rock. "A couple of TV ads butchered it like the Wrigley’s Spearmint gum thing, where they just used my voice. Island Records did better than we did. The song broke us in America, but we couldn’t capitalise because we broke up and became an enigma there."

Indeed, the success of All Right Now was a factor in that breakup, robbing Free of the musical freedom their name implied. “All Right Now really was an albatross,” Kirke told Classic Rock. “What’s that old Chinese saying: be careful what you wish for? And we got it. Suddenly, instead of playing a different town every night, we were playing a different country."

“The pressure was on to come up with a follow-up to All Right Now, and we just couldn’t," he continued. "That’s when Andy and Paul thought, well, we’ve reached the end of our musical journey together, let’s split up. I’ll never forget Koss’s reaction. He slumped like he’d been hit in the stomach.”

In 1971 revolutionary singer-songwriter Roy Harper was about to go deep into the world of concept rock – but his four-track opus got buried by his label. In 2011 Prog found out why.

There are many ways to describe Roy Harper, but ‘conventional’ has never been one of them. He emerged from London’s boho folk circuit of the 60s as a singer-songwriter of alarming intensity, motored by a mistrust of authority and an inalienable belief in everyone’s basic right to individual freedom. While other folkies were protesting the Vietnam War, Harper was railing against deeper societal ills. But then he was never really a folkie in any traditional sense.

Shaped by a traumatic early life – a fanatically religious stepmother, homelessness, prison, a spell in a mental institution – his music avoided the easy route too. Harper’s early albums were hallucinogenic things that skittered between poetry, revox-blues and psychedelia, as much prone to spliffed-up lunacy as they were to chilling autobiography and 17-minute songs about Patrick McGoohan. His underground status as a countercultural hero was finally seeping upwards by 1970, when his friendship with Led Zeppelin led to the touching tribute Hats Off To (Roy) Harper, which appeared on Led Zeppelin III that October.

He was by then managed by Peter Jenner, onetime custodian of Pink Floyd (who themselves would later invite Harper to sing Have A Cigar on the multi-platinum Wish You Were Here). Jenner had produced Harper’s previous opus, 1970’s wonderful Flat Baroque And Berserk, at Abbey Road. With the same studio again available, and a searing new set of compositions, Harper began making Stormcock. For once in his five-year recording career, he was able to fully focus on the job at hand.

The combined studio time of his first three albums – from 1966’s The Sophisticated Beggar to 1969’s Folkjokeopus – had been a week. “Flat Baroque And Berserk was where I was spreading wings and finding out exactly what could be done,” Harper tells Prog. “But then I saw a different light at the end of that record. I felt the time was right for me to do what I really wanted to, which was Stormcock.”

Adds Jenner, who again produced the album: “The Floyd were making things like Atom Heart Mother and Meddle; Zeppelin were making long tracks and The Who were doing Tommy. The spirit of the times was concept rock. Suddenly, in terms of songwriting, you weren’t restricted to three minutes or what was acceptable for radio.”

Stormcock was a masterpiece. Comprising just four songs, most featuring only Harper and his dizzying skill on acoustic and 12-string guitar, it was emotionally fierce and highly inventive. There were savage attacks on war, the judicial system, rock critics and religious dogma – among other things – alongside an anguished plea to save the planet. And, trading as S. Flavius Mercurius, Jimmy Page provided flashing lead guitar on the 12-and-a-half-minute The Same Old Rock. It remains Harper’s own personal highlight of Stormcock.

“Jimmy’s so intuitive,” he explains. “He finds things he can identify with, and that’s what he did on that song. It was just an atmosphere he created – it’s one of those things you just remember forever in your life. Jimmy elevated it into something else entirely.” It’s an astonishing piece of work all round, both men spinning soundwebs as complex as they are complementary.

Jenner believes Harper and Page shared a common understanding in the studio: “Page could feel where he was going and Roy would follow him. Page obviously liked working with Roy. And it got him away from being either the session man or the rock god. He was just able to play.”

The Same Old Rock is generally perceived as a scathing indictment of religion. In truth it’s less specific – it’s actually a discourse on the constrictive nature of any kind of dogmatic institution you care to name. Harper’s frustration at organisations which fail to acknowledge any alternative belief system is shared aloud: ‘You try to warn me that there’s only one combination / One new sling, the same old rock.’ Above all, the piece sounds like a plea for tolerance.

Hors D’Oeuvres is equally withering. The first verse is an eloquent diatribe against the judiciary, particularly the power invested in it. Harper makes it personal by alluding to the fact that the jury had somehow been out on his career ever since he began. Hors D’Oeuvres, like Stormcock itself, was both a statement of intent and statement for the defence. It was Harper laid very bare. The second verse is a ferocious attack on music critics. Anyone in particular? “There were one or two it was aimed at,” he concedes.

“But I don’t think naming names is going to help. That’s not fair. It’s like football referees: you can single one out but then the poor bugger has to go home.” There were consequences, though: “I was told by one journalist, after Stormcock, that I was a megalomaniac. And it had a real intense effect on me. I thought, ‘If that’s what people think about me, what am I going to do about it?’ It was like being compared favourably to Hitler. If there was any ethic I would want to avoid it would be national socialism.”

His reaction might well surprise those who view turn-of-the 70s Harper – a man seemingly possessed of uncommon self-belief – as impervious to the slings and arrows of rock journalism.

“I think that was because of the absolute authority I looked as though I was handing it out with,” he suggests. “But I felt very hurt at the time, because the way I saw myself was exactly the opposite of that. You always get a critic who’s able to open your guts up and spray your innards everywhere.”

Stormcock doesn’t get any less heavy further in. One Man Rock And Roll Band is both a meditation on the madness of war and the peace movement’s propensity for breaking out into full-scale riots. It’s all ably rendered by Harper’s fluid guitar accents and piano, with a delicacy and lightness of touch that belies its subject matter. In fact, it’s one of the defining features of the album itself.

For all its bite and burningly poetic anger, Stormcock is beautiful to listen to. There are flourishes of reverb, double-tracked harmonies, passages that billow between folk and jazz, rock and acoustic blues. As Jenner explains: “We were working at Abbey Road with people who’d all recorded The Beatles in one way or another. The influence of Phil Spector – who they’d all worked with too – meant there were certain traditions where we were working. With Stormcock, Roy managed to make a record that embraced a lot of prog rock aspects within the context of the sort of music he wrote.”

Nothing illustrates this quite like the sumptuous Me And My Woman, a 13-minute opus orchestrated by David Bedford, who’d also been involved with Flat Baroque And Berserk. It remains one of Harper’s greatest ever moments. “It’s rather like an opera,” Bedford says. “The themes and the basic riff keep recurring. I decided to give the verses a kind of baroque feel, then have these big sweeping strings for the chorus to differentiate the two. And they seemed to really like that. Me And My Woman was almost three different songs fused together.”

The song could be taken as an ornate love ballad, but it’s actually one of the first eco-protest songs – Harper warning of imminent environmental collapse in the face of the relentless pursuit of wealth and power. Stuffed with metaphor, it’s a song open to interpretation.

“Me And My Woman is about Mocy [Harper’s first wife],” posits Jenner. “Around that time Roy’s marriage was breaking up and I think it was a statement about how important she’d been with Nick [Roy’s son] and all the rest of it. But Roy had a wandering eye. So I think Me And My Woman was his paean of praise to her, which I think was wonderful. And it was about living with her down in Wiltshire. In many ways I think it was one of the happiest parts of his life and it’s a shame he didn’t settle down a bit more into that.”

“It partly is about her,” Harper concedes. “But in my mind that song is always the question: ‘Me and my woman, what are we doing on this planet? Are we part of the ongoing fauna and flora or are we likely to last very much longer? Are we not making it very difficult for ourselves to carry on?’ I was making this point when I wrote it in 1970. People are still asking the same question – but it’s actually got a lot closer to the bone now. It’s still a huge question and one that remains unanswered.”

Released in May 1971, Stormcock should have been a flyaway success. But as with many things in Harper’s life, it was never quite that simple. The record company, whose execs had dipped in and out of the studio a couple of times, weren’t happy. “They wanted a single and there was no single appearing,” Harper recalls. “So even before the record was finished it was outlawed.” Not only did Harvest refuse to get behind it, assert Harper and Jenner, they claimed there was no budget for promotion either. It was the same in the US, where the suits at parent label Capitol just weren’t interested.

“They turned it down,” says Harper, “which effectively meant that it was a non-starter internationally. They were hard and fast pop men. Anything that was selling in millions they got behind, but they didn’t want to break new ground. That wasn’t in their remit. I was distraught, to be honest. I knew that if Stormcock had been taken at face value, it was a revolution in itself. It was a new direction for people to look in.”

It was a situation that also devastated Jenner. “Stormcock got virtually no promotion,” he says. “In hindsight, that’s one of the greatest disappointments in my life. It could have been a huge record, but they absolutely buried it. And that was a tragedy. It was Roy’s time but the boat just sailed away.”

Nevertheless, Stormcock remains undimmed by the years. Subsequent generations of musicians have hailed it as a hugely influential record. Kate Bush, for one, has long been an admirer, while Johnny Marr recently told The Guardian that “if ever there was a secret weapon of a record it would be Stormcock. If anyone thinks it might be a collection of lovely songs by some twee old folkie then they’d be mistaken. It’s intense and beautiful and clever: [Bowie’s] Hunky Dory’s big, badder brother.”

California’s harp-wielding phenomenon Joanna Newsom is another greatly indebted to Stormcock. A prime influence on her astonishing 2006 breakthrough Ys, she invited Harper to support her at the Royal Albert Hall the following year, where he performed Stormcock in its entirety. The pair are now fast friends. Another convert is Fleet Foxes’ leader Robin Pecknold, who has stated that the 12-string sections on their much-anticipated new album were partly shaped by Stormcock.

“It’s a great unrecognised masterpiece,” concludes Peter Jenner. “And as time goes by it looms larger in my personal history. I imagine people will still be listening to it and talking about it 50 years from now.”

Anyone unconvinced by Greta Van Fleet's return to action, pay heed, for their return to action has now been augmented by a hard-fought victory in our most recent Tracks Of The Week fracas. This historic triumph is despite the close attention of London's one-man rock'n'roll phenomenon Cam Cole, who finished second. So congratulations to them. And indeed, to him.

Third place was swallowed up by Hannah Wicklund, so congratulations to her, too. And now? We start again, with eight new candidates lined up to assume legendary status. We hope you enjoy them.

Sweat - Hilary

A loose-limbed, glam-booted banger with highly melodic feet in the camps of Heart and Cheap Trick, the latest single from these Pittsburgh rockers is a joyous thing to ingest. Also a strident calling card for their new album, In Dreams, which comes out in September. “Hilary lands in the sweet spot between glittering glam rock and late-’70s power pop,” the band say. “It’s a loud tribute to the friendships that become lifelines and the people who stay when things get messy, heavy, and uncomfortable — the ones who always show up when it matters most.”

Kris Barras Band - Beautiful Lie

The MMA fighting, blues noodling, hard-rocking singer/guitarist has the black attire and full sleeve tattoos of a metalcore star, but on Beautiful Lie he’s all about the oomphy yet tender hard rock with a moody, melodious heart under all the heavy, riffed-up muscle. Not long now til the release of its parent album, Monsters We Made – in fact, it’s out this week, accompanied by an in-store tour across the UK, with a full headline tour to come in October.

The Bites - Whenever You’re Ready

One of those rock’n’roll party-ready cheesefests whose substance sneaks up on you, Whenever You’re Ready put us in a great mood – it’s merrily, even proudly Route One lyrics (‘son of a gun / on the run’ etc etc) bounding into a warm, swinging pop rock chorus. Simple but effective harmonies complete the picture. Almost McFly-esque, but with more old-school heft. Feeling a little off today? Stick this on, turn it up and get some of those denim-clad Californian sunrays into your soul.

Grace Bowers - Eat Shit And Live

Earlier this year Grace Bowers quit Youtube, stating “I’m deeply uncomfortable with the amount of old men here. I’m no longer interested in playing blues or whatever the hell keeps attracting yall. I’m done.” It was a sad reflection of a certain portion of the online world (even if dismissing the blues itself feels a little reductive), but now she’s back with a bright, snappy bang – singing and playing on this taste of her next chapter. As a singer Bowers has something of a young Gwen Stefani going on, and her guitar chops here are full of punk rock teeth, sort of like the Runaways meeting Tom Morello for a jam.

The Pineapple Thief - New World Order

New World Order is the opening track of the British progressive quartet’s new album, Far And Wide, and it’s a biting, punchy beast with a note of dystopian menace. Still imbued with the moodiness and light, clever touches we expect from them, but packing an extra level of hard-hitting edge that nods to the increasingly big stages and globe-trotting adventures they’ve had in recent years (including successful first South America shows and an expanded US live presence).

Frenzee - Unapologetically Me

Need some proper, no-bullshit punk rock'n'roll with a feminist kick in your life this week? Meet Frenzee, the Greek-Australian siblings with Bikini Kill, Motorhead and Amyl & The Sniffers in their hearts and sweaty gigs written into their DNA (not to mention the marathon traditional Greek folk sets that guitarist Adonis and drummer Nikos cut their teeth in as kids). Unapologetically Me is fast, furious, over in about two and a half minutes and bursting with beefy, riffy fire – a strong showcase for these guys, in other words.

Jack J Hutchinson - Rise Again

Kicking straight in with an absolute ripper of a riff (conjured up one soundcheck), Jack J Hutchinson’s new track finds him channeling his blues-come-southern foundations into a big, upward-punching rocker – laced with the richness and grit of his heroes. “I told my producer Josiah that I wanted to write a track that sounded like a mix between Blackberry Smoke and Led Zep,” Jack explains, “with a melodic chorus like Neil Young’s anthemic rockers.”

Crossbone Skully - Thunder Love feat. Phil Collen

In which Crossbone Skully mainman Tommy Henriksen continues his apparent quest to create music for people who think it's all been downhill since Def Leppard finished touring Hysteria. There are gang vocals and booming drums and a euphoric chorus and executive production from "Mutt" Lange, and just in case that isn't enough, Leppard's very own Phil Collen guests on guitar and backing vocals. Oh, and there's a girl wearing a Pyromania t-shirt in the video. The Leppard vibe is recreated so perfectly it feels churlish to call out any lack of originality, and besides, we're enjoying the results too much to complain.

Who would have thought that Robin Trower, the “backroom” guitarist with the stately keyboards-led Procol Harum, would become one of the great blues rock guitarists?

It was the second of his power trio’s superb trilogy of back-to-back albums in the mid-70s that sealed his reputation. Beginning with the stuttering riff of Day Of The Eagle, the album combines urgency with gravitas. ‘A cold wind blows and gods look down in anger on this poor child,’ sings bassist James Dewar as the title track unfolds with a vast, slow momentum, like a planet drifting through the void.

It’s a beautifully balanced, dynamic record filled with quality songs, masterful playing from Trower (Bridge Of Sighs, Too Rolling Stoned) with his overdriven, reverb-drenched, swirling psychedelic sound and Hendrix inflections, plus some outstanding performances (About To Begin, In This Place) from the peerless Dewar.

Bridge Of Sighs peaked at No.7 in the US and remains one of the pillars of Trower's repertoire to this day.

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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.

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Other albums released in April 1974

• Ragged Old Flag - Johnny Cash
• Second Helping - Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Big Fun - Miles Davis
• Carolina County Ball - Elf
• Standing on the Verge of Getting It On - Funkadelic
• Okie - J.J. Cale
• Exotic Birds and Fruit - Procol Harum
• Hamburger Concerto - Focus
• Houston (I'm Comin' to See You) - Glen Campbell
• Positive Vibrations - Ten Years After
• Road Food - The Guess Who
• Secret Treaties - Blue Öyster Cult
• Unconditionally Guaranteed - Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band
• Sweet Fanny Adams - Sweet

What they said...

"At his best, Trower's gauzy sheets of oozing, wistful sound and subtle use of wah-wah combine with Dewar's whisky-soaked soul-drenched vocals to take a song like the wistful ballad "In This Place" into orbit. "Too Rolling Stoned," another highlight and one of the most covered tracks from this album, adds throbbing, subtle funk to the mix, changing tempos midway to a slow, forceful amble on top of which Trower lays his quicksilver guitar."(AllMusic)

"The song ideas are strong, and Dewar’s vocals are impressively sturdy, but ultimately it is Trower’s virtuosic touch, the nuanced tone of his Strat and the intrinsic skill of the 'bends and wobbles' that Robert Fripp so admired on which the success of Bridge Of Sighs rests." (Uncut)

"Throughout you can almost play 'name that Jimi' (try the last third of Too Rolling Stoned, where you can namecheck maybe four passages you've heard somewhere before), but with the raw bluesy voice of bassist James Dewar and Trower's writing the album manages to find its own voice. On the slower About To Begin the guitarist leans more towards Peter Green and a whiff of Carlos Santana's purity of tone." (Elsewhere)

What you said...

Adam Ranger: Such a good choice! As teenagers, my friend and I listened to Trower a lot. We could not understand why he was not talked about in the same terms as Hendrix, Page, etc. Very underrated outside of certain circles.

The Hendrix style is unmistakable at times, especially on Day Of The Eagle and Little Bit Of Sympathy. The power trio format may help that impression.

That said, he is no Hendrix tribute act. He has a wonderful style of his own. I love the way he often avoids obvious guitar licks and builds atmosphere instead (a good example is the title track). But when he lets himself go, it's a joy to listen to.

Special mention to James Dewar's bass and vocals. He has a wonderful voice for this style, low but melodic. Maybe comparisons with Cream are as valid as the Hendrix ones? The cover art always put me in mind of stirred cream.... A brilliant blues rock album that scores highly for me.

Philip Qvist: In the mid 2000s, as established South African radio stations started to shun rock music, record companies started to issue CD compilations of rock music from assorted artists, with a collection of songs from the usual suspects such as Deep Purple, Rainbow, Boston and Kansas. And believe it or not, it was on one of those compilations that I was first introduced to Robin Trower, via a live version of Too Rolling Stoned.

I had never heard of this guitarist and songwriter until then, and it's only after that moment that I started to listen to a couple of his songs, even if they never made it onto my playlist of essential songs.

So listening to Bridge of Sighs this week is my first real introduction to Robin Trower the solo artist, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Too Rolling Stoned, Bridge Of Sighs and Day Of The Eagle are my picks, but in truth there aren't any duds on this record.

Special mentions must go to singer and bass player James Dewar for his soulful singing, and drummer Reg Isidore for maintaining the pace. An 8/10 from me; I'm just glad that I finally got to listen to Bridge Of Sighs (named after a racehorse, I believe, and not the structure in Venice).

Jackie Craig: I bought this when it was first released. Re: the title track, when that riff comes in for the first time it still has the same mesmerising effect on me all these years later; probably more so now that I'm so much older. Day Of The Eagle is a great opener, and in fact the entire album is an absolute feast. 10/10.

John Davidson: Great album. Bridge Of Sighs is a fantastic track, but Too Rolling Stoned is the one I listen to most often.

I recall Trower being criticised for aping Jimi Hendrix, but while I can hear a little of his inspiration on some tracks, it's not overdone. The vocals are another highlight, and the bass and drumming complete the set. It's perhaps not groundbreaking, but it's very accomplished and a thoroughly enjoyable album.

Mark Herrington: My first introduction to Robin Trower was hearing the meaty Victims of the Fury on the radio in 1980, and buying the single. Intrigued, I bought the album, probably his hardest-rocking LP. From there, I was hooked on his bluesy psychedelic style.

Then I picked up a second-hand vinyl copy of Caravan to Midnight for £1, a much more languid, dreamy offering. Gradually, I worked backwards through his albums, until probably his best work, Bridge of Sighs (1974).

Trower excels in his expressive, psychedelic, and soulful bluesy guitar, dovetailing naturally with James Dewar's deep, emotive vocals. I gravitate to his slower, more expressive tracks such as Bridge Of Sighs and In This Place, where every note seems to linger and carry meaning. But I also love the muscular virtuosity on tracks like Too Rolling Stoned.

He is a master at bringing the guitar to life and giving it a voice, underlined by his live performances, where he seems to mouth every note he plays. Overall, probably Trower's finest work.

Mike Canoe: A classic blues-rock album. The title track is still the most amazing and astounding thing here, but the rest of the album is enjoyable too. Much as when we reviewed Twice Removed from Yesterday in the club's second year, I am struck by how bassist and singer James Dewar is the band's not-so-secret weapon. While Robin Trower is deservedly the name above the title, Dewar's gruff but melodious voice complements Trower's playing perfectly. He doesn't overemote or ape other blues singers; he just sings. The overall restraint of the musicianship is impressive, and the songs are songs first and not just showcases for guitar wankery.

Come for the title track, stay for In This Place, Too Rolling Stoned, The Fool and Me, and Lady Love.

Greg Schwepe: If you’re looking for another album to add to your “1970’s Rock Guitar Album Time Capsule” (there is such a thing, right?) before you bury it, look no further than Robin Trower’s Bridge of Sighs to throw in there with a few other good ones. How often have you heard an album called “dated?” Well, this one is. Sounds just like 1974, and meant to be that way!

This has all the hallmarks of a classic 70’s guitar-fest album; the tasteful guitar tones of Robin Trower, the soulful vocals (and bass) of James Dewar, and the grooving drums of Reg Isidore. Ah yes, the Power Trio. It’s been proven many times, you only need three guys to make an awesome racket.

The clarion call of Day Of The Eagle leads off the one-two punch of Sighs. The galloping and repeating riff gets your attention. And then, right at about three minutes in, the tempo slows to a halt, but your attention does not. Trower’s bluesy soloing finishes out the song. They are not the first band to change tempos and time signatures for effect, but they do it with authority.

The title track is next, and Trower’s trilling hammer-on note that fades in changes to a sparse three-four note repeating groove that is spacey, atmospheric, pulsing, and undulating, all at the same time. The layered repeating guitar sections at the end with the blowing wind sound effects make for a trippy end to the song.

I had read in liner notes how some thought Trower was a bit of a “Hendrix Clone.” Yes, he played a Strat through a Marshall, and used many of the same effects (Univibe, Wah-Wah, Leslie) as Jimi, but he had his own style. I think I also read that Trower said that if you’re going to be accused of copying someone, Hendrix wasn’t a bad person to be compared to.

Too Rolling Stoned is another riff-filled monster where Trower’s wah-wah pedal and Univibe get quite the workout. Once again we have a ton of riffs that then hit the brakes at about the 2:45 mark. Dewar’s vocals and the bluesy riffs finish out the rest of the song. Extended guitar solo anyone? Yes indeed. Along with a thumping drumbeat to keep you engaged.

I did a deep dive on Robin Trower’s catalogue several years ago after hearing Bridge of Sighs on the radio after not having heard it in years. While I had certainly heard of Trower before, his music was not a regular staple on the radio where I lived. “Oh yeah, I have got to check him out.” A compilation CD led to purchasing most of his catalogue. Which then turned into another “Wow, what have I been missing?” moment. 9 out of 10 on this one for me. Come for the title track, stay for the rest.

Final score: 8.91 (59 votes cast, total score 526)

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Like all Pete Townshend’s best songs, The Who's My Generation was a thrilling collision of body and brain. The title had highbrow roots, the guitarist inspired by the Generations collection by socialist playwright David Mercer. But the song’s visceral clatter was fuelled by Townshend’s disgust at his well-heeled neighbours in London. Despite the iconic ‘hope I die before I get old’ line, the songwriter later noted, it was wealth and class, more than age, that he despised.

"The line actually came from a time when I was living in a really wealthy district of London, just by accident," Townshend said in 1983. "I didn't really understand quite where I was living at the time. And I was treated very strangely on the street, in an imperious way by a lot of people, and it was that that I didn't like. I didn't like being confronted with money and the class system and power. I didn't like being in a corner shop in Belgravia and some woman in a fur coat pushing me out of the way because she was richer.

"I didn't know how to deal with that. I could've, I suppose, insisted on my rights and not written the song. But I was a fucked-up little kid, and so I wrote the song."

Townshend worked on My Generation during The Who’s Scandinavian summer tour of 1965, but on his return, the original demo proved a torpid thing, “very much inspired by Mose Allison’s Young Man Blues, my vocal casual and confident”.

Management saw the song differently, and pushed for a heavier riff and – after Townshend played them John Lee Hooker’s Stuttering Blues – the vocal tic that went down in history. Roger Daltrey had genuinely stammered as a child, but he was told to emphasise this. “[Manager] Kit Lambert came up and said ‘Stutter the words – it makes it sound like you’re pilled’.”

No doubt, it appealed to the mischief of all concerned that Daltrey was able to let a stammered ‘f’ hang in the air, the listener braced for ‘fuck’ (before the singer resolved the lyric with the less inflammatory ‘fade away’).

Both as a single – and on the Marquee stage, where the song had its first live airing on November 2 – My Generation let all four members shine. There was Daltrey’s rabblerousing vocal. Townshend’s slashed chords. John Entwistle’s rubber-band bass solo (“John was becoming the outstanding bass revolutionary of the day,” noted Townshend, “and I wanted to provide him with a vehicle for his incredible playing”). Keith Moon’s clatterous outro, chasing around the kit in a squall of feedback. Together, they made the heaviest sound in the pop charts of 1965. It also became the band's biggest UK hit – reaching number two in the chart – and denting the Top 100 in the US.

If Townshend felt any guilt at sticking it to the establishment, then shortly before the song’s release, he was reminded why he wrote it in the first place, as his 936 Packard V12 hearse was impounded on the orders of the Queen Mother. “She had to pass it every day and complained that it reminded her of her late husband’s funeral. So I resentfully dedicated My Generation to the Queen Mother…”

The song would influence a generation of up-and-coming rockers, including Alice Cooper, whose all-star Hollywood Vampires – named after the infamous drinking club whose members included Cooper and Keith Moon – play My Generation to this day.

“I think My Generation was maybe the first anthem," Cooper told Classic Rock. "That was the birth of the power chord, right there. And then you saw The Who performing it, and you saw [Pete Townshend] smashing into his amps, and you started going, ‘Is there any end to this British Invasion? I mean, who else is going to come up?’"

From Townshend's power chords to Daltrey's iconic stutter, via Entwhistle's string-breaking solo and Moon's wild, clattering finale, My Generation is one of those rare songs that's a solo tour-de-force for every band member, yet somehow comes together to be even greater than the sum of its virtuostic individual parts.

“Being a mod, I always thought My Generation was a fucking great song, an unbelievable song," said Kenny Jones, Moon's replacement in The Who. "Once a mod, always a mod, y’know? Moony was all over the place. That bit at the end where he goes crazy on the drums? I know – I’ve done it. There are fills that you have to play because the song dictates it."

The Anchoress’ strikingly-titled single I Had A Baby, Not A Lobotomy was inspired by her experience as a new mother facing the bewildering attitudes of those around her.

After her daughter’s birth five years ago, she heard comments – now immortalised in the song – including: ‘I guess you’ll be retiring now’, ‘You’re getting on, the kid will hate ya,’ and ‘Guess now there won’t be any more tours?’

While Catherina Anne Davies stresses that the lead track from her latest Anchoress album, As We Once Were, humorous rather than a furious or vindictive rant, she admits she found the process of channelling the phrases into art somewhat therapeutic.

“I would jot it down on my phone every time someone would say something to me that pissed me off. Rather than want to throttle them, I would write it down and bite my lip, and it became this litany of comments.

“Some of it was really well meaning, or they thought they were being helpful, so I didn’t want to make people feel bad. The best thing you can do with satire and humour is to try and get people to think again. I always want to do that with a smile on my face.”

When the track went live she knew she’d struck a chord. “My phone has been blowing up, as the kids say, with all sorts of people, including a lot of other musicians and producers who are trying to navigate this shit the whole time.

“They’re all saying a very big, resounding ‘Yes! I feel like this, too!’ And other people are saying, ‘You wouldn’t believe some of the inane shit I’ve had thrown at me – jobs I’ve lost when they found out I had kids.’

“So yeah, it’s resonated in quite a serious way, even though my intention was fairly tongue-in-cheek.”

The song’s parent album is something of a concept set, partly inspired by a family discovery. “I found a lost tape of my grandmother’s voice, talking about her life, which is heard throughout the record,” she explains. That’s the thread that holds it all together.”

Four generations of Davies women are heard on As We Once Were – including her five-year-old daughter, of course. And there are other sounds to be heard that might be considered to come from a past era.

“I was invited to come into Pete Townshend’s studios and use all his vintage synths,” Davies says. “I got to have a whale of the time piloting all these crazy machines.

“It’s made the album very synth-heavy, but it goes to a whole new level from what I’ve done previously, because I’ve never worked on modular synths before.

“It was a real learning curve. On modern synths you can press a pre-saved patch and just play. With these you have to create and shape the sound yourself; and the sound I made that day on that synth, I won’t be able to repeat.

“And that chimes in with what the record is about, which is the impossibility of freezing time and holding onto moments.”

Meanwhile, she’s has launch a podcast called The Milk And The Music, talking to working musicians about their experiences of motherhood. Guests include Lau.ra, Charlotte Hatherley and Gazelle Twin.

Davies hopes it will move beyond storytelling to offer practical solutions. “I’m not a fan of negativity and moaning without some sense of what the solution is,” she explains.

As We Once Were is on sale now.

The Pineapple Thief just announced that 15th album Far And Wide will arrive on October 9, 2026. It follows 2024’s It Leads To This, which came out of a new way of working for leader Bruce Soord and drummer Gavin Harrison. That year the pair, along with bassist Jon Sykes, told Prog about the process.

There’s a slight air of world weariness about The Pineapple Thief. The band have been in Gavin Harrison’s studio, rehearsing for their upcoming tour in support of new album It Leads To This, and there’s the sense that it’s been an elongated, potentially mildly frustrating day of missed cues and occasional bum notes.

“Gavin doesn’t sugar-coat anything,” reveals frontman Bruce Soord, referencing the drummer with a knowing smile. “We play a song, record it, gather around the speakers and listen back. The first time you play it through it’s quite brutal. We have this dynamic where we have an ordered section and a chaos section, but I’m not going to tell you where the chaos section is.

“It’s an interesting dynamic and there’s a lot of patience with one certain member of the band. It’s quite a nice environment because nobody cares if someone says, ‘Don’t do it like that,’ ‘I don’t like that sound,’ or, ‘Actually play it right next time!’ It’s all fine, although that last one generally only comes my way.”

Such comments could be indicative of a band embroiled in disheartening studio friction, but the lack of animosity between the musicians is palpable. It’s merely the kind of jovial, lampooning mentality that relieves stressful situations in any collection of close bandmates. There’s also a transparent desire to ensure that their live presentation is as consummate as their evocative recordings.

It’s startling to consider that this year is The Pineapple Thief’s 25th anniversary, even if there have been drastic changes over that time. “It’s impossible to think of it as one thing,” considers Soord. “It really feels like three separate entities. There was the first entity, which was just me alone in the studio. Then we signed to Kscope and started to do small tours with the band. I think then this current entity started in 2016, when we met Gavin for the Your Wilderness album.

“That’s why it still feels fresh to me – because this is only the fourth proper studio album that we’ve done with this lot.”

The record in question is another captivating release that possesses all the classic Pineapple Thief signatures. Perhaps more guitar-heavy than its predecessor, it was assembled using a different writing style – in recent years the band have digitally exchanged files, but this time Soord and Harrison began writing together in the drummer’s north London home studio.

“I had been so used to working alone,” Soord explains. “I would come up with an idea and then send it to the guys. Gavin would send a drum idea back or chop things up, and I’d think, ‘I’ve a couple of days to faff around with this.’ There was no pressure. It’s hard work when you’re on your own; you think, ‘I’ll make myself a cup of coffee and do it tomorrow!’”

He continues: “We all have our own studios, which is a little bit of a double-edged sword. You can get a bit complacent and, dare I say it myself” – looking at the rest of the band – “a bit lazy. When you’re sat there together in a room, it’s a completely different mindset. It was good and a lot of the songs came out of that session.”

“I think that was the first time we were working in the same room together,” adds Harrison. “Before that it was an internet love affair, sending files backwards and forwards. You do something, but you might not get a response to it for a couple of days, whereas this was in the second – I’d play something and there was instant feedback.”

The combination of guitarist and drummer crafting much of the material together, without the involvement of keyboardist Steve Kitch or bassist Jon Sykes, may seem relatively quirky. While there’s a declared willingness of all four members to convene to write together in the future, Harrison expresses a certain reticence about the idea.

“You can just end up with a half-hour jam in E,” he argues dryly with a smile. “I’ve done it before and it’s very hard – you have three people all trying to contribute harmonically. If it’s just a drummer with a guitarist or keyboard player, then you can change the key, the tonality, the time signature, all on the fly.

“When there are three people all trying to play chords, asking, ‘What’s that? Is that in E and then it’s a D?’ You know, they’re just falling over each other and it’s not an organic process. It usually works best with one harmonics player and a drummer. It’s a bit easier to manoeuvre around each other and dance around, rather than three people all trying to contribute harmonically.”

“I think there are pros and cons,” says Sykes. “It gives you a fresh approach and you’ll get something different to what you’d have if you’d done it on your own. I think there’s also a benefit to the way we always did it, writing separately, because you get a different type of organic progress.

“Quite often we’re not even talking. The communication is through files with music on them. That must give you a different result to when you’re face to face saying, ‘What about this?’ I think it’s probably good to mix it up.”

While the core material is created by the Soord-Harrison partnership, the full band has been essential in shaping the album’s sound. Sykes suggests that The Pineapple Thief now feels more “proper” than in their past. “It definitely feels like more of a band project these days,” he says. “There’ll be a demo base that Bruce will have sent, which might be just a drone sound or something, which gives me a lot of space to develop.

“Usually, I’m responding to what Gavin has done; it does sometimes change the path of a song or might result in a bigger change to one of the sections. We don’t really talk about references or anything like that. There isn’t a steer to say, ‘Make it sound like this.’ You can just do whatever you think sounds right.”

For all the satisfaction over the album’s quality, Soord reveals that its creation was one of the most intense periods he can recall. It was seemingly caused by the combination of a desire to avoid stagnation, along with the challenge of playing some of the more complicated compositions.

“I think it boils down to just trying to better yourself every record,” he says. “I’m not saying it always happens like that; but as an artist, that’s your aim. I pushed myself personally to a higher level. There was a period when the album was coming together when you’re thinking, ‘Right, this is how it’s going to be.’ Then things start to ramp up and everybody wants it to be as good as it could possibly be.

“We’re all pushing each other and we all have ideas as to where we think it should go. Luckily, we’re all pretty much on the same page – but that doesn’t mean there isn’t healthy tension. So it was an intense time getting it finished.

“The good thing about coming to Gavin’s was that I was pushed. There’s one track called Rubicon, where he had a rhythm I hadn’t heard before. I was completely out of my comfort zone, but in a good way. It’s about pushing in every aspect, playing, writing words, and the sound.”

Those familiar with the band’s catalogue will be aware that Harrison’s arrival has altered their music, frequently adding complex, unexpected rhythmic patterns that embellish their sound. As one of the world’s most technically gifted drummers, do the rest of the band ever have to rein him in?

“No, I didn’t have the genital cuffs on!” says Harrison with a smile. “I try to do something unique, play some rhythms you’ve never heard before – things that you couldn’t say, ‘There’s a record just like that with that exact rhythm.’ With music that’s moving into a popular area, you get very limited; everything’s in 4/4 and there’s almost nothing you can do that hasn’t been done before.

“In a more progressive way, you can do things that aren’t technically complicated but you think, ‘I’ve never heard a band play with this rhythm before,’ which at the very least gives us something that’s unique and interesting.”

The carefully crafted musical backdrop is a perfect foil for Soord’s lyrics. Known for introspective tales that reference some of his personal, internal conflicts, the songs on It Leads To This continue his desire to attempt to comprehend the world. “I remember making a conscious decision about what the theme of the record would be,” he recalls.

“It began in the depths of the pandemic, when we started to write the first track, Put It Right. It was a time of reflection because you were forced into this solitary confinement of your house. I was lucky because I had the studio in my garden. So that definitely set the tone; but effectively, I feel it’s a continuation of the theme of the last album, which was basically looking at the world that we live in and thinking: ’What’s going on? How can I make sense of it, as it’s all getting a bit fucked up?’ Then in 2023 you look at it and think, ‘My God, how did it get this bad? This wasn’t in the script.’

That kind of relates to the It Leads To This title, but at the same time, it’s not all negative. It’s a positive message, which is that it’s in our power to change it. Writing about it is a way of dealing with it. It’s tackling it head on. Even now, we’re playing the songs together for the first time as a band, and it feels really good to sing it. It’s a cathartic experience.”

It Leads To This is avaiable via Kscope.

Blue Oyster Cult’s Imaginos is quite probably the longest-gestating album of all time. Its concept – in the loosest sense, the story of an alien race arriving upon Earth in the Middle Ages and shaping human history from that point forward – was developed by erstwhile rock critic Sandy Pearlman when he was still a college student in the mid-60s. Pearlman, of course, went on to found, manage and produce Blue Öyster Cult, originally as Soft White Underbelly. Even the band’s eventual name was taken from their mentor’s monumental creation.

The band used Pearlman’s sprawling collection of poems on the subject as source material for lyrics on their first four albums, notably on two tracks on 1974’s Secret Treaties –Astronomy and Subhuman – but never tackled the whole. That task eventually fell to drummer Albert Bouchard, who, having been fired from the band in 1981, went on to work with Pearlman on a planned three-double-album saga. However, Columbia Records, BÖC’s label, rejected the first instalment of Bouchard’s magnum opus in 1986, by which point BÖC had also disbanded, demoralised after the failure of their most recent album, Club Ninja, and then re-formed once again.

Pearlman coaxed the band back into the studio using his and Bouchard’s recordings as bait. He had BÖC’s two singers, Eric Bloom and Donald Roeser, substitute Bouchard’s vocals on the original tracks. He also added to them a so-called ‘Guitar Orchestra’ that featured, among others, Joe Satriani, and then persuaded Columbia to release the reworked

Trimmed to a nine-track single disc and with the songs lifted out of sequence from Pearlman’s original story, this new version of Imaginos was finally released in July 1988 and promptly bombed. So much so that it would be another 10 years before Blue Öyster Cult made their next record. Yet in spite of the concept being rendered now entirely nonsensical, in all other respects, Imaginos was as powerful and cohesive as the band’s best works from the 70s. Whereas BÖC had strived on their two immediate predecessors for a more AOR-oriented direction and sounded neutered, this was a hulking, riff‑heavy beast, casting them once more as an American Black Sabbath.

Suitably grandiose, it includes such high points as a retooled version of Astronomy and the ludicrously but also magnificently overblown The Siege And Investiture Of Baron Von Frankenstein’s Castle At Weisseria.

Speaking to Classic Rock in 2018, Eric Bloom didn’t necessarily agree such sentiments. Speaking today from his New York home, he seemed faintly baffled by the Imaginos experience, even 18 years on. This is what he had to say.

When were you first made aware of the Imaginos concept?

Eric Bloom: Sandy made the lyrics available to the members of the group in the original band house on Long Island. I moved into that house on Christmas Day 1968 and joined the band as a member in April 1969. So the lyrics were always there, in a manila folder. Any of us could just dip into that folder and write a song. But I was never aware that it was supposed to be three double albums. It was Albert who really took that under his wing. Most of the rest of us weren’t that interested in taking this material and making a record with it.

Did you understand the overall concept, or even care about it?

I got the general idea, but not necessarily every nook and cranny of the story Sandy had written. For instance, I know that the aliens lived underwater.

From your point of view, how did Albert’s solo project become a BÖC album?

The band had already re-formed with Donald, Allen [Lanier, keyboards], myself and a couple of sidemen. We had started to work again and there was an ongoing discussion about us making a record. At the same time, Albert and Sandy had been working together for years and by then burned through a small fortune that they had got from the record company. Ultimately, Columbia wasn’t interested in putting their record out, so it came filtering back to us that if we were interested in, um… I don’t know what verb you want to use, but I’ll say ‘fixing’ it then it could be released as a Blue Öyster Cult album.

My part in that record strictly extended to going in and doing vocals. I flew to San Francisco and sang at Pearlman’s studio for six straight weeks. Then I met Donald at the airport, passed off the keys to my rental car to him and he went on and stayed out there for an equal amount of time.

Ultimately, do you think it even really counts as a Blue Öyster Cult record?

In a way, since I sang on it and there’s one of my songs on there, albeit a slightly left-hand voyage through it [an updated Subhuman, retitled Blue Öyster Cult]. But I don’t really have a lot of love for that record because my involvement wasn’t so great. I think it’s fair to say that Columbia, certainly in America, didn’t do anything with it also.

For us, it was a means to a method in terms of getting a new record out. It was helpful to us while we were out on the road and we did play a few of the tunes in the live show. The people that cared, the hardcore fans, knew the story, but it didn’t reach out to the general public. Certainly, it didn’t sell much.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 232 (December 2016)

In 1969, the Allman Brothers were in Jacksonville, Florida, staying at the home of a friend. In the middle of the night, Gregg Allman woke from a dream with some music and lyrics in his head. Because bandmate Berry Oakley was in the next room with his wife and new baby, Gregg knew he had to be quiet if he was going to get his idea down.

He couldn’t find a paper or pen, so he ended up writing lyrics and notes using the only things available – an ironing board and the burnt end of a matchstick. It was the seed of the song that would become Whipping Post. For a number about a man who’s helplessly awaiting more torture from the woman who betrayed him, words scrawled in ash seemed an appropriately poetic beginning.

As with many classic songs, Whipping Post had a different feel initially. Guitarist Dickey Betts recalled, “It was a ballad when Gregg brought it to us. It was a real melancholy, slow blues.” Bassist Oakley’s intro bass lick – worked on all night, but only five seconds long – soon propelled the song in a new direction. Unusual for rock, Whipping Post had an unorthodox time signature. Or two, really – 11/8 on the intro, 12/8 on the verses.

“I just stumbled onto ‘em,” Allman later said. “I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I just did it. My brother said, ‘That’s good, man. I didn’t know you understood.’ I said something intelligent like, ‘What’s 11/8?’ and Duane just said, ‘Okay, dumb ass, I’ll try to draw it up on paper for you.’”

Recorded at Atlantic Studios in New York in August 1969, the song took an entire day to get down on tape. It clocked in at five minutes and seventeen seconds. But once the band took it on stage, it quadrupled in length, a mélange of blues, rock, funk and fusion jazz (the 22-minute version on 1971’s At Fillmore East is definitive).

"We just felt like we could play all night and sometimes we did,” says Betts. "We could really hit the note. There’s not a single fix on Fillmore. Everything you hear there is how we played it."

If one song epitomises their concept of “hittin’ the note,” that interplay and musical telepathy they were famous for, it’s Whipping Post. The Brothers played it at every show they ever did, and no two versions were exactly alike.

They encored with it at their final show at New York's Beacon Theatre in 2014, Gregg Allman ended his last UK show with the same song the following year, and in 2020, when the surviving members of the final Allman Brothers Band lineup reunited as The Brothers at Madison Square Garden in New York, Whipping Post was the final number in a mammoth set. In 2025, they repeated the trick over three nights.

Whipping Post also developed an unlikely relationship with none other than Frank Zappa. During a 1974 show in Finland, an audience member famously disrupted Zappa by repeatedly screaming a request for the song. Zappa didn't know it, but improvised a response by playing his own track Montona while altering the lyrics to mock the request, which he subtitled Whipping Floss. This interaction became known as 'The Helsinki Incident'.

"We didn't know it, and I felt kind of bad that we couldn't just play it and blow the guy's socks off," Zappa told Guitar Player in 1983. "So when [pianist/vocalist/saxophonist] Bobby Martin joined the band, and I found out that he knew how to sing that song, I said, 'We are definitely going to be prepared for the next time somebody wants Whipping Post – in fact we're going to play it before somebody even asks for it.'"

Zappa eventually released his own satirical-yet-virtuosic cover of it on his 1984 album Them or Us, while Gregg Allman would rerecord the song for his 1997 album Searching for Simplicity, ignoring the original's mix of time signatures and rendering it in good old-fashioned 4/4.

While the Allman Brothers Band were rightfully proud of the song and its improvisational legacy, they remained resistant to easy labels. “I’ve heard that damn expression ‘jam band’ so many times,” Gregg told Classic Rock in an interview. “It’s b.s. The Brothers are not a jam band. We’re a band that jams."

When Genesis released fourth album Foxtrot in 1972, they’d pushed themselves to create something more challenging and satisfying than anything they’d done to date. History would record they achieved that goal – notably with the most feted prog suite in history in Supper’s Ready – but as Steve Hackett told Prog in 2012, they were by no means certain that they’d delivered a successful record.

The foxtrot – the dance itself, which premiered a century ago – is usually defined as a smooth dance of long, continuous, flowing movements. Genesis’ Foxtrot, which arrived 40 years ago, certainly has its long, continuous flowing movements, and much else besides.

Today it sounds as unique, dramatic, thrilling and ambitious as ever. It’s where the classic line-up of the band came fully into being; it’s when they realised how much they could do, how far they could go. “It was about creating a film for the ear rather than the eye,” says Steve Hackett.

“And it even got to Number 12 in the charts,” Tony Banks laughs. “Of course the next week it went down to Number 27 or something, but it was our first moment of scoring anything, so we felt that we were underway, that we were heading somewhere different. Foxtrot was where we first started, in my opinion, to become significant.”

While all of its tracks are strong and inventive, Foxtrot is unavoidably dominated by the 23-minute, seven-part suite which graced what used to be side two. Supper’s Ready is one of the towering landmarks of prog, dovetailing short surreal pieces with moving neo-classical reprises and recapitulations, serene flows with shuddering staccato, parochial realism with pulchritudinous dreams.

Across this fire from the skies, Peter Gabriel sings of battles between good and evil and love and war, of firemen, farmers, flowers (‘a flower?’), and a frog who was a prince (who was a brick) (which was an egg) (which was a bird). And of 666 and a new Jerusalem. Startling then, it remains a stunning achievement of vision and scale. Roger Taylor of Queen has called it “at separate times, homely, beautiful, tortured and epic.”

‘We’ve got everything,’ it declares presciently. ‘We’re growing everything…’

While Supper’s Ready is the main course, Foxtrot should be appreciated as more than just a set of appetisers leading up to it. It’s strange to learn that the album came about in a relatively ramshackle manner: no great master plan had been conceived.

The band sought a producer who could capture their improving live sound, and to that end had meetings or sessions with Paul Samwell-Smith, John Anthony and Bob Potter. None was quite the right fit; so David Hitchcock, whose work with Caravan had impressed, came in with the more outspoken engineer John Burns.

Hackett was fatigued by the heavy touring schedule and still somewhat intimidated by his fellow band members’ prowess – he’s recalled thinking, “These guys are so good!" In 2012, having just re-recorded Supper’s Ready and others for his Genesis Revisited II album, he remembers the steps towards Foxtrot more fondly.

“There weren’t a lot of days off; we were a hard-working live band,” he says. “Whereas with its predecessor, Nursery Cryme, we’d taken the summer off and written and recorded together as a unit, bonding the team, this time we were on the run, in and out of the studio. I remember flying back from Italy to be in there a day or two ahead of the others, who were travelling by road, just to finish off my guitar parts on the end of Supper’s Ready.”

If there’s one album that doesn’t sound like a rush job, it’s Foxtrot… “Maybe not. But when you’ve done something, you know what your intention was. The perpetrators will always be looking for improvements. We generally agreed to a man that we recorded Watcher Of The Skies too fast. To my ears now it sounds like a young band desperate to get the notes right in a race to the finish. Once we’d been playing it live for a while, we relaxed into it and it sounded bigger.

“The version that ended up on Genesis Live is more in-the-pocket. That rhythm is almost impossible for any band to play perfectly! It’s full of pitfalls.Yet there’s lots of weird and wonderful stuff; it’s a band at its most creatively eccentric.”

Rehearsals and writing sessions in a variety of locations may have coloured the album’s angles and attitudes. Hackett recounts that Foxtrot was worked up in a variety of “drab, functional” places, until they moved (without Gabriel, who added the words later) to the Una Billings School Of Dance in Shepherd’s Bush.

“There were girls upstairs, learning their tap-dance and what-have-you. And the sound of that, those rhythms would come down through the ceiling. We were below in what had been a refectory, so you had a counter here and a gobstopper-dispensing machine there. It was all a bit strange, and the atmosphere influenced our subsequent efforts.

“Much of Supper’s Ready was written in the two weeks there. With the tap-dancing upstairs, you couldn’t be too serious for long, because you’d hear them: clumpety clump clump. That rhythm would kick in, and we’d have to break into smiles…”

Watcher Of The Skies had grown out of Banks “fooling around” with the Mellotron. “We bought one of the ex-King Crimson Mellotrons,” he notes, “and Robert Fripp insisted it was the one they’d used on In The Court Of The Crimson King. Mind you, he had three, and I’m sure he said that about all of them when he was selling them!”

Hackett also emphasises the importance of that instrument to the album. “I’d kept hammering on that we should get one, saying it’d make our story-telling abilities so much greater. It meant that the band could function as a time machine, with all these various mythologies. The idea was that all the old instruments were there within the Frankenstein that was the Mellotron.

“It was like an alien orchestra being beamed to you by satellite. And you need to be able to smell the dust from time to time. It had a… cold warmth. I think it’s actually the most influential keyboard instrument in the whole of rock.”

Banks reckons people had never heard “a big, big sound like that” before. It brought the album in with an impossible-to-ignore surge.

“Time Table, Get ‘Em Out By Friday and Can-Utility And The Coastliners don’t get as much attention as the others,” agrees Hackett, “but they’re all part of the journey.” Not least because of Gabriel’s always busy, multi-voiced lyrics. “Yes, there’s important social comment on Get ‘Em Out…, and the rest is hardly boy-meets-girl, is it? And the sci-fi elements show that mythology doesn’t have to be backward looking.

“Time Table has something: there’s a magic between the piano and the six-string electric. It chimes. You get that third instrument – not piano, not guitar – where the distinction between them is blurred. The ensemble work welds instruments together, grafts them onto each other like that Star Trek mind-meld. It’s not so much an album of solos.

So how was the response to Foxtrot upon initial release? Were people dazzled, confused, appalled, or exhilarated? Or just indifferent? “All of those things,” muses Hackett. “Don’t forget, we weren’t The Beatles. Just before they released Sgt Pepper, they worried whether they’d gone too far and whether the crowd might give them the thumbs-down.

“We felt in a similar position. It was early days for the band. We just weren’t sure. We’d really gone out on a limb with Supper’s Ready, it was labyrinthine with layers, and it was by no means certain that the response would be positive.”

Of course, Paul Whitehead’s surrealist sleeve design is as much a part of the Foxtrot “immersion” experience as that pyramid-prism is to The Dark Side Of The Moon. Gabriel certainly dived in, courageously donning his wife’s red dress and a fox-head for stage shows. “It’s interesting how the most cherished albums have the most cherished sleeves,” ponders Hackett.

“I think for fans of it there was always that feeling of looking at it and thinking: ‘I’m onto something here that other people don’t necessarily know about.’ One’s taste becomes tribal: these albums become important bonding elements. Where language leaves off, music begins, and you share a dream.”

A dream that’s lasted 40 years and counting, in the case of Foxtrot… “Musicians do tend to disparage their early work – the need to continually move forward can be everything,” Hackett says. “I prefer to celebrate it, and look for what’s right about it. If you have passion, energy and honesty you will come up with something valuable. You don’t always verbalise it as a band; you try to do things instinctively, listening closely to each other without ego - and sometimes you get a great crystallisation.

“You may not recognise it at the time; you might think it was just a doodle, but someone else will see it as a full-blown portrait, a Mona Lisa. The musicians might still be searching, but the audience, the true owners, will say, ‘Look no further. We’ve found it.’”

“We still laugh about it now,” says The Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson,. “We were one of those local bands that really wasn’t very popular. If we wrote a riff at sound-check then we played it that night, we’d play the song on the spot, just throw it in there. People weren’t so keen on that sort of thing.”

Even their A&R man stumbled upon them by accident. George Drakoulias was in Atlanta scouting other bands for Rick Rubin’s American Recordings label. He happened to be nursing a drink in a bar when he asked the stranger next to him if there were any rock bands in town worth hearing.

“And someone mentioned Mr Crowe’s Garden, as we were back then,” Chris recalls. “Typically, we had no shows booked while he was in town, but we had a gig booked in New York coming up, third on the bill of five bands at Drums. George came down and he said we were all right. And I guess we were. He kept coming down to Atlanta after that and we kept working on demos.

“All these bands in Atlanta were working hard on their repertoires and their stage shows, and we were the worst – no work ethic, non-career minded, no local following. But for some reason we always had people flying in from LA or New York to see what we were doing. We just thought they’ll take us to dinner. We’d order eight pitchers of margaritas and by the time the gig started we were pissed out of our heads and barely able to finish the show. They’d fly back home and we thought we’d got one over on them.”

Dining on someone else’s dime and playing live intermittently enabled the band to focus on making what would become their debut album for the American label. Yet while they were recording Shake Your Money Maker, they hadn’t even signed the deal. And George Drakoulias hadn’t produced a full album before, so he was also feeling his way. They hunkered down in a studio and wrote and rehearsed for days at a time.

“That really was when we built up our relationship with George,” says Chris. “We were kids, we had a few guitars, a couple of amps… We didn’t have a budget for food, we kind of ate whatever George didn’t finish. It was fantastic, though, a real adventure for us. We were thinking, we’re making a record, then we’ll get a deal and we’ll try to get us much out of this experience as possible and then figure out what we’re going to do with our lives. It seemed to us that you had to be an asshole to get on MTV or in showbiz. We weren’t interested in that so much.”

“It was just like that,” agrees the other Robinson brother, guitarist Rich. “The studio was a place where Brendan O’Brien had worked. He was just our engineer then, which is very strange when you think about it now. I moved into my 20s in the middle of recording our first album – as good a way to start a new decade as any.”

Two years later, Rich had come up with a song that would make the final cut of the album, the elegiac She Talks To Angels.

“She Talks To Angels has always held up for us,” says Rich, “That was the first song I wrote. And when George heard it he really liked it. Chris wasn’t sure, but George insisted, said we needed it on the record. Chris likes to move on, he doesn’t tend to dwell on the past, and I think that song had been around a while by the time we got to making the album and he just wanted to hear new stuff.”

“It’s a George record,” Chris says, but not unkindly. “We were so excited and eager, and George was very methodical – thank God. He made a very radio-friendly record. It took a long time because we weren’t used to the studio, we weren’t used to things being perfect. But we were thinking, this is how it’s done so this is how we’ll do it. Though when we bought our freedom with that record selling millions of copies in the States, we never made a perfect record again.”

Both Robinsons agree that the album still stands up 20 years later, even if they can hear the band’s naivety between the grooves.

“We still play pretty much everything from that record,” says Chris. “The only song that’s been lost is Struttin’ Blues. Seein’ Things is still a band favourite and a song that we probably play twice a week if we’re on the road. I hear songs on the radio like Jealous Again and I like it. It’s still a big part of our show. It’s an iconic song for us, as is Twice As Hard. I still love to sing Sister Luck when we do it.”

“Though it was Sister Luck that was really hard to capture in the studio,” Rich remembers. “As a band we hadn’t played much together, and trying to find that dynamic was really hard for us on some songs. We recorded Sister Luck several times just trying to get it really right. But it holds up as an album, I think. I always view our records as what they meant at the time. I think when you’re that young and things happen that fast, you really wear your influences on your sleeve. And the only frame of reference you have is wanting to make music that moves people as much as the music that I loved moved me. That was always the goal. So to me it was the best possible record we could’ve made then. I still think the songs are pretty great.”

So did the record-buying public. Shake Your Money Maker sold more than seven million copies, and on the back of it the band went off on a world tour that would take them away from Atlanta for almost two years, playing more than 350 shows.

“I remember us coming over to London to play the Marquee club, and thinking the queue outside was for someone else,” Rich laughs. “The audiences over there were unbelievable compared to America. We played the Marquee, and then went out opening for the Dogs D’Amour. Then months later, at the end of the Shake Your Money Maker tour, we came back to London and did Hammersmith Odeon. That sort of wrapped up it all up. We came full circle, and then we got on the plane and finally went home.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 150 (September 2010)

During December 1965 and the first two months of ’66, The Beatles’ Rubber Soul album spent eight weeks at No.1 in the UK and six weeks at No.1 in the US, and was still in the US Top 20 when the group returned to Abbey Road studios in April ’66 to begin recording material for their next new album. The ‘all killer no filler’ excellence of Rubber Soul had set a new benchmark for the world’s top rock artists to equal, and was even talked about as having shifted the focus of rock music from singles to albums.

As others strove to equal it, The Beatles set about the task of making something even better.

“At this point in their career there was very little external pressure on them,” Apple Records director Tony Bramwell remembers. “EMI had all but given up trying to make them do things, and [Beatles manager] Brian Epstein never interfered in that way.”

Being a close associate of the band since his days of being their roadie in Liverpool, Bramwell noticed a different kind of pressure on them. “They were no longer the four-headed mop-top monster they’d been at the start,” he recalls. “They were developing their own lives away from the band, with John and George leading their suburban existences, George becoming interested in Indian music and Paul being thoroughly metropolitan, checking out the galleries and exhibitions, going to clubs and so on.”

McCartney was also the driving force of the band, Bramwell confirms, and was the one who took the initiative to get them back into the studio to record the follow-up to Rubber Soul. Fortunately they were still prolific songwriters so there was no shortage of material.

The first track they worked on was the epochal Tomorrow Never Knows, a psychedelic, pseudo-Indian cosmic soup dreamed up by Lennon four months earlier, inspired by the lines: “Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream,” which he’d read in translator Walter Kaufmann’s book The Portable Nietzsche.

It was also the first track that 19-year-old Abbey Road engineer Geoff Emerick worked on, having that very morning been promoted from recording assistant. “I was extremely nervous,” he recalled. “One request from John was that he wanted the vocal to sound like the Dali Lama singing on a mountain top twenty-five miles away. Obviously we had no plug-ins or software. What we’ve got is two tape machines, a [recording console] and one echo chamber. So I’m looking through the control room window into the studio and saw the revolving Leslie speaker from the Hammond organ, and I thought: ‘If we could get John’s voice to go into that revolving speaker, maybe we’ll get something that sounds a bit new.’ And that is what we did use, on the last verse. That sort of won John over.”

McCartney, too, had been working on ideas that fitted nicely with the other-worldly ambience they sought for Tomorrow Never Knows. “I had an idea to use something I had been experimenting with at home on my tape player, where I would put a piece of tape over the record head and saturate the tape with all kinds of sounds,” he later revealed. “I was listening to Stockhausen, and these saturated loops were inspired by his work.”

Producer George Martin remembered how “they would bring me tapes of all the loops, and we would play them just for a giggle, like crossword puzzles. And when we made Tomorrow Never Knows, that was all the tapes they had made at home made into loops. We had about twenty-odd loops or more, at varying speeds.”

For its time, Abbey Road was a state-of-the-art recording facility, but Emerick reveals exactly how primitive state-of-the-art was in 1966: “We’d lace [the tapes] up on our tape machine, and people would have to hold them out with pencils. On Tomorrow Never Knows there weren’t enough people in the control room to handle holding them, so we got some of the maintenance department down to help. I think we put five loops up on faders and then just played it as an instrument.”

Even just with those sonic innovations, Tomorrow Never Knows would have been a revolutionary-sounding track. But Emerick then pulled another rabbit out of the hat to refresh Ringo Starr’s drum sound. The Beatles had been hearing hard, solid drums on American records that were not being matched in England. So – and strictly against Abbey Road rules – Emerick “took the front skin off the bass drum, stuffed a sweater inside and put the skin back on… I moved the microphone about four inches away from the drum and got the bass drum sound I really wanted, this hard sort of up-front thud.”

Contemporary Abbey Road wisdom decreed that any mic placed closer than 18 inches from a bass drum would be damaged by the air pressure from it. But Emerick and The Beatles were less interested in equipment than in achieving new sounds. “All I could do to accommodate requests for new sounds for them was really, basically, just to abuse the equipment,” he says.

Predictably, Abbey Road management rapped Emerick’s knuckles. But in the longer term, equipment abuse became another tool in the search for new sounds.

The following day, work started on the uptempo Got To Get You Into My Life, a more traditional Stax soul-based McCartney composition. At first listen it’s just another standard romantic relationship song. But as Macca himself explained, it was written after his first experience with marijuana and was “actually an ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret”.

The track didn’t require the kind of innovations that transformed Tomorrow Never Knows but even so, producer Martin and engineer Emerick racked their brains to devise ways of making it sound the way McCartney wanted.

“In those days they would hear a record coming from America where they had really good brass sounds,” Martin explained. “They’d say: ‘Let’s try some.’ So we would get brass players in the studio and I would write down parts for them.”

For Got To Get You Into My Life, Martin brought in a horn section, including members of Georgie Fame’s Blue Fames and a fistful of London’s go-to jazz session players. “Paul sat at the piano and showed us what he wanted, and we played with the rhythm track in our headphones,” Blue Flames sax player Peter Coe remembered. “We tried it a few times to get the feel right, and then John Lennon, who was in the control room, suddenly rushed out, stuck his thumb aloft and shouted: ‘Got it!’”

However, Lennon’s celebratory yell referred only to their performance. The sound that McCartney envisaged was still not quite there. He wanted it to be bigger. Emerick pondered how to achieve McCartney’s aim. “We could double-track it, but there were no more tracks left. So we actually recorded it on to a [separate] stereo piece of tape.”

There was no way in 1966 to sync up two tape recorders, so they simply marked off the ‘start’ point of the copy with a grease pencil and, when it came to the final mix, crossed their fingers, started up the copy and the original and prayed that the two would “marry up”.

On April 11 they started work on Granny Smith, a Harrison concoction later to become Love You To. Harrison had become fascinated by Indian music and, specifically, sitars at a late-August 1965 gathering in LA’s Benedict Canyon, where The Beatles hung out with The Byrds, whose David Crosby introduced him to the music of Ravi Shankar. Two months later, Harrison had executed an effective sitar part on Norwegian Wood, but Love You To went much further. With minimal participation from the other Beatles, Harrison created the track with tabla player Anil Bhagwat and several Indian musicians from London’s Asian Music Circle.

Bhagwat was rung up on the day of the session. “It was only when a Rolls-Royce came to pick me up that I realised I’d be playing on a Beatles session,” he later explained. “When I arrived at Abbey Road there were girls everywhere with Thermos flasks, cakes, sandwiches, waiting for The Beatles to come out. George told me what he wanted and I tuned the tabla with him. He suggested I play something in the Ravi Shankar style, 16 beats, though he agreed that I should improvise.”

As he had done with Ringo’s drums, Emerick close-mic’d Bhagwat’s tabla, achieving a previously unimaginably powerful thwack. What remains unclear is how much of the sitar on the track was played by Harrison, but it seems likely that the intro is his while the remainder is played by an uncredited Asian Music Circle member.

With Love You To completed, work started on Paperback Writer which, because it was released as a single, did not appear on Revolver (a common practice in that era). This is also true of its B-side, Rain, recorded one day later. But both songs are clearly products of the same gloriously freewheeling mindsets that created the album.

McCartney had conceived the structure of Paperback Writer on the drive from central London to Lennon’s suburban home for an afternoon songwriting session. “I developed the whole idea in the car,” he explained. “I came in, had my bowl of cornflakes and said: ‘How’s about if we write a letter: Dear Sir or Madam, next line, next paragraph etc?’”

Opening with the most distinctively layered harmony vocals of their career so far, the song was propelled on a dynamic guitar riff underpinned by the loudest drum and bass combo yet heard on a Beatles single, thanks to Emerick’s now firmly established techniques. With typically tongue-in-cheek Beatles whimsy, Lennon and Harrison’s backing vocals bear no relation to the song’s lyric, as they sing instead the title of the French folk song Frere Jacques.

Rain, which was chosen as the B-side of Paperpack Writer, would have fitted perfectly on Revolver. Lyrically, it takes an off-kilter look at its subject matter. “Songs have traditionally treated rain as a bad thing, and what we got on to was that it’s no bad thing,” McCartney pointed out. “There’s no greater feeling than the rain dripping down your back. The most interesting thing about it wasn’t the writing, which was tilted seventy-thirty to John, but the recording of it.”

The new grainy guitar texture was achieved by recording the backing track at a higher speed than normal, then adding the vocals to the slowed down instrumental sounds. When Lennon went home after the session – in a somewhat altered state – he accidentally played the reel-to-reel tape backwards. “I sat there, transfixed, with the earphones on, with a big hash joint,” he later remembered. “I ran in the next day and said: ‘I know what to do with it, I know… Listen to this!’ So I made them all play it backwards. The fade is me actually singing, backwards, with the guitars going backwards.”

Dr Robert Freymann, a Manhattan doctor notorious for dispensing ‘good vibes’ – in the shape of vitamin B-12 shots laced with amphetamine – to his wealthy clientele provided the subject matter for the Lennon song they laid down on April 17. Explaining how Freymann inspired Doctor Robert, McCartney said: “John and I thought that was a funny idea – the fantasy doctor who would fix you up by giving you drugs. It was a parody on that idea.”

Perhaps not the album’s most captivating composition, Doctor Robert does contain an example of ADT (Artificial Double Tracking), a new recording technique developed by Abbey Road staffer Ken Townshend. ADT freed the band from the chore of recording their vocals more than once to fatten them up. Instead the system copied the vocal track then played it back alongside the original, out of sync by a matter of milliseconds, just enough to create a double image.

On April 20 the band were back in Studio 2, working on the songs Taxman and You Don’t Get Me, later retitled And Your Bird Can Sing. Harrison’s Taxman would be chosen to open the album, probably because of its dynamic opening bars and harsh, trebly chord slashes, but its most intriguing guitar-related fact is that the energetically crazed solo was played by McCartney. “I got the guitar and was playing around in the studio with the feedback and stuff, and I said to George: ‘Maybe you could play it like this.’ I can’t quite remember how it happened that I played it, but it was probably one of those times when somebody says: ‘Well why don’t you do it, then?’”

Later that day, Harrison and McCartney played the guitar duet on Lennon’s And Your Bird Can Sing, delivering a powerful, distinctly Byrds-like folk-rock workout, but they felt they could do better. By the time they returned to it a week later, everything was tightened up, the guitar parts flowed better and the rock was decidedly more evident than the folk.

Lennon never revealed what his song’s cryptic lyric was about, but one favourite interpretation is that it was an attack on Mick Jagger, whose ‘bird’ of the time, Marianne Faithful, could indeed sing.

The gloriously soporific I’m Only Sleeping was the next track they worked on, beginning on April 27 but not completed until May 5. Lennon was a notoriously snoozy kind of guy. In the contentious “more popular than Jesus” interview, journalist Maureen Cleave wrote: “He can sleep almost indefinitely, is probably the laziest person in England. ‘Physically lazy,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind writing or reading or watching or speaking, but sex is the only physical thing I can be bothered with any more.’” There are known instances, notably Here, There And Everywhere, of McCartney working industriously on songs at Lennon’s Kenwood home while his writing partner remained in the land of nod.

Lennon had written the lyric on April 25, on the back of a car-phone bill. But at the first studio session, McCartney noticed the lack of a middle eight, and supplied the more upbeat ‘Keeping an eye on the world going by my window…’ section.

In the wake of Lennon’s ‘discovery’ of backwards recording techniques during the making of Rain, it was now virtually de rigueur to try everything backwards – just in case. Harrison’s eight-measure solo in I’m Only Sleeping was one beneficiary of that process. The technique was somewhat refined, however, because Harrison deliberately crafted a solo which he thought would sound good in reverse, then asked George Martin to transcribe it backwards. What followed was an exhausting nine-hour session during which Martin conducted Harrison painstakingly through the reversed notation until he got it right. “I can still picture George hunched over his guitar for hours on end,” Emerick wrote in 2006, “headphones clamped on, brow furrowed in concentration.”

When he finally managed to play the solo, it was reversed before being inserted into the track.

Eleanor Rigby, begun on April 28, was a very different story. Folk-rock hit maker Donovan, one of McCartney’s near-neighbours, has recalled a day that spring when the Beatle turned up at his house uninvited: “He knocked on the door and said: ‘What are you doing?’ I said: ‘Writing songs. What are you doing?’ ‘I’m writing songs too…’ He sat down, and I said: ‘Okay, what do you got?’ ‘He said: ‘Well, I got this,’ and he sang this: ‘Ola Na Tunjee/Blowing his mind in the dark with a pipe full of clay.’”

Sing those words in your head to the tune of Eleanor Rigby and its easy to see where Paul was headed. He always considered melody the most important element in a song, and frequently tried out different words before settling on a final version (famously, Yesterday was called Scrambled Eggs for several weeks).

There’s no definitive account of precisely how he got from ‘Ola Na Tunjee’ to ‘Eleanor Rigby’, but McCartney’s version holds that he combined the first name of actress friend Eleanor Bron with a sign he saw in Bristol advertising wine merchants Rigby And Evens Ltd. Most curiously, though, there’s a 1939 gravestone bearing the name Eleanor Rigby in St. Peter’s churchyard in Woolton, just yards from the hall where Lennon and McCartney first played together in 1957. McCartney himself has acknowledged that he might have seen that stone as a teenager, and unknowingly unearthed it from his subconscious while working on the song.

Once he had the name and the lyric outline, the others helped piece together the rest, but in the final version, only the voices of McCartney, Lennon and Harrison are heard, backed by a pair of string quartets, arranged impeccably by Martin. In response to McCartney asking if the strings could sound more ‘biting’, Emerick again used close-mic’ing, this time with a separate mic on each instrument. The result was a dramatic improvement in the sound definition – rich, resonant strings with a front-and-centre clarity previously unheard on record.

Another flirtation with the classical world came about during the recording of For No One, which began on May 9. It had started life back in March as Why Did It Die, a McCartney song composed in a Swiss Alps ski resort chalet after an argument with his then-girlfriend Jane Asher. Neither Lennon nor Harrison took part in the recording, on which McCartney played piano, clavichord and bass, with Ringo on drums and tambourine.

“Occasionally we’d have an idea for some new kind of instrumentation, particularly for solos,” McCartney has said. “I was interested in the French horn because it was an instrument I’d always loved from when I was a kid. It’s a beautiful sound. So I went to George Martin and said: ‘How can we go about this?’ And he said: ‘Well, let me get the very finest.’”

For a fee of £50, Martin got Alan Civil, principal horn player for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, who remembers: “I thought the song was called For Number One, because I saw ‘For No One’ written down. Anyway, they played the existing tape to me, which was complete, and I thought it had been recorded in rather bad musical style, in that it was ‘in the cracks’, neither B-flat nor B-major. This posed a certain difficulty in tuning my instrument.”

Civil’s horn part was constructed by McCartney singing the melody he wanted to George Martin, who then transcribed it for Civil to sight-read. But they slyly slipped in a top F, one note higher than the instrument’s usual range. “Alan looked up from his bit of paper: ‘Er, George? I think there’s a mistake here – you’ve got a high F written down,’” McCartney remembers. “Then George and I said: ‘Yeah,’ and smiled back at him. And he knew what we were up to, and played it. These great players will do it.”

With its plangent, descending bassline, For No One’s understated mood of weary resignation provides a stunning contrast to the vibrantly experimental tracks that surround it.

On May 20 the band briefly left the confines of Abbey Road to film promos for Paperback Writer and Rain in the grounds of Chiswick House in West London. They returned to the studio on the 26th to continue the tradition of including one song sung by Ringo on every Beatles album. McCartney recalls the origins of Yellow Submarine thus: “I was laying in bed in the Ashers’ garret… I was thinking of it as a song for Ringo, so I wrote it as not too rangey in the vocal, then started making a story, sort of an ancient mariner telling the young kids where he’d lived.”

During the same Donovan encounter when McCartney had sung him Ola Na Tunjee, he also sang him, Donovan says, “another song that was missing a verse. It was a very small part, and I just went into the other room and put together ‘sky of blue, sea of green’. They had always asked other people for help with a line or two, so I helped with that line.”

Several people contributed words here and there for the lyrics to Yellow Submarine. A second recording session on June 1 turned into a mini-party with guests including Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull, Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd and a gaggle of Abbey Road staffers, all of them handed noise-making devices, ranging from chains to old bathtubs, dredged from the trap room, an under-stairs cupboard described by George Martin as “full of general sorts of percussion instruments”. Yellow Submarine even used an ancient cash register, which was used again in 1973 by Pink Floyd for Money.

Inevitably, down the years, critics and pundits have allocated symbolic significance to the song’s lyrics, sometimes drug-related, sometimes socio-political, but McCartney has always remained adamant that “it’s a happy place, that’s all. You know, it was just… We were trying to write a children’s song. That was the basic idea. And there’s nothing more to be read into it than there is in the lyrics of any children’s song.”

Which is not quite the case for Harrison’s I Want To Tell You, which was put together on June 2 and 3. Superficially it’s a simple tale of a young man tongue-tied in the presence of a pretty girl, but Harrison revealed that it was actually about “the avalanche of thoughts that are so hard to write down or say or transmit” caused by taking LSD.

His acid daze did not, however, prevent him from innovating musically; the song includes a rare use of the chord E7flat9, with which he was inordinately chuffed. When asked what it is, Harrison explained: “That’s an E7 with an F on top played on the piano. I’m really proud of that, as I literally invented that chord… John later borrowed it on I Want You.”

Neil Innes, of novelty act the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (and later The Rutles) vividly remembers recording an inconsequential music-hall song in Studio 1, during which he “snuck out, down the corridor to outside their studio, and I could hear very clearly what they were doing. They were working on one of George’s songs, and it was just fantastic listening to this, especially this F over the E.” At that moment, Innes realised just how far out of The Beatles’ league he was creatively. “Then I had to go back to our studio and record My Brother Makes The Noises For The Talkies.”

As the Revolver sessions neared their end, time was being taken up with mixing and overdubbing. But on June 8 they spent the first of two days recording Good Day Sunshine, which McCartney has described as “very much a nod to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s Daydream, the same traditional, almost trad-jazz feel”. Neither as technically complex nor as musically sophisticated as many other tracks on Revolver, it nevertheless includes a neat piece of studio trickery in the shape of George Martin’s honky-tonk piano solo, which was recorded slow, then speeded up to give it some extra zip.

It took three days, June 14-16, to record the sublime Here, There And Everywhere, but the writing of it, at Lennon’s Weybridge home, was much faster. “It was written quite quickly,” McCartney recalls, “out by the swimming pool in St George’s Hill while I was waiting for John to wake up one morning.” By the time Lennon woke, the song was almost complete, although McCartney concedes that when they went indoors to finish it, “John might have helped with a few last words”.

The last song recorded for Revolver was She Said She Said. According to Lennon it “was written after an acid trip in LA during a break in The Beatles’ [1965] tour, where we were having fun with The Byrds and lots of girls… Peter Fonda came in when we were on acid, and kept coming up to me, sitting next to me and whispering: ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.’ He was describing an acid trip he’d been on.” Lennon’s home demos reveal that after getting the basic idea for the song he changed it several times, added new sections and sought advice from Harrison. Harrison recalls that Lennon “had loads of bits, maybe three songs, that were unfinished, and I made suggestions and helped him to work them together so that they became one finished song”.

Lennon was evidently not entirely happy with She Said She Said, because it was not a serious contender for Revolver until the last moment, when they realised they were one song short.

An acerbic counterpoint to the honey of Here, There And Everywhere, it required a nine-hour session on June 21, during which Harrison played bass because McCartney and Lennon had become embroiled in a squabble.

Once it, and therefore the album, was done, producer George Martin reportedly sighed: “All right, boys, I’m just going for a lie down.”

As soon as the album was mixed, The Beatles played three dates in Germany, followed by a brief Far Eastern jaunt. But even while on the road, the album was uppermost in their minds. On June 26, the day of their gig in Hamburg, they finally decided on a name for it, discarding suggestions including Abracadabra, Four Sides Of The Eternal Triangle, Magic Circles, Pendulum and After Geography (Ringo’s jokey take on the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath). The multi-layered pun of Revolver won the day, finding favour with all of the band.

Also during the German trip, in Essen on June 25, they played Got To Get You Into My Life for support band Cliff Bennett And The Rebel Rousers. “Paul and John came in the dressing room and let us hear Got To Get You Into My Life,” Bennett recalls. “They’d thought it would be great for us because of all the brass. John played his guitar and Paul ‘dah-dah-dah’d the brass parts. Right away, even like that, I knew it was brilliant for us.”

Cliff Bennett and co. recorded the song at Abbey Road with McCartney as producer. “We were mesmerised with the things he did,” Bennett says. “New techniques like putting limiters on the piano, stuffing the grand piano cover inside the bass drum to get that flat-slap sound, things like that. Actually, I preferred the old ‘ba-boom’ sound from a bass drum, but we went along with it.”

At two am, when McCartney called it a day, Bennett still hadn’t done his vocals, so they reconvened the following morning. “Paul lived just along the road, so he turned up in his pyjamas, carpet slippers, and a jacket over his pyjama top. Must have walked round the corner like that, which I thought was hilarious.”

Revolver was released in the UK on August 5. On its front cover was a surreal mixed-media artwork by Klaus Voormann, the bassist with Manfred Mann and a friend of The Beatles since their early days in Hamburg. Having heard Tomorrow Never Knows, Voormann had decided: “They were being so avant-garde. I thought: ‘The cover has to do the same thing. How far can I go? How surreal and strange can it be?’”

His instantly striking collage, part line drawing and part photographic, ingeniously coupled modern art with commerciality. “We were very pleased,” McCartney enthused. “We liked the way there were little things coming out of people’s ears, and how he’d collaged things on a small scale while the drawings were on a big scale. He also knew us well enough to capture us rather beautifully in the drawings. We were flattered.”

Voormann was paid £40 for his work, which reduced Beatles manager Brian Epstein to tears of joy on first seeing it. It was subsequently awarded the 1966 Best Album Cover Grammy.

Cliff Bennett’s version of Got To Get You Into My Life was released on the same day as Revolver. The feeding frenzy accompanying any new Beatles album meant that virtually anyone lucky enough to acquire a pre-release test pressing headed straight for the nearest studio to record one of its tracks. Thus August 5 also saw the release of Here, There And Everywhere by The Fourmost, Good Day Sunshine by The Tremeloes, Tax Man by The Loose Ends, and two versions of For No One, one by Marc Reid and one by Brian Withers. In the coming weeks, Cilla Black released yet another For No One, while Episode Six went for Here, There And Everywhere. Intriguingly, apart from Bennett’s single, which peaked at No.6 in the UK, none of the other versions were noticeably successful, probably because so many people already owned the album that buying an inferior version seemed pointless.

Revolver’s commercial impact was immediate, the album topping the UK chart for seven weeks and the US chart for six. Culturally, although there had been earlier instances of psychedelic music, mostly in San Francisco, London and New York, Revolver opened the floodgates, and changed the thinking, and the chemical preferences, of young rock and pop visionaries worldwide. It’s hard to imagine the careers of Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and many others without the trail blazed by Revolver.

Even beyond the music world, The Beatles could now be seen as a socio-economic force. On August 10, just days after the release of Revolver, the American stock market wobbled because the price of shares in their US label, Capitol Records, dropped sharply. The reason was that Lennon’s observation that The Beatles were now “more popular than Jesus” had triggered bans and burnings of Beatles records. Of course, before too long their popularity would recover, but the incident made it clear that the music industry, and The Beatles themselves, were now seriously big business.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 226 (July 2016)

In the summer of 1977, a journalist for US rock magazine Circus interviewed Paul Rodgers at Bad Company’s Palm Springs HQ. The group were touring their new album, Burnin’ Sky, and had rented houses in the California resort, from where they’d fly back and forth in a private jet.

When Circus’s writer arrived at Rodgers’ place, he found the singer waiting to have a karate lesson. In fact, Rodgers was photographed wearing his karate robe, known as a gi, on the cover of Burnin’ Sky. On Bad Company’s last tour the group had lived up to their outlaw reputation, but the singer insisted he was a changed man now. “I’m working at keeping fit,” he said, “because people can get very messed up on tour.”

The records that preceded it have always unfairly overshadowed Bad Company’s fourth album. In the band’s back catalogue, Burnin’ Sky is close to being a ‘great lost album’, if any US Top 20 gold-certified record could ever truly be described as ‘lost’.

Bad Company swept into the Château d’Hérouville studio in France’s Oise Valley in the summer of 1976, just as Iggy Pop and David Bowie swept out after recording Pop’s The Idiot. They weren’t in good shape.

“We had been on the road pretty heavily and we were burned,” admitted Rodgers, who wrote the chords for the title track in his Paris hotel suite and then ad-libbed the lyrics in the studio the next day. It was a one-take affair, recorded by the Rolling Stones’ engineer Chris Kimsey, but it worked.

Burnin’ Sky’s throbbing groove sets the tempo for what follows. Boz Burrell and Simon Kirke maintain a snake-charming rhythm for 5.22 unbroken minutes, as treated vocals, Mick Ralphs’ wailing guitar, peals of thunder and pattering percussion whizz around the mix. It’s spare and economical – Bad Company at their best.

Once again, Rodgers handled the lion’s share of the writing, serving up the bump-and-grind rockers but also the more thoughtful Like Water, co-written with his then wife Machiko Shimizu. Elsewhere, Ralphs delivers two of the album’s best riffs on Man Needs Woman and Too Bad – the last riff cheekily reconfigured by Whitesnake for their song Girl in 1981.

Elsewhere, there’s the jokey intro to Everything I Need, in which Bad Company sing a few lines from The Happy Wanderer (‘…with my knapsack on my back!’) and which evokes a 4am refreshment session, with empty bottles on the table and the unwelcome dawn light creeping through the curtains.

Burnin’ Sky ends as it began with another fine but often forgotten track. On Master Of Ceremony, Rodgers pleads for global harmony over a mesmerising groove. The whole song is fuzzy around the edges, suggesting either the last round in that 4am drinking session or the head-spinning after-effects of one of Rodgers’ karate chops.

Burnin’ Sky maintained Bad Company’s strike rate on the UK and US charts but without a big hit single to raise the profile, it’s since slipped between the cracks. More’s the pity. It’s high time to don the gi, head back to the château and get reacquainted.

You can say that you saw it coming, but you’d be a liar. On October 28, 2016, Avenged Sevenfold released their seventh studio album, The Stage. It had been rumoured for some time that the California chart-toppers were working on new music, in no small part due to a seemingly standalone single coming out in mid-October. But no one who woke up that morning truly expected to have 73 minutes of new music waiting for them.

To hear them tell it, Avenged surprise-released their progressive metal opus out of fatigue. Their last album, 2013’s Hail To The King, had a months-long rollout featuring online puzzles, a radio-ruling single and countless interviews. They were also in a legal battle with their former label Warner Bros and feared some kind of sabotage. Those fears were realised when friend and wrestler Chris Jericho ‘leaked’ a fake release date for The Stage and the label hurriedly announced an unauthorised Avenged best-of album to come out one week earlier. Long story short: they were sick of the industry’s shit, and they felt that their fans were, too.

“We could sense the boredom in our fans [after Hail…],” rhythm guitarist Zacky Vengeance told this writer in 2017. “‘Oh, Avenged is trolling us. They’re doing the campaign and doing scavenger hunts, just release the fucking songs already! We just wanna hear the album!’ This time, we gave them nothing and then we gave them the album, like, ‘Here you go. Make up your mind!’”

Of course, Avenged didn’t invent the surprise album release. It’s been a thing since alt-rock leaders Radiohead effectively leaked their own album In Rainbows in 2007. But since The Stage, and especially in 2026, metal has embraced the tactic like no other genre. Over the last few months alone, black metal band Ultha, doomsters Spirit Adrift and returning post-metal idols Neurosis have all put out new records with no notice. Converge released their long-awaited 10th album Love Is Not Enough in February, only to reveal shortly afterwards that it was the start of a two-part series, with Hum Of Hurt swiftly following. Avenged themselves went back to the well with the divisive Statica EP last month.

For Spirit Adrift, whose surprise album Infinite Illumination was also their last, the decision was born from the same music industry fatigue as Avenged. “I think bands and artists have two choices,” mainman Nate Garrett told MusicRadar. “You crawl out on your fucking hands and knees with the shit kicked out of you, or you walk away on your own two feet. That’s the way I look at it right now. I respect bands that go out that way, like, on the high-note.”

On paper, releasing an album without any singles or promotional interviews seems like commercial suicide, and it has been. The Stage was the lowest-charting Avenged album since 2007, and when A Day To Remember surprise-released Big Ole Album Vol. 1 in February 2025, they slid from the number 15 US chart position of predecessor You’re Welcome to 155. Talking to Guitar.com in May 2025, on the day his band surprise-released their final album Clockworked, Stray From The Path’s Tom Williams acknowledged the probable commercial slump yet was unfazed.

“Charting was important in 2016, but charting in 2025, no one cares,” he said. “I get an email every week about first-week sales and they’re just lower and lower and lower and lower. We charted back in the day, when it mattered, and that was cool, but right now, it’s more important for me to present the record in a way that’s fun and exciting and fulfilling.”

Zacky said similar in 2017: “Album sales [for The Stage] weren’t as good, but at what point do people critique success on how many fucking albums you sell in a week rather than how big your balls are? So for us, I think we had some pretty big fucking balls and we did some exciting shit. I think the fans appreciate that, too.”

That makes sense: in the streaming age, barely anyone makes a liveable profit from recorded music, so why not circumvent the time-consuming promo process? And for the majority of metal bands, who reside in the genre’s underground, their output is more album-focussed than single-focussed. No one could realistically accuse drone outfit Khanate, who returned out of the blue with 2023’s To Be Cruel, or panoramic stoners Sleep, whose 2018 album The Sciences stunned everyone, of being radio darlings.

Although there are major commercial drawbacks, there are also commercial benefits, albeit less obvious ones. Williams, who manages Canadian metalcore band Counterparts and oversaw the surprise-release of their 2024 EP Let Them Die, insisted that fans were relieved about the lack of a staggered preorder process, which sometimes doesn’t get the record to their doorstep in time for release day anyway.

“That’s when it really clicked for me,” he said. “Everyone was like, ‘Thank God! No fucking pre-order! The vinyl ships now!’ It’s what people want, and it’s what I want: I’m a consumer, too!”

Surprise album releases also have the potential to feel like events, in the way that traditional release days rarely do. When Neurosis came back with An Undying Love For A Burning World, it was monumental news. In the same instant, fans learned that the pioneers had reunited after a decade away, ex-Isis frontman Aaron Turner had joined, they were returning to the live circuit, and a new album was out, in full. It became a massive talking point for a cult band.

Had these stories been drip-fed, it would have been less of a moment, and the hype actually let Neurosis reverse the surprise-album commercial curse. Take a quick glance at Spotify and An Undying Love… is already one of their most listened-to albums, eclipsing even what was long assumed to be their swansong, 2016’s Fires Within Fires.

But these are all bands who are either firmly in the underground, who are breaking up or whose names are firmly established. For an up-and-coming artist looking to broaden their audience, a surprise release would be one of the worst things to do. As Sleep Token made readied breakthrough third album, 2023’s Take Me Back To Eden, the rollout was everything. Their scheme of sharing singles in rapidfire succession (five from early January to mid-February) offered the kind of frequency that social media algorithms reward, and they became a fast TikTok sensation. Safe to say, had the album just been unloaded in one go with no warning, they wouldn’t be filling arenas and headlining stadiums right now.

A surprise release is a great way to reward an active fanbase but no way to build one. For as long as heavy metal bands want to rebel against the music industry system and emphasise the album over the single, it will have a place in the genre. Whether or not it’s a good commercial move, if you’re truly set on doing a surprise release, you probably don’t care by that point either way.

The year 1971 was a momentous one for prog rock. Among the year’s signal albums were ELP’s Tarkus, Pink Floyd’s Meddle, Hawkwind’s In Search Of Space and Genesis’s Nursery Cryme, not to mention a brace from Yes.

The three-minute pop song had become passé. In its place were labyrinthine epics about things like Greek nymphs, moon dogs and strange Russian hogweed. This was music with a default setting of ‘challenging’.

Rock music was suddenly taking itself very seriously indeed. Never mind that much of it actually sounded thrillingly original, the battle lines between new and old – between knotty-browed experimentation and straight-up rock’n’pop – were well and truly drawn.

Enter Jethro Tull, who since 1967 had gradually morphed from a fairly conventional white blues band into avatars of something altogether weirder. Their fourth album Aqualung, released in March ’71, was a miasmic mix of folk, jazz and rock, wherein leader Ian Anderson vocalised all manner of thoughts on religion, consumerism and global poverty.

It sold by the bucketload, sealed their reputation at home in the UK and made them big stars in America. But critics suddenly started lumping Tull in with the prog pack, which Anderson didn’t exactly take kindly to.

“Prog was beginning to have a derisory and slightly critical note attached to it,” he explains today. “Bands like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes and Genesis were seen as being bombastic, over-the-top, pain-in-the-arse, showing-off kinds of performers. And to some extent I felt that, too.”

Anderson’s response was to pour his scorn for critics and portentous musos alike into Tull’s next album, Thick As A Brick. What began as a song idea soon flowered into an intricate, 45-minute treatise that made dizzying use of harpsichord, strings, trumpet, organ, acoustic guitar and Anderson’s signature flute, among other things.

The whole shebang was then housed inside a spoof 12-page newspaper, The St. Cleve Chronicle & Linwell Advertiser, which claimed that Anderson had adapted all the lyrics for the record from a poem by an eight-year-old child prodigy called Gerald Bostock. What could be more prog than that?

“When I wrote Thick As A Brick I tried to approach it in a humorous and satirical way,” Anderson says. “The whole idea happened very quickly. It was done in a fast and furious period of time. I’d just turn up at rehearsal every lunchtime with what I’d written that morning. Then the guys would dutifully grapple with it and we’d try to recap on what we did yesterday and the day before.

“By the end of 10 days we’d rehearsed to a performance level all the elements of Thick As A Brick. And we went in and recorded it, literally in a few days. The album cover actually took us longer than the music itself.”

So is Thick As A Brick a song, or an album? And was it intended as more than mere prog foolery?

“It was written very much as I went along, and was a very natural, organically evolving piece of music. There was an almost Monty Pythonesque idea in my head of this pastiche approach to creating this idea – ‘the mother of all concept albums’, as I’ve come to call it.

“It was presenting such a preposterous notion that an eight-year-old boy had written this saga in some poetry competition. Of course, you can then suspend disbelief and just go with it. But there were a lot of countries where they just didn’t get the joke. They thought it was a real story, that this precocious schoolboy had written this stuff and somehow I turned it into an album.

“You have to preserve the fiction to some extent, because that’s your starting point – the absurdity of precocious youth and complex ideas; that somehow Thick As A Brick is an album about what this youth might become and the distortion of his ideas as a prepubescent child. Essentially it’s setting out future scenarios of what might happen.”

So there was a serious side to it all?

“Some of the elements in the lyrics are quite serious,” offers Anderson, “where I drew upon my own childhood and my own early experiences for ideas for sections within the overall work. But I was also drawing very much on the world of the eight-year-old Gerald Bostock. It was part of the absurdity.”

Thick As A Brick was edited and released as a single in April 1972, a month after the album’s release. But skimming the cream from a three-quarter-hour masterwork was never going to be easy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it failed to make the charts on either side of the Atlantic.

The album, however, made No.5 in the UK, while over in the US it topped the Billboard chart for two weeks. It remains Jethro Tull’s second-biggest seller in America. Critics and fans generally adored it, but Anderson had all eventualities covered in any case.

One section of The St. Cleve Chronicle has the audacity to contain a mock review of the album, describing it as being marked by “ugly changes of time signature, and banal instrumental passages”. Was he trying to make it all ultimately bomb-proof?

“It’s okay for me to say those things about my own work,” Anderson reasons, “but I don’t think it’s too cool if somebody else tries to do it, because I’m already well aware of it. There’s every scope to say that this is noodly, extreme, anal, pompous, bombastic, arrogant – all of those words are applicable to prog rock and definitely applicable to Thick As A Brick – but they’re there on purpose. And if you don’t get the joke, fuck off! Don’t start telling me something that I know full well, because I wrote it to be like that. That’s the point!”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 159 (May 2011)

Taking Back Sunday have announced they’re reissuing their third studio album Louder Now to mark its 20th anniversary.

It’ll arrive on October 16 via Craft Recordings in deluxe vinyl and CD packages, complete with the bonus tracks Sleep and Brooklyn (If You See Something, Say Something. On the LP version, they’ll be presented on a 7-inch single, while both songs will be included on the deluxe CD.

Frontman Adam Lazzara says: “Our record Louder Now represents a huge milestone for me and to know it has made an impact on so many other people’s lives as well is something I still struggle to get my head around.

“To have the opportunity to celebrate that record with both John Nolan and Fred Mascherino onstage together, along with Shaun Cooper, is incredible to me. The songs sound stronger than I can ever remember live and I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am to share that with everyone.”

Taking Back Sunday are currently on tour, with their next live performance scheduled for Musikfest in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on August 8. They also have further dates planned with Thrice and Saves The Day.

Next year, the band will head back out on the road with Weezer for their run of UK and European shows, with the first date taking place in Dublin on May 12.

Taking Back Sunday: Louder Now Deluxe

Vinyl edition

Side A
1. What’s It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?
2. Liar (It Takes One To Know One)
3. MakeDamnSure
4. Up Against (Blackout)
5. My Blue Heaven

Side B
6. Twenty-Twenty Surgery
7. Spin
8. Divine Intervention
9. Miami
10. Error Operator
11. I’ll Let You Live

7"

Side A
1. Brooklyn (If You See Something, Say Something)

Side B
2. Sleep

CD edition

1. What’s It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?
2. Liar (It Takes One To Know One)
3. MakeDamnSure
4. Up Against (Blackout)
5. My Blue Heaven
6. Twenty-Twenty Surgery
7. Spin
8. Divine Intervention
9. Miami
10. Error Operator
11. I’ll Let You Live
12. Brooklyn (If You See Something, Say Something)
13. Sleep

• Looking for a budget turntable for your ever-growing vinyl collection? We have you covered
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In January 1982, Def Leppard entered Park Gate Studios in Battle, East Sussex to make the follow-up to their breakthrough album High ’N’ Dry. Under the aegis of producer ‘Mutt’ Lange, they pieced together a record the likes of which had never been heard before: the gleaming pop-metal behemoth Pyromania. And Photograph was the perfect single with which to launch it.

Photograph embodied Leppard’s brave new sonic world. Gone were the gritty AC/DC-isms of High ’N’ Dry, replaced by machine-tooled melodies and Lange’s hi-finish gloss, oven-ready for brand new music channel MTV.

Lange himself came up with the song’s lyrical hook. “Mutt had the line ‘All I’ve got is a photograph,’” said Elliott. “I said, “That’s a Ringo Starr song.” He went, ‘Nobody will ever notice.’ For Elliott, the song title referred to an unobtainable someone.

"I said to Mutt, 'Wouldn't it be great to write a song about a woman who's the ultimate woman, but also a woman you could never have?' He said, 'What do you mean, never?' And I said, 'Because she's fucking dead!"

The video featured footage of Marilyn Monroe, suggesting the iconic Hollywood star was its subject. “Over the years it’s become exaggerated to Biblical proportions that Photograph was written about her,” said Elliott. “I don’t want to break anybody’s heart here, but Marilyn Monroe was just another average actress to me.”

"I used to live in a little basement apartment on the outskirts of London, toward Heathrow," he told Rolling Stone. "It was a real dump – there was a hole in the wall with a poster covering it up, kind of like in The Shawshank Redemption. It wasn't an escape hatch, but it looked like one! And the poster that was over this hole was Marilyn Monroe."

"Def Leppard's Photograph looked different from anything at the time," said the video's famed director, David Mallet, who'd previously worked with David Bowie, Queen, Blondie, the Rolling Stones and more. "Different colours, mood, visuals, editing, photography. It's hard to believe now, because it looks like every heavy metal video ever made. But nothing had ever looked like that before."

"When we did Photograph, we went mental," said Elliot, who frosted his hair for the first time on the morning of the shoot. "Phil wore a polka-dot top. Steve wore all white. The day before the shoot, I had £25 in my pocket, and I went down Kings Road in London to get some clothes. I found a pair of black pleather trousers that were too short by about four inches, so I bought them, and some leg warmers, which I'd seen in the TV show Fame.

"When I was done buying the pants and the effeminate leggings, I had £8 left. I walked past a punk rock shop, and they had a red, white and blue Union Jack shirt in the window for £7.99. It was all I could afford, and it was loud. After that video, the shirt became so iconic that we sold almost 100,000 of them on tour that summer."

The reception to Pyromania in Britain was decidedly cool, a hangover from Leppard allegedly “selling out” to America a few years earlier. In the US it was a different story: Photograph was a huge hit on radio and MTV. “Photograph blew out the door the way More Than A Feeling or Radar Love or Black Betty did,” says Elliott. “I met George Michael, and he said: ‘I bought Photograph – great song!’ That’s when you know you’re crossing over.”

Not everyone appreciated it. Photograph was one of the videos that spurred Tipper Gore to form the PMRC, the organisation that advocated for increased parental control over children's access to music, after she watched it on MTV alongside videos by Van Halen, Mötley Crüe and Scorpions. "The images frightened my children; they frightened me," said Gore. "The graphic sex and violence were too much for us to handle."

Nevertheless, the single was the first proper stepping stone on Def Leppard’s journey to megastardom, helping to push the sales of Pyromania into the multi-millions. It remains a staple of the band’s live set today.

“When I was a kid in Sheffield,” Elliott says, “I was this geeky twat who liked music and wasn’t living in the real world. All I ever wanted was to be a star.”

It was Photograph that helped him achieve that dream.

Aurora is the third Yes studio album to be released in five years, an astonishing work rate for a veteran band who seem to be riding a genuine wave of creativity. Prog spoke to Steve Howe and vocalist Jon Davison about this burst of activity and how, even after nearly 60 years, the band are still honing their craft.

To release three albums in the space of five years would be a fine effort for any contemporary band. For a supposed ‘heritage act’ with a history spanning more than 55 years, it’s a herculean feat – although Yes’ current rate of work isn’t quite on a par with their run of early-1970s classics.

They recently unveiled Aurora, the third work in a trilogy that began with The Quest in 2021 and continued with Mirror To The Sky in 2023. “I really like some of the songs on The Quest,” says guitarist Steve Howe. “But we were finding our feet. Then on Mirror To The Sky, we were much more assertive with the rock elements. When the opportunity came up for another record, we all felt we should try to do even better; we wanted to develop more polish and detail, leading to a greater continuity in the music. I think it’s quite a successful project in that regard.”

A feature of Aurora is the varied combinations of writing credits, with even Jay Schellen – playing drums on a Yes album for the second time following Alan White’s passing in 2022 – contributing to the 13-minute album centrepiece, Countermovement. “Each song takes a great deal of crafting, and every member of the band contributes,” explains Howe, “especially in developing the arrangements. That’s always been the key to Yes music. We still want to attempt to inspire, and to get across that Yes are a band of very high standards, which we still hope to achieve.”

A further aspect of the record is the enhanced contributions of keyboardist Geoff Downes, following a somewhat muted role on Mirror To The Sky. Vocalist Jon Davison confirms it was a deliberate move. “We wanted to bring him more tightly into the fold, so we expressed our love and appreciation for him and how important it was that he be given a position where he could place his unique stamp on the album.”

Downes was chiefly responsible for the Anytime Soon section of Countermovement, sung by Howe, and much of the music of the grandiose Ariadne. The latter is one of only two orchestral arrangements from Paul K Joyce, whose fine work graces all three recent albums; his other contribution being on the title song. “The treatment’s quite different this time because although we only use the orchestra twice, they’re on big tracks,” says Howe. “I didn’t want them to keep interfering with the band too much, so when they had their moments, I wanted to make them really huge.”

Davison is also full of praise for Joyce: “He’s our sixth bandmate, if you will, because his classical touches are simply beautiful, and really give a broader sense and legitimacy to our music. I love working with him. His two arrangements are very different. He composed the piano on the beginning of the title track and then arranged that surge into its great, powerful intro, taking various vocal themes from the song and intertwining them. It’s just brilliant.”

Even though Downes is much more prominent on Aurora it doesn’t mean there’s any less of Howe. As always, he provides a wealth of textures, from the layering on the two short pieces that bookend Countermovement to the acoustic and classical textures of Turnaround Situation and Love Lies Dreaming, then the almost aggressive distortion of All Hands On Deck. His beloved Gibson ES-175 was a key instrument.

“It was really enjoyable having the opportunity to use the 175 so much on this album,” he says. “But I still like to develop my steel guitar work, especially because it lets me combine unusual textures. You get that very stern and emotional steel in Freedom’s Edge [the final part of Countermovement]. But in Taro [the first part], it’s more of a playful interplay between the electric and the steel, and I don’t know whether anybody’s ever done that. So I still try to cross bridges I haven’t attempted myself yet.”

Davison’s approach to vocal melodies is intriguing. He’s often working with music that’s already composed and arranged and so his melodies sometimes explore directions the listener may not expect, or indeed appreciate on first listen. “I sometimes approach the vocal melodies instrumentally,” he says, “so I’ll write them with a keyboard, which brings out more complexity than if I were just singing off the top of my head.”

In other areas Aurora is downright catchy; listeners may find that the chorus of Turnaround Situation, for instance, becomes an earworm. Davison laughs as he remembers how he came up with the melody: “I have this habit of repeating something my wife has said – I’ll sing it back to her. It’s quite annoying, actually. One evening, we got lost leaving engineer Curtis Schwartz’s studio. It was late at night in the dark English countryside, and we kept missing our turn. Emily started saying, ‘You know, this is a turnaround situation.’ So rather than me helping her through our navigational predicament, I start singing, ‘Turnaround situation lately,’ and there it was!”

One aspect of the album that might intrigue listeners and even split the crowd somewhat is its structure. It’s front-loaded with pieces that will sound relatively familiar in style; but it finishes with three shorter tracks that display some wild stylistic twists – Howe’s surprising All Hands On Deck, the wordless Outside The Box and the sensitive Davison ballad Emotional Intelligence. How were the sequencing decisions made? “That’s down to the brilliance of Thomas Waber of InsideOut,” says Davison. “He formulates the song order and how it should flow, and then suggests it to the band. It’s worked out that way each time over the last three albums that we finish on a quieter song. Perhaps I have some quality in my songwriting that appeals to him as a nice closure.”

When the title track was released ahead of the full album, fans reported mixed reactions. “I don’t really read any comments,” Davison says, “but when the video came out on YouTube and I saw there were so many likes and views, I read some of the feedback. The first one caught my eye – it was really insightful, which led me to the next one. I thought, ‘Don’t read the comments; you know better.’ I kept going, and in the main they were really positive. But I’m not part of Facebook, so I’m not privy to the battle zone, if you will.”

One song that might well prod the hornet’s nest is Howe’s deceptively simple All Hands On Deck. “Fundamentally, Yes is a rock band,” he says, “and if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be Yes – we’d be a lot more middle of the road. So yeah, All Hands On Deck does shout in your face a bit, but I think it’s refreshing to have a track like that.”

While some of Davison’s lyrics, such as on Ariadne, have their roots in mythology, others hint a little at former vocalist Jon Anderson’s more oblique phrasing. Does Davison feel any pressure of legacy? “I’ve learned to see it not as pressure, because that would be limiting. I see it as inspiration. I just respect the man so much. He’s a sheer genius; he’s a hero of mine, and for whatever reason, the universe decided that I needed to step up and accept this call of duty from Chris Squire, Alan White and Steve Howe.

“And I’ve done my best to honour Jon. So it’s not like I want to go one way and this voice in my head is telling me to go another. I just do my best to celebrate the Yes music – music I love.”

With Howe awaiting an essential medical procedure, the band’s upcoming live shows have been pushed back to the spring of 2027. The plan had been to perform the same set they’d been playing during the US tour in 2025, based around the Fragile album, and it seems that will remain the case. They also included Circles Of Time from Mirror To The Sky, which raises the question of whether a song or two from Aurora might appear.

“It’s really challenging to take on the new songs, which is why it’s impossible to say for certain,” Davison says. “When we first toured after Mirror To The Sky came out, we played Cut From The Stars, which wasn’t easy; and we attempted All Connected, which went really well for a while,but the set got too long and that was the one that had to get cut.”

Although the band see their three recent albums as a trilogy, it seems that this definition is a loose one – it isn’t the end of a Yes journey, but more a convenient way to frame the last five years. There’s a clear feeling that there’s more to follow. “We’re really in a good stride now,” says Davison. “There’s a sense of momentum. The muse and its music are sort of taking over the artist, if you will. So, I certainly think there is more music to come.”

Howe feels the same: “These three albums bookend a story about the band. So where we go next has to be more revolutionary or stylistically somewhat different. I think that’s what Yes are about: we don’t have to confine ourselves to being a certain kind of band. We’re free to be whatever we can be. We need to keep moving forward. It’s no good to keep looking back and saying, ‘Lset’s do this song – it’s a bit like Yours Is No Disgrace.’”

So, regardless of how Yes fans react to Aurora, it seems this is a band with plenty more to offer, and with so many of their contemporaries now retired or, at best, sporadically active, that’s quite remarkable.

Aurora is on sale now.

Ghost frontman Tobias Forge, Anthrax bassist Frank Bello and Korn drummer Ray Luzier have contributed to a re-recorded version of German heavy metal band Accept’s 1980 deep cut Save Us.

The re-imagining, which you can hear below, also features Accept themselves and is taken from an upcoming tribute album marking 50 years since the Solingen band formed. The 19-song set, Teutonic Titans 1976–2026, comes out on September 4 via Napalm.

Accept guitarist Wolf Hoffman says in a statement that Forge “was not really on my radar” until he met him at a show in Stockholm. The singer told him that Save Us was his favourite Accept song, and that he once wanted Ghost to cover it, but plans were scrapped.

“Save Us? I don’t even remember that song,” Hoffman jokes. “Nobody has even mentioned that song! I had to go back and listen to it. After I saw a Ghost show it all made sense to me. It really fits his style and I could really imagine him doing that song really well. He’s right, it’s a fun song!”

Teutonic Titans 1976–2026 was announced in April and features guest spots from 50 rock and heavy metal musicians. Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and ex-Motörhead drummer Mikkey Dee play on Fast As A Shark, Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford sings Balls To The Wall and The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan appears on Love Child.

Ex-Judas Priest guitarist K.K. Downing, Overkill singer Bobby Blitz, Fozzy frontman Chris Jericho and many others are set to appear on as-yet-undisclosed tracks.

Accept are also celebrating their 50th anniversary on the road. The band are currently making their way across mainland Europe and will perform at Helsinki Metal Fest on Friday, August 7. They’ll play two headline UK dates and a set at Stonedead festival in Newark later this month, before returning to the mainland for a headline tour from November to December.

Although Ghost are best known for such successful hard rock originals as the multi-Platinum-selling Mary On A Cross and the Grammy Award-winning Cirice, they’re a prolific cover act. They’ve released three EPs mostly or entirely composed of covers, the latest being 2023’s Phantomime. In 2021, they contributed a take on Metallica’s Enter Sandman to the US heavy metal giants’ tribute album The Metallica Blacklist.

Ghost are currently on hiatus following the completion of their globe-trotting Skeletour earlier this year, but are the subject of a new documentary/concert film, 2 Big To Rig, which hits cinema and IMAX screens worldwide from August 26. The film follows 2024’s Rite Here Rite Now and offers a rare look at the real-life workings of the band, who wear masks onstage and are made up of anonymous members apart from Forge.

Meanwhile, Bello’s band Anthrax are gearing up to release their 12th album Cursum Perficio on September 18. It will mark their first studio release in 10 years. Luzier’s Korn will tour Europe and the UK in October and November.

Electric Callboy’s rise remains one of metal’s most fascinating transformations. Over the last few years, the Germans have gone from metalcore oddballs with a love of early 00s club anthems to Download main stage arrivals, collecting viral hits and collaborations with Babymetal along the way.

The catalyst was 2022’s Tekkno, an album that turned a novelty act into one of metal’s hottest properties. It leaves Tanzneid with a sizeable challenge: proving lightning can strike twice.

Fortunately, the album arrives with all the subtlety of an air horn, doubling down on everything that has carried Electric Callboy this far. The title track, translating to ‘dance envy’, erupts in a rush of electro trance hooks and brutal riffs like a brawl in a Berlin nightclub at 3am, but its secret weapon is a chorus so shamelessly infectious it could have been lifted from a forgotten Eurodance classic.

Hypercharged and Elevator Operator lean into EC’s gift for turning the sort of trance pop nonsense that once filled Ministry Of Sound compilations into bona fide festival anthems. Hypercharged opens with the cartoonish energy of Aqua’s Barbie Girl before slamming the accelerator through the floor and disappearing into a whirlwind of guitar riffs, clubland excess and clean-sung choruses.

Meanwhile, Elevator Operator is gloriously daft, pairing rubbery synths and rap metal bounce with a chorus that feels like a TikTok dance craze waiting to happen. It’s the sort of hook most bands would be embarrassed to write and most would kill to have.

And that’s the thing about Electric Callboy: beneath the breakdowns, strobes and Euro-silliness lies some genuinely elite songwriting. Even boyband pisstake The Way You Are and the breezy The Offspring collab Let The Good Times Roll reveal a knack for melody rarely found in metalcore. Babymetal prove equally at home on Ratatata, whose collision of kawaii metal and electronicore absurdity has already become one of the band’s defining songs, earning it Metal Hammer’s 2024 Song Of The Year crown.

Tanzneid isn’t all giant hooks, however. Heartclub is the album’s heaviest detour, trading EDM fun for blunt-force trauma, while Revery wraps its heaviness in the atmosphere of a dark fairytale. The Saviour and a cover of Sum 41’s Still Waiting keep the momentum high, while the remixes feel more like an afterparty.

If there’s a criticism, it’s that Tanzneid occasionally feels more like the culmination of an era than a fresh chapter. Much of its strongest material – including Ratatata, Elevator Operator and the title track – has been circulating for months or even years. Still, familiarity isn’t the same thing as fatigue. The closing remixes underline how deeply dance music remains embedded in Electric Callboy’s DNA, while the album as a whole feels like a celebration of everything they’ve become.

Tanzneid may not represent a dramatic reinvention, but it doesn’t need to. Few bands have spent the last five years turning irreverence into such a potent creative and commercial force. Electric Callboy once looked destined to become nothing but a joke. Instead, they’ve become one of modern metal’s biggest success stories.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 416, August 2026. Order your copy now, with an exclusive Electric Callboy cover and numbered art print, via the Louder webstore.

Tanzneid is out on Friday (August 7) via Century Media. Electric Callboy tour Europe from January to March.

The career of Dream Theater can be divided into three distinct parts. Many hardliners consider the band's initial years with Mike Portnoy on the drum stool as definitive, and such claims have solid grounding.

From the 1989 unveiling of a highly promising debut entitled When Dream And Day Unite, until September of 2010, when Portnoy dumbfounded his bandmates with the ill-received proposal of a five-year hiatus that would prompt his shocking exit from the group, Dream Theater forged a reputation as the chief progenitors of the genre known as progressive-metal.

With Portnoy, the North American-based quintet set bold new standards, and in much the same way as a very particular type of Van Halen fan refuses to acknowledge its Sammy Hagar-fronted line-up, many still choose to undervalue or even outright dismiss Dream Theater’s not inconsiderable achievements with Portnoy's replacement, Mike Mangini (of Extreme, Steve Vai and Annihilator fame).

Frankly, it’s their loss. The introduction of the noted percussionist allowed Dream Theater not only to survive a potentially calamitous creative crisis but to reevaluate, reenergise and prosper.

Released in 2010, their debut with Mangini, A Dramatic Turn Of Events, generated a first-ever Grammy nomination. Although Dream Theater didn’t win the award, within two years they were shortlisted once again (losing out for a second time). The Mangini era lasted five albums, and 2016’s love-it-or-loathe-it The Astonishing was the biggest, boldest thing that they’d ever created – no small feat.

In 2024, to the delight of many, Portnoy returned, and the third part of the Dream Theater story began with a new collection of songs, Parasomnia. "My regret was not leaving the band," said the drummer. "The regret is that it took so long to reunite. Now that we’re back together, it feels so natural, so good and so right. I just wish it had happened sooner."