We’ve officially reached the point where it’s so hot that we don’t want to go outside anymore. But who needs sun, sea and socialising, anyway? We’ve got a brand-new week of heavy metal bangers to listen to!

Before we dive into that, though, let’s look at the results of last week’s poll. Metalcore up-and-comers Koh put in a respectable showing, receiving 31 percent of our readers’ votes, but the far-and-away champions were goth metal institution Moonspell and their throwback track The Great Wolf In The Sky. Congrats, chaps! Your prize money is in the mail.*

Now, beneath a ceiling fan that’s been spinning so long and so hard that it may take off at any moment, we cast our eyes to a refreshed lineup. This week, Anthrax, Amon Amarth and Hanabie are among the noiseniks vying for your approval. Listen to their offerings below and decide which ones will be saved from the lion pit.

(*It is not.)

Anthrax – The Edge Of Perfection

Following on from the May release of It's For The Kids, the lead single previewing Anthrax's forthcoming 12th studio album, Cursum Perficio, the New York thrash metal legends return with another stunner, The Edge Of Perfection, which guitarist Scott Ian describes as "the apex predator of Anthrax songs" and - quite a claim, this - "the best song we’ve ever written". If this doesn't get you excited for the September 18 release of the first Anthrax album in TEN FUCKING YEARS, you might wanna check your pulse to make sure you're still actually alive.

Amon Amarth – Upphaf

Amon Amarth going acoustic? Sounds as likely as a tortoise going mach five. But, for their new standalone single, the Viking berserkers dropped the metal and tapped into moody Nordic folk. Upphaf (Old Norse for “beginning” or “origin”) bridges the gap between the Swedes’ last album The Great Heathen Army and its as-yet-unannounced follow-up, with the members saying its quietness stands in stark contrast to the “fury” of what’s coming next. Reckon this will make the setlist for their European tour in October?

Hanabie – Life Is Short, O Brave Girl

Anime’s favourite metal band have added another jewel to their crown. Following collaborations with the series Momentary Lily and Araiguma Calcal-Dan, new single Life Is Short, O Brave Girl is the opening theme to Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games: a new show about friends bonding over their shared love of beat-’em-ups. It’s as colourful and electrified as you’d expect from anything under the Hanabie banner, including their recent EP Iconic, which dropped at the start of the year.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Level 5

If the title of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard's upcoming 28th studio album, Alien Metal, has you imagining the prolific and always creatively restless Melbourne psych kings pivoting towards some sort of Voivod-meets-Slift space rock, we're here to warn you that it's nothing of the sort. Instead, we're promised "a seamless, ever-shifting journey through techno, hardcore, house and jungle influences, filtered through King Gizzard's unmistakable psychedelic lens", which sounds like one hell of an intriguing trip to be fair, not least because guitarist/vocalist Joey Walker assures us that it "goes hard". Here's a tasty preview of what's to come.

Devildriver – Strike And Kill

Devildriver’s 11th album Strike And Kill, out today, is the best thing the American groove heavyweights have made in more than a decade. The title track demonstrates why. After a dramatic opening, it drops into a blitzkrieg of metal, endowed with a ferocious turn from frontman Dez Fafara. New producer/guitarist Gabe Mangold unquestionably earns his paycheque, as well, with every chugging riff landing like a sledgehammer to the foot. Stream the full album to hear one of the New Wave Of American Heavy Metal’s finest bands rediscover their mojo.

Chat Pile – Pen I S Mall

Oklahoma City noise-rock supremos Chat Pile offer up another taste of their forthcoming Who Loves The Sun album (scheduled for a September 4 release), and - hurrah! - it's a deliciously bleak feel bad blast of rage and loathing. Pen I S Mall finds frontman Raygun Busch looking back on his past life as a maintenance man in a shopping mall with joy-free lyrics such as "the world is full of hallowed halls of degradation / Hard to think but your whole life can pass, as a series of acts of subordination". Here comes the bummer!

No Cure – Brain Matter Displacement

Well, now this is just nasty. Taken from the Birmingham, Alabama straight edge metallic hardcore band's debut album It Is Going To Get Dark, out today, Brain Matter Displacement is an unapologetically savage revenge fantasy, with guesting force-of-nature Jayway from Bayway spitting "I don't give a fuck if you like me / Bitch you could suck my dick / Cause you gone have to deal with me ", while vocalist Blaythe Steuer promises to "smash your skull in to the pavement". Charming.

Fallen Letters – A Familiar Absence

Hailing from Bengaluru, India, Fallen Letters play a strain of atmospheric prog metal ideal for Opeth and Katatonia fans. A Familiar Absence is their first release since last year’s mighty debut album Mindfractures and finds the band in diverse form, blending black, death and post-metal. Frontman Vishal Naidu is similarly restless, as he darts between haunting cleans and full-throttle growls. No word on a second album yet, but hopefully it’s sooner rather than later, because stuff this good is add

In May 1965, at the end of a two-month solo tour of the UK, Bob Dylan was considering giving up performing. “I was drained,” he said afterwards. “I was playing a lot of songs I didn’t want to play. I was singing words I really didn’t want to sing.”

On his flight home, Dylan wrote something that would change his mind. It was a 20-page stream-of-consciousness poem, which he jokingly called “a long piece of vomit.” A few days later, in his Greenwich Village apartment, while looking it over, he hit on what he called the “slow motion phrase” of “How does it feel?” and that brought the song into focus.

He edited the verses, setting them to a simple three-chord progression nicked from La Bamba by Ritchie Valens. While Dylan’s interviews of the time are notoriously unreliable sources of information, one thing that he couldn’t camouflage was his delight with Like A Rolling Stone, calling it the “best song he’d ever written.”

On June 15, 1965, he brought it into Columbia Studio A in New York, running through it with producer Tom Wilson and a band led by prodigal blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield. Dylan had handpicked Bloomfield for the session, though strangely insisted he not play “any of that B.B. King shit.”

Early takes of the song were in waltz time, moody and a bit unfocused. Then the next day, a catalyst arrived in the form of Al Kooper. Bloomfield’s presence denied the guitarist his usual spot, so Kooper played the Hammond B-3 organ instead. In one of rock’s happiest accidents, he ignited the band to a once-in-a-lifetime groove.

But Like A Rolling Stone is first and foremost about words. Rhymes dovetail with rhymes, lines bend meter, images startle (‘Napoleon in rags’). It’s like proto-rap. And it’s all delivered with a sneering attitude.

Even the six-minute length was a middle finger to the three-minute rule of the day, with Columbia initially hesitant to release the single until an acetate was leaked to Arthur, a newly opened, high-profile discotheque in Midtown Manhattan, by the label's new-releases coordinator, Shaun Considine.

It all fell into place. The club DJs played the song on repeat, the crowd loved it, and several watching DJs called Columbia the following morning to request their own copies. Like A Rolling Stone was then released as a single on July 20, reaching No. 2 in the US Billboard charts (No. 1 in Cashbox) and becoming a worldwide hit.

The song was the pivot point where he stopped being a folkie and started being a rocker, and he rubber-stamped the deal five days later at the Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan famously played the first "plugged-in" set of his career. After kicking off with a fiery version of Maggie's Farm, he followed it with the new song, much to the apparent chagrin of festival organiser and folk legend Pete Seeger, who told the sound crew, "If I had an axe, I'd cut the cable."

Decades later, Seeger wrote a postcard to Dylan clarifying his stance, claiming that his fury was not directed at Dylan's choice to go electric, but at the "distorted sound" of the PA system he was obliged to play through.

"My mistake was not challenging from the stage the foolish few who booed," Seeger wrote. "I shoulda said, Howling Wolf goes electric, why can't Bob?"

“I’d never written anything like …Rolling Stone before,” Dylan later said. “And it suddenly came to me that that was what I should do. After writing that, I wasn’t interested in writing a novel or a play. I wanted to just write songs.”

And didn’t he?

Metallica's WorldWired tour kicked off in 2016. Every night, about two-thirds of the way through the set, there was a jam: Rob Trujillo and Kirk Hammett's Doodle. In Amsterdam in the summer of 2017, on the second of two nights at the Ziggo Dome, the pair changed things up and added a ragged cover of Golden Earring's Radar Love to the Doodle. A tradition was born. A local song, for local people. And it's happened at most Metallica shows in the years since.

It's rough and ready. The parts are learned before the performance, and Rob reads the lyrics from a music stand. They're often in a foreign language. But it's become one of the most anticipated parts of the show.

In Minneapolis in 2018, they covered When Doves Cry as a tribute to local hero Prince. In Stockholm, Abba's Dancing Queen was wheeled out. In London, it was Iron Maiden's Killers. You get the idea.

Some of the artists they cover are established, while others require a little more local knowledge. For every Black Sabbath or Rammstein or Lynyrd Skynyrd or A-Ha (yes, they tackled Take On Me in Oslo), there's a song by Indianapolis hardcore punks Zero Boys or Portuguese rockers Xutos & Pontapés.

Sometimes it's good, and sometimes it isn't. Anyone who saw the pair labour their way through The Stone Roses' I Wanna Be Adored in Manchester in 2019 will have no difficulty in associating the phrase 'damp squib' with the experience, while their version of Celtic Frost's The Usurper – played in Zurich in May of the same year – drew complaints from Frost frontman Tom G. Warrior.

"They butchered it, and it was humiliating," he moaned. "Why don't they leave their millionaire fingers off it? They've long lost the ability to play true metal, in my opinion."

For the M72 tour, with its no-repeat weekends, Rob and Kirk (or "My friend Rob" and "My friend Kirk" as James Hetfield invariably introduces them) changed things again. Initially, on night one, they'd play a Doodle they'd just composed, and leave the local choices to night two.

The self-written Doodle didn't always work, and for the final leg of the M72 tour in 2026, they were dropped, with local Doodles once again the focus. They don't always work either, but when they do, they really work. And, for some reason, it's often the Eastern European choices that work best.

Take Jožin Z Bažin, originally by Czech musician Ivan Mládek, performed as a doodle in Prague in 2018. It's a comedy folk song about a mysterious, swamp-dwelling man-eating monster, and the stadium erupts when it's played. The crowd bellows along, Rob and Kirk sound like the greatest, drunkest wedding band ever, and everyone goes home knowing they witnessed something entirely unique.

Our Metallica Doodle Map is below. It features every local Doodle performed on the WorldWired and M72 tours. Zoom in and pick a show, and you'll be able to watch Kirk and Rob at work.

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Amon Amarth have stripped away at their Viking-themed death metal and released a moody, acoustic single called Upphaf.

The Nordic folk-inspired jam (which translates to “beginning” or “origin” in Old Norse) bridges the gap between the five-piece’s previous album, 2022’s The Great Heathen Army, and their as-yet-unannounced 13th record. Press materials call it a “quiet moment”, in contrast to the “fury” of their upcoming album.

The track comes with a cinematic music video directed by Pavel Trebukhin. Watch and listen below.

No details of Amon Amarth’s 13th album have been given yet, but, talking to Hammer earlier this year, singer Johan Hegg teased a “very diverse” set of songs.

“We always try to balance new, interesting takes on our music with trying to keep the format of the band,” he said. “It’s like what Iron Maiden do: you will always hear that it’s an Iron Maiden song, but they always add some new, interesting things to their albums.”

The release of Upphaf precedes the start of the band’s European tour, during which they’ll be supported by fellow Swedes Orbit Culture and Soilwork. The shows kick off at the O2 Apollo in Manchester on October 9 and continue through the UK until October 11. They’ll then play across mainland Europe until November 15.

See the full list of dates below.

Hegg told Hammer that fans can expect a “more elaborate stage” setup than on previous tours.

“[It] gives us the possibility to keep things moving throughout the show,” he said. “The idea is to do an extended set for the headline tour with a bigger and better production. We are definitely working on making the stage production… I’m not sure I would say more interesting, but at least more eventful.”

Formed in Tumba, Sweden in 1992, Amon Amarth took their name from the Sindarin word for Mount Doom, a volcano in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings. Contemporaries to fellow Swedish melodic death metal bands such as In Flames, Dark Tranquillity and At The Gates, their lyrics often focus on Viking warfare and Norse mythology.

They charted in Sweden for the first time with 2006’s With Oden On Our Side. The title track of 2008 follow-up effort Twilight Of The Thunder God is considered their signature song.

Amon Amarth 2026 European tour dates (with Orbit Culture and Soilwork):

• Oct 09: Manchester O2 Apollo, UK
• Oct 10: London Eventim Apollo, UK
• Oct 11: Wolverhampton Civic Hall, UK
• Oct 13: Paris Zenith, France
• Oct 14: Esch-sur-Alzette Rockhal, Luxembourg
• Oct 16: Stuttgart Schleyer-Halle, Germany
• Oct 17: Frankfurt Festhalle, Germany
• Oct 18: Antwerp Lotto Arena, Belgium
• Oct 20: Den Bosch Mainstage, Netherlands
• Oct 21: Hamburg Sporthalle, Germany
• Oct 23: Gothenburg Scandinavium, Sweden
• Oct 24: Stockholm Hovet, Sweden
• Oct 26: Helsinki Ice Hall, Finland
• Oct 27: Tallinn Unibet Arena, Estonia
• Oct 29: Gliwice PreZero Arena, Poland
• Oct 30: Leipzig Quarterback Immobilien Arena, Germany
• Oct 31: Oberhausen Rudolf Weber Arena, Germany
• Nov 02: Budapest Barba Negra, Hungary
• Nov 03: Vienna Gasometer, Austria
• Nov 04: Bamberg Brose Arena, Germany
• Nov 06: Prague O2 Universum, Czech Republic
• Nov 07: Berlin Velodrom, Germany
• Nov 08: Munich Zenith, Germany
• Nov 10: Milan Alcatraz, Italy
• Nov 11: Zurich The Hall, Switzerland
• Nov 13: Barcelona Sant Jordi Club, Spain
• Nov 14: Madrid Vistalegre, Spain
• Nov 15: Lisbon Sala Tejo, Portugal

There’s the clank of a cash register. A jangle of coins. A tearing of till receipts. A loping bassline, built on just eight notes. And finally, David Gilmour’s opening gambit (‘Money! Get away…’). So begins Pink Floyd’s first true international signature tune and their ticket to the stadium league.

Nobody could have predicted those impending plaudits when Roger Waters arrived at Abbey Road in June 1972 with the bones of the song: an awkward 7/4 composition that tested both Nick Mason and guesting tenor saxophonist Dick Parry.

“It’s Roger’s riff,” noted Gilmour. “Roger came in with the verses and lyrics for Money more or less completed. We made up middle sections, guitar solos and all that stuff. We also invented some new riffs – we created a 4/4 progression for the guitar solo and made the poor saxophone player play in 7/4.”

“Occasionally,” Waters reflected, “I would do things and Dave would say, ‘No, that’s wrong. There should be another beat. That’s only seven’. I’d say, ‘Well, that’s how it is’. A number of my songs have bars of odd length. When you play Money on an acoustic guitar, it’s very much a blues thing.”

For the studio take, Waters would re-record the sound effects that he had originally created in his garden shed by throwing coins into a bowl used by his wife for mixing clay, while Mason drilled holes into old British pennies and threaded them onto strings to create a distinctive metallic chink.

Yet the song’s most dazzling moment came from Gilmour. Though the guitarist would self-deprecatingly refer to Money as “nice white English architecture students getting funky”, there was searing soul in his solo, which adrenalises the song at the three-minute mark then drops its effects for the ‘dry’ section at 3:48.

While Floyd’s management quickly identified Money as a potential “monster hit”, the band members themselves were ambivalent, feeling that the tricky time signature would hold it back, and also envious of Led Zeppelin’s refusal to issue singles or pander to radio.

“We didn’t think anything would happen with Money,” noted Rick Wright. “And suddenly, it just did.”

And how. Released on May 7, 1973 – two months after parent album The Dark Side Of The Moon had topped the Billboard chart – Money climbed to No.13 in the US, announcing Floyd as rock heavyweights and making Waters’s wealth-baiting lyric ring a little hollow. With Money in their locker, the band found themselves harangued at shows across the planet.

“It was quite a shock,” Gilmour said, “to be confronted with people down the front all screaming for us to play Money – when previously our slightly more reverential audiences were sitting in absolute silence waiting to hear the next pin being dropped.

Unusually, Money was re-recorded by Gilmour in 1981 for the Pink Floyd compilation album, A Collection of Great Dance Songs. The band had recently signed to Columbia Records, but Capitol still held the US rights to the original 1973 studio version of The Dark Side of the Moon and flatly refused to license Money to their rival.

To bypass this roadblock, Columbia asked the band to re-record the track from scratch, but Gilmour and Waters weren't talking, and Mason and Wright weren't available, so the guitarist re-recorded the song from scratch, playing every part himself apart from the saxophone, which was reprised by Dick Parry.

Gilmour's new version was as faithful a reproduction as he could manage, although his drums lacked Mason's swing and the bass felt rather perfunctory compared to Waters' more swaggering original.

Fifty years on from Money's emergence, Waters got his own back, releasing an unexpected new version as part of his Redux re-recording of The Dark Side Of The Moon.

Gone was the original's lively rhythm, replaced by a slow, brooding acoustic arrangement. Gone was the original's most iconic instrumentation – Gilmour's guitar and Parry's saxophone – replaced by spooky strings and a foreboding piano. Gone was Gilmour's voice, replaced by a gravelly new vocal from Waters. And the midsection now contained an apocalyptic spoken-word poem.

“The original Dark Side of the Moon feels in some ways like the lament of an elder being on the human condition,” said Waters. “But Dave, Rick, Nick and I were so young when we made it, and when you look at the world around us, clearly the message hasn’t stuck. That’s why I started to consider what the wisdom of an 80-year-old could bring to a reimagined version."

Counting Worms began life as a simple interlude during Knocked Loose’s early, violent sets.

This 71-second song is not about a basic technique for measuring soil health, but rather slang for being quite deceased. It’s not a happy song by any stretch of the imagination, but when it was released in 2016 on their debut album Laugh Tracks, it became something of a viral hit.

The song features just 16 words and two noises a dog might make if the post arrives, or if a neighbour dares leave their own house. Vocalist Bryan Garris believed the feral sounds gave the song a sense of menace. Perfect, then, for whipping up a crowd into a frenzy.

“I feel like every decision that we make when it comes to writing is based off the live show,” Garris told Metal Hammer. “We have a setlist that is completely built around crowd participation, and where in our songs we can create moments in a live setting.”

“The bark was something that I thought sounded hard,” he later told podcaster Nik Nocturnal in 2024. “It was kind of just always an interlude live, and back in the day, I don’t know what it was about that song, but that was the scariest moment of our set. It became like this unspoken rule that when you heard the chirping everything was crazy.”

More often than not, things would take an ugly turn when it was time to play Counting Worms.

"The funny thing about that is that it has a pretty happy energy now, because people will put the song over their dog making a mess of something," guitarist Isaac Hale told former Stray from the Path drummer Craig Reynolds on his podcast, The Downbeat. "It’s such a joke now, but back in the day, when we started playing Counting Worms, it was the most terrifying part of our set."

Indeed, the song went viral and Garris' dog noises since have been incorporated into a SpongeBob SquarePants meme and featured across multiple TikTok posts, with yo-yo trickster Kremmet being a particular highlight. The song has also been co-opted, sliced and diced by the drum and bass community (American DJ Kayzo in particular).

"Full disclosure: half the time we show up to play a show or even a headline show, I’m assuming half these people just heard Counting Worms off of TikTok or they heard the 'Gary' Mistakes like Fractures meme," shrugs Hale. "That’s a good percentage of why people come."

"When we were playing like 100-cap rooms, right, as soon as that kicked in, people were in danger, like people could die," Hale added during an interview with YouTuber Rob Scallon. "Now when we kick into Counting Worms, everyone’s like, 'Yay! Happy fun time!', like, 'Yeah, I saw a video of a dog running around to this,' whereas I used to see people getting knocked out.”

Its viral success – along with the band's formidable live reputation – opened doors, leading to shows with Every Time I Die and, later, Parkway Drive. Their status as headliners was grew rapidly, to the point they were joined by Terror and Jesus Piece during a North American run in support of their debut.

Almost a decade on, Counting Worms has lost none of its feral power, viral hit or not, and the band did not squander the opportunities it afforded them. In recent years, their profile has grown further; their song Suffocate earned a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance in 2025 and they were invited to support Metallica on their recent run of European shows.

To walk away from the world’s hottest rock band at the very peak of their popularity takes a certain amount of chutzpah, but then David Lee Roth never did lack confidence. When the Indiana-born singer quit Van Halen – or was fired from the Pasadena band, depending on whose version of rock history you choose to believe – on April 1, 1985, ostensibly to focus upon directing his (ill-fated) Crazy From The Heat movie, the rock world went into mourning. But everyone knew that the louder-than-life Roth wouldn’t be quiet for long.

Forty years on from the release of his thrilling debut album Eat 'Em And Smile, here are our picks for 'Diamond' Dave's finest solo songs.

10. Slam Dunk! (1998)

With nu metal at its peak, no-one paid much attention at all when DLR released his fifth solo album DLR Band – featuring future Marilyn Manson / Mötley Crüe guitarist John 5 and future Korn drummer Ray Luzier – in 1998: the fact that the album was released on the singer’s own Wawazat!! Records label speaks volume about how the industry viewed Roth at the time. Truthfully, the world wasn’t missing out on a whole lot, but the opening track – essentially a sneaky re-write of VH’s Hot For Teacher – is a zinger.

9. Knucklebones (1988)

Roth knew exactly what he was doing when he recruited crack musicians Steve Vai, Billy Sheehan and Greg Bissonette to back him post-Van Halen: this was a unit capable of going toe-to-toe with anyone in rock. The opening track of the group’s second album Skyscraper perfectly illustrates their confidence and verve, with the singer’s ‘Stop dreaming and start driving Stevie!’ exhortation to Vai ahead of the solo, this was classic DLR.

8. Sensible Shoes (1991)

Offering a sonic relocation from California to the Bayou for five minutes, the second single from Roth’s third solo album A Little Ain’t Enough is a sleazy, bluesy, mid-pocket rocker that could have fitted perfectly on Aeromsith’s Permanent Vacation album. Roth’s harmonica playing is wonderful here, although he didn’t sound entirely believable delivering lyrics such as ‘I look good and I’m funny, so why am I lonesome honey?’

7. Damn Good (1988)

Famously, Van Halen declared that in their world, every night was a Saturday night. Damn Good, from Skyscraper, is the sound of the party winding down, a bluesy last-whiskey-of-the-night, you’re-my-besssssht-mate kind of song, with Steve Vai playing twelve string guitar and Roth delivering nostalgia-laden lyrics that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a Bruce Springsteen album.

6. It’s Showtime! (1991)

That title couldn’t be more David Lee Roth, a perfect encapsulation of his gleefully cheesy showbiz trouper persona, but really this highlight fromA Little Ain’t Enough is all about the dazzling, jaw-dropping freetboard skills of the brilliant Jason Becker. Check this out, then seek out the 2012 documentary Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet for a heart-melting, inspirational look at the guitarist’s life post-DLR.

5. A Lil’ Ain’t Enough (1991)

David Lee Roth’s career might have already have been on the slide by the time he released his third solo album, but you’d never guess it from the album’s cocksure, strutting, ‘Everyone look at me!’ title track. The song is arguably most memorable for its eye-popping video, which features the presence of ‘blacked-up’ people of short stature and young ladies in what the Daily Mail would call ‘barely there’ attire. And people wonder why grunge happened…

4. Just Like Paradise (1988)

As perfect a pop-rock song as Roth ever sang with VH, Just Like Paradise is one of those sun-streaked, convertible-top down, speeding-down-the-Pacific Highway songs which instantly transports the listener to California. When Roth sings ‘Girl we we’ve been meant for this since we were born’ he sounds like the cat that got all the cream.

3. California Girls (1985)

Truthfully we could have compiled a Top 10 DLR Cover Songs list here, with the likes of Just A Gigolo and That’s Life contributing massively to the singer’s popularity in the mid ‘80s, but that’d be cheating, so we’ve confined ourselves to selecting this one, the outrageously upbeat Beach Boys cover at the heart of Roth’s Crazy From The Heat EP. If ever there was a man born to sing this song…

2. Goin’ Crazy (1986)

The second single from Roth’s brilliant debut solo album, 1986’s Eat ‘Em And Smile, is the perfect distillation of the DLR ‘brand’, a song deliberately designed to make the listener feel like this is Roth’s world, and we’re lucky to live in it. Every time Roth sings ‘I wanna live it up, wanna quit my job, Tell the boss to go to hell!’ you can imagine thousands of blue collar American males punching the air in ‘Fuck yeah, Dave!’ solidarity.

1. Yankee Rose (1986)

Now this is how you make a comeback. The gloriously OTT first single from Eat ‘Em And Smile had the rock world believing, if only for four minutes, that leaving Van Halen was the smartest move DLR ever made. With lyrics such as ‘"Are you ready for the new sensation?" and "Well, guess who’s back in circulation?’" this is Roth in irresistible dick-swinging megastar mode, and it's a trip. Steve Vai’s ‘talking guitar’ might as well have shrieked ‘Fuck you Eddie!’

Evanescence's Amy Lee has revealed that there was a period where she was concerned that her band would be viewed as a one-hit wonder following the huge success of their single Bring Me to Life.

The track, which was recently certified Diamond in the United States, and surpassed a billion streams on Spotify and a billion more on YouTube, was originally released in early 2003 and featured a guest appearance from 12 Stones vocalist Paul McCoy.

But in a recent interview with Canada's CBC host Tom Power, Lee shared her worries that her band were going to be a flash in the pan, as well as gaining popularity through a song that was largely at odds with the rest of their debut album, Fallen.

"My biggest fear was that we were gonna be a one-hit wonder, that people are gonna hear that one song that was different from everything else that we were ever gonna do next, and then they... It's like a 'bait and switch'," Lee said in an interview on Q with Tom Power (transcribed by Blabbermouth). "Then they would hear the rest of our music and be, like, 'Oh, this is not what I thought it was.' Like, 'You lied.' And they were, like, 'We'll do our best.'"

Lee adds that it was pressure from the label that led to a guest male vocal on the band's debut single, but points out that McCoy was a "hero" during the recording process.

"I remember Paul being so sweet and understanding and excited for us and pouring his heart into it," she explains. "And then, of course, for years I've had to tell the story that I never get time to tell the end of, and it makes him sound like the bad guy. He was absolutely a hero in the story to make it as positive of an experience as it possibly could have been for me.

"We overcame it," she adds. "The whole thing was, 'You just have to do it for this one song.' I was, like, 'Okay, we're gonna make this one song really great.' And it definitely flew higher than anybody expected it to. And we did release another song and another song that were fortunately also understood, accepted and embraced. So there we are."

Evanescence are currently on tour in support of their latest album Sanctuary.

Catch them at the following dates:

Evanescence 2026 world tour dates:

w/ Spiritbox, Nova Twins:

Jul 08: Tinley Park Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre, IL
Jul 09: Noblesville Ruoff Music Center, IN
Jul 11: North Little Rock Simmons Bank Arena, AR
Jul 12: Kansas City Morton Amphitheater, MO
Jul 14: Albuquerque Isleta Amphitheater, NM
Jul 15: Phoenix Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre, AZ
Jul 17: Chula Vista North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre, CA
Jul 18: TBA
Jul 20: Mountain View Shoreline Amphitheatre, CA
Jul 22: Ridgefield Cascades Amphitheater, WA
Jul 23: Auburn White River Amphitheatre, WA
Jul 25: Salt Lake City Utah First Credit Union Amphitheatre, UT
Jul 28: St Louis Hallywood Casio Amphitheater, MO
Jul 30: Cuyahoga Falls Blossom Music Center, OH
Aug 01: Cincinnati Riverbend Music Center, OH
Aug 02: Clarkston Pine Knob Music Theatre, MI

w/ Poppy, K. Flay:
Sep 08: Leeds First Direct Bank Arena, UK
Sep 10: Manchester Co-Op Live, UK
Sep 11: Birmingham Utilita Arena, UK
Sep 13: London The O2, UK

w/ Poppy, Nova Twins:
Sep 16: Brussels Forest National, Belgium
Sep 17: Paris Accor Arena, France
Sep 19: Frankfurt Festhalle, Germany
Sep 20: Dortmund Westfalenhallen, Germany
Sep 22: Amsterdam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Sep 23: Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
Sep 25: Berlin Velodrom, Germany
Sep 26: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Sep 28: Bologna Unipol Arena, Italy
Sep 29: Zurich Hallenstadion, Switzerland
Oct 01: Barcelona Palau Olimpic, Spain
Oct 02: Madrid Palacio Vistalegre, Spain
Oct 04: Lisbon MEO Arena, Portugal

w/ K. Flay:
Oct 26: Morrison Red Rocks Amphitheatre, CO

It’s funny to think now that Radiohead were once considered a one-hit wonder, given how long it’s been since Thom Yorke & co. seemed to have any concerns with having hits at all. Radiohead could be regarded as the ultimate modern example of a group as an “album band”, a reputation that was first forged when they didn’t release any singles from their 2000 fourth record Kid A. It didn’t seem to harm the cause, given it went to Number One in the UK and the US.

But just a few years before, the one-hit wonder tag borne from the worldwide success of their 1992 anthem Creep was still hanging over the Oxford quintet. There had been some indicators that Radiohead were not totally willing to go down the traditional route expected of guitar bands in the 90s, with their 1994 EP My Iron Lung the first signs that they were more inventive and trailblazing than anybody (perhaps themselves included) had yet realised.

The release of their era-defining second album The Bends in March 1995 would hammer home that point, a record melding forward-thinking art-rock and mesmeric yearning ballads. But still, the band played it safe when it came to the first single from the record, going with the melodic, mid-tempo acoustic-rock High & Dry. It was a double A-side with the more mind-blowing cut Planet Telex, but it was clear which song was going to get more airtime on radio playlists.

Listen to The Bends now, just a few months out from its 30^th anniversary, and High & Dry does seem oddly out of place on the record, even sitting next to another lilting acoustic ballad, Fake Plastic Trees, on the album’s tracklisting. That’s because it wasn’t created with the batch of songs that the band penned for inclusion on their second record but written years before.

Frontman and chief songwriter Yorke had actually come up with the song whilst an early version of the group, then called On A Friday, were on hiatus because some of the members had gone to university. Yorke was down in the south-west of the UK, studying English and Fine Arts in Exeter, and this is where and when he wrote High & Dry. As you can see in the video at the end of this story, he went as far as performing it with Headless Chickens, the band he formed at uni, albeit a much-more rocky and up-tempo take on the track.

Radiohead was always Yorke’s creative alma mater, though, and they picked up where they left off when the scattered members returned to Oxford. High & Dry stuck around for a few years but wasn’t deemed worthy of inclusion on the band’s debut Pablo Honey. In March 1993, they recorded a demo of it with engineer Jim Warren but immediately discounted it. “We thought it was rubbish,” Yorke later explained to Billboard. “It was too Rod Stewart or something.”

But when they came upon that demo recording whilst making The Bends, the song made sense in a way that it hadn’t previously. “It seemed like a mirror showing us all the things we had been through,” recalled Yorke. “After Creep and the fatigue from all the touring, we were scared shitless really and people were interfering. We had to claim our collective freedom. That’ll never happen again. Now we have so much freedom, we barely know what to do with it.”

The song, Yorke said, was originally about “some loony girl I was going out with” but now the words meant something different. “After a while, they got all mixed up with ideas about success and failure,” he explained.

Perhaps that is the prism through which High & Dry needs to be viewed, a song that captures a sort of in-between version of Radiohead as they sought to go their own way but didn’t yet have the power to do it. They certainly seem to have a complicated relationship with it, even moreso than Creep, which has cropped up in their setlists now and then. According to Setlist.fm, High & Dry hasn’t been played live since January 1998.

“It reminded me of that song Mull Of Kintyre,” said guitarist Jonny Greenwood at the time, perhaps by way of explanation, “that really horrible kind of single, but in a nice way. It was one of those songs that people hopefully would be playing as soon as they learned guitar or something.”

You’d have to bet against Greenwood or any of his bandmates playing it if they return, as has been rumoured, for their first shows since 2018 this year. High & Dry has long been left in the past. Check out that very early performance of it by Thom Yorke with Headless Chickens below:

When Pink Floyd launched second single See Emily Play in 1967, it marked the beginning of their rise to global success – but also the beginning of their end for early leader Syd Barrett.

Released in March 1967, Pink Floyd’s first single Arnold Layne reached Number 20 on the UK chart. It seems tame now – but Syd Barrett’s whimsical tale of the moonlight clothes thief was considered transgressive by broadcasters, and its airplay soon dwindled.

Trippy follow-up See Emily Play was less contentious, released in June 1967 and peaking at Number 6 the following month. “We were convinced we’d go higher,” Nick Mason told Prog in 2010. “We were sure A Whiter Shade Of Pale would drop out week to week. But of course it didn’t – it just stuck there!”

As Prog reported in a rundown of the 10 most important Floyd concerts, See Emily Play had been written by Barrett for a 1967 show billed as Games For May, and shared that title in its earliest form. The event at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall was described as “a space-age relaxation for the climax of spring – electronic composition, colour and image projection, girls, and the Pink Floyd.” What was not to like?

The performance included “more or less what was to become The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, and premiering Emily.” At one point “someone dressed as an admiral gave out daffodils to the audience, while a bubble machine stained the seats – allegedly resulting in a lifelong ban at the venue for the group.”

Alan Freeman introduced the band for their first appearance on Top Of The Pops. “I suppose we expected more out of it than it could deliver,” the drummer reflects. “It was a bit like going through sheep dip: you’re brought in, you do the rehearsal, then mime rather than actually play live.

“My main memory is of going into hair and make-up and finding all the road crew having their hair done! Nobody knew who anyone was, so as long as you had long hair, if you wandered in to that area someone would wash your hair.

“But the show was an anticlimax for all the inevitable reasons – you’d been on telly but it didn’t change the world. The important stuff was still to go out and play.”

The success of See Emily Play was a milestone in the Pink Floyd story, and it’s still their second highest-charting single by a long chalk, after 1979’s Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2). Its three performances on Top Of The Pops also foreshadowed the troubled times ahead for the song’s mercurial writer.

“By the time we went back for the second show Syd was not that happy about it,” says Mason. “He was getting a bit weird, so that made it all the more difficult. He felt that John Lennon didn’t do Top Of The Pops, so why should he? He was already wandering off into that area of not wanting to be a pop star.”

The BBC later wiped all three Top Of The Pops appearances, although a degraded video recording of their first performance, on July 6, was revealed in 2009.

Once described by Prog as “the perfect marriage of Floyd’s psych sound and Barrett’s lyrical genius,” a subject that’s lingered over the decades is the identity of the song’s titular Emily. It’s often assumed to be the Right Honourable Emily Young, a politician’s daughter who earned the nickname ‘the psychedelic schoolgirl’ at London’s UFO Club, and who later became a revered artist.

Roger Waters said in 2004 that “Emily could be anyone. She’s just a hung-up chick, that’s all.” But Syd’s girlfriend Jenny Spires – ‘Jennifer Gentle’ in Lucifer Sam – told Prog in 2022: “Syd loved the name Emily; quite unusual then, and used to say, ‘If I ever have a daughter I want to call her Emily.’ ‘Emily’ was Syd’s Alice [Through the Looking Glass].”

As Barrett increasingly rejected the idea of being a pop star, and became more erratic in his behaviour, the band would move on without him. “But See Emily Play was a very important stepping stone in our career,” Mason said. “It was a big part of the journey.”

In the spring of 1980, Judas Priest released an album that was to prove so successful within the parameters of its genre that it would almost come to define the term ‘heavy metal’. British Steel, the Birmingham group’s sixth studio record, was a masterclass in leather-and-studs bombast.

More than four decades on, British Steel remains a cherished gem from the golden age of British metal. What separated Judas Priest from the heavy metal crowd was their ability to marry the primal, industrial pounding that had reverberated around their industrial-heartland birthplace to a bloody good chorus.

“Although I say so myself, British Steel is a very, very good album,” says guitarist Glenn Tipton. “We had gone into Tittenhurst Park, the home of Ringo Starr, who’d bought it from John Lennon, after a previous attempt at another studio, and with only half of its songs written. Until that point, we’d never worked that way before.

“I’ll always recall that 1980 was a great summer, and being in such an inspirational surrounding definitely rubbed off on us,” he continues. “What came out was a set of very simple yet effective songs that, I’d like to think, helped to shape what else was going on [in heavy rock music] at the time.”

Living After Midnight, the first of the album’s three huge hit singles (the others being Breaking The Law and United), was among the songs conceived at Tittenhurst, near Ascot.

“One night while we were there, John Lennon was on the TV playing Imagine, and of course it was very weird to be in the actual room where he’d been filmed,” Tipton remembers. “You could almost visualise the white piano in the corner.”

In an equally eerie scenario, singer Rob Halford got the inspiration for the lyrics for Living After Midnight as his bandmates kept him awake by blasting out riffs and drum beats in the studio below. “He came downstairs to complain and said: ‘Hey, guys, come on. It’s gone midnight.’ Which shouldn’t really have bothered such a heavy metal icon as Rob,” Tipton says, laughing at the memory.

“It was 4am and we’d been working all day,” Halford protests. “But when I said what I did, the guys went: ‘That’s a brilliant title. Write it down.”

“Rob’s comment proved to be a spark for a very important song for us,” says Tipton. “It was one of those lucky spontaneous things that sometimes just happen.”

If the song’s swaggering, chest-beating, nocturnal-themed lyric – ‘I’m getting hotter by the hour/Loaded, loaded’ – seemed to set up Halford as a bit of an all-conquering, love-’em-and-leave- ’em sex machine, then the singer has no complaints.

“Yeah,” he smiles when reminded. “It made me sound like Clint Eastwood from A Fistful Of Dollars, clutching a condom.”

Living After Midnight begins with a drum intro from the then newly arrived Dave Holland (formerly of Trapeze), and then it goes straight to the chorus.

“I really don’t know why it turned out like that,” Tipton admits. “Sometimes the simplest ideas just work out the best. Maybe that was in the back of our minds.”

“There’s a lot to be said for the very famous phrase that goes: ‘Don’t bore us, get to the chorus,’” says Halford. “In this instance, we took it pretty literally.”

Both agree that the vision of producer Tom Allom, who had been retained after the band’s live Unleashed In The East, was fundamental to the project’s success. In those pre-sampling days, Allom suggested the band raid the studio’s kitchen to rattle trays of cutlery as an enhancement of the ominous grind of Metal Gods. (He also recorded the sound of smashed milk bottles and a police siren for Priest’s more commercial-sounding Breaking The Law.)

“We used to make our own samples in those days, and Tom had such great ideas. I sometimes think that even we [the band] overlooked his importance,” Tipton offers. “He was such a diplomatic guy, and great at getting guitar and drum sounds. What an underrated producer.”

Like the hilarious video for Breaking The Law, in which Priest robbed a branch of Barclays Bank in London’s Wardour Street, armed with their Flying V guitars, and then made their getaway in an open-topped convertible, the video for Living After Midnight was a suitably ludicrous affair. Directed by Julien Temple and shot at Sheffield City Hall, it boasted Dave Holland playing an invisible drum kit.

“The air guitarists, and everybody piling onto a coach, those were early days of videos,” Tipton says of Priest’s comedic vent. “Although corny, I still think they were great.”

Although Living After Midnight didn’t chart in the US (it reached No.12 in the UK), the immediacy of it opened the door there for Judas Priest.

“It was absolutely pivotal in breaking the band in many parts of the world,” Halford says.

“Heavy metal is all about getting together with your mates, donning the gear, drinking a few beers and watching some great music,” adds Tipton. “And in the morning you go back to work, school, college or whatever. It’s therapeutic, nothing more and nothing less."

We are delighted to report that our feisty New Zealand friends Pieces Of Molly have once again triumphed in our Tracks Of The Week contest, earning themselves a place in the pantheon of rock immortality with a comprehensive victory over These Wicked Rivers and Bywater Call. We're putting it down to all the meat in the video.

So congratulations to them. And then up it's Up! Up! And away! As we begin a new contest. Listen hard, vote harder.

Airbourne - Kid In A Candy Store

The latest slice of the Aussie’s long-awaited new album, Kid In A Candy Store is a pensive, understated affair with a surprise acoustic twist… just kidding: it’s AC/DC-baked raunch and balls-to-the-wall boogieing from start to finish, audibly draped in the same torn black denim and tourbus-fresh locks they’ve had since about 2003. It kinda puts us in the mind of their first couple of albums, channeling that same fury and road-dog work ethic. Have you heard it all before, and then some? Yes. Does that really matter? No. Sure to be a blast live.

The Heat Inc - Mind Control

London rock’n’rollers The Heat Inc cook up a haunting yet headbanging swirl of alt/goth 80s flavours and guitar fuzz, without feeling like a mindless throwback – quite the contrary. “This is a long way from being our first rodeo and God knows, we’ve never done it for the money,” they say. “We do it because we love it. There is no other way.” You can hear all that in Mind Control, and it feels all the more strident for it.

The Sheepdogs - Bad For Your Health

Riding the waves of this year’s Keep Out Of The Storm, the Canadian canines have released this gorgeous live version of one of its highlights – the lush yet rocking Bad For Your Health. All glam grooves, vintage threads and warmly toned riffage, it’s both beautifully laidback and the sort of rock’n’roller you can't help but move to. Good health is overrated anyway, right? Catch them live in the UK this November and December.

The Anchoress - Throw Over Your Man

Enigma, auteur and progressive musical mastermind behind The Anchoress, Catherine Anne Davies is joined by James Dean Bradfield on guitar for this sumptuous taste of her next album, As We Once Were. Billed by Davies as a “celebratory queer rock anthem,” it mixes driving alt, classic rock and folk notes with sensual storytelling in one absorbing cocktail. If Virginia Woolf wrote rock songs instead of novels, having listened to a load of Fleetwood Mac and Kate Bush, she might have come up with this.

The Virginmarys - My Nettle

A fiery, urgent highlight from 2024’s excellent The House Beyond The Fires, My Nettle packs a different kind of punch on this stripped-back rendition. An elegantly desolate slow burner, its bare-bones piano core expands through percussive beats and subtle, stirring string layers into something quietly lush, even as it bristles with raw feeling. Better than the original? No. A thoughtful, compelling sojourn from their fully electric set? Absolutely.

The Temperance Movement - Eat You Alive

Last year these guys reunited for their first shows since before the pandemic. Now, the fruits of that reunion further reveal themselves with this raw, rollicking taste of an all-new studio album, due later this year. Mixing analogue-y Black Crowes-come-Creedence spittle and sugar with classic British rock’n’roll, it’s a sun-dappled opening shot of this next chapter. Sonically not unlike Midnight Black (from their acclaimed debut), but with a sweetly roughened shadow.

Stanley Simmons - Don't Leave Me Here Like That 

Stanley Simmons continue to carve out a niche that's deliciously distant from their dads, with fifth single Don't Leave Me Here Like That coming on like Simon & Garfunkel playing a long-lost Tom Petty tune. Or like UK indie verterans Dodgy, with an effervescent, summery vibe, and some 80s pop thrown in for good measure. The duo's debut LP will be released on August 28, with tour dates following in September and October.

The Band Feel - Summer Song

St. Louis retro-rockers The Band Feel continue their musical mission, which is apparently to pretend that disco and punk and everything that followed never actually followed, and that one can journey safely from 1974 to 2026 without any pesky musical interference whatsoever. Summer Song is exactly as described on the packaging, sounding as if it were created on a hazy July 1974 evening in Laurel Canyon, with the right amount of lightness and whimsy. Debut album What Of Now will be available at your nearest hippie emporium from August 21.

In their essay The Grim Emotional Legacy Of 1970s Parenting, writer Jae L asserts the idea that it was a "golden era of parenting by benevolent neglect".

They argue that "it was entirely possible to be emotionally neglectful while appearing to the world as a model parent provided you kept a nice home and sent your children out the door fully clothed."

So, by the time the '80s rolled around, it's reasonable to assume that there was a generation of emotionally battered, self-reliant young adults who'd grown up with a resistance to authority baked into their DNA. And look at that, the California punk scene was full of their swinging limbs.

Hailing from Venice Beach, Suicidal Tendencies had been a hardcore band for just a few years when they recorded their self-titled debut album.

While Mike Muir has previously described his childhood as "fortunate," he cast a wider net when writing the lyrics for Institutionalized. Clocking in at 3:50, his half-spoken, half-shouted words help create a spiralling panic attack of a song which was composed by their then-bassist Louiche Mayorga.

The recording – which also featured guitarist Grant Estes and drummer Amery Smith, and was produced by legendary skateboarding and music photographer Glen E. Friedman – would appeal to every teenager who'd experienced a complete breakdown in communicating with their parents and had nowhere to channel their hormonal rage.

In a 1983 interview with Maximum Rocknroll, Muir explained the real-life interaction which inspired the song and why the need to have a Pepsi features so prominently in the lyrics.

"I got it from this little kid named Howie, who's 12 years old," he said. "He used to hang out with us. He lives up here now. It was just funny he was saying ‘Man, I told my mom to give me a Coke, and she wouldn't give me one. Wow, I don't know why. Why?’ I just put that in there because I thought it was amusing. It all relates to having problems with parents and when they can't deal with you, they say ‘I'll have you [put] in an institution.’

"I know about 10 or 15 of my friends have been, and it's all a situation where their parents just are tired with dealing with them," he continued. "They're not saying, 'OK, this is the way you are and let's try to figure it out.' They say. 'It's too much of a bother, we'll just stick him in an institution.' It's saying just because you can't understand the way a person is doesn't mean they're crazy. It's just a cop-out: stick him in an institution."

When the song was released as a single, US DJ Rodney Bingenheimer played it on his KROQ show.

"He said to one of the other top DJs, ‘You’ve got to play this song, just play it!’," Muir told Metal Hammer. "They played it and the phones lit up, but one of the people at the top said, ‘This isn’t music. We can’t play that!' It’s funny, because they’re supposed to be alternative."

"A little while later I went into a 7-Eleven and they were playing KROQ, and Institutionalized came on," he continued. "There were some older college chicks there. I thought they were gonna freak out and tell them to turn the fucking radio off! They were just like, ‘You hear this? I like it!’ I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ So, the supposed tastemakers got it wrong."

The radio play led to a feature on the MTV show The Cutting Edge, a weekly alternative show which ran from 1983 until 1987.

"People got bummed when we were on MTV," Muir told the Hard Times zine in 1984. "I asked them, 'Did you like it, did you think it was cool?' and they said, 'It would have been cool if it wasn't on MTV.'

"When we were on there, for some people it was the first time they'd ever seen anything like us," he continued. "I think it was the best thing that's ever been on MTV! It's a helluva lot better to see Suicidal Tendencies on there than it is to see Duran Duran."

In the same interview, Muir mentions that the band were going to make their first-ever video using their own money.

"The thing about a lot of videos is that, you know, you watch MTV and the video has nothing to do with the words to the song," said Muir. "In a sense, Institutionalized is made for a video because the story's already there."

The now-iconic clip features Muir mouthing the lyrics directly to the camera, becoming more stressed and agitated as the song's tempo gradually picks up and his skater friends unhelpfully perform ollies and kickflips around him.

At 35 seconds into the video, Slayer frontman Tom Araya gives Muir a half-hearted shove and wanders off, presumably off to write a new, fast song about the devil.

Donating their services free of charge, Jack Nance (Henry Spencer in Eraserhead) and Mary Woronov (Principal Evelyn Togar in Rock 'n' Roll High School) portray Muir's exasperated parents, who, after attempting to lock up their agitated son at home, sentence him to a life in a "white shirt with long sleeves" in an institution.

All he wanted was a Pepsi. Now, Muir can probably get a can of pop whenever he wants, but can still relate to the young man who wrote the lyrics decades earlier.

“When I was 18 I was going, ‘When I was 16 I was screwed up!’ and when I was 21 I was going, ‘When I was 18 I was screwed up!’ and when I was 25 I was going, ‘When I was 21 I was screwed up!’,” he told Metal Hammer in 2020. “I look back and I can say that I’m screwed up now, but not as screwed up! But that first album is a great record and I’m proud of what we did. When we did that record there wasn’t really an audience for what we were doing. Selling 5,000 copies was a big deal. You just did what you did and it was a surprise if anyone else liked it!”

Megadeth's 1990 album Rust in Peace is one of the best thrash albums ever made, but it was recorded in absolutely chaotic circumstances.

Dave Mustaine had fired most of his band in 1988: guitarist Jeff Young and drummer Chuck Behler were out. After auditioning many musicians, former Cacophony guitarist Marty Friedman joined the band while Behler's tech Nick Menza took over on drums.

"By just about every conceivable standard, Rust in Peace was a watershed event for Megadeth," Mustaine recalled in his 2010 autobiography Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir. "Funny thing was, it didn’t start out that well. We recorded at a place called Rumbo Recorders, which was owned by the Captain and Tennille, of all people. I was skeptical about Rumbo offering the right atmosphere, a feeling that was exacerbated one day when I walked in and saw our producer, Dave Jerden, eating a chili dog and smoking a cigarette at the controls. The place just reeked."

According to engineer Micajah Ryan, the Megadeth frontman was swift in relieving Jerden of his post after a few days: "The quote was, 'I think there's too many guys named Dave around here, we're gonna get rid of one of them.' And Dave Jerden got fired.”

Producer Mike Clink also "got off on the wrong foot" with Mustaine when he revealed that he may have to leave the studio at a moment's notice to work with Guns N' Roses on their follow-up to Appetite for Destruction. It was another dog – this time an actual puppy – that ended this particular producer's tenure.

"The damn dog ate a hole in the wall and then knocked over my guitar, and we just had to let him go," remembered Mustaine. "But I want to be fair here. Mike Clink has always gotten credit for producing Rust in Peace, and I certainly wouldn’t deny his contributions. It’s a terrific record, start to finish."

He's not wrong. Rust in Peace is packed with highlights and spawned two Top 30 hit singles. The first was Holy Wars... The Punishment Due, inspired by the frontman's unwise comments about the IRA during their show at the Antrim Forum in Northern Ireland.

The second single was political, too, but this time tapped into a popular UFO conspiracy theory that the US government allegedly hid alien lifeforms in an Ohio building belonging to the USAF.

"It was an idea that Nick came up with," said Mustaine. "The idea’s based on a place in the Four Corners state region of the United States; it’s a place where the military intelligence is housing alien aircraft and alien life-forms. Not that I subscribe to this point of view or any of that kind of BS, but Nick is way into it. I mean, the guy thinks that Jesus was a Martian.

"But, I guess those of you who know Nick probably know that the possibility, the way he explains it, it could be real," he conceded. "So we tried to bring it to you guys in a song form, and it’s up to your imaginations to see whether or not you believe it."

Mustaine – a Christian – later told Rock Radio that Menza's religious comments marked his card for a future dismissal.

"Menza is the guy who believes in UFOs," he explained. "If you look at his website or if you listen to his solo music, it shows you where he's at in his life. Nick said something that I found really juvenile and offensive. He told me that Jesus was an alien and he could levitate. That was the end of me taking Nick seriously – I believed in God ever since I was a kid.”

Mustaine had the song's riff lying around unused for around a decade or so, back when he was lead guitarist for his first band, Panic.

"It was called N2RHQ and it was about an environment that was up on another planet," he told Rolling Stone. "As it morphed through going into Metallica and us deciding whether we were gonna do that song, I just waited to revisit it in Megadeth, just like in Panic, I had the song Rust in Peace … Polaris completely done; it was called Child Saint back at that time. And I'm sure that if I would've shown it to the guys, Metallica probably would've recorded that one also."

Hangar 18 is one of the album's most ambitious songs. Tempo-wise, it's all over the shop and changes four times before Mustaine opens his mouth and the climax of the song quickens the pace further.

"In the middle of the break when we go to the first extended solo section, it's a very Spanish 'jazzy' kind of part," Mustaine told Total Guitar. "Then the end solo, when the guitar duel takes over, it's no holds barred get the fuck out of the way."

Indeed, Friedman and Mustaine trade a staggering 11 solos during the song. In a post on his website, Friedman recalls that it was producer Clink that offered words of inspiration before committing his part to tape.

"He said: 'Check out the lyrics of this song. It's about aliens and Martians, so play something that sounds like you are coming from outer space.’

“That was good advice and from then on, I really paid a lot more attention to the lyrics in a song than I had before," he added.

Hangar 18 was released as a single in February 1991 and was nominated in the 'Best Metal Performance' category at the Grammys held at Radio City Music Hall in New York City the following year.

During the ceremony, singer Johnny Mathis gave the band a shout-out during a pre-written bit with Dionne Warwick: "I just love the GRAMMYs. On what other list would I find my name between Madonna and Megadeth?"

Another band, whose name begins with M, were named as winners of their category for their self-titled album: Metallica. As the band accepted their gong, residents in Brooklyn could have probably heard Mustaine loudly complaining about this snub on his efforts despite writing a thrash classic for the ages.

Effectively written out of history by the immediately subsequent media-friendly circus that was Britpop, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine were significantly more successful in the early 90s than almost anybody seems, or possibly cares, to remember. From humble indie roots, the shorts and cycling cap-sporting duo enjoyed a five-year overnight success that took them from tireless toilet-circuit slogging to the top of the UK album chart.

Dangle-fringed beanpole Jim Morrison (yes, really) (aka Jim Bob) first met cheeky-chopped Angus Young aficionado Les ‘Fruitbat’ Carter in a Streatham rehearsal studio, and before you could say ‘Sarf London indie-squindy apprenticeship’ they’d manned the boiler room of Jamie Wednesday. When they were the only two band members to turn up for an ’87 London Astoria charity gig, inspired by the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and Age Of Chance the pair got up to play the show as Carter USM with a tape recorder rhythm section.

So far, so Squatney. But where countless other 80s landfill indies foundered, Carter - with a deft combination of post-punk Clash-like political conscience, a well-tuned ear for rabble-rousing terrace chants, heartstring-strumming, tears-in-beers anthems and memorable lyrics laced with Olympics-standard puns Jim Bob delivered like a tabloid sub editor with a penchant for the London A-Z – saw word-of-mouth peer reviews take them from the Bull & Gate to Brixton Academy in record time.

Carter had never quite got over punk. The Clash were a touchstone for both, while Jim Bob found endless pith and vinegar in the lyrical blurts of Elvis Costello and Jam-era Paul Weller. “We were quite politically minded, lefty people at the time,” says Jim Bob, “We didn’t know much about it, and were very non-political party.”

“In our twenties, almost thirties,” Les remembers, “we still had that kind of teenage anger about… everything, really, but especially injustice.”

Carter hit a nerve, jagged a constituency who hadn’t followed a band since Chairman Joe sacked Mick Jones. They found this audience with a winning combo of big tunes, tangible passion and a rare ability to sell serious issues with a sharp ready wit. They simultaneously inhabited rock’s cutting edge, with their hip-hop-alike embrace of technology and sampling, while offering a mighty dose of punk nostalgia nobody in their audience had previously realised they even had.

While fiercely decrying societal wrongs across a series of alternative chartbusters – Sheriff Fatman (slum landlords), Rubbish (anodyne playlist radio), Anytime Anyplace Anywhere (alcoholism), Bloodsport For All (racist bullying in the armed forces) – they sold an awful lot of T-shirts.

Having gone top 30 with their 101 Damnations debut album and Top 10 with their 30 Something second (both released on independents and recorded in their mate’s shed), they decided to make their major label debut with After The Watershed (Early Learning The Hard Way), a single about child abuse, with an audacious ‘Goodbye Ruby Tuesday’ hook-line that almost dared the Rolling Stones to sue them inside out.

“That happened during our honeymoon period with Chrysalis,” recalls Jim Bob. “So I don’t think After The Watershed’s subject matter was ever an issue. I mean, everything that happened after was an issue, and how we promoted it was an issue, but I don’t think they ever had a problem with it up front. The press did, though. They thought it was too jolly musically, too danceable, and should you really be dancing or enjoying yourself to a song about child abuse?”

Was there a specific incident that inspired the lyric?

“I’ve a very vivid memory of seeing someone hitting their child,” says Jim Bob, “and feeling I needed to intervene, because I was thinking what happens when they’re not out shopping? What happens when they’re at home? That’s what set me off lyrically. The Ruby Tuesday thing? I was just singing it along to Les’s music, and it just sort of came out. It’s my favourite Rolling Stones song, the meaning made sense and, naively, I thought: ‘Oh, they’ll love this.’”

“When we were at Big Cat and Rough Trade we never sought permission for any of the samples we used, but Chrysalis thought that they legally had to ask. It took time for the Stones’ publishers to respond, and we’d already released it by then.” The Stones won, the record was withdrawn, the song was cut from the album, and both Jagger and Richards gained a credit.

Would that that were the end of the song’s attendant controversy. In October ’91, Carter appeared on The Smash Hits Poll Winners Party (televised live on BBC1) to promote After The Watershed. Les - fresh from the road - had enjoyed a couple of cold drinks, and at the song’s conclusion enthusiastically hoofed his equipment. As one would.

The show’s presenter, one Phillip Schofield (then still very much ticking the box marked ‘much-loved national treasure’), offered something of a sneer in response to this gesture, which elicited a headline-grabbing rugby tackle from an infuriated Fruitbat by way of reply.

Carter followed 1992: The Love Album with a further brace of Top 10s (Post Historic Monsters, Worry Bomb), before gradually expanding to a quintet and then going their separate ways in 1998: Fruitbat into Abdoujaparov, Jim Bob into Jim’s Superstereo World, authoring novels, and pursuing a solo career that last year saw the release of Automatic and Stick.

So how’s the old Sex Machine, then? Still unstoppable?

“I’m definitely stoppable,” admits Les. “I might have even stopped.”

The remastered edition of Carter USM’s Straw Donkey: The Complete Singles is out now via Chrysalis.

When Alice In Chains singer Layne Staley died on April 5, 2002, it seemingly marked the end of the road for one of the greatest and most influential bands of the previous decade.

Alice In Chains rose from the ashes of a bunch of local big-haired hard rock outfits to become grunge’s first true breakout band. Their 1990 debut album, Facelift, sold half a million copies in the US, cracking open the door for the likes of Soundgarden and Nirvana to step through into the mainstream, while 1992’s monumental if harrowing Dirt remains not just AIC’s finest hour, but one of the decade’s landmark albums.

But the demons that haunted the band, and Layne in particular, were their undoing. They managed just a handful of further releases – the acclaimed, largely acoustic Sap and Jar Of Flies EPs, 1995’s claustrophobic self-titled third album, and the following year’s darkly powerful MTV Unplugged live album – before the singer retreated into his addictions. By the time of his death from an overdose of heroin and cocaine, he hadn’t been seen publicly in five years.

But the story didn’t end with Layne’s death. Unexpectedly, guitarist Jerry Cantrell, drummer Sean Kinney and bassist Mike Inez reunited in 2006 with new singer William DuVall, subsequently releasing three albums that underlined their legacy without attempting to replicate the past.

Today, the band’s influence can be heard across the rock and metal spectrum. To mark the 30th anniversary of Dirt, we asked some of music’s biggest names to choose the Alice In Chains song that influenced them the most. This is what they had to say.

Them Bones

Chosen by ex-Slayer guitarist Kerry King

Kerry: “Them Bones is such a great song – super-short, heavy, great video and these really haunting vocal melodies. Those dudes were untouchable on their first two records, they were really vibing as a band and Layne was just a superstar. They played on the [US 1990 package tour] Clash Of The Titans, and on the first couple of dates we’d be backstage going, ‘Who is that with that fucking voice?’ And we started going out to watch the entire set every night. It was just one of those moments.”

Rain When I Die  

Chosen by Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale

Lzzy: “Layne Staley was a legend; his voice was otherworldly. My bandmates and I have gotten to listen to some Atmos mixes, it’s almost like if you’re listening to a song in 3D. I got to listen to Rain When I Die and hear Layne’s vocals solo. You can hear the tinkling of his jewellery, and in between every line he’s like [takes a deep breath]. It’s just such power – it gave me goosebumps then and it gives me goosebumps thinking about it now. That’s a song that I would love to cover one day.”

Down In A Hole

Chosen by Zakk Wylde

Zakk: “I remember being on the road with Alice In Chains, and Jerry Cantrell and Layne Staley came into my dressing room to jam on my electric guitar. So I was getting them to blast those songs out, playing the whole Dirt album, basically! They get to Down In A Hole and I’m just floored – it’s so epic, and obviously when you hear the production on that track, you really feel it. The melody is amazing.”

Would?

Chosen by Max Cavalera

Max: “I first heard it on a movie soundtrack [1992 grunge rom-com Singles] and I really dug that melody, it was beautifully sung by Layne. We did some gigs with Alice In Chains and Ozzy Osbourne back in the day and Layne would come hang out on the bus with us – he was real cool. In fact, Ozzy used Would? almost every day for soundcheck – I don’t know if the sound guy was obsessed with them or whatever, but he would play it five or six times in a row some days. That stuck with me, but luckily I love that song so I didn’t care.”

Check My Brain

Chosen by Skindred’s Benji Webbe

Benji: “I play Check My Brain at every DJ set I do. I love it, it’s such a big song. I first heard it in a car going along the PCH [Pacific Coast Highway] on my way into California, it came on rock radio and I was just like, ‘What is this, it’s badass?’. The view going along that road from Malibu to Venice is so epic and that song always takes me back to that moment.”

Dam That River

Chosen by Incubus’ Brandon Boyd

Brandon: “With a band like Alice In Chains its almost impossible just picking one song, especially because so often I’ll sit there listening to their whole albums. But I’ll go for Dam That River. I absolutely love how Dirt smashes from Them Bones right into Dam That River. I performed Man In The Box with Jerry Cantrell at a private show where I sang the vocal and his dick popped out his leather pants right at the first chorus – it was one of the greatest moments of my life. It was an event!”

Heaven Beside You

Chosen by Killswitch Engage’s Jesse Leach

Jesse: “I was in my final year of school when I first heard Heaven Beside You. I loved Alice In Chains and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is different, slower and less heavy.’ It’s dark poetry set to music – the vibe is bluesy, but with that AIC feel that only they can pull off. I also love that Jerry takes lead vocals on this one, which really reveals his importance to the sound and soul of the band. A lot of people lean hard on Layne’s legacy, and I get that, but without Jerry there is no Alice In Chains. To this day, they’re still putting out great music, and I’ll be a fan for as long as they continue doing what they do.”

Rotten Apple

Chosen by Napalm Death’s Shane Embury

Shane: “I loved Alice In Chains from Facelift – Man In The Box was always on at [Birmingham rock club] Edwards. And Dirt was immense, every track on that was just a winner. But the Jar Of Flies EP was so different from Dirt. It was mellow; it had its own vibe. It was sad music, and I think I was probably sad myself at times when I listened to it. I saw them with Screaming Trees and Gruntruck at the Palladium in LA. I saw them backstage at a distance, and they had a massive buzz about them. Did I say hello? Nah, I was too shy. I wish I had done.”

Don’t Follow

Chosen by Shinedown’s Brent Smith

Brent: “The Jar of Flies EP is brilliant. For a band that was fuelled by dark imagery and tone, there was a light-hearted approach to this album, and a sincerity of overwhelming emotion. The song Don’t Follow will always be special to me, as it reminds me of my early teenage years. It’s acoustic, beautiful and reminds me of simpler times. I love this song, and all the nostalgia that comes along with it.”

Love, Hate, Love

Chosen by A.A. Williams

A.A. Williams: “When I listen through Facelift I adore the way that Love, Hate, Love presents a real shift in pace to slower, groovier territory. A fairly sparse arrangement, simple textural changes make big differences – the slower tempo and less regimented percussion give a different sense of weight to that found on the rest of the album. The jangly guitars and minimal rhythm section create a hypnotic bed for Layne’s impassioned and effortless vocal delivery, creating a song that could almost be an ominous, sultry, grungy Bond theme.”

Nutshell

Chosen by Cane Hill’s Elijah Witt

Elijah: “I think Jar Of Flies is Alice In Chains’ best release, because it shows their versatility as a band – it keeps that pain and heaviness in an acoustic form. Nutshell makes you understand what it’s like to feel alone inside the prison you’ve built around yourself with your own vices. The first time I heard Alice In Chains was the first time I heard an artist’s true pain. There was audible anguish in everything Layne sang. If you want to hear the pain of a man dying, Alice In Chains is the mood.”

A Looking In View

Chosen by Tetrarch’s Diamond Rowe

Diamond: “Alice In Chains are a band that genuinely only come around once in a lifetime. There’s something so uniquely different about them. A Looking In View feels like a drug trip or a high that you can’t come down from. I love songs that sound ominous and unsettling and this is just that. The entire song feels like something bad is about to happen and their ability to consistently produce songs with that vibe intrigues me. There’s a soul to the vocal harmonies and melodies that is just so creepy, and the dynamics of the song work perfectly. Jerry’s guitar work in that song and how it drones is amazing as well. He’s one of the best guitar players, and at catching a vibe of a song and running with it.”

Sunshine

Chosen by Alter Bridge’s Mark Tremonti

Mark: “Alice In Chains will always be one of my favourite bands. When the Facelift record came out, it blew me away. I listened to it endlessly for about six months straight. I always loved the chorus on Sunshine. It just did the thing that great songs do – it made me feel and gave me the chills. It made me want to pick up the guitar and write a song of my own. I’ve said this before, but I think Jerry Cantrell is one of the greatest modern rock songwriters. Pair that with Layne Staley and the magic is undeniable.”

Rooster

Chosen by Alien Weaponry’s Henry de Jong

Henry: “Alice In Chains were a household favourite when I was growing up – my dad loves them, so me and [brother/AW frontman] Lewis grew up listening to them. I worked as a mechanic for about seven months after I left school, and a radio station we have called The Rock would play this every day without fail. Me and my co-worker would just belt it out. What’s brilliant about it is that they’ve managed to make something so beautiful out of something so sad and harrowing. It’s an amazing artistic expression.”

Grind

Chosen by Gojira’s Christian Andreu

Christian: “Me and my best friend spent our evenings listening to music, and he called me one night to listen to the new ‘Dog Album’ [Alice In Chains’ self-titled third album, with a three-legged dog on the cover]. It struck me as true masterpiece. Grind is the first song, and it’s so mesmerising. When I listen to it, I feel like I’m suspended in air from the beginning to the end. There’s only one main beat, but so many amazing melodies and great guitar solos. For AIC, anything and everything was possible. I always liked that feeling of freedom when listening to their music.”

Black Gives Way To Blue

Chosen by Ocean Of Slumbers’ Cammie Beverly

Cammie: “I wasn’t really allowed to have a whole lot of CDs growing up, so a lot of what I listened to came from hearing it on the local alternative rock radio station. That’s how I heard Alice In Chains – they had this raw, passionate, unbridled way of making music. Black Gives Way To Blue is just a wonderful, impactful, moving song. The vocals are so poignant, you can really hear everything they’ve been through. That’s one of the great things about Alice In Chains - they’ve had so many tribulations, but their music has stood the test of time.”

Angry Chair

Chosen by Ithaca’s Sam Chetan-Welsh

Sam: “Alice In Chains were a real gateway band for me when I was younger, certainly on the sludgier side of things, and I used to listen to Angry Chair a lot. I actually found the whole Dirt album scary, and this was the scariest of all. Even now when I listen back on it, the way Layne Staley double-tracks his vocals in the verse melody, kind of like a Gregorian chant, makes me feel a little sick – in a good way. They were a supremely innovative band, and people don’t really give them credit for the range of influences they were bringing in, from funk to sludge metal. And they used harmonies better than anyone else – even in Angry Chair, the harmonies in the chorus are pleasant but then they get darker and weirder.”

Junkhead

Chosen by Pallbearer’s Brett Campbell

Brett: “Jerry Cantrell is a master of writing simple, memorable riffs that twist in some way as to make them unique. A perfect example of that, the big draw of Junkhead, is that lurching, staggering riff that sounds as fucked-up as the narrator of the song. The lyrics describe a junkie who has embraced, and enjoys, the lifestyle, but the musical atmosphere is degraded and sour. It’s a juxtaposition that works perfectly. The blissful guitar harmonies in the bridge suggest the drug-induced euphoria experienced by the narrator, but before long, that insistent riff smashes the listener back to the bleak reality.”

Stone

Chosen by Loathe’s Erik Bickerstaffe

Erik: “I hadn’t intently listened to a song by Alice In Chains before, aside from playing Them Bones on Guitar Hero when I was younger, but Stone [from The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here] completely caught me off guard. The way they approach melody is so abstract, in the best way. Such a good bass tone instantly; amazing mix and amazing riff, too, because of the phrasing and the bends. They don’t stray away from including ‘uncomfortable’ or less traditional movements in their choruses or in their riffs - they’re so mean and so heavy too.”

Dirt

Chosen by Tesseract’s James Monteith

James: “AIC’s haunting close harmonies are one of their most defining characteristics. The intro to the song Dirt is a wonderful example of how powerful it sounds, and still gives me shivers down my spine to this day. I remember first hearing it at a house party when I was 15. I was a few cans of terrible cider in, my mind was blown and I was instantly hooked. The combination of delicate beauty with dark overtones was a gamechanger for me. A massive eye-opener as to how you can mix emotions to a great effect.”

What The Hell Have I

Chosen by Irist’s Rodrigo Carvalho

Rodrigo: “As soon as you listen to the sitar sound of the initial riff, you know that something special is going to come. What The Hell Have I is so mesmerising that it makes you feel like you’re in a maze, only this time you don’t want to escape. Being lost in the song’s melody and layers of vocals and strings simply feels amazing to me. I never just listen to it once.”

All I Am

Chosen by Malevolence’s Konan Hall

Konan: “This is one of their newer songs, but to me it still embodies the miserable grunge from all those years ago. To me, this eerie, low-tempo ballad is atmospherically and lyrically a point of self-reflection of the band’s career and the audience’s lives and own experiences; the scars and hardships you face along the way; the triumphs and low points where you find yourself asking, ‘Is this all I am?’”

Perhaps more so than with any other band, Status Quo’s repertoire includes a handful of songs that became enormous chart hits yet were reviled by many of the band’s staunchest fans. In Quo’s case examples of this include Living On An Island, In The Army Now, The Anniversary Waltz and Burning Bridges.

But Marguerita Time, a jaunty yet seemingly inoffensive 1983 single that Quo singer and guitarist Francis Rossi and collaborative partner Bernie Frost wrote about an alcoholic cocktail, was despised so much by one member of the group that it caused him to quit. It may even have been a catalyst in Quo’s decision to call it a day in 1984 (temporarily, as it turned out).

The previous summer, the UK had been swept by a craze for getting smashed on margueritas – a sweet-tasting but deceptively strong tequila-based cocktail. Decorated with fruit and mini-umbrellas, for all its potency it was about as far from the good old-fashioned British pint as you could get. Rossi didn’t care at all, and found himself supping more margueritas than was advisable.

“I’d never been a drinker until then, but they were delicious and really got you pissed,” he recalls. “I used to order them six at a time. For a while I got out of control on tequila.”

The basic structure of Marguerita Time came together while Rossi was “poncing around” on his grand piano at home, and the rest was worked up with Bernie Frost over the phone. The singer even volunteers the similarities to Labelled With Love, which was a hit for fellow British band Squeeze two years earlier.

The album it appeared on was 1983’s Back To Back. It wasn’t an easy record to make, and Quo almost scrapped it and started again when they returned home. Nevertheless, Rossi had very little trouble persuading bassist Alan Lancaster – the band member who ended up opposing Marguerita Time so vehemently – to record his part for it.

“He didn’t argue too much because he didn’t think it would see the light of day,” Rossi recalls. “But the record label knew right away it should come out as a single at Christmas time.”

Speaking to Classic Rock, the late Lancaster once said of Marguerita Time: “All it did was advertise the fact that we were becoming a bunch of nerds.” The fact that it became the band’s first song to be playlisted by both Radio 1 and Radio 2 quickly brought matters to a head with the frustrated bassist.

“Funnily enough, it also made the Kerrang! heavy metal chart too,” Rossi chuckles. Because Quo had already recorded lightweight songs like Living On An Island, Rossi couldn’t understand Lancaster’s anger. “Alan had this macho attitude which really pissed me off,” he comments. “We’d be playing a song like Dirty Water [from the Rocking All Over The World album] on stage and he’d get really upset, claiming to be embarrassed to play material like that.”

Nevertheless, Marguerita Time reached No.3 in Britain. And when Lancaster – who had emigrated to Australia years earlier – refused to fly back to London to appear on Top Of The Pops, his continued membership of Quo became almost untenable.

“Alan didn’t wanna know,” sighs Rossi. “Just like he didn’t wanna know when Rick [Parfitt, late guitar/vocals] suggested we record Rocking All Over The World [written by John Fogerty]. He told us that he didn’t know how he’d face his family again. If he’d had the courage to say: ‘I won’t accept my royalties for that,’ I’d have admired the courage of his convictions.”

In the same Classic Rock interview, Lancaster also insisted that Rossi was the only member of Quo who had wanted to record Marguerita Time. Rossi pleads ignorance regarding Rick Parfitt’s opinion of the song, and his willingness to have played on it, but he does acknowledge how divisive it was. “A lot of our fans absolutely hated Marguerita Time.,” he says.

The band had planned to retire from the road after the Back To Back album and the End Of The Road tour. But of course their appearance as openers at Live Aid in the summer of 1985 prompted Rossi and Parfitt to put together a new line-up.

“It was a breath of fresh air,” Rossi enthuses. “I’d gone to school with Alan Lancaster, we’d been good friends and he was a great guy. I just didn’t want to work with him any more.”

The ‘new’ Status Quo played the controversial Marguerita Time live for a while, but as part of a medley.

“Lots of people loved it when we did that,” Rossi says, “but our hard-core fans were up in arms. That’s the main problem this band has: the floating punters are the ones that just like the main tunes – one of which is Marguerita Time – and all the rest want to hear the album tracks. Personally, I still love Marguerita Time, but finding a balance is hard. Whatever we do, we seem to ostracise one side or the other.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 101 (December 2006)

And we're past the halfway mark! Seven months into 2026 and the summer is at its peak, which means a whole heap of new albums are just around the corner. Naturally, that also means an even bigger heap of singles to sift through.

That in mind, here are the results of last week's vote! The King Ultramega project - a tribute to Chris Cornell - showed its star power off by nabbing third place with the excellent, Lzzy Hale-headlined Loud Love cover. Just ahead of that were Mongolian metal stars The Hu, but our overall winners for the week were returning arena conquerors Five Finger Death Punch, whose De Oppresso Liber took the crown.

This week we've got a weird and wonderful mix to share. From the strange sounds of "peasant metal" (yep, another colourful subgenre) to former black metal bands and musicians shucking off the past to explore new realms, thundering beatdowns and straight-up great metal, there's a little of something for everyone. Don't forget to cast your vote in the poll below - and have an excellent weekend!

Netherwilds - Return The Goat

If there was a prize for weirdest single of the week, Netherwilds would walk it. With its medieval peasant video and SOAD-like sense of eccentricity, it isn't long before the track is veering off in wild directions. If you've ever wondered what post-hardcore would sound like fronted by a medieval peasant... Now you know.

Distant - All Will Be (N)One

If you want to stand out in deathcore in 2026, you'd better put some serious work in. Dutch/Slovakian brutes Distant are certainly doing their legwork with yet another slab of angular, pummelling violence in new single All Will Be (N)One, drafting in Ricky Myers of Suffocation for some extra lung-shredding nastiness.

Xenith - Killer Instinct

Expanding out into the realms of the epic, Manchester newcomers Xenith are gearing up for the release of their debut album To No Avail, due August 28. It might be early doors for them, but Killer Instinct lays out a stall of gorgeous guitars and explosive breakouts, bringing to mind Skeletonwitch or Black Dahlia Murder.

Haken - Delirium

Even with their 20th anniversary as a band looming, Haken are showing no signs of dialing back their expansive sonic palette. Delirium comes from new EP In A Fever Dream, due July 17, and finds the band blending brittle notes with pounding breakout moments and more than a few skittering drum beats.

Moonspell - The Great Wolf In The Sky

Portugal's goth metal kings, Moonspell never get the credit they deserve. At the time where Type O Negative were blowing up, they pioneered a similarly vampiric take on darkness that would help inspire the likes of HIM. You can hear echoes of both those other bands in new single The Great Wolf In The Sky, a dark, melodious track which captures some of their crepuscular charm. New album Far From God is out today and well worth a listen.

Enslaved - Spirit Helper (feat. Kevin Kicking Woman)

This far in, it's become accepted that Enslaved have the capacity to venture far from their black metal roots. Even after sidelines into prog, folk and beyond, a track like Spirit Helper stands out for just how starkly different it is to their core sound, the band drafting in an Elder of the Blackfoot Nation - Kevin Kicking Woman - to create a track that is sparse yet loaded with heavy atmospherics. Even when they go full Wardruna, there's some of the grandeur inherent to Enslaved still popping up, particularly towards the song's closing minute.

Trelldom - When This Way Was Young

From one maverick to another. Gaahl has also long since shed his black metal roots to explore more oppressive sonic realms, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Trelldom. The band's new album ...By The Word... arrived on May 29, and new single When This Way Was Young showcases their evolution towards a dread-filled sense of abjection that feels both doomy and gothic whilst being neither of those things, with the cold, dark atmos of his black metal past. It's certainly one way to beat the summer sun.

Kamelot - Ashen World (feat. Ignacia Fernández)

Set somewhere between the realms of power and symphonic metal, Kamelot can always be relied upon to bring a sense of grandeur. Ashen World comes with the announcement that the band's fourteenth album Dark Asylum will be out August 28, the single also drafting in Decessus vocalist Ignacia Fernández for some extra heavy ballast.

Living Weapon - The Leaving Process

We hardly need an excuse to get sweaty right now, but Living Weapon have provided the perfect soundtrack to a skull-stomping beatdown nonetheless. The Boston hardcore mob are going right for the jugular on new single The Leaving Process, melody left gathering dust while they kick the ever-loving shit out of the listener. Keep your eyes out for new album Death In The Family on August 14.

Koh - Golden Death

It might be short and sharp, but Koh's Golden Death isn't your usual in-n-out hardcore rager. There's a sense of sublime melody early on in the track that gives way to a blasting maelstrom of noise, feeling akin to the likes of Harakiri For The Sky. The Aussie band's debut EP of the same name is out now and well worth a listen if you like your heaviness to feel expansive and powerful whilst also not overly self indulgent.

The novelist Peter Matthiesen once wrote, “Mountains have no meaning; they are the meaning.”

Joe Walsh might've been having similar awe-struck thoughts when he wrote his signature hit Rocky Mountain Way.

It was spring 1972, and the then 24-year old Walsh was in a period of transition. He'd just quit his band The James Gang, while simultaneously turning down an invitation from Steve Marriott to join Humble Pie, taking Peter Frampton's place. Instead, Walsh upped stakes from Cleveland, moved out to the idyllic town of Boulder, and formed a new band called Barnstorm.

“I'd gone to Colorado because Bill Szymczyk [James Gang producer] was there and so were a whole bunch of other people I knew,” Walsh told Rolling Stone. Barnstorm's self-titled debut, recorded at Caribou Ranch in the Rocky Mountains, was influenced by the acoustic sounds of Crosby, Stills & Nash and James Taylor. It made a moderate splash, but the band wasted no time recording the follow-up.

Walsh said, “We had the Smoker album pretty much done [The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get] except we had this one track that was an instrumental. I couldn't think of any words and everybody was patiently waiting for me to come up with something.”

Inspiration arrived one day while Walsh was mowing his lawn. “I looked up, and there were the Rocky Mountains. It was summer but you could still see snow on the back range. It just hit me how beautiful it all was, 5,000 feet up. And that was it – the words came: Spent the last year Rocky Mountain way / Couldn’t get much higher. And the second verse is about my old management – Telling us this, telling us that, time to change the batter. I got all of that at once. And I ran inside to write it down before I forgot it.”

But in his haste to scratch down the lyrics, Walsh forgot to shut off the lawn mower. He said, “It kept moving and went into the neighbour’s yard and ate her rose bushes. Cleared a little path straight through. So those lyrics wound up costing me, I don’t know, maybe fifteen hundred bucks. But it was well worth it. The neighbour, though, she was pissed. I said to her, ‘You don’t understand! I got the words!’ But she just looked at me.”

Walsh had written and recorded the instrumental track for Rocky Mountain Way with bandmates Joe Vitale, Rocke Grace and Kenny Passarelli. Now with the lyric completed, he went back in the studio with Szymczyk to finish the song. After perfecting the vocal, Walsh layered on “six or seven” guitars, arriving at that wonderfully dense texture on the rhythm part. For lead, he played slide on the fills, and for the solo breakdown section, he tried out a new toy called the Talk Box.

Walsh had borrowed the contraption from acclaimed Nashville steel guitar player Pete Drake, who'd built it himself and used it on several country songs, as far back as his own hit, Forever, in 1961. Basically, a Talk Box redirects sound from an instrument into the player's mouth via a plastic tube. The player can then shape that sound by vocalizing along with it into a microphone. In short, it looks like a beer bong and sounds like a robot.

But Walsh was frustrated by the lack of volume of Drake's invention, and had sound engineer Bob Heil build a new, rock-friendly version of the Talk Box. Famously, Heil would soon give one of those prototypes to Peter Frampton, who made it part of his signature sound in the '70s.

Rocky Mountain Way reached only #23 on the charts, but became a staple at FM radio, and has been a Walsh solo spotlight in Eagles' concerts for years. Because the lyrics mention “Casey's at bat,” a reference to a famous baseball poem, the Colorado Rockies have used the song after every home win since 1995. That's some steady royalty money for Walsh and his Barnstorm buddies. Meanwhile, the Denver Broncos football team use the song during their home games, though they prefer the cover version by Godsmack. Another prominent cover by Triumph became a hit in Canada in 1977.

Rocky Mountain inspiration aside, Walsh said the success of the song is more down-to- earth. “One of the the things that makes the song magic is it's a bunch of guys playing together in a room. That's a groove you can't do with computer software.”

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

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

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

Akatsuki (Babymetal, 2014)

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

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

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

What is it like singing the a cappella version?

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

Megitsune (Babymetal, 2014)

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

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

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

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

Gimme Chocolate!! (Babymetal, 2014)

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

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

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

Why do you think the song became so popular?

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

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

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

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

How challenging was it to learn the dance routine?

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

Karate (Metal Resistance, 2016)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syncopation (Metal Resistance, 2016)

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

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

Distortion (Single, 2018 / Metal Galaxy, 2019)

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

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

BxMxC (Metal Galaxy, 2019)

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

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

Pa Pa Ya!! (Metal Galaxy, 2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mirror Mirror (The Other One, 2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ratatata feat. Electric Callboy (Metal Forth, 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

My Queen feat. Spiritbox (Metal Forth, 2025)

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

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

What did Courtney bring to the song vocally?

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

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

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

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

Are there any similarities between Poppy and Babymetal?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would Babymetal like to play in India?

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

Babymetal play Louder Than Life and Aftershock festivals this fall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pieces Of Molly - Alligator

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

Green Lung - Necropolitan Line

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

Bad Nerves - Network

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

These Wicked Rivers - Horse To Water

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

The Meffs - Where Did It All Go Wrong?

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

Radio Everything - Ignoramus Stupidatus

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

Bywater Call - Is This Thing On?

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

Return to Dust - Sweet Escape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Floor Jansen 2027 tour dates:

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

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

Jonathan Davis (Korn)

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

Lemmy

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

Kerry King (ex-Slayer)

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

Ronnie James Dio

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

Kurt Cobain (Nirvana)

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

James Hetfield (Metallica)

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

Robb Flynn (Machine Head)

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

Chino Moreno

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

Shawn “Clown” Crahan

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

Amy Lee (Evanscence)

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

Joe Duplantier (Gojira)

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

Paolo Gregoletto (Trivium)

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

Dave Mustaine (Megadeth)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Hardwired (2016) — 178 BPM

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

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

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

8. St. Anger (2003) — 186 BPM

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

7. Blackened (1988)  — 190 BPM (avg)

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

6. Dyers Eve (1988) — 194 BPM (avg)

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

5. My Apocalypse (2016) — 196 BPM

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

4. The Four Horsemen (1983) — 204 BPM

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

3. Fuel (1997) — 208 BPM

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

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

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

1. Master Of Puppets (1986) — 212 BPM

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

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

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

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

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

THE GIFT

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

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

I’M WAITING FOR THE MAN

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

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

PERFECT DAY

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

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

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

BERLIN

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

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

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

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

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

STREET HASSLE

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

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

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

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

NEW YORK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While the title of their third album was a nod to Ornette Coleman's similarly groundbreaking 1959 release The Shape of Jazz to Come, Refused drew a line under a stagnating post-hardcore scene. Recorded at Umeå's Tonteknik Bomba Je Studios with producers Eskil Lövström, Andreas Nilsson and Pelle Henricsson, they created an avant-garde masterpiece in 12 movements, bringing in jazz and electronic interludes, cellos and violins to soundtrack frontman Lyxzén's anti-capitalist manifesto.

In the years leading up to their 2012 reunion, the band's profile grew and influenced a new generation of bands and musicians, while spin-off projects like The (International) Noise Conspiracy and TEXT toiled away in the shadow of their former band's legacy.

Dennis Lyxzén recognises the far-reaching influence of The Shape of Punk to Come but notes that the scene it was attempting to rejuvenate did not react kindly to the release.

"People were kind of pissed off when that record came out," Lyxzén told Canadian magazine Exclaim!. "They were like, 'You heathens. If this is the shape of punk to come then I'm quitting punk.' We got a lot of that. When Ornette Coleman's record came out people thought he was an idiot and they wanted to kill him so it's kind of fitting in a way."

Of the entire tracklist, two songs in particular kept the album alive throughout their 14-year hiatus. One was Liberation Frequency; the other was New Noise, whose compelling video was aired regularly on alternative music television channels, while the song was included on the soundtrack for the video game Tony Hawk's Underground.

"To a lot of people, we’re just a rock band," Lyxzén told Revolver. "So obviously, there’s gonna be a lot of people who don’t understand where we’re coming from or don’t understand our political background or our musical background, even. That’s not to put anyone down, but if you discovered New Noise 10 years ago and thought, 'This is a killer song. I like this band', but you have no concept of who we are, you might be offended by the fact that we made a theme record saying capitalism is bad.

"But those are the people we’ve always been, and those are the ideas we’ve always had," he added. "I don’t think that’s as clear-cut to people now as it was in the '90s, because in the '90s we were part of something very specific."

Crazy Town loved New Noise so much they would massacre the song during their shows around the time Butterfly was a massive hit. The very idea that this band who’d become famous by sampling another band – and singing about "new art for real people" – left a bitter taste in Lyxzén's mouth.

"It's horrible; they should be shot," Lyxzén told Exclaim! in 2000, whose writer Stuart Green noted the singer’s remark was uttered “with only a hint of irony”. "Seriously, I hate that band. Did you ever listen to them? I don't like to talk shit about bands, there are more constructive ways to work, but sometimes you just have to say, 'Stop... please stop this.'

"If someone listened to The Shape... and really understood what we were thinking about they wouldn't be in Crazy Town and they wouldn't think The Shape of Punk to Come was to add a DJ to a metal band," he added. "If they really loved Refused, they missed everything that was important about that band."

In recent years, the television and movie industries have cottoned on to the song's volatile power.

It has been featured in the films Crank, Here Comes the Boom and Triangle of Sadness, as well as the TV shows Friday Night Lights and Criminal Minds.

Most recently, the song has become a theme of sorts for The Bear, a tense drama set in a busy Chicago restaurant. The show, which began in 2022, boasts an exemplary soundtrack, but it's the 1998 hardcore classic New Noise which gives the series its most visceral pacing.

"I was watching the Emmys or whatever it was when they constantly played New Noise every time they won an award," Lyxzén told the CBC podcast Q with Tom Power. "I'm like, this is trippy. Seeing Steve Martin on stage listening to New Noise? That's wild.”

For the Umeå quartet, it is wild. It’s a surreal coup for the highlight of an album that some sections of their scene originally detested. But almost three decades on, the song and album retains its raw power.

Refused are fucking dead. Long live Refused.

How about that intense sunshine? Thankfully, here are 10 bands which have thoughtfully scheduled new music in advance to help take our minds of those red and amber weather warnings. It's like everything Nuclear Assault predicted in the '80s is coming true.

Check the best 10 metal songs of the week before your local power infrastructure buckles under the weight of a million fans being switched on at once.

The Hu – Grey Hun

Mongolian folk metallers The Hu are set to release their third album Hun on July 24. According to horsehead fiddle player and backing vocalist Enkhsaikhan ‘Enkush’ Batjargal, Grey Hun is a thumping anthem that celebrates everyone’s right to be themselves and deserves to be played at a more than reasonable volume.

“It started with composing the riff as I imagined a man riding his horse through a vast landscape," he explains. "From there, it took a while for us to finish the song because we wanted to make sure to clearly communicate [its] positive message."

Loathe – Fangs

Merseyside four-piece Loathe release their long-awaited new album A Stranger To You on July 17. Fangs is a bass-y slab of downtuned R&B featuring a sublime vocal performance from Kadeem France. Following on from the thudding metalcore of Revenant, it's clear that their time away has been wisely spent adding even more colours to their sonic palette.

Five Finger Death Punch – De Oppresso Liber

It's been about four years since Five Finger Death Punch released their last album, AfterLife. The Nevada quintet are readying the digital release of album 10 – Legacy – at the end of July, with physical releases planned for later in the year. On De Oppresso Liber, it's business as usual for Zoltan Bathory's mob. It's got more crunch you could shake a stick at and a memorable, soaring chorus. "[The title] is more than just a motto," says the guitarist. "It's a calling. It's a philosophy. It represents a willingness to stand between danger and those who cannot defend themselves. Throughout human history, there have always been people who were drawn to accept that responsibility. This song is our way of paying respect to that mindset."

Bring Me The Horizon – Dehumanized

Bring Me The Horizon aren't celebrating the 20th anniversary of their album Count Your Blessings with a lazy reissue. Count Your Blessings Repented is a new recording, which sees the Sheffield four-piece give the album a proper makeover and deliver the sound they'd envisioned as teenagers. Dehumanised is a brutal bastard of a single with an aggressive, unsettling video to match.

King Ultramega – Loud Love

King Ultramega is the star-studded tribute to late Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell. This cover of the Louder Than Love single features an incredible vocal performance from Halestorm's Lzzy Hale, Testament guitarist Alex Skolnick and former Pearl Jam drummer Dave Krusen. It's a faithful rendition by all those involved and a bittersweet reminder of Cornell's incalculable loss.

Chelsea Wolfe - Death is Not the End

This week, Chelsea Wolfe released two new songs which will feature on her as-yet-untitled ninth studio album. The first was the folky The Dark but it's Death is Not the End that is the most affecting. A fragile vocal floats above a delicate piano and guitar line, before gradually swelling into a soaring, meditative doom riff by former Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck.

Russian Circles – Empath

Well, if it's not our favourite post-metal hypnotists named after an ice hockey drill who return with a new song and news of a brand new full-length. Taken from the album Nine, which was recorded at Steve Albini's Electrical Audio studio and engineered by Converge's Kurt Ballou, Empath is gloriously heavy, all-enveloping, ominous and mesmerising. Absolutely perfect.

Psycroptic – No Blade of Grass

Australian quintet Psycroptic return with The Pulse of Annihilation, their first album in four years, on July 17. No Blade of Grass is a ferocious bark of tech-death with an immense groove. And to drive the song title home, the narrative part of their video is set in a desert. Thanks lads!

Green Lung – Necropolitan Line

Here's another taster from the occultist stoner doom quintet's forthcoming album Necropolitan. This song is about the Necropolis Railway, "a real-life train line that carried corpses and mourners across London in the late 19th century". So imagine if Deep Purple were trapped in a carriage with a bag of cans and holding torches under their chins, then you've got yourself some creepy 70s psych pomp. Lovely stuff.

New Idea Society – Lantern

Here's a second mention of Kurt Ballou, and that's a wonderful thing. New Idea Society, a project featuring Cave In's Stephen Brodsky and Euclid's Mike Law, have filmed a performance of the slow-burning Lantern at God City Studios with a few friends: Cave In's Adam McGrath, Old Man Gloom's Santos Montano and Ballou. The original can be found on the album Fire On The Hill, which was released last month through Relapse.

Not much ran smoothly for The Doors. And so it was with sessions for their sixth album, L.A. Woman. In November 1970, regular producer Paul Rothchild, unconvinced by what he was hearing in the studio, decided to quit. Enter engineer Bruce Botnick, who joined the band in their old rehearsal space, the Doors Workshop, on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was a back-to-basics move that mirrored the eventual tone of the album itself. Gone were the symphonic flourishes and painstaking exactitude of their most recent work, replaced instead by a freer, garage-blues sound that harked back to their beginnings.

This was most keenly expressed on the title track, the final track recorded during the album sessions. On one level, it’s a simple song about barrelling down the LA Freeway, lights a-blur and the wind at its tail. But it’s also a conflicted homage to Los Angeles as a living entity, a promised land of midnight alleys and Hollywood bungalows, peopled by the lost and lonely.

As drummer John Densmore remarked in the documentary, The Story of L.A. Woman: “The metaphor for the city as a woman is brilliant - cops in cars, never saw a woman so alone…The physicality of the town and thinking of her and how we need to take care of her. It’s my hometown.”

Musically, L.A. Woman shifts through the gears. Densmore’s tight rhythm and Ray Manzarek’s descending organ riff hurry it along, before Jim Morrison’s vocals (mimic’d after each line by Robby Krieger bluesy guitar) open the throttle. Elvis’s former bassist Jerry Scheff adds a sense of propulsion, as does rhythm guitarist Marc Benno.

Morrison’s repeated phrase – ‘City of Night, City of Night’ – takes its cue from John Rechy’s underground novel of the same name, which depicts a demi-monde of hustlers, fiends and illicit sexual trysts, partly set in Los Angeles, while further inspiration came from 1940s writer John Fante, who described Hollywood in love-hate lines like: ‘So fuck you, Los Angeles, fuck your palm trees, and your high-assed women, and your fancy streets… Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand…’

"L.A. Woman was recorded in a state of high excitement," said Manzarek. "The Doors jumped in. We dug our teeth into that song. It was all about passion and hauling ass. It felt like we were on Route 101, on the road from Bakersfield to San Francisco. You can hear our enthusiasm. Welcome to Los Angeles!”

Hurtling through eight minutes of dark psychedelic blues, the song heads for optimum pick-up when Morrison begins to intone ‘Mr. Mojo Risin’ (an anagram of his own name) over and over. As his vocals become more frenzied – ‘Risin’!, Risin’!’ - the symbolism is obvious.

The Doors debuted L.A. Woman at the State Fair Music Hall in Dallas that December, and reprised it at The Warehouse in New Orleans the following night, the only times the four men played the song.

In Texas, a doomy 15-minute version of L.A. Woman was unveiled during a relatively triumphant show. Morrison was drunk but coherent. But Louisiana was a fiasco, and the last live show the band ever gave.

“He just lost his energy completely," said Mazarak. "He was so dissipated. His voice got lower and lower, and he ground to a halt. He was empty. This wasn’t like when he comes to the studio wasted and can’t deliver, but then there’s always tomorrow – and by God, he will deliver. This was final."

Morrison's legend continues to endure, of course, not least via what Krieger calls “the quintessential Doors song,” but within three months of its parent album’s release in early 1971, Morrison was dead. The music was over.

Question: What do you call a woman at a Rush concert? Answer: Lost.

It's an old joke, and it's never been true, but it's also something that Rush themselves have been happy to jest about.

"There were women on one tour!" Geddy Lee jokingly told MuchMusic in 1988. "The trend has always been mostly male, and I think that's because we attract a young musician type of audience, and they're mostly male musicians. I guess the kind of rock we play has some sort of masculine vibe to it.

"When we did Signals, we started getting more girl fans. Sometimes we'd come out, and there would be girls screaming. It was short-lived, though. Things got back to normal on the next tour."

Those jokes are no more. Anika Nilles is nailing Neil Peart's parts on the Fifty Something tour, and it's the doubters who are nowhere to be seen. And, in a bathroom in Missouri, Payton Rose Velligan has videoed herself singing all 15 minutes of Rush's 1978 prog epic Cygnus X-1 Book II.

Payton is the guitarist in "Weird Al" Yankovic's band. She worked with late Boston singer Tommy DeCarlo. At the age of 15, she was the bassist and singer of Irrashional, a Rush tribute band turned original group. And, these days, she also fronts another Rush tribute act, The Camera Eye.

So it's probably not entirely unexpected to find Payton singing Cygnus X-1 Book II. The choice of venue might be novel, but the bathroom's natural reverb works in her favour, and the performance is committed and dramatic – complete with air guitar and dance moves – albeit with more of a Broadway musical vibe than you'll get from Geddy Lee.

"Rush is the greatest!!!!" says Payton, using more exclamation marks than is strictly necessary.

So are you, Payton. So are you.

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2026

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

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2027

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

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

Find Rush tickets.

British metal seemed ready to take over the world in the mid-1990s, but then the rise of nu metal scuppered its momentum. In 2020, Hammer caught up with Orange Goblin, Paradise Lost, Napalm Death and more to find out what exactly went wrong.

August 17, 1996 was a good day to be a British metal fan. The sun shone on the hallowed turf of Donington Park, and tens of thousands of metalheads made the annual pilgrimage to witness a reformed and re-made-up Kiss headlining that year’s Monsters Of Rock alongside Ozzy Osbourne, Sepultura and many more.

Plus, while the mainstream was wrapped up in ‘Cool Britannia’ and the Britpop phenomenon, our metal bands had been thriving. Carcass, Napalm Death, Bolt Thrower and more were all doing fine business, despite the threat of grunge that had killed off so many of their US peers.

“It was incredible when you think back,” reflects Nick Holmes of Yorkshire doom merchants Paradise Lost. The band had broken out of the underground, been tipped as the next Metallica and, with 1995’s classic Draconian Times in their back pocket, were added to the Main Stage line-up. “We always dreamed about playing there. We don’t really get that excited by anything, to be honest, but that was pretty special after all the work we’d put in.”

Everything seemed set up for a moment of coronation for the new breed of British metal, a springboard to the next level for our scene… but, of course, that isn’t what Donington ’96 is remembered for. A few hours after Paradise Lost stepped offstage, Korn arrived to headline the second stage of the festival, their incredible, day-stealing performance triggering the forthcoming domination of the as-yet-untitled nu metal movement.

Almost overnight, the pendulum swung back in favour of the USA: nu metal became the biggest movement on Earth, Carcass split, Bolt Thrower were plagued by line-up changes, Paradise Lost rejected metal for synth-pop, and a generation of young, vibrant British metal bands ended up being treated almost exclusively with apathy and ignorance for half a decade.

“It was a really great scene back then, because it was so underground,” says Orange Goblin frontman Ben Ward. “You’d go see Electric Wizard or Cradle Of Filth in [south east London’s] The Amersham Arms and Barney would be handing out flyers for Napalm Death gigs. We didn’t think about commercial concerns, because there was no chance of it. Everyone sort of knew each other and got along whatever music they were playing or into.”

The UK may have invented metal, but there was no place for the more dour, straightforward British stereotype in the nu metal scene that was taking over in the late 90s.

“It was funny to see the change in the scene,” says Paul Catten of Herefordshire-based metallic hardcore band Medulla Nocte. “We were coming from the punk scene and it just hit a point where you’d suddenly see all these people in baggy jeans getting piercings and dying their hair blue or whatever.”

It’s safe to say that, for some of the bands that had enjoyed success in the early 90s, nu metal was an unwanted addition. Nick Holmes remembers being backstage at a festival during the years of Korn and Limp Bizkit’s dominance.

“They were brash and loud,” he laughs. “I didn’t know who these bands were, but I saw a bunch of guys all smiling and high-fiving each other and wearing multicoloured clothing. I remember thinking, ‘This ain’t metal, is it?! Smiling!’”

The British bands of the time were not anti-American; they just took their influences from other areas of the US scene.

“We loved American bands and were hugely influenced by them,” Karl Middleton of Nottingham post-metallers Earthtone9 explains. “But our problem is that we weren’t influenced by hip-hop. We were taking bits of Corrosion Of Conformity and Kyuss, and there was very little of that in what was popular at that time. The band from our scene we really looked up to was Pulkas; they had this very British, almost Killing Joke, kind of vibe.”

Pulkas were one of the first bands to turn heads in the press during the dominance of nu metal. Although they were short-lived, the band splitting with no fanfare shortly after the release of 1998 debut album Greed, they were arguably the first band from British shores that had the audacity to take the fight to America, leaning heavily on the atmospherics of Tool and the textured groove of Deftones or Helmet. They wouldn’t be the last.

“I remember when Pitchshifter signed to Geffen,” says Karl, still awed all these years later. “One of our bands signing to an international major was a game-changer. Everyone re-evaluated the possibilities of what they could achieve.”

Pitchshifter were undoubtedly the biggest band of this period, their evolution from underground, Godflesh-worshipping industrialists to major-label drum’n’bass punks as surprising as it was exciting. Their 1998 album, www.pitchshifter.com, was their first to feature clean vocals.

“I didn’t want to make another record with grunting vocals,” Pitchshifter vocalist JS Clayden explains. “The guys were gracious enough to let me present more varied vocal and song ideas. I believe British anything can be successful if it has structural support. Unfortunately, that support had to come from the USA. Only Geffen were adventurous or dumb enough to back our brand of experimentation, so we took the money and ran.”

Pitchshifter’s success seemed to make the door creak open, and trickles of British bands, such as Anglo-Irish rap-metallers One Minute Silence and industrial northerners Kill II This, began to experience a modicum of success – albeit in guises that borrowed from the US metal sound du jour.

“I lost interest as that decade progressed,” says Napalm Death’s Barney Greenway, who appeared on Kill II This’s Deviate album in 1998. “The spark that made heavy music interesting wasn’t there for me anymore. So we went back to being inspired by the things that originally inspired us, and if we did take anything from 90s music it was more stuff like Sonic Youth.”

But progress was being made. In December 1999, British/Gibraltan post-grungers Breed 77 opened for Black Sabbath at their one-off show at the Astoria, and Kill II This opened for Slipknot at their legendary debut UK show there. At the same time, One Minute Silence were out as main support to Machine Head on their Burning Red tour, and then played on Slipknot’s first-ever UK tour. Once again, though, it was Pitchshifter who were the trailblazers. They were added as the opening band on the bill of the inaugural UK Ozzfest at Milton Keynes in 1998, proving that British bands could hold their own if given the chance.

“That was a trip,” JS Clayden remembers. “We learnt a lot on Ozzfest. Love them or hate them, the American bands took no prisoners – they killed it like it was their last show at every gig.”

While Pitchshifter had the industry infrastructure in place to rise to the challenge of playing alongside the American behemoths, many of their peers didn’t, and the thrill of being placed on a bill with some of the biggest names in metal didn’t last long when the reality of the situation was made apparent.

“It’s the old adage: be careful of what you wish for,” says Karl, when asked about Earthtone9’s experiences of touring with the likes of Soulfly and Glassjaw. “We soon realised that without the machine you need for touring behind us, we couldn’t compete. We can’t complain about our label and the small budget we were on, but ultimately, you’re being put in front of the first few people through the door who don’t know your stuff and might not necessarily be interested in what you’re trying to do.”

“I loved the challenge,” smiles Paul Catten when remembering Medulla Nocte’s stint as the opening band on, again, a Soulfly tour. “You see your name on the poster with the bloke who used to be in Sepultura and you think, ‘Bloody hell! This’ll be good!’ But I remember building up the London show in my head, and when we got onstage, there were only about 30 people in the building! We still played well, mind.”

While most of the British bands were swimming against the tide of the American onslaught, one band vehemently went out of their way to alienate themselves from everyone: Nottingham’s Iron Monkey. Their blend of New Orleans sludge, mixed with British grit and driven by the inhuman, nihilistic belch of iconic frontman Johnny Morrow, made them a band to look up to.

“They were something else,” laughs Paul, who formed Murder One with Johnny in 2001 after the break-up of their own bands (Johnny sadly passed away shortly after). “The first time I saw them, I had to laugh; this quiet, polite guy that I’d met before the show was up there making all these noises! And they didn’t give a fuck. Bands all say that, but Monkey were proper punk rock.”

By the dawn of the new millennium, most of the lower tier of British bands had split up due to a lack of interest. Those that were continuing suffered from diminishing returns, but Earthtone9 gave the scene its definitive parting shot with the arc’tan’gent album. This sprawling masterpiece should have catapulted them to the highest of heights, but instead they split just over a year after its release.

“We were really happy with the record,” says Karl. “We didn’t know that it’d be thought of as our ‘magnum opus’, we just felt we were getting closer to our initial vision. But it wasn’t working as a unit; it was actually a relief when we split.”

As nu metal flooded the mainstream, the metal world looked around for something new. The Dillinger Escape Plan’s visionary masterpiece Calculating Infinity arrived in 1999, and ushered in a new attitude to music. Suddenly the dirtier, angrier, more progressive and noise-based likes of Meshuggah, Botch, Candiria and many more shifted focus away from the ludicrously over-the-top third wave of nu metal and, slowly but surely, being British no longer reduced you to second-class citizen status.

Corby-based sludge metal sextet Raging Speedhorn came within touching distance of the UK top 40 singles chart, Watford tech oddities Sikth suddenly found themselves being played on Radio One, and the likes of Hundred Reasons and Funeral For A Friend, and later Bullet For My Valentine and Gallows, put heavier British music back where it belonged… to the point where, over 20 years after Paradise Lost stepped out onto the main stage at Donington Park, one of the original members of British metal’s 90s underground scene did the same.

“It was hugely satisfying,” says Ben Ward of Orange Goblin’s appearance on Download 2017’s main stage. “After all these years of toil, we are taken seriously. You look at us and at Electric Wizard, and we’ve grown from that scene I was talking about earlier. We never could have imagined that day coming back then, but if we’ve played our part in helping it to where it is now then I’m happy with that.”

The late 90s may not have been the most commercially viable time to make metal in this country, but without the grassroots underground scene, we may not have reached a point where we hold the likes of While She Sleeps, Bury Tomorrow, Venom Prison, Black Peaks, Employed To Serve and the rest in such esteem.

“I wouldn’t want to comment on the artistry of others too much,” says JS Clayden to sign off. “But I think that Pitchshifter and Earthtone9 were underground bands that made music from the heart and didn’t have to pretend to write ballads to make more money. From my perspective, our music was a genuine and stentorian voice that came out by necessity rather than any nonsense designed to fill our bank accounts.”

This article was originally published in 2020.

1970's prog rockers Quiet Sun have shared a newly remixed and remastered version of Bargain Classics, a track from the band's acclaimed debut album, Mainstream, reissued as a Deluxe Edition through Expression Records and BFD/The Orchard on September 11.

The band originally formed at Dulwich College in the late 1960s and featured future Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera alongside Bill MacCormick (bass), Dave Jarrett (keyboards) and Charles Hayward (drums). Manzanera reconvened the line-up in 1975 during a break in Roxy Music's touring schedule to record their debut album, Mainstream, which also featured contributions from Brian Eno and Ian MacCormick (also known as NME Assistant Editor Ian MacDonald). The album was recorded at the same time as Manzanera's own solo album, Diamond Head, which also featured songs that featured on Mainstream.

A year later, 801, a one-off project band featuring Manzanera, Eno, MacCormick, Simon Phillips, Francis Monkman (Curved Air) and Lloyd Watson, performed Quiet Sun material at their own live shows and featured on their 1976 live release, 801 Live.

"Listening back to this album, 51 years later — and especially hearing the analogue tapes — I was quite amazed by how good it sounds," says Manzenra of the upcoming remixed and remastered Deluxe edition. "It’s a testament to Charles, Dave and Bill’s musical prowess, and to the detailed work we had put in between 1970 and 1971, before I joined Roxy. It had been six years since we had played together, and in the space of two weeks we recorded these eight tracks — surreptitiously, mostly as first takes, certainly with very few overdubs. At Basing Street Studios, the Island Records base, we recaptured the volatility and excitement of what we had set out to be as a band, and this new set of mixes shines a light on Quiet Sun once again.”

The new edition has been remixed and remastered and will be released as a two-disc media book with a 60-page book with a Blu-Ray disc containing a Dolby Atmos 5.1 mix, a new Abbey Road remastered version of the original mix from the original analogue ¼ inch tapes and a new 2026 mix, while a second disc features a stereo CD with the new 2026 mix.

The album will also be available as a gatefold single-disc vinyl release with the new 2026 mix using the original 24-track analogue tapes. and it will also be found on all major streaming services.

Pre-order Mainstream.

With their fourth album, Destroyer, Kiss reached for the stars and created their masterpiece. Their first three studio records were simplistic rock’n’roll, banged out fast. For Destroyer, they hired Bob Ezrin, producer of Alice Cooper and Lou Reed.

As a result, Kiss sounded bigger, better and smarter. And they never sounded, bigger or smarter than on the juggernaut of an opening track that is Detroit Rock City. The song was partly inspired by the true story of a fan who was killed on the way to a Kiss gig, hence sound of a car radio and noise of smashing vehicles that bookended the song.

“On a previous tour, somebody had gotten hit by a car and killed outside the arena,” said Paul Stanley. “I remember thinking how weird it is that people can be on their way to something that’s really a party and a celebration of being alive, and die in the process of doing it. So that became the basis of the lyric.”

Ezrin set about encouraging Stanley to complete a lyric, and the end result was the story of a kid who hears about his own demise. And, no, despite what you may have read on the internet, Gene doesn’t take the part of the radio reporter at the start. That was Ezrin.

"We put his voice through a little radio and recorded it off the radio," said engineer Corky Stasiak. "If you listen to this opening through headphones, you get this eerie feeling that this is all happening to you."

Beyond the tragedy told in the lyrics, Detroit Rock City was also a salute to the city namechecked in the title. It was in Detroit, not their home town of New York, that Kiss found their biggest audience in their early days. In return, the band gave the Motor City its own rock anthem. “The first town that opened its arms and legs to us,” as Stanley quipped.

Urged on by Bob Ezrin, this was a fitting tribute – a 150mph rocket of a song, propelled by a bassline lifted from Curtis Mayfield’s blaxploitation classic Freddie’s Dead and featuring Stanley and Frehley’s iconic push-me-pull-you twin guitar solo. With its Spanish flamenco flavour and flair, the solo was an idea that came from Ezrin.

“I wrote the guitar solo on Detroit Rock City," he said. "We got to the point that we had seen the introduction and met the characters, and it was time to set up a little tension with a moment of high drama. I felt like this was the sequence where he was driving and this would be the music that would go underneath it.

"I wrote that in my head; I don’t think I actually picked up an instrument. It’s not exactly original. It is pretty well an old-fashioned flamenco theme adapted to hard rock music. And it’s not because I’m some kind of musicology major. It was my take on Gladiator music."

"Bob sang that solo section note for note, then asked Ace to learn it, including the harmony," confirmed Paul, happy to give credit where it’s due. "The drumbeat, the bassline, it was really all Bob."

Detroit Rock City opened both Destroyer and 1977’s Alive II with an almighty bang, and right until the end, no Kiss show was complete without it.

"This was a calling card of sorts for Kiss," Stanley told Classic Rock. "I always believe that albums, particularly ours, should start with a song that captures the spirit of what you’re going to get on the rest of the album, and Detroit Rock City was very much that for Destroyer."

The surprise for the band was that when radio stations got the single in July 1976, they flipped it over to play Peter Criss's ballad Beth [the single’s B-side] and lo and behold, Kiss got an unexpected hit with a different song, one that climbed all the way to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became Kiss's biggest commercial hit in the US.

More than two decades later, Detroit Rock City gave its name to a Gene Simmons-produced comedy film, which followed a group of 1970s teenagers attempting to crash a Kiss show. Described by the New York Times as a "weary promotional comedy", it bombed at the box office but didn't dampen Simmons' rightful enthusiasm for the original song.

"It's kind of a national anthem of rock if you will," said Gene. "Sure, Rock 'N' Roll All Night is a celebration [it's also the only song Kiss have performed more], but there's something about Detroit Rock City that just says 'Heartland.'"

At this rate, we're going to have to ban The Warning from our Tracks Of The Week contest, simply because their presence is transparently unfair to everyone else in the rock world. After collecting 97% and 98% of the overall votes in their two most recent appearances in the content, this week they picked up an astonishing 99% of the votes, rivalling only Kim Jong-il and Serdar Berdimuhamedow in historic ballot box dominance. So congratulations to them.

Trailing far behind The Warning's wondrous wake were Beaux Gris Gris & The Apocalypse and Des Rocs, so congratulations to them too. This week? It's a more level playing field, as The Warning have a week off.

Alex Henry Foster - Springtime

Back in the early days of the pandemic, when lockdown was still a novelty and bands weren't playing live, Canadian progger Alex Henry Foster performed a livestreamed set that blew our tiny minds to such an extent that we still haven't entirely recovered. Springtime captures much of that same euphoric vibe, with ringing guitars, hints of North Africa, and the kind of uplift you only get from music that aims for transcendence and hits the target dead centre.

Bats! - Midsummer

Not to be confused with New Zealand band That Bats, South African band The Bats or the Irish band Bats, Bats! (note the exclamation mark) are from Sweden and feature members of JIRM, Spøgelse, Nationalteatern, Steget and Souls! Second single Midsummer is, they say, "influenced by 70s rock, Blue Öyster Cult, Kiss, Guns N' Roses and Turbonegro," and there's literally nothing wrong with any of that, although to us it sounds more like Grace Slick fronting Aussie larrakins the Celibate Rifles. And there's nothing wrong with that either.

Parker Barrow - Nothin' Left To Save

After more than half a century, Led Zeppelin still cast an occasional musical shadow over rock music from the southern US, and there's a swagger about Nothin' Left To Save that definitely harks back to Jimmy Page and co. Throw in some Black Crowes, a tinge of gospel and a powerhouse vocal from Megan Kane, and it's clear Nashville's Parker Barrow are hitting vibrant new heights. "This song taught me a lot about my voice," says Kane. "How to trust it, stretch it, and use it in ways I never would have naturally gravitated toward."

Identity Crisis - Pictures

While Eddie Vedder has a new single out this week (Better Believe, recorded with Chicago-based non-profit youth organisation Guitars Over Guns), here's something that harks back to Pearl Jam's early days. Texan alt-rockers Identity Crisis have a singer who definitely gives off Vedder vibes, while the thumping Pictures sounds like something from Ten or Vs. crossed with Alice Cooper's Eighteen. If you're in New York, you can catch them supporting the UK's very own Barns Courtney at the Silver Lining Lounge on Friday.

Villagers Of Ioannina City - Ghosts In The Sky

Age Of Aquarius, the 2019 album by psychedelic Greek stoners Villagers Of Ioannina City, was one of the very best albums released that year, so we're delighted that they've finally returned to the studio to record a follow-up. Ghosts In The Sky – the first track to emerge from upcoming long-player Venceremos – picks up right where Aquarius left off, with much titanic riffing and the usual supporting complement of bagpipes and zourna. A possible soundtrack to epic future battles and violent storms, it's possibly the most heroic thing to emerge from Greece since Heracles himself.

Beth Hart - Stuff For You

Plucked from the deluxe edition version of Beth Hart's 2024 album You Still Got Me, the previously unreleased Stuff For You is an absolute joy, powered by a glorious walking bassline and starring a vocal from Hart that's both off-kilter and effortlessly carefree. "I'm on the wrong meds!" she sings during one brief lull, before cartwheeling deliriously off into full jazz-blues-swing territory. Wonderful.

Battlesnake - I Killed Satan

Anyone who hasn't been following Australian titans Battlesnake too closely may have assumed that the band had already killed Satan, but no, they've only just got around to it, and, what's more, they documented the encounter. "I filmed this footage early last year on our trip to Hell," frontman Sam Frank explains. "We didn’t realise that Satan would be there and he was being awfully disruptive. So we had to kill him." The song, of course, is utterly demented. All hail Battlesnake, the band Manowar could have been.

The Lonely Ones - Dark Side Of The Disco Ball

The Lonely Ones describe themselves as a "three-piece, vocal-oriented hard rock band," and Dark Side Of The Disco Ball is excellent evidence of those leanings. It comes across as a jubilant cross between Church Of The Cosmic Skull and Golden Earring's classic Twilight Zone, while the video includes plenty of hot vampire action. Lawd knows what the local authorities are putting in the water supply in Columbus, OH, but the residents clearly need to keep slurping.

Roger Waters has released a new version of Pink Floyd's classic Comfortably Numb with acclaimed Palestinian singer Mona Miari. The recording, which features new lyrics in English and Arabic, has been released to raise money for the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, a non-profit organisation that arranges free medical care for injured and ill children in Palestine.

"Every child deserves access to medical care, no matter where they are born," says Waters. "From organising volunteer medical missions to building pediatric cancer centres and supporting children in need of critical care, PCRF works every day to heal wounds – both visible and invisible – caused by conflict, poverty, and displacement."

The video for the new version of Comfortably Numb was shot in New York City and Gaza.

"The making of this video did not surpass the reality of Gaza today," say the organisers. "Our Emmy-recognised crew was being bombed in real time while filming and would frequently lose connection with the production team. Most have never been permitted to leave Gaza, yet they continue to make vital work under siege."

The new version of the song, which features Arabic arrangements and melodies, also shifts the focus of the lyrics, with the original's "I have become comfortably numb" changing to "I will never become comfortably numb." It climaxes with the lines, "Equal human rights for all, from the river to the sea,” before ending on the chanted refrain, "Palestine will be free… Falasteen."

The name of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, who is listed as "lyricist, associated performer and composer" on the 1979 original version of the song, has been removed from the credits of the remake, which is credited to Waters and Miari alone.

For more information about the project, visit the Comfortably Numb Reimagined website.

In June 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young released the protest anthem Ohio. Recorded on May 21 that year, the song documents Neil Young’s outrage at the killing of four students by National Guardsmen during a protest march at Kent State University on May 4. The students’ anger had been directed at president Richard Nixon and his decision to backtrack on his promise to wind down America’s war effort in Vietnam.

In the States, it was now abundantly clear that the era of pushing flowers into the barrels of soldiers’ rifles was over. Being part of the counter culture could get you killed.

Five months after releasing Ohio, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young put out Our House. The emotional contrast between the primal howl of the former and the ever so slightly smug pipe-and-slippers reportage of the latter was difficult for some to reconcile. For journalist Barney Hoskyns, "the journey from Ohio back to Our House seemed to sum up a general failure of nerve in the LA music scene". In other words, the era that writer Tom Wolfe described as the ‘Me’ Decade had begun. People were less inclined to want to save the planet. It became more about securing your own piece. ‘Four dead in Ohio’ gave way to ‘Our House, is a very very very nice house/With two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard…’

At its heart, Our House is a snapshot of domestic bliss. "In late '68, early '69 I had taken Joni Mitchell to breakfast on Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles," Graham Nash recalls. "After breakfast we were walking back to her car, and we passed an antique store. So we were looking in the window, and Joni saw a small vase she wanted to buy. And it was reasonably cheap, so she bought it.

"It was one of those mornings. It was cold, it was rainy, it was foggy. Just miserable. So, we got in Joni’s car and drove back to our house in Laurel Canyon. We got through the front door and I said: ‘Hey Joni. Why don’t I light a fire and you put some flowers in that vase you bought today?’ So, Joni was outside trying to find some winter flowers for the vase. That meant two things: one, she was not at her piano, and two, I was. Within an hour, Our House was born."

Nash more or less had the arrangement in that first hour.

That’s clear from the achingly sweet demo version included on his forthcoming career retrospective Over The Years. He continues: "I got in the studio in Los Angeles with Dallas Taylor, the drummer, and Greg Reeves, our bass player, and I played the song. We went through it a couple of times and we got a great take. So now I’ve got my lead vocal, my piano and the drums and the bass. I overdubbed harpsichord and another piano for a fat sound, then brought it to David [Crosby] and Stephen [Stills] who loved it and sang on it."

The vocal blend on Our House has always been CS&N’s USP. Before hooking up to form the first international rock supergroup, Stephen Stills had been a member of Buffalo Springfield, as was Neil Young (who didn’t perform on Our House).

David Crosby was in The Byrds and Graham Nash was a founding member of British pop group The Hollies. So vocal harmonies were bread and butter to these guys and, Nash didn’t feel the need to direct his bandmates in the studio.

"That’s how much I trusted Stephen and David," says Nash. "Once I’d done the basic track, I wanted to open it up to them. We have what we call the ‘reality rule’, and it goes like this. If I sit down with a guitar and play a song and they don’t react, you’ll never hear that song again. If I play the song and Crosby says: ‘Oh, I know what I’m going to do in the chorus’, or Stephen goes: ‘I have a great guitar piece for the opening’, then we’re in business. We can only work on stuff that all three of us love."

One of the sweetest elements of the demo and the final recording is the vocal ‘instrumental’ break. "Well, we couldn’t quite figure out whether it needed a guitar solo or a harmonica solo," Nash explains. "We couldn’t think of anything, so we just went ‘la la la la…’"

Nash once claimed he was bored with Our House a mere 24 hours after he recorded it. These days, after preparing his Over The Years collection, he regards the song from a different perspective. It’s a view that allows him to reconcile its release at the point when America was blowing itself apart.

"It’s about a beautiful moment between a man and a woman. It’s about peace. Even though the times were turbulent, particularly with the Vietnam War, and Civil Rights, two and a half minutes of peace was what we all needed."

The original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock 251

The arrival of Loverboy in 1980 made very little sense to those of us who were captivated by what you might term traditional hard rock. The appearance of five dorky Canadians dressed in sharp chinos, deck shoes and Miami Vice T-shirts made for something of a conundrum.

But for anyone who cared to look beyond the incongruous image, they had the pedigree. The band included two former members of killer Canuck combo Streetheart and, as a bonus, the singer from Moxy – names that were definitely on any hard rock connoisseur’s radar. Their self-titled debut album was produced by rising hotshot Bruce Fairbairn, who had been making a name for himself via his work with a smattering of cult AOR acts, including Prism.

But the album itself was the clincher: this was serious melodic AOR pop, driven by precision guitar work, with hooks somersaulting out of the tweeters like a troupe of New York street dancers. It was a modern sound, suggesting that these men of rock had studied the period’s pop chart climbers hoping to acquire a contemporary edge to set them apart from the likes of grizzly old Ice Road Truckers such as Bachman Turner Overdrive and Triumph.

Suited and booted, the arrival of Loverboy certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons, setting radio alight with hit after hit of furiously energetic and danceable AOR. North America couldn’t get enough of the band’s red jumpsuits, quirky keyboards and singer Mike Reno’s distinctive high-pitched vocals. But if you think it was overnight success story, then think again. Most of the guys in the band had been struggling in various groups since the 1960s, struggling to the point where they had almost – but not quite – given up on their dreams. But their perseverance paid off – Loverboy would become Canada’s most successful AOR band of all time.

Before he co-founded Loverboy in Calgary, Alberta in 1979, guitarist Paul Dean had been a member of countless bands stretching back to the mid-60s, among them Kentish Steele And The Shantelles, Canada, Scrubbaloe Caine and Steelheart, the latter of whom released a well-received debut album, Meanwhile Back In Paris, in 1978. “We killed,” says Dean of the latter outfit. “It was really a great band. I used to think it was the Led Zeppelin of Canada.”

But Streetheart struggled to get noticed outside of their homeland. Worse, Dean lasted just one album before being fired, forcing him to play bass guitar in a Calgary covers band. “It was a tough time for me,” he says. “One thing is for sure though, it kicked my butt into gear.”

There was a silver lining to this particular cloud. He’d met keyboard player and future Loverboy bandmate Doug Johnson, and the two of them began writing songs together. Further good cheer was on the horizon in the form of singer Joseph Michael Rynoski – aka Mike Reno – who had been fronting well-respected hard rockers Moxy. Mike had moved from British Columbia to Calgary and was singing with a local unsigned band.

“He was working in construction during the day, carrying cement around,” remembers Paul. “I had heard him sing in a band called Spunk, but at the time Mike was actually looking for a gig as a drummer. I thought he was an incredible singer, so I said maybe we should write some songs and we hooked up the next day and wrote Always On My Mind.”

Reno’s path to fame was equally littered with frustration and disappointment. Early in his career he’d joined an act called Hammersmith, only to bail when they recruited a second singer. He made a bigger splash when he joined Moxy for their fourth album, 1978’s Under The Lights.

“I worked with them for three years but after I got settled in I discovered that we didn’t share the same ambitions,” recalls Mike. “I wanted to achieve more and they kept trying to hold me down, but after a while I said: ‘I can’t do this.’ So I moved on and left.”

Hooking up with Dean and Doug Johnson, they decided to put all their energy into a new project, though not before the guitarist was forced to record some deliberately bad demos to wriggle out of the deal he’d signed with WEA/Atlantic as part of his former band Streetheart. Their first step was to recruit a band, which was easier said than done.

“We had a local bass player,” says Dean. “I think he was a stockbroker but he left pretty quickly. I remember we even stuck one guy on a train from Toronto – it took him four days to get here and it didn’t work out!”

They eventually settled on Dean’s old Streetheart buddy Matt Frenette on drums and bassist Scott Smith, who had been playing with quirky Canadian chanteuse Lisa Dal Bello. The scene was set for Loverboy to conquer the planet.

Cutting a set of demos on a boom box, they enticed Bachman Turner Overdrive manager Bruce Allen to get involved. Relocating to Vancouver to be nearer Allen, their next step was to cut some quality Eight-Track demos, including a killer version of Turn Me Loose, the song that would become their debut single

“That was the track that I’m sure got us the record deal,” states Paul. “Mike nailed the big note in the line ‘I’ve gotta do it my way’ in one take. We couldn’t believe it, he sounded amazing.”

Allen harangued a number of labels in the US, but it was the Canadian division of CBS that spotted the Loverboy’s potential. Bizarrely, CBS in the US had already been to see the band on their home turf and had passed. And it wasn’t until the huge success of the debut album in Canada that Columbia Records New York took any further interest.

With a record deal in their back pocket the band set about tracking their debut album with fast-rising producer Bruce Fairbairn.

“Bruce was being managed by our manager [Bruce Allen], who was also working with Prism,” Paul reveals. “He had produced some of the Prism albums, which we thought sounded great. In all honesty, we didn’t consider anybody else to produce us. It’s amazing to think that Bob Rock and Mike Fraser were the engineers – I mean, what a team! Those three guys went on to work with everybody.”

Loverboy, the band’s first album, was practically an overnight success – a triumph magnified by their eventual explosion of popularity in the US, with the record going on to sell over two million copies, and producing several hit singles.

“The public just jumped all over it,” recalls Mike, “and don’t forget that this was at a time when people would actually go out and buy a record. I was totally amazed at how great it was, just one of those moments in time I guess. My last band, Moxy, didn’t want to do anything like that. They didn’t want to dig deeper, and this was really working for me. I was elated.”

Dean’s previous disappointments had steeled him for his experiences with Loverboy. “In every band that I’d been in, I always felt like: ‘This is it, this band is perfect, the best combination of songs and players.’ So when the Loverboy album came out I thought, this is another great combination, as it had all the elements. My mission was to keep going, keep moving forward and this was a successful example of that philosophy.”

Dean realised that things were really started to happen when Bryan Adams – then experiencing his own first taste of success – tapped him up to become his guitar player.

“I was looking for a rental house in North Vancouver,” says Paul. “Bryan showed up at the rental place and he said to me: ‘Congratulations, you know you’ve got a hit, right?’ So he explained to me that Turn Me Loose was racing up the charts in all the radio trade magazines.”

The band’s first show as a fully formed entity was to support Kiss in Vancouver. As you can imagine it was a tough, resistant crowd. Further trial by fire was to follow in the US opening for ZZ Top.

“We did 40 shows with them,” recalls Paul. “In between, we toured with Kansas, which wasn’t that great a fit but we became really good friends. The ZZ Top tour was tough, as their audience were hardcore biker blues fans. Mind you, the band were great guys and very generous to us, but the fans were a tough nut to crack. It taught us how to talk, how to move, how to interact. It was very educational, a baptism by fire almost.

“I remember one gig in Cape Cod when all hell broke loose so I put on my [baseball] batter’s helmet while the audience threw cigarette lighters, bottles, ice cubes and coins – it all came raining down on us. We managed four songs before being booed off stage. That was a wake-up call, I can tell you.”

For the band’s ‘difficult’ second album, Get Lucky, they wisely stuck to the same formula, utilising producer Bruce Fairbairn and crafting a string of immediately identifiable songs that actually propelled them further into the public consciousness. The track Working For The Weekend became something of a major anthem for the 80s blue-collar generation. The sound was lean and mean, showcasing a band with a degree of musical intelligence that dwarfed the competition. It was a monster success, selling in excess of four million copies in the US alone. It also marked the first time Mike Reno was photographed wearing a sweatband on his head.

Mike: “We had been working hard and writing songs all though the success of the first album. We had no idea if they were any good and we just threw Get Lucky out there. I think the momentum was just so strong that it worked. I suppose the songs and lyrics were right for the time, with diverse styles attracting a different range of fans. That all played a vital part in it.”

“We rehearsed the songs for Get Lucky in dressing rooms,” remembers Paul. “I remember we had a day to track some demos – Take Me To The Top came from that particular session. In fact I remember writing Watch Out with Doug while driving across Texas between gigs, singing that track into a ghetto-blaster. Get Lucky sold three million copies immediately in the US. That was a really great feeling.”

Loverboy’s third album, 1983’s Keep It Up, was also produced by Bruce Fairbairn, and continued the band’s chart momentum, reinforcing their songwriting prowess with yet more prime-time, radio-friendly party anthems. It was another US Top 10 album for the band, throwing down two killer singles: Hot Girls In Love and Queen Of The Broken Hearts. The album’s best cut was the truly monumental Strike Zone, an instant hard rock anthem, rivalling the majesty of the debut’s standout cut Turn Me Lose.

1985’s Lovin’ Every Minute Of It was even better. Featuring Steal The Thunder, Friday Night (a sequel in spirit to Working For The Weekend) together with the title track, the album gave Loverboy a harder rocking edge, increased dynamics and a more robust vibe. Breaking with Bruce Fairbairn, the band elected to use seasoned British producer Tom Allom, a man who’d built a fine reputation working on a number of cool hard rock albums including several by Judas Priest.

“We really liked what he did with Judas Priest, he made them sound awesome,” chuckles Mike Reno. “Bruce Fairbairn was busy finishing another project but we were ready to go and there was a timeline in place. So we gave Tom a call and had a great time with him and his engineer Mark [Dodson]. They both came over to Vancouver and really enjoyed themselves.”

Then the unthinkable happened: the golden times came to an abrupt end. Wildside, issued in 1987, stiffed badly, leaving the group scratching their heads as to what had gone wrong. It wasn’t a bad album, far from it; the material was up to scratch and Bruce Fairbairn was back in the producer’s seat. So what happened?

“We were the darlings of MTV but the first single, Notorious, just didn’t get the air time,” reckons Paul Dean. “Then we cut a very expensive video for Love Will Rise and they refused to play it – they spun it once, I believe. I guess they’d just had it with what they perceived as hair bands, and Loverboy were no longer considered part of their roster. I can understand it – if trends hadn’t changed, Bing Crosby would still be in heavy rotation.”

“I think there is a moment, a point when things become redundant because you’re too famous or you’re too wealthy or too popular or people start to get jealous,” adds Mike. “They begin to dislike you or they change their feelings towards you and you change your feelings towards them. It happens. It’s the same reason why style changes.

“We were pretty tired by then,” he continues. “ I started to lose interest, from being pushed so hard. I rebelled by not putting so much effort into it. I had no time to myself. I hated it because there should be a balance in life, but it was all go-go-go. I booked a holiday and got out of town but that’s all water under the bridge now.”

They soldiered on, of course, looking to rekindle the flame, but with the musical terrain beginning to shift toward murkier waters Loverboy were shuffling ever closer to the ‘where are they now’ file, looking out of time.

“I’ll be honest, I didn’t get grunge – and Nirvana in particular – at the time,” admits Paul. “It’s only the past few years that I’ve come to appreciate where they were coming from, song-wise. Now, when I listen to their music and compare it to their contemporaries, they set the standard. They wrote great songs, Kurt Cobain had a great voice and it was all wrapped up in amazing production.

“I remember when our co-manager Lou [Blair] first heard them, he was raving about it. I didn’t get it at all – I completely missed out and it took me years and years to finally say: ‘OK, now I get it.’”

Like so many bands of their ilk, the 1990s weren’t easy for Loverboy. They toured sporadically, and released a sole album, Six. But worse was to come. On November 30, 2000, the band’s original bassist, Scott Smith, was sailing off the coast of San Francisco near the Golden Gate Bridge, when a freak 26-foot wave swept him overboard in shark-infested waters. A four-hour search was conducted in vain. He was 45. Loverboy began a tour in his memory the following year.

The 21st century has been more active. They’ve released three albums (2007s defiantly titled Just Getting Started, 2012’s Bob Rock co-produced Rock And Roll Revival and 2014’s Unfinished Business). In 2009, they were inducted into the Canadian Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, but today they keep their expectations in check.

“We are under no illusion that we’re going to sell five million albums anymore,” says Mike. “Our expectations have gone down in line with reality.”

That’s Loverboy. Playing the game on their own terms and lovin’ every minute of it.

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents AOR issue 6

Nothing says summer like massive tunes. Actually, that's a lie - we'll take a cold beer in the sunshine any time - but with festival season well underway and the Autumn release scheduling filling in quickly, it's definitely feeling like we're hitting the peak of the year.

But, before we get to any new tunes, how about a round-up of last week's winners? Noisy hardcore brutes Chat Pile took an admirable third place - narrowly beating Bring Me The Horizon - while hardcore heroes Madball landed second with Tethered. The overall winners for the week however were returning doom metallers Khemmis, whose Gilded Chambers proved too good to pass up.

As ever, we've hunted far and wide to bring you this week's selection. There's Belarusian post-black metal (with a doomy spin), Indian symphonic deathcore, gothic metalcore, black metal and beyond all for you to explore. Don't forget to cast your vote in the poll below - and have an excellent weekend!

Poppy - Dying To Forget

Let's kick off with a rager, shall we? Poppy has released a music video for the high-speed smasher Dying To Forget, taken from the album Empty Hands which came earlier this year. In September, she returns to the UK for her first arena headline tour of the UK. With more bangers like this one, we can expect that to be a wild night.

Vindicta - The Face Of The Clown

Vindicta sure are living up to their name on their debut single. Former members of Dogma who left in a very public and acrimonious split last year, this new group of demonic nuns are clearly taking aim at their past situation with first single The Face Of The Clown. Every lyric of the song seems aimed at the entity behind Dogma's rise, lines like "see you choking on your strings" (with a cheeky Dogma musical throwback) leaving no mystery about how they feel now they're working on new music. Musically, it's very much a continuation of the symphonically underpinned classic heavy metal of their own group, though there's a strange vocal shift halfway through the song where a male vocalist comes in. Either way, it's a suitably dramatic start to their new band.

Mork - Ferdamann

Too warm? Here's a bit of frosty Norwegian black metal to cool you off. Now on their eighth album, there's some wonderfully simple and straight ahead about Mork's approach to BM, Ferdamann offering up choppy, vicious riffs whilst maintained a conservative, controlled air. The subtle strings that pop up add some flashes of beauty, but otherwise this is pure tooth-gnashing force. Check out their new album Monolitt today.

Sleep - Have Spacesuit, Will Travel

Have Sleep really "returned"? Eight years since their last album, the stoner metal legends have announced a tour for later this year and released riffy new single Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, but fans will quickly notice that the line-up has undergone a significant shift. Bassist/vocalist Al Cisneros is the only longterm member of the band still standing, recruiting Melvins legend Dale Crover on drums and Bubba Dupree of hardcore punks Void on guitar. This first single suggests a straight-ahead stoner sound, though it'll be worth keeping eyes on to see if they expand out into more progressive realms in future.

Dymna Lotva - The Boat Of Despair (ft. Aaron Stainthorpe)

Dymna Lotva have been through a hell of a lot to make their fourth album (and you can read all about that in Perran Helyes' excellent feature). Vyraj is finally coming on August 7 however, and latest single The Boat Of Despair sees the Belarusian band team up with former My Dying Bride vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe to create a dense, gothic monolith.

Myrath - Through The Seasons

Seven albums and 25 years in, Myrath are sounding grander than ever. Mixing elements of prog and symphonic metal, the Tunisian/French band are at their most grandiose on new single Through The Seasons. Taken from new album Wilderness Of Mirrors, it's a gorgeous track that perfectly demonstrates their larger-than-life sound.

Dark Helm - Throne

The change of pace on Dark Helm's Throne isn't so much whiplash inducing as enough to take your whole damn head off. One second it's a swelling symphony, only to suddenly launch headfirst into pummelling deathcore with a bassline that sounds like someone playing on a train track. The Indian deathcore band mix those two elements throughout the track, creating something fascinating and brutal.

Motionless In White - R.I.P. (feat. Skylar Grey)

"If you ever leave, it would be the end of me/I would die but I'd never rest in peace." Let's face it: that's a killer hook, so it's no surprise it's front and centre in Motionless In White's new single R.I.P., a gothic slab of modern alt metal. Taken from the band's new album Decades, due July 17, it makes great use of MiW's sense of flair and drama to create something anthemic.

The Big Hell - Harder

Hailing from the West Midlands, there's no shortage of bands for The Big Hell to look up to. Rather than be cowed in the shadow of Sabbath, Priest and Napalm Death, The Big Hell are making an almighty racket that shows the region's brilliance is still alive and well. Harder comes from the group's upcoming second album, and is a full, slobbering blast of noisy, extreme punk.

Flesh Creep - Flake

More noisy Brummies? Oh go on then. Falling closer to the hardcore punk spectrum, Flesh Creep's new single Flake comes on like a furious runaway train, clattering into everything in its path and making a glorious racket on the way. Keep your eyes out for new EP Glimmer on July 17.

Battlesnake - I Killed Satan

Australia's Battlesnake are one of those bands that seem to get wilder every time you look back at them. Their new single has the air of Lordi's The Devil Is A Loser, a very tongue-in-cheek blast of trad metal with Monty Python like humour. If Venom had more self awareness, they'd probably have written this. They'll be back in the UK this summer, supporting Cancer Bats and performing at both 2000 Trees and ArcTanGent.

Burner - Blood River

There's something ferally unhinged about Burner's Blood River, and we suspect it might be Burner themselves. The British band let loose some vicious sounds on their 2023 debut It All Returns To Nothing and it's looking like follow-up No One Is Coming To Save Us will follow suit, newest single Blood River chucking elements of hardcore and death metal into a blender and chugging down the mush before anyone can accuse it of being deathcore.

Play the dramatic, tension-building intro to Eye In The Sky to anyone, anywhere, and you’ll most likely get an instant flicker of recognition.

Try that same experiment in the US, and that familiarity skyrockets. To millions of Americans, those looping, ominous synth chords aren't just music; they're the sound of the Chicago Bulls heading to the court.

Some might recognise the music as WWE wrestler Ricky Steamboat's entrance theme. Or as the soundtrack to the Nebraska Cornhuskers' introductory Tunnel Walk. If they've been paying attention to the FIFA World Cup, they'll have heard it at every game, the atmospheric instrumental ushering the players onto the pitch.

“It has never ceased to amaze me how much use that one tune gets,” says its co-writer. “We get requests for commercials, movies, and it’s become a sports anthem. It’s just incredible.”

Yet, ask those same people to name the man who co-wrote the damn thing and lent it his actual name? Blank faces. Ask them to pick Alan Parsons out of a police line-up? Forget about it. And Parsons, the former Pink Floyd engineer turned composer, knows it.

“There’s an old story about me going into Tower Records on Sunset Strip in LA,” Parsons told Prog in 2017. “I bought several copies of my own albums to the counter because I didn’t have any to give away to friends and so on. I slapped down a credit card, which clearly had the words ‘Alan Parsons’ on it, and the cashier said, ‘Have you got ID?’"

Siruis – for that's the name of the tune – is less than two minutes long. It's actually the intro to another song, Eye In The Sky. And it's become one of those tunes, like Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Fanfare For The Common Man or Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, that's become much bigger than the artist who wrote it because of its use as a sporting anthem. Like those tunes, Sirius is an exercise in tension and high drama, but it's also arena-friendly, conjuring up visions of sport at its most heroic and ancient, gladiatorial combat.

The Chicago Bulls debuted it at Michael Jordan's first home game in 1984, after public address announcer Tommy Edwards heard it playing in a local cinema, and it's been there ever since.

"It’s a bit of a frustration that people hear the music and say that’s the Bulls theme,” Parsons told ESPN. "I wish they did know it was The Alan Parsons Project. But they don't."

Parsons initially wrote Sirius as the intro to Eye In The Sky for no other reason than the Alan Parsons Project – which saw Parsons working with singer, songwriter and pianist Eric Woolfson – had a tradition of starting albums with instrumentals, and Parsons needed one for the Eye In The Sky album.

He came up with the riff while messing around at home on the just-released, eye-wateringly expensive Fairlight synthesiser in 1982, having joined a select group of well-to-do early adopters who included Todd Rundgren, Boz Burrell and Peter Gabriel.

"The riff you hear is a combination of a sample of a clavinet, which Stevie Wonder used to great effect on Superstition, and a set of notes, to which I added a delay," Parsons told Variety. "Part of the sound of the Fairlight sample used in Sirius is a delay upon itself. It’s the artificial echo that goes with it that gives it its character."

To contrast the sharp electronic pulse, Woolfson arranged some sweeping orchestral strings, which elevated the track's dramatic tension and cinematic build. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Sirius has also shown up in a variety of guises. In the UK, it was used during record-breaking attempts on the BBC's Record Breakers show. In basketball, it's also been used by the Phoenix Suns, Utah Jazz, and San Antonio Spurs. In American football, by the New Orleans Saints. In what rest of the world knows as football, by the German team Vfl Wolfsburg. In Rugby, by Australia's Melbourne Rebels. And its remarkable, 40-year ubiquity hasn't lessened its dramatic impact one bit.

So why have FIFA chosen Sirius to soundtrack the player walk-ons at this year's World Cup? Just ask Luc Longley, the Australian baller who won three championship rings alongside Michael Jordan in the 1990s.

"If you're Michael Jordan, Sirius might have a 2% effect on your pregame ability to get in the zone," Longley told ESPN. "If you're Luc Longley, and it's really fucking hard to be as good as you need to be every night because you're not that talented, Sirius can have a 20% effect. It's the guys like me who can use that shit to really help."

Camel guitarist and singer Andrew Latimer has shared a new suite of music through his Bandcamp page, featuring his current and past Camel colleagues.

From The Vault is a suite of eight pieces written by Latimer along with his Camel colleagues Colin Bass and keyboardist Peter Jones, also of Tiger Moth Tales, and also featuring Ton Scherpenzeel, the Kayak keyboardist who was a member of Camel from 1983 to 1991, and who has toured with the band since, most recently from 2014 to 2016.

Speaking about the new release, Jones says, "Hopefully this may be one of a series. The suite is comprised of eight songs, some by Andy and some co-written by Colin Bass, myself and others. I'm excited and so happy that these songs are seeing the light of day.

"One of the tracks Andy and I wrote is Dingley Dell. Those who saw the early shows of the legendary 2018 tour, would have seen us play this one live. Perhaps more obvious to English listeners, the lyric is based around Dickens' Pickwick Papers, which appeals to my sense of English eccentricity. It's one of the proggy pieces I'm most proud of.

"While the opening track called Those Times, was written about our experiences on that wonderful tour, which remains one of the best experiences of my life. Heaven is the other song on there that Andy and I wrote, and that's just a good old love song. Haha.

"The other pieces in the suite are fantastic. It's true that these songs have a demo feel about them, but demos often have a way of capturing something in the moment. Personally, I love the feel of this collection, and as always, I'm deeply honoured to be involved in all matters Camel. As this album features work from three current band members and also contributions from Ton Scherpanzeel, it feels like a Camel band effort. Once again, I'm so happy these songs are out there, and I hope Andy has more that he wants to dig out of them there vaults."

Camel last performed live back in 2018, and a proposed tour for 2023 was cancelled when Laterminer required surgery. A 32-disc super deluxe box set, Air Born: The MCA & Decca Years 1973-1984, was released in 2023.

From The Vault is available from Latimer's Bandcamp page here.

Prior to the release of Jimi Hendrix’s second single in March 1967, mainstream audiences had yet to enjoy the full Jimi experience. His arrival into the UK the previous September, had caused a sensation among the select few – The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend – who’d encountered him playing live, but his debut single Hey Joe (a relatively sedate blues number written by Billy Roberts) wasn’t entirely representative of Hendrix’s revolutionary modus operandi.

"That record isn't us," Hendrix was keen to point out, "The next one’s gonna be different."

The next one was Purple Haze. The premier release on The Who’s Track Records label, this was the sound of the future. Its dissonant interpretation of psychedelia only seemed to render all previous pop-psych prosaic, redundant and twee.

The first draft of Purple Haze, Hendrix reflected, had sprawled to "a thousand words… I had it all written out", but manager Chas Chandler, eyeing radio, helped prune Purple Haze back to a more palatable three minutes – without sacrificing a lick of what (arguably) nudges Voodoo Child as Jimi’s signature guitar moment.

From its opening deployment of a distorted ‘diabolus in musica’ tritone, to its disorienting fade of spiralling speeded-up guitars and muttered vocal asides, it had an inner darkness at odds with the prevailing ‘it’s all too beautiful’ mood of an imminent summer of love. It was irresistible.

Unusually, Hendrix recorded his parts on a guitar he'd never used before, having bent one of the tuning pegs on his more familiar Strat after stabbing its headstock into the ceiling during a show at the Ricky Tick, a cramped venue above a row of shops in Hounslow, West London. Bassist Noel Redding was dispatched to fetch a replacement, and returned with a butterscotch Telecaster.

"The Purple Haze solos were played on the upper part of the neck and Jimi wasn’t intending to use a vibrato," said Roger Mayer, who built Hendrix's Octavia pedal. "So it didn’t matter that it was a Telecaster."

"The brain to the heart to the hands to the feet, it was one fluid motion," said engineer Eddie Kramer, working with Hendrix for the first time. "There was never any question, never any doubt as to where he would put his hands on the guitar, what sound would come out. And I don't think there is any musician that I've worked with in the last 30-odd years that has ever come close to that."

It helped that Hendrix looked like no one had ever looked before. His exotic ethnic mix (African-American and Cherokee), inability to look bad in any item of clothing, casual blend of shy charm with sexual magnetism and unruly haze of the singularly most psychedelic hair in history (skyward tendrils that gave every impression that he was simultaneously receiving direct communiques from the cosmos while plugged into the mains) was a perfect recipe for instantaneous icon status.

Hendrix represented freedom, licentiousness: cool. Granted, there were musicians who were considered cool prior to Hendrix, but it was Hendrix who ultimately defined the term. And in 1967, Purple Haze was the coolest thing anyone had ever heard.

As if that wasn’t enough, when sold by Hendrix on Top Of The Pops or Beat Club, it was also the coolest thing they’d ever seen. As clangorous explosions erupt from his instrument, Jimi’s ‘kissing the sky’, hip-thrusting his guitar from behind, tonguing, tickling, seducing sounds of abandon from over-cranked amps, eyes closed in apparently orgasmic ecstasy. It was a hard watch with parents in the room.

What Hendrix and Chas Chandler did in order to attain the sound of Purple Haze is explicable: there were multiple journeys back and forth to various studios, headphones waved around microphones, half-speed recording, Fuzz-Face and Octavia pedals, but blissfully ignorant of such inconvenient truths, it’s easy to confuse the sound of Purple Haze with the sound of divine intervention.

Purple Haze climbed to number three in the UK chart, before being released three months later in the US, the day after the Experience gave their historic first Stateside performance at the Monterey Pop Festival.

In the years since, it's come to be recognised as one of Hendrix's defining tracks, and has been covered by a plethora of big names, including Frank Zappa, The Cure, Ozzy Osbourne, Winger, Paul Rodgers, Ministry and the Kronos Quartet.

"Everybody else just screwed it up, and thought wailing away is the answer," said Keith Richards. "But it ain't. You've got to be a Jimi to do that. You've got to be one of the special cats."

The frosty relationship between Saxon frontman Biff Byford and former guitarist Graham Oliver appears to have thawed, three decades after the band fired the latter man. Oliver was sacked from Saxon in 1994 after his relationship with Byford became toxic.

"When there’s no chemistry, the band can’t survive," Byford told Classic Rock in 2014. "When it goes from being competitive and on the edge to you can’t even stand being in the same room with the person, it has to stop."

Much to Byford’s chagrin, Oliver went on to register "Saxon" as a trademark, and toured with former Saxon bassist Steve ‘Dobby’ Dawson – another member of the "classic" Saxon lineup – under the names Saxon: The Early Years and Oliver/Dawson Saxon.

Byford applied to have the trademark declared invalid in 2000, and three years later, the UK High Court ruled in his favour, finding that Oliver and Dawson had registered the trademark in bad faith.

"I could do a gig with Steve," Byford told us in 2019. "But with Graham, it went too far. That door is shut. Let’s leave it at that."

More recently, Oliver has been playing Saxon-themed shows with fellow founding guitarist Paul Quinn, who retired from touring with the band in 2023, but it appears that that door may have been cracked open.

"I don’t really have any problem with Graham anymore," Byford now tells Classic Rock. "He used to do stupid things that smashed the reputation of the band. That’s all over now. I met Graham not too long ago in an airport and we had a chat."

"Really, it’s fine," he continues. "As long as we’re sensible and don’t start using logos, there’s plenty of room for everybody."

Saxon's European summer festival schedule begins later this month. Full dates below.

Saxon: 2026 tour dates

Jun 27: Copenhagen Copenhell, Denmark
Jul 01: Motala Lokverkstan, Sweden
Jul 02: Borlänge Alive Festival, Sweden
Jul 03: Göteborg Liseberg, Sweden
Jul 10: Kallithea Release Athens Festival, Greece
Jul 11: Provincia Di Vicenza AMA Festival, Italy
Jul 16: Leoben AREA 53 Festival, Austria
Jul 18: Maidstone Maid of Stone Festival, UK
Jul 31: Wacken Open Air, Germany
Aug 04: Pratteln Z7 Summer Nights Open Air, Switzerland
Aug 06: Walton-on-Trent Bloodstock Open Air, UK
Aug 08: Geiselwind Keep it True Legions, Germany
Aug 09: Kortrijk Alcatraz Festival, Belgium
Aug 13: Wittelshofen Summer Breeze Open Air, Germany
Aug 29: Wörrstadt Neuborn Open Air Festival, Germany

Find Saxon tickets.

Van Halen’s 1978 debut was a yearzero for virtuosity, the warp-speed instrumental Eruption establishing in two minutes flat that the metallers’ eponymous guitarist had the fastest fingers on the West Coast. Perhaps it was that same reputation for quicksilver two-hand tapping and violent tremolo abuse that meant Eddie Van Halen was reticent to show his bandmates the lick he’d been kicking around in private.

“I figured out something melodic instead of just going for it,” the guitarist said in 1980. “When I wrote Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love, I thought it was the lamest song I ever wrote in my life. It took me six months before I worked up the nerve to show the guys.”

By EVH’s eye-popping standards, Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love was a rudimentary doodle, not much more than an up-and-down picking pattern on a handful of open-position chords. As the guitarist said in Guitar World, it was a musical piss-take, too, lampooning the punk bands whose route-one neanderthals was the polar opposite of his own flashing-blade virtuosity.

“Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love was originally supposed to be a punk-rock parody. It was a stupid thing to us, just two chords. It didn’t end up sounding punk, but that was the intention.”

But as producer Ted Templeman knocked the debut album out of them at LA’s Sunset Sound over the summer of ’77, Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love emerged as a front-runner, its tense groove darkening the frivolous mood. ‘I’ve been to the edge,’ sings an uncharacteristically vulnerable-sounding David Lee Roth, as the band drop to a whisper. ‘And then I stood and looked down/ Y’know I lost a lot of friends there, baby, got no time to mess around.’

"Dave’s lyrics were so creative," Templeman told Guitar Player. "He had a sense of humour, and I’d never heard that unique situation where you have a heavy metal–sounding band with a sense of humour. Think of a song like Ain’t Talking ’Bout Love: “Ain’t talkin’ bout love / My love is rotten to the core.” [laughs] You know, who else is going to say, “You know you’re semi-good lookin’ and on the streets again”?

Then came one of EVH’s most interesting solos: light on flash, but melodic and evocative, with an offbeat Eastern-sounding tone.

“I doubled the solo section with an electric sitar,” he remembered. “It could have been a Coral, but it looked real cheap. It looked like a Danelectro. I never really knew it was an electric sitar, because it didn’t sound like one. It just sounded like a buzzy-fretted guitar. That thing was real bizarre.”

For all his early reservations, Van Halen had to admit: “Kids go nuts for it”. And even the next generation of the punks whose noses the song had set out to tweak were taking notes.

“When I started,” recalled Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, “I had this guitar teacher who showed me how to get those Eddie Van Halen sounds like on Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.”

"It's like his guitar playing came from a different place," he told Howard Stern. "He reinvented how to play guitar. But they also wrote great songs, that's the main thing that I took away from Van Halen. The songs were just so fucking great."

Elsewhere, LA punks The Minutemen turned Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love on its head, covering the song on their landmark Double Nickels On The Dime set. Rather than pay faithful homage to the original, their version was simplified and shortened, its 38-second length a deliberate "fuck you!" to a band who'd done more than any other to promote the hedonistic Southern Californian heavy rock sound, something Minutemen bassist Mike Watt called "the most marketable rebellion I've ever seen."

A surprise cover version arrived in 2022, from David Lee Roth himself, backed by guitarist Al Estrada, bassist Ryan Wheeler and drummer Francis Valentino. Uploaded to YouTube, it has since been removed from the platform.

Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love has also been covered by ska punks The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, synth parody duo The Moog Cookbook and L.A. Guns guitarist Tracii Guns. It's also been sampled several times, most successfully by English electronic music group Apollo 440, whose 1997 single Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Dub reached the Top 10 in several countries.

The best part of 40 years later, Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love is the song producer Templeman considers his favourite, from all the hundreds of sessions he's worked on.

"First of all, Ed’s guitar – that riff is incredible, and Donn [engineer Donn Landee] got a great sound on it," he says. "Instantly, he tuned right in. And the lyrics are really brilliant, and Dave’s delivery is brilliant. And it’s got a really interesting solo on it. For some reason, out of anything I ever cut, I still love listening to that. And a lot of it is the intro. Ed’s guitar is amazing."

“It was the first heavy guitar riff rock record,” says Kinks guitarist Dave Davies, adding that he really doesn’t like the term ‘heavy metal’. Still, the sheer simplistic brutality of the 1964 classic You Really Got Me was not only a crucial element of metal, but also punk. It’s slack-jawed and punchy, wastes neither time nor energy. It’s the sound of youthful impatience. The apotheosis of lust. Or, as Dave puts it: “a love song for street kids.”

It wasn’t meant to be that way. One of the first five songs that Dave’s brother Ray ever wrote, You Really Got Me was supposed to be a sophisticated walking blues, the sort of smooth and easy 12-bar one might expect of Big Bill Broonzy, Lead Belly or, perhaps more appropriately, considering the song started its life on piano, Gerry Mulligan. The tempo and style remained comparatively sedate right up to the point that it was recorded as The Kinks’ third Pye single.

Producer Shel Talmy’s sluggish original version buried the guitars in reverb and the band were determined to re-record, but the record company weren’t prepared to pay out for a further session due to the The Kinks’ first two singles having bombed. Ultimately, the band dipped into their own pockets and transformed the song into the restless beast we all know and love.

The stripped-to-the-bone rebore of the core riff (inspired by Jimmy Giuffre’s The Train And The River, finally nailed while working out the chords to The Kingsmen’s Louie Louie) and its distorted guitar sound that launched a million garage bands was achieved by Dave setting about the speaker cone of his Elpico ‘Little Green’ AC55 amp with a razor blade and then boosting its volume through a Vox AC-30.

As is frequently the case with the battling Davies brothers, this story is not without controversy, with Ray claiming in a 2014 radio interview that he'd created the distortion himself: "We cranked up the amplifier and I stuck a knitting needle in it."

"I alone created this sound," Dave responded on Facebook. "I am just flabbergasted and shocked at the depth of his selfish desire to take credit for everything. I never once claimed songwriting royalties on You Really Got Me, yet this song would not have happened without my guitar sound."

The frantic guitar solo that follows Ray’s heartfelt scream of ‘Oh no!’ (reportedly deployed to cover up Dave audibly telling Ray to “fuck off” as he offered encouragement – a story later refuted by Talmy) was not played by Jimmy Page, despite apocryphal tales and claims to the contrary by Deep Purple's Jon Lord, who also claimed to have played piano on the song. Page, by his own admission, did play on some Kinks recordings, but not on You Really Got Me.

"This is a result of internet meddling and muddling," Page told Rolling Stone. "I wasn’t on You Really Got Me, but I did play on the Kinks’ records. That’s all I’m going to say about it. But every time I do an interview, people ask me about You Really Got Me. So maybe somebody can correct Wikipedia so people won’t keep asking me."

However, there may be a version of You Really Got Me that does feature the future Led Zeppelin man.

“The [version] of You Really Got Me that was actually released was the third [recording],” Ray Davies said in Ritchie Yorke’s book, Led Zeppelin: The Definitive Biography. “There was a demo thing with Dave playing lead, a second cut which may have had Jimmy Page on it (and which Pye Records still have in their vaults) and a third which definitely had Dave on it.

“I know because I was standing right next to him when he played on it. And that's the one which was released.”

To focus exclusively on You Really Got Me as a guitar record, remarkable only for Dave’s ‘invention’ of the riff, is to do sole composer Ray a severe disservice, because his vocal performance is utterly extraordinary: the very definition of the sex-crazed lout; mod-era juvenile delinquency incarnate. Terminally frustrated rock’n’roll angst to the bone.

"When You Really Got Me came out, it was so different," Dave told The Guardian. "It seemed as if nobody liked it – until it became an international hit. I remember hearing it on the radio for the first time in my mate's Humber Super Snipe. I was transfixed. I thought it was someone else. I said: "Is that us? That's us!"

The song was released as a single on August 4, 1964, and hit the top of the UK chart the following month, before making the top ten in the US.

In the decades since, You Really Got Me has been covered by artists as varied as Van Halen, Iggy Pop, Sly & the Family Stone, Mott the Hoople, Lords of the New Church, David Essex, Oingo Boingo, Robert Palmer and Toots and the Maytals.

And to bring things full circle, You Really Got Me's status as ground zero for heavy metal was unofficially recognised in 2010, when Ray Davies joined unlikely forces with Metallica for a blunt-force version of the song on his See My Friends duets album.

"The original Kinks version was more jazzy and had a slippery kind of vocal," explained Davies. "With Metallica, it had to be more full-on."

Last Monday, Europe returned to the Tracks Of The Week referendum, with what we believe to be their first release since the UK left the EU, and what a return it was, as Joey Tempest led his men to a convincing, thoroughly deserved victory. So congratulations to them.

Bringing up the rear, so to speak, were American hopefuls The Bites and other American hopefuls Stanley Simmons, so congratulations to them, too. Eight new contestants are ready to do battle below, armour shining and broadswords sharpened.

Goose - Good Times // End Times

Goose, like the Grateful Dead, might be one of those bands it's difficult to "get" without partaking in the whole live experience thing, but Good Times // End Times is a pretty good entry point for the uninitiated, coming on a like a joyful mix of the E Street Band, Range-era Bruce Hornsby, Steely Dan and Ben Folds, but also sounding like none of those. Excellent New album Big Modern! is out now, and the band return to New York's fabled Madison Square Garden for a pair of shows this week, once it's been tidied up after all those Knicks celebrations.

Des Rocs - Fall Together

It seems that every rock band worth its salt tries to write their own version of Kashmir at some point, and Fall Together is Des Rocs' version. He's gone all-in, with the Middle Eastern melodies, the epic strings, the mystical lyrics ("Laced crown / Placed on meat / Red dogs devour me, devour me, devour me"), the towering ambition and whatnot, and who are we to argue? No one, that's who. New album To Hell And Back is out now.

Joanne Shaw Taylor - Tired Of Being Right

Over in the Keeps Getting Better Corner, Joanne Shaw Taylor's latest is a relaxed, apparently effortless soul-blues, the kind of thing that's mainstream enough to attract a large audience yet skilful enough to keep the purists happy. "A very personal song for me," says Joanne. "A song about always holding out hope that the one you love might finally step up, but sadly sometimes you have to give yourself clarity and permission to leave. Sometimes people will never change no matter how long you invest in them." Well, that's us told.

King Falcon - Nothing Feels Amazing

Nothing Feels Amazing takes a while to get where it's going, but Brooklyn alt-rockers King Falcon eventually explode into a chorus that's both fast and frothy. They're very much in the New York tradition of spiky, guitar-led bands – fans of The Strokes or the much-missed Ambulance Ltd will feel immediately at home – but there's a frisky, power-pop side to this band that marks them out as more than just another bunch of Williamsburg wannabies.

Beaux Gris Gris & The Apocalypse - Me Ye Ye Yow!

If Tracks Of The Week were a song-title competition, Me Ye Ye Yow! would swiftly banish its fellow contestants to the outer reaches of the songwriting realm, but it isn't. Thankfully, Me Ye Ye Yow! (there we go again!) stands up on its own, powered by a street-walkin' cheetah of a riff, a typically dominant vocal from Greta Valenti, and a video starring counter-surveillance operatives the Kitty Cat Gang, who may be the greatest gang of all time.

The Warning - Ritual

Last time The Warning were in our Tracks Of The Week contest, they accounted for 98% of the total votes. The time before that, it was 97%. Can anyone step up to thwart the inexorable rise of the popular Mexican sisters, or will their trudge to the top remain unhindered? Only the next seven days will tell, but in the meantime, Ritual – which comes on like Rammstein playing footsie with Halestorm – makes a very big noise, in all the right, arena-straddling ways.

All Them Witches - The Welterweight 

All Them Witches' new album House Of Mirrors is shaping up to be one of the finest albums of 2026, and The Welterweight is just one of a literal plethora of highlights. With a grown-up, atmospheric arrangement and instrumentation that's somehow restrained but dramatic at the same time, it's the kind of song that makes you wonder why other bands don't do more with the traditional sonic palette. Nice use of cicadas at the end of the video, too. We like cicadas.

The Last Internationale - People, Let's Stop the War

We didn't have The Last Internationale covering Grand Funk Railroad on our 2026 rock bingo card, but the New York City band's version of People, Let's Stop the War – presumably released in tribute to Donald Trump's Sun Tzu-like mastery of military strategy – is an appropriately incendiary beast indeed, filled with such explosive fury it probably should come shrink-wrapped to a fire extinguisher. It's available on limited edition 7" vinyl and will be on sale at the band's upcoming dates with Tom Morello. Promises to be a quiet night out.