There have been few more satisfying phenomena than the rise of Green Lung. Forged in the choking fog of sinister south London streets, they’ve defied every passing trend and become the UK’s leading exponents of proudly traditional heavy metal, with all the occult trimmings.

Everything, from the all-encompassing bombast of their meticulously crafted songs, to the symbiotic relationship they have with the artwork of legendary illustrator Richard Wells, chimes so brilliantly with a very real contemporary need for authenticity that the band’s success has been inevitable. For those looking for the festival headliners of the future, Green Lung have already staked a formidable claim.

On their fourth album, they make their case with such exuberance and bravado that it takes the breath away. Necropolitan is siphoned from London’s dark, otherworldly corners. Green Lung have always revelled in the twilit haze that separates the living from the dead, and these songs offer an even more vivid and disquieting glimpse into the capital’s hidden secrets and immortal antiheroes, pin-sharp modern analogies included as a courtesy.

The dizzyingly thunderous Dance To The Grave casts a damning eye on the kamikaze greed of tyrannical tech giants and bloated billionaires dragging us all into an idiotic apocalypse. On the insanely catchy Black Magick Radio, they reimagine pirate radio as a conduit for supernatural malice. The full-throttle uproar of Necropolitan Line fills the Tube network with zombies in tribute to the London Necropolis Railway and its early 20th-century transporting of corpses out of the city centre. And grand finale To The Gallows Born evokes Iron Maiden’s Hallowed Be Thy Name for a bone-chilling tale of death at the Tyburn gallows.

Green Lung even manage to pay their respects to revered poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose florid verse provides the inspiration for the wild and esoteric Ozymandias. None of this would count for a hill of beans were it not for Green Lung’s unerring brilliance as songwriters and musicians.

Necropolitan is fit to burst with great riffs, incisive vocal melodies, and smart, nuanced arrangements that imbue every song with startling colour and character. From the treacly organ tones that underpin Black Magick Radio to the shimmering Mellotron and blissful, pastoral harmonies that make To The Gallows Born so gloriously timeless and eerie, this is a sustained explosion of fine details and earthy enhancements, with every element honouring the band’s singular vision.

Frontman Tom Templar has never sounded so charismatic or commanding. Keyboard wizard John Wright is a perpetual source of textural audacity, and Scott Black makes yet another bid to be the most inventive six-string maverick of his generation. The rhythm section is hugely impressive, too.

There aren’t too many reasons to be cheerful in 2026. But the sound of a certifiably great, young-ish band asserting themselves with this much intelligence, charm and bite should give even the most weary pessimists cause for celebration. British heavy metal is alive, well and out of its mind on laudanum, absinthe and riffs the size of St. Paul’s Cathedral. All aboard!

Necropolitan is out September 11 via Nuclear Blast.

Louisa Livingstone, the woman whose ghostly figure adorns the cover of Black Sabbath's debut album, has released a rock opera based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books. Livingstone was identified as the model on the cover of Black Sabbath in 2020, after five decades of silence.

Earlier this year, Livingstone – who records music under the name Indreba (short for Incredible Dream Band) – released a pair of songs celebrating her place in history, with Witch Woman alluding to her iconic appearance and The Woman By The Mill referencing the location of the photograph, at Mapledurham Watermill in Oxfordshire.

"Witch Woman came out of nowhere as a sudden idea of what I could do," she tells Rolling Stone. "Black Sabbath fans loved the songs, which was gratifying as it was aimed at them and definitely deliberately in the metal genre for that reason.”

Now Livingstone has released Alice, an AI-assisted five-track EP she describes as "a psychedelic rock opera featuring Alice who returns to explore the crazy 2026 world of the internet and AI."

"Tracks one to five tell the story in sequence with an abundance of captivating musical changes," she adds. "The lyrics are a key element in this rollercoaster ride of a music trip."

"I used to be very judgmental about AI like many people," she tells Rolling Stone, "but it’s a tool that you can use to create either absolute rubbish or ‘slop’ as it’s called, to something really good and interesting."

The songs include the opening Feed Your Head, which takes Jefferson Airplane's own Alice In Wonderland-themed classic White Rabbit as its starting point, but updates the lyrics to include lines like "One pill makes you scroll for hours" and "If you go chasing white rabbits / down the algorithms of your mind."

Alice is available via Bandcamp.

When Elbow won the Mercury Music Prize for 2008 album The Seldom Seen Kid, it was seen by some as a victory for prog music. Others didn’t like the idea of Guy Garvey’s band being seen as part of the genre. But in 2013 the vocalist confirmed that – like it or not – the band’s prog tendencies were roots in his very earliest years.

Guy Garvey, lead singer of Elbow, once described his band as “prog rock without the solos.” If the only Elbow song you’ve ever heard is One Day Like This – an anthem so ubiquitous that the King probably knows the words – then the “prog” tag may come as a surprise. But a deep dive into Elbow’s catalogue reveals that the Mancunians revel in experimental sounds, non-linear arrangements and big, conceptual ideas.

“We count ourselves as progressive because we go where the music takes us and we work themes throughout albums,” explains Garvey. “When I said, ‘Prog rock without the solos,’ it was the late 90s. Nobody was talking about progressive rock; it was a dirty word. And yet so much of the music I was listening to – and that was being featured in the music press – was inspired by the work of Yes, Genesis and King Crimson. There was no denying it, yet nobody was talking about it. So when I spoke up for our prog influences, it was as much to buck that trend as anything.”

Case in point: Radiohead have never cited Pink Floyd as an influence, which Garvey calls “ridiculous.” The singer, born in Manchester in 1974, was so thoroughly exposed to his sister’s Genesis records from an early age that they were his nursery rhymes. Nursery Cryme as crib music? Genius!

“Selling England By The Pound is probably my favourite album,” he says. “Another is A Trick Of The Tail, and the live version of Carpet Crawlers from Seconds Out, which has Phil Collins singing on it, I prefer to the original.”

Garvey had developed a wide taste in music by the time he met guitarist Mark Potter at sixth-form college in 1990. He was invited to join Potter’s band, which included bass player Pete Turner and drummer Richard Jupp. Potter’s younger brother, Craig, was later recruited as keyboardist. Right from the start, Garvey impressed his love of prog rock upon the others.

“I became obsessed with Yes around the time I joined,” says Garvey. “I remember the first time I met Mark, I played him lots of songs. He got a job at a local restaurant – he’s quite a good cook. He said, ‘I get a wage this weekend. I want you to take me into town and buy me a record collection.’ The first one I bought him was Close To The Edge, just because of the guitar work on it. I remember really falling in love with Siberian Khatru from that record. It’s such a great one to rock out to – and it’s the reason Craig played an organ in the first place.”

It took a long while for those progressive sounds to percolate into the band’s output. The fledgling group, named Mr. Soft, initially settled on a “chilled funk” sound inspired by a shared love of Jimi Hendrix, Sly & The Family Stone and The Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Mr. Soft spent the 1990s gigging, but record company A&R scouts were stingy about handing over their business cards. In hindsight, bassist Pete Turner summed up the band’s early work with the following thoughtfully considered critique: “It was shite.”

“We’d tried again and again to get a record deal and had taken plenty of advice and never gotten anywhere,” says Garvey. “That was when we decided to do what we wanted, unequivocally.”

To commemorate a fresh start, the band renamed itself. Its new moniker was inspired by a line in The Singing Detective, in which a character says that ‘elbow’ is the most sensuous word in the English language. (Word of advice: Garvey does not recommend that you whisper “elbow” into your loved one’s ear as a seduction technique.)

By the time Elbow released their debut, Asleep In The Back, on V2 records in 2001, they’d developed a sound influenced by trip-hop acts such as Massive Attack and Portishead, and post-rock bands such as Talk Talk and Radiohead.

Asleep In The Back also includes a subcutaneous layer of progressive rock. Can’t Stop, Little Beast, Coming Second and Bitten By The Tailfly utilise unsettling discordance, suffocating drum patterns and jagged swipes of guitar to underscore the claustrophobic melancholy in Garvey’s vocals.

Newborn, a poignant tale of an elderly couple facing their final years together, takes its cues from a Genesis song. “Entangled goes on this beautiful, sonic exploration – haunting and grand – it’s a compact song that does something very special,” says Garvey.

Newborn features an extended coda, which builds from the subdued swirls and eddies of an organ to a fireball eruption of guitar and a feverish vocal. “That was a real lament from the soul. It’s a very earnest, apocalyptic love song and it doesn’t work without the second half.”

Asleep In The Back was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. The title track cracked the Top 20 singles charts, but album sales were modest. The follow-up, Cast Of Thousands (2003), didn’t fare much better. It boasted some fine moments (Fugitive Motel, Switching Off), but became ‘the difficult second album.’

“We didn’t have the songs,” admits Garvey today. But he wasn’t stuck for inspiration when it came to writing his typically literate lyrics for Leaders Of The Free World (2005). Blindsided by the end of his romance with radio DJ Edith Bowman, Garvey’s nakedly emotional singing seemed to burble up from his bruised heart. Musically, Elbow refined their signature use of minimalist organic textures.

Though the press tended to make facile comparisons between Elbow and contemporaries such as Coldplay, Travis and Snow Patrol, Leaders Of The Free World was hardly commercial stadium rock. Tracks such as Station Approach, Picky Bugger and Mexican Standoff exemplify Elbow’s love of undulating arrangements that often eschew the traditional verse-chorus-verse structure.

One early fan was Marillion guitarist Steve Rothery. “Elbow are one of my favourite bands,” he tells Prog. “It’s great to hear such intelligent music in the mainstream. Guy Garvey has one of the most soulful voices I’ve heard and Craig Potter’s production is perfect. It’s really good to hear music with such a dynamic range again.”

Yet Elbow’s attempt to nudge their way into the big leagues stalled. The band were dropped by their record company. Undeterred, the five Mancunians set about creating their most ambitious album statement, The Seldom Seen Kid. Though it’s not quite a concept album, there’s an overarching theme about the costly pursuit of material success. The epic, orchestral centrepiece The Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver, exemplifies the album’s message.

“My brother-in-law met a tower crane driver who, at the beginning of the evening, was showing off how much money he got paid,” explains Garvey. “He had a television up there and the best view of the city wherever he was working. But it turned out that it took him so long to get up there first thing in the morning, and so long to come down, that he didn’t actually meet anyone he worked with. He was consequently very lonely. His story is a good metaphor for ambition leaving you lonely, especially as you sacrifice love and relationships for it.”

Musically, The Seldom Seen Kid utilises the sort of volume dynamics that Garvey says are more common in classical music than rock music. For instance, Starlings is punctuated with unexpected blasts of brass that aren’t for the faint of heart or ear. Some Riot seems to seesaw unsteadily from side to side as if its cellos were seasick. When the stomp rocker Grounds For Divorce explodes midway through, the musical shrapnel seems to ricochet across the speakers.

Like previous Elbow albums, TSSK weaves unusual sounds into its fabric. “Quite often, one of us will have a sound in mind, not knowing how to make that sound,” says Garvey. “For instance, with The Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver, that came from a concept. I wanted a sound that sounds like a tower crane moving across the skyline. That’s where we began. It’s hidden in the mix, but there’s a very wobbly, peculiar sort of ‘bong’. It’s almost xylophonic.

“I was saying, ‘It’s got to sound a little bit like a seatbelt sign “bong” on an aircraft, but it’s got to be deeper and have a soulful tone.’ We ran around the studio hitting things. We found this 70s glass lampshade – quite ugly, I don’t know what it was doing there – and not only was it the perfect sound, it was in the right key!”

Elbow signed to Polydor, who had little idea that The Seldom Seen Kid would become a Mercury Music Prize winner. The album shifted over a million copies thanks to its euphoric single One Day Like This, which has soundtracked countless weddings and nature documentaries, along with Apple product launches and award ceremonies for Sir Bradley Wiggins. It’s a wonder the song isn’t a staple at Last Night Of The Proms by now. “It kind of became the national anthem in the UK,” marvels Garvey. “It was written from a very real place. I was falling in love with my girlfriend, Emma Jane.”

The newly crowned ‘people’s band’ charted a similar musical course on 2011’s Build A Rocket Boys! It’s a relatively quieter album that emphasises drizzle-light drumming, plucked acoustic guitars and plangent piano chords – “very minimal and spacious,” explains Garvey. It’s far from simple music, though. Elbow even looked to a 16th-century composer for inspiration. “Looking at the roots of folk music led me back to Thomas Tallis and we decided to use that kind of harmonic sequence in it,” says the singer.

The album’s eight-minute opener The Birds is dominated by a pulsar-like keyboard figure and goes supernova during its rousing outro. It’s Elbow’s proggiest song to date.

“It’s a long-lost love affair from the point of view of a really old man, which is why the reprise of The Birds has a really old man singing the song,” says Garvey. “When the synths and the strings kick in toward the end, you can’t help but be in the moment.”

The Birds may well be a precursor to the direction of an upcoming album, set to include several lengthy songs. “I want it to have the impact of The Seldom Seen Kid without its pop sensibilities,” says Garvey with the same excitement as when Boddingtons Brewery teamed with Elbow to launch a line of Build A Rocket Boys! beer.

“The record we’re currently writing has at least five or six pieces of music that go through at least three stages,” reveals Garvey. “We’ve got one at the moment called This Blue World, which goes into two pieces of music. The working titles are Slow Moving Water and Fast Moving Water. “

Is it time to file Elbow next to ELP? “It’s probably going to be our most progressive album,” reveals the singer. “That word is coming up a lot in the studio.”

He adds that critics of progressive rock tend to dismissively deem it nerdy, classical-influenced music born in English public schools. “It’s also about freedom of expression,” he concludes. “It’s a really passionate, intense form of music that’s quite often fun.”

When Weezer were booked to appear on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in August to promote their 20th studio album, frontman Rivers Cuomo decided to push the boat out, fashion-wise. Given that the record, the Los Angeles band's seventh self-titled album, is destined to be forever known as 'The Gold Album' - the quartet's vocalist/guitarist elected to wear an all-gold outfit for the evening, accessorising a a gold lamé suit, with a gold bow tie, a gold top hat, gold trainers and gold face paint. It was a bold stylistic statement that even the world's most fashionable men would struggle to pull off, but respect to the 56-year-old musician for taking a risk.

Cuomo may possibly have been a little surprised then, when, following a cursory mention of Weezer's newest release, Jimmy Fallon opted not to query their frontman's apparel, but instead pulled out an old black-and-white band photo, identified a teenage Cuomo in the middle of the frame/line-up, and asked, "What kind of band was this, and was that your real hair?"

"We were progressive metal, and it was my real hair, yeah," Cuomo answered with a somewhat bemused expression creasing his golden face.

The band in the photo was Avant Garde, formed in the mid-80s while Cuomo - then known to his bandmates as Peter Kitts - was a student at E.O. Smith High School in Mansfield, Connecticut. Alongside lead guitarist Cuomo/Kitts, Avant Garde originally featured brothers Kevin Ridel (vocals) and Eric Ridel (guitar, replaced in 1988 by Michael Stanton) and fellow E.O. Smith pupils Justin Fisher (bass) and Bryn Mutch (drums).

The quintet were influenced by local heroes Fates Warning - Rivers Cuomo actually took guitar lessons from founding member Jim Matheos - Seattle's Queensrÿche, Florida's Crimson Glory, San Francisco's Cacophony (featuring Marty Friedman and Jason Becker), Iron Maiden, Metallica, and Swedish guitar hero Yngwie Malmsteen. The teenagers took the band extremely seriously, practising up to four times a week, and largely staying away from indulgence in alcohol and drugs in order to focus fully on their craft.

In 1988, the year of Operation: Mindcrime, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, ...And Justice For All, King's X's Out of the Silent Planet (voted album of the year by Kerrang!), and Death Angel's Frolic Through The Park, Avant Garde sent out their second demo cassette to local radio stations, hoping for airplay for songs such as the epic power ballad Standing in the Paris Rain, and the Helloween-esque Never Forget. When DJs at local college radio station WHUS 91.7 began playing songs from the demo, peers began to see that the poodle-haired high school teens actually had some potential.

"I was always a bit of an oddity," Cuomo told The Hartford Courant newspaper in 1996. "When I was in ninth grade, we were picked on and ostracized. By 11th grade, we were tolerated. And by 12th grade, people gave us a certain amount of respect. But we were never rock stars, just the weird guys who did music."

In 1989, Avant Garde recorded a third demo, Somethin' Different!, featuring a more commercial sound, and upon graduating from high school, the quintet relocated to Los Angeles, searching for their big break. It soon became crystal clear, however, that the young Connecticut band were not what Hollywood's A&R scouts were looking for. The group tried a reset, changing their name to Zoom, and adopting a more streamlined sound inspired by Van Halen, but disillusionment quickly sent in. After drummer Bryn Mutch bailed, the group dissolved without much fanfare. And if Rivers Cuomo had not burst into the spotlight with a new band four years later, it's doubtful that very many people in 2026 would be interested in seeking out the 'lost' music which paved his way to stardom.

"[Avant Garde] just kind of sucked," suggested Kevin Ridel, somewhat harshly, when speaking with The Hartford Courant in 1996. "We were trying to be kings of our instruments and just disregarded the idea of writing good songs. We were striving for technical prowess, but we still couldn't really play."

Stripping things back musically and concentrating on impactful, melodic song-craft with Weezer proved rather more fruitful for the artist formerly known as Peter Kitts.

"He was fascinated by heavy metal," Cuomo's high school music teacher and choir master Kenneth Holton told The Hartford Courant. "My chorus got a reputation for having the kid with the long hair.

"[With Weezer] I hear a lot of harmonies and the chord changes of pop songs. I was really surprised to hear all that coming through. [He] rejected all that entirely in high school."

A previously unreleased Van Halen demo is to be released as a 7" picture disc. The 1974 recording, Glitter – made with the band's first bassist, Mark Stone – will be packaged with Van Halen, a limited-edition anthology written by drummer Alex Van Halen.

1500 copies of the anthology will be published by Genesis Publications in November. A Deluxe boxed set edition of 350 is already sold out, but the Collector boxed set run of 1150 – yours for a trifling £345 ($525) – is still available.

Each Collector copy is quarter-bound in black vegan leather with silver page edging, and features a silver debossed Van Halen logo. The book is housed in a black clamshell box with silver foiling.

In addition to the Glitter picture disc – which is backed by spoken word excerpts from interviews with Alex Van Halen – the package includes a Van Halen Productions keychain, three replica Eddie Van Halen stage-used guitar picks, and six 6" × 4" art postcards. Each copy of the book has been personally signed by Alex Van Halen.

While Glitter has not been officially released before, it has been widely available as a bootleg, notably on the unofficial Van Halen/David Lee Roth CRr compilation Back In Circulation. It was also released in 1998 via the Dave TV section of David Lee Roth's website, alongside another demo from the same session, Gentlemen Of Leisure.

The recordings were originally made at the home of David Lee Roth's father, Dr Nathan Roth, a prominent Pasadena ophthalmologist. The tapes were then distributed to club bookers in the Los Angeles area in the hope of securing live shows.

Alex Van Halen published a memoir, Brothers, in 2024.

Toyah Willcox began her career as an actor in Quadrophenia and Quatermass, and as a post-punk in the 80s declared she wanted to be free. In the 21st century she teamed up with the late Bill Rieflin, Markus Reuter and her husband Robert Fripp, and was even In The Court Of The Crimson Queen. In 2020 – just as Toyah And Robert’s Sunday Lunch presented the pair in a new, light-hearted light – we asked the question: how prog is she?

Most people think they know Toyah Willcox. She’s rooted in popular perception as the rebel queen of 80s new wave, responsible for mega-hits like It’s A Mystery, I Want To Be Free and Thunder In The Mountains. But there’s a whole other, less-celebrated side to her – the edgy adventurer, surveying the worlds of improv, art rock and experimental music.

“I’ve always needed to walk away from the predictable,” she tells Prog. “I love doing the 80s festivals and the touring shows, and my audience turns up in their thousands, which I’m so grateful for. But there’s also a part of me that is very off-the-wall. And I need to feed that.”

In recent years, that creative nourishment has taken the form of The Humans, the trio that she co-founded in 2007 with multi-instrumentalists Chris Wong and Bill Rieflin (former drummer with King Crimson). The band’s studio endeavours – now collected in a handsome five-disc box set, Noise In Your Head – are centred around Toyah’s voice and two bass guitars, making for a fascinating aural experience. You’ll find ambient music, gnarly avant-rock, elastic funk and deconstructed pop. And yes, even prog.

Toyah is acutely aware of the connotations of the latter genre. She is, after all, married to Robert Fripp. And even though they’ve deliberately kept their artistic lives separate, her husband pops in and out of her story like a recurring King Crimson riff. The birth of The Humans is a prime example.

“I made a feature film in Estonia [Tied Up In Tallinn] during the country’s first year of independence,” she begins, “and I fell in love with the place. Then Robert and I became great friends with the Estonian ambassador for the UK, Dr Margus Laidre. In 2007, the president [Toomas Hendrik Ilves] asked if Robert would come and play on his birthday, to which he said, ‘No.’ I’ve heard Robert say ‘no’ to everybody – David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, you name it. He’s always got an excuse not to play.

“So I contacted Dr Margus and said, ‘Look, there’s a project really dear to my heart and I want it to be a spontaneous thing with three musicians.’ He was intrigued. I told him, ‘We’ll do this, for your president, on his birthday.’ I didn’t expect to hear anything back, but, within 24 hours the invitation was accepted.”

She immediately called Rieflin, who she’d bonded with through his involvement with Fripp. Wong, her musical director, was in too. Using Toyah’s demos as base material, the threesome flew out and played for the then Estonian president. “It was challenging,” she recalls, “but we really made it work.”

Their set formed the core of the band’s 2009 debut, We Are The Humans. “It’s a completely stripped-down, sonically naked album,” says Toyah. “My ears have always been very sensitive. I said to Bill, ‘I can’t have drums on this – they’re limiting my vocal ability. I just want that middle spectrum for me.’ So We Are The Humans was very much a work in progress. But, as a standalone piece, I think it’s magical.”

Later that summer she and Wong returned to Estonia, where they teamed up with German producer and touch guitarist Markus Reuter, plus local duo Robert Jürjendal (guitar) and Arvo Urb (drums). They christened themselves This Fragile Moment for a self-titled studio effort. “I think that album is one of the best in-the-moment pieces of writing I’ve ever done,” Toyah declares. “We all met in Tallinn, sat down in a circle, put headphones on and improvised for a week.”

Putting her solo career on hold (2008’s In The Court Of The Crimson Queen had been a neatly titled acknowledgement of her other half), Toyah threw herself into The Humans. The recording of 2011’s Sugar Rush, however, proved particularly difficult, both on a professional and personal level. “My father died the day after I’d gone over to Seattle to map Sugar Rush,” she explains. “So a lot of that album was grief-ridden and angry, because my father wasn’t treated well in his last days.”

The deeply atmospheric Snow At 10:23 marks the time of his death back home, while Fragment Pool and Small Town Psychopath concern Toyah’s relationship with her father and what happened to him. “I lost my mother around that time too and I also had a cancer scare,” she adds. “It was just the most ridiculous time. I had three years of intensive surgery – one of them kept me in a coma for 24 hours.”

From an artistic standpoint, the intensity of the sessions was heightened by Fripp’s presence in the studio. Rieflin had wanted to expand the sound of The Humans on Sugar Rush, adding more harmonic structure, with Fripp on board. Toyah acceded, but only out of respect for Rieflin, whose invaluable musical know-how had been sharpened by his involvement with the likes of Ministry, Revolting Cocks, Swans, Nine Inch Nails and REM.

“I told Bill it would be the death of The Humans,” she says. “And to a certain extent it was – certainly as a live act. I said to him, ‘The moment you put Robert on this project, we no longer exist.’ I had to let Bill see that.

“When I first met Robert I was three days away from suicide and he just took me out of the country and unravelled the knots and put me back on my feet. He’s a wonderful husband, but professionally it’s not done me any favours at all. We managed to do one more tour – and it was phenomenal – but that was it. At the same time, I think Sugar Rush is a work of genius on all our parts.”

The Humans went on to record a final studio album, 2014’s more vocal-led Strange Tales, but the sessions were hampered by Rieflin’s ongoing struggle with cancer. The results are nevertheless often spectacular, be it the post-grunge She’s Fast or the masterly art-funk of Get In Your Car and Bedhead. Rieflin pushes the band’s parameters by also taking on drums, keyboards and percussion, while violins and saxophones add further colour.

Noise In Your Head acts as a fitting tribute to Rieflin, who died in March this year. Toyah says he’d spent the last 12 months of his life taking care of loose ends, including the box set. “I’d deliberately stayed away from putting my name at the top of this project,” she explains. “Calling ourselves The Humans got rid of my past history in some ways. I have worked blisteringly hard to be where I am today and thought that if I put my name on this it wouldn’t help, because everyone would pick up on the fact that I’m married to Robert.

“But in the last year Bill told me, ‘Your name has to be on this. It’s got to be Toyah & The Humans.’ I think he realised that I had a greater audience, so it was all part of the journey.”

Toyah’s work with The Humans and This Fragile Moment isn’t some isolated left turn. She grew up listening to big-selling names with strong cult appeal – Roxy Music, Bolan, Bowie, Alice Cooper. As her love of theatrical art grew into an acting career (appearing in late-70s subculture classics like Jubilee and Quadrophenia), she began to absorb the audio-visual delights of Devo and The Tubes.

She spent her first £60 wage packet from the National Theatre on a bunch of vinyl: Velvet Underground, Pere Ubu and (No Pussyfooting). “So my first experience of Robert Fripp was through Brian Eno,” she says. “Later on I got King Crimson’s Discipline, which is an amazing album.”

Witnessing the Sex Pistols in her Birmingham hometown in October 1976 had been liberating for its vibe. But Toyah’s notions of live performance had started to take shape at a younger age. “I saw Black Sabbath when I was 11,” she remembers, “then I saw Hawkwind when I was 12. I spent the whole night running away from Stacia! I was just this child, surrounded by all these acid-heads and with a naked woman dancing on stage. She was wonderful though; quite something.”

Even at the peak of her fame in the early 80s, the playlist on Toyah’s tour bus reflected tastes that most post-punk artists wouldn’t admit to, from The Moody Blues’ Days Of Future Passed to the trippy Stones gem, Citadel. 1988’s Prostitute is a startling pre-echo of her Humans output. An abstract, confrontational album peppered with dialogue, samples and avant-pop grooves, it was an emphatic statement, issued after her commercial star had waned.

“I’d signed to CBS on their new Portrait label [for 1985’s Minx], but everybody wanted me to emulate Pat Benatar,” she explains. “Then as soon as I got married [she and Fripp wed in 1986] the phone would ring and the people who used to talk to me would ask for Robert instead. And they would discuss me with him! I suddenly became completely invisible, culturally, as a woman.

“I’d gone from having an award-winning, groundbreaking career – one of the top-selling artists and the most-awarded female in Europe – to suddenly having to have meetings with my husband in the room. And people saying to me, ‘Why don’t you go away and have babies?’ Prostitute was really a response to all that.”

She followed up in 1991 with the more prog-oriented Ophelia’s Shadow, backed by the musicians she’d previously fronted as Sunday All Over The World, including Fripp and future King Crimson man Trey Gunn. They released their sole album, Kneeling At The Shrine, that year.

Encouraged by pre-sales of The Humans box set (“It’s already been a hundred times more successful than any of those albums were originally”), Toyah thrives on challenging herself. “There’s always room for improvement in all of us; even Robert would agree with that,” she states. “So what drives me is the desire to remain creative, to expand, to explore. It’s definitely not commerce.

“I just don’t believe in this cultural thing where if you get older you lose power and relevance. You don’t. All your experiences are generating inside you, like a battery, wanting to come out. So you continue to resonate.”

“It’s all about thrash, kill, metal, slash, burn, pillage, repeat.”

The words of Metallica's James Hetfield? Slayer's Tom Araya? Slipknot's Shawn 'The Clown' Crahan?

No, friends, the words of Billy Joel, New York City's esteemed Piano Man and failed heavy metal superstar.

Hard rock and heavy metal is not for everyone, as we all know. Rolling Stone told us that Led Zeppelin’s debut album was “dull”, “redundant” and “prissy”, and Black Sabbath’s first album was “inane”, “wooden” and “plodding”. The boomer bible was even more savage when reviewing Uriah Heep’s debut, 1970’s Very ’Eavy, Very ’Umble: “If this group makes it,” wrote one Melissa Mills, “I’ll have to commit suicide.”

But even these notices pale alongside the kickings administered by critics to the self-titled debut album by Attila, the heavy psych / heavy metal duo formed in 1969 by Billy Joel and his drummer pal Jon Small, both former members of The Hassles

Joel and Small formed their new enterprise - named after the infamously bloodthirsty Attila The Hun - in the image of Led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly and Blue Cheer: their unique spin on the hard rock format was that they planned to operate without a guitarist, with Joel feeding his Hammond organ through a wall of amplifiers.

“We wanted to be a heavy band and we decided we were going to get heavy… somehow,” he told biographer Fred Schruers in 2014.

“We were going to destroy the world with amplification,” he had informed DJ Dan Neer in 1985. “We had about a dozen gigs and nobody could stay in the room when we were playing. It was too loud. We drove people literally out of clubs.”

“We were so loud. You could see blood coming out of people’s ears. It was just horrible.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, this sonic slaughter, Attila secured a record deal with Epic Records. The eight-track album boasted song titles such as Brain Invasion, Tear This Castle Down and the epic two part Amplifier Fire (Part I: Godzilla / Part II: March of the Huns). The band shot the cover photo in a meat locker, dressed in armour, chainmail, and fur, flanked by animal carcasses.

The world was not ready.

“Attila undoubtedly is the worst album released in the history of rock & roll - hell, the history of recorded music itself,” wrote a reviewer for the AllMusic site. “There have been many bad ideas in rock, but none match the colossal stupidity of Attila.”

Ouch.

Perhaps Attila might have come into fashion had they stuck around a little longer to find an audience for their bold and experimental sound. That possibility, however, was scuppered by Joel having an affair with Small's wife, Elizabeth, who he later married.

Looking back, the singer/songwriter dubbed the project “a colossal failure.” Subsequently selling 160 million records as a solo artist probably took the sting away, we imagine.

On September 7, 2026, the world lost half of Attila, as Joel shared the news of his old friend Jon Small's passing. No details have been given as to the drummer's cause of death.

The new documentary film charting last year’s Oasis reunion will hit cinema screens later this week, and is said to give viewers a “backstage pass” into the celebrated live shows.

Don’t Look Back In Anger arrives on the silver screen from September 9, with tickets available to book right now via a number of sites including Cineworld and Odeon.

Producer Steven Knight, who also created Peaky Blinders, House of Guinness and SAS: Rogue Heroes among others, says: “The Oasis world tour united generations, cultures and countries and spoke to a broken world about reconciliation.

"Don’t Look Back In Anger is not only your ticket to the show – it’s a backstage pass and a seat at the table when Liam and Noel sit down together for the first time in 15 years and tell it how it is and how it was.”

Following its cinema release, Don't Look Back In Anger will land on Disney+ on a date still to be finalised

How to watch Oasis: Don't Look Back In Anger

Although a home streaming release date for Don't Look Back In Anger has still to be officially announced, we do know that when it does land, it'll be on Disney+. Here's some pricing details if you're not currently a subscriber.

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

• Read our full Disney+ review

How to watch from anywhere

While we don't know exactly when Don't Look Back In Anger will arrive on Disney+, it's worthwhile keeping this page bookmarked for when it drops. When it does premiere, you might be out of the country and if that's the case and you want to watch it straight away, you'll need a VPN to help you.

Virtual Private Networks are used to change the location of your IP address, enabling you to stream no matter where you are. Nord VPN is Louder's service of choice and it's currently available with 70% off the usual price - and there's a 30-day money back guarantee.

How to use a VPN

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

2. Choose the location you wish to connect to in the VPN. If you're outside of the country and don't want to miss content on your favourite streaming service, just select your country from the list, then log on to your Disney+ account.

3. Kick back and relax: That's it - you're all set to stream.

• Check out Amazon’s range of official Oasis merch

What else is on Disney+?

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

Top of my list is the excellent documentary Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear, which charts the Blink-182 drummer's life before he joined the band, his meteoric rise to fame, and his recovery after surviving a horrific plane crash in 2008.

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

It's also home to the entire Star Wars universe – all the classic movies are here, alongside spin-offs such as The Mandalorian, Andor, The Book Of Boba Fett and The Clone Wars animated series. There's even an option to watch everything in timeline order.

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

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

Steven Wilson has launched a new website and released a short trailer for his next studio album, featruing Dr. Who actor David Tennant narrating and bearing the title "The Village Is Alive. Welcome to the village.", hinting that he may soon release a follow-up to last year's The Overview.

A website, taking the form of a village parish council-style website for Larkstone, entitled Requiem For A Village, appeared online this morning. Amongst the notices for village hall hire, the Village Historical Society, North Boundary Footpath Group and Over-60s Lunch Club, is a photograph featuring Wilson staring up at a village church.

The overall effect carries with it hints of a bygone world, as seen in films such as 1974's Pender's Fen (from the BBC's Play For Today series), the 1970s children's TV series Children Of The Stones and Robin Hardy's 1973 classic The Wicker Man, among others.

There has been no official announcement about the album, its title or release date, but this recent spate of activity suggests the wheels are in motion.

Listening sessions were held for some fans back in May and June at the Polygon Portal in London's Soho, where reports included the fact that the upcoming album featured a narration from Tennant, that the album seemed to be inspired by folk horror, centred around a fictional village from which there was no escape, and musically blended prog, ambient electronica, acid folk and crunching heavy guitar riffs.

The unsettling trailer – released through Wilson's YouTube channel, which now features an image of a Celtic-type gravestone that also appears on Wilson's other social channels – features Tennant's voice and some folk-like acoustic guitar.

Perhaps most importantly for eager fans, the website lists an Autumn Festival in its events section for November 6.

Live footage of Slayer playing 1986 album Reign In Blood in full has made its way online.

The California thrash metal hellraisers kicked off a tour celebrating 40 years of their most lauded release with a show at Mystic Lake Amphitheater in Shakopee, Minnesota on September 4. They dusted off an assortment of hits before finishing with Reign… in its 28-minute entirety: the first time they’ve performed the whole thing since 2014.

Watch footage of the complete Reign… section of the show below.

The Reign In Blood 40th-anniversary tour resumed at Rocklahoma in Pryor, Oklahoma on September 6. It will pick back up with a stop at Palacio de los Deportes in Mexico City on October 21, then continue for more North and Latin American dates. See the full list of dates below.

Slayer’s third full-length album, Reign In Blood was produced by Rick Rubin (then known for his collaborations with such hip-hop stars as the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC) and released via Rubin’s label, Def Jam. It charted in the UK and US and won critical acclaim. In 2017, Rolling Stone put it at number six on their list of the 100 greatest metal albums of all time.

Reign… faced public backlash due to its album art and lyrical themes. Conservative commentators accused Slayer of having Nazi sympathies due to the opening song Angel Of Death, which was about Josef Mengele and his experimental surgeries at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The band have repeatedly denied that they support Nazism.

Guitarist Kerry King said of the controversy during a Loudwire interview in 2015: “My rebuttal to that has been since day one, if you put that on the History Channel and took Slayer out of it, it would be an educational, intriguing ride through World War II. You put Slayer in, and heavy metal, and it’s, ‘Oh, they meant that shit!’”

Slayer retired from touring in 2019 but reunited in 2024 and have since played standalone shows and short tours. Talking to Australia’s Metal Roos in 2024, King dismissed the possibility of a new Slayer album and more extensive touring.

“Mark my words: we’re never gonna make a record again, we’re never gonna tour again," he said. “Because that was the last thing. We said [in 2019], ‘This is our final tour.’ It took five years for us to come and say, ‘Hey, here’s a couple of shows, five-year anniversary.’”

Slayer’s final album, Repentless, came out in 2015. King took his ideas for a scrapped follow-up and used them to start a solo band. His first album under his own name, From Hell I Rise, came out in 2024. A second album is in the works.

Slayer Reign In Blood: 40th Anniversary tour dates:

• Oct 21: Mexico City Palacio de los Deportes, Mexico
• Oct 24: Fort Worth Sick New World, TX
• Nov 13: Inglewood Kia Forum, CA
• Nov 14: Inglewood Kia Forum, CA
• Dec 05: Bogota Vive Claro – Distrito Cultural, Colombia
• Dec 10: Santiago Estadio Santa Laura, Chile
• Dec 14: Buenos Aires Movistar Arena, Argentina
• Dec 17: São Paulo Nubank Parque, Brazil

Phil Collins may still be physically restricted, having been through the wringer in recent years, but at 75, clad in casual black, he exudes positivity. He’s approachable and friendly – every inch the “bloke next door” of his popular persona. “I’ve been blessed with this career, y’know?” he says. “Hard work, but that goes without saying. I wouldn’t have done anything else, or anything differently. The whole trip has just been a pleasure.”

Prog wonders if it was sometimes so hectic that he couldn’t take a breath. “Oh, I always appreciated it,” he replies. “Mainly because I was doing what I wanted to do. I didn’t know much about Genesis when I joined, apart from the fact that they were working. To me, just joining a band that was busy was hitting the jackpot. Playing every night!

“It was never a road to somewhere, or about building up a reputation – I’d probably have done it without getting paid, as long as I could live. So it all worked out incredibly well. I look back and my life’s been just a dream.”

Is it true you began playing on a toy drum at the age of five?

Oh yeah. It’s funny, you see that thing over there? [He points to a tiny plastic drum kit on a shelf.]That’s Lily’s daughter’s. My granddaughter. She’s one-and- a-half, and Lily said, “She’s going around at home hitting things, especially when we play your songs. So get her a drum kit for her birthday?” And that’s what was age-appropriate. So yeah, it’s running in the family – hitting things!

Now, my toy drum: I can picture it. I was three or four actually. I spoil my kids, but in those days you got one toy for Christmas. A soldier. A ball. Ha – yeah, an orange in a stocking. But I was given a drum – no idea why.

These friends of the family saw I liked the toy so much, they made a better one out of bits of wood and brass with a tambourine, cymbal and triangle on it. I’d play along to the telly – Sunday Night At The London Palladium, that kind of thing.

It was always music for me, really. I never went through the childhood phases of racing driver, fireman, pilot...

Weren’t you a keen footballer?

Yeah, but I think I was enthusiastic more than good. Growing up in Hounslow [in west London] I’d go and see Brentford: I’d even go and watch them training at the old ground, Griffin Park. QPR when I got older. But my idol was Jimmy Greaves.

And you got into acting...

When I was 13 years old there was no pop industry really, or it was just starting: The Beatles’ Please Please Me was the first album I bought. Then The Beatles caught fire. Lonnie Donegan was probably the first sign – skiffle and all that. I’d play along to his 78s.

My sister went out with him for a while. He came to our house one Sunday and watched me play. But I was too young to go on the road with him. I wouldn’t have been allowed in the chicken-and- scampi clubs!

Anyway, music wasn’t a “job” then. Mum was answering the phones at this drama school so she got me a place there. Yes, I got to play the Artful Dodger, but I just wanted to play drums.

Later I did enjoy acting – I liked making Buster and other things. Did I use my acting lessons when I became a frontman? Hmm, only maybe some things I did without thinking about it.

You and Genesis were from very different backgrounds, yet as soon as you sat behind the kit in the audition they knew you were the guy.

Apparently! So they’ve said. It was just Tony, Peter and Mike (By the way, I’m seeing Mike today – he’s coming by later). Mike’s always said that when Anthony Phillips, the unsung hero, left because he couldn’t take the stress, they thought that was the end of the band. But they carried on. They thought they could get a better drummer, I believe, than John Mayhew, who was on Trespass.

I didn’t know all this background dynamic; I had just seen their name a lot in the back of Melody Maker. I knew Tony Stratton- Smith, their manager, since I’d been about 16 and he was managing The Creation.

I went down to the Marquee bar one night to see if he could put in a word for me with Genesis. He said, “Oh, I’d love to, but I’m afraid they’re very fussy, these guys – you’ll have to audition.” So I went along and here we are today!

Yes, they were public school boys, and I was from the drama school where you could get away with murder. In their school they weren’t allowed to own a guitar. At mine, I’d bring my records in and we’d play Sgt. Pepper or Motown or The Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday. The teacher would say, “Are you sure you can hear me talk at the same time as this music is on?” We’d say, “Oh sure…!”

Spiritbox have released a new single, Mourning, as they prepare for their headlining tour of Europe.

The Canadian metalcore stars have put out the standalone track with a music video directed by guitarist Mike Stringer and Alex Bemis. The band co-produced alongside frequent collaborator Dan Braunstein. Watch and listen below.

Mourning comes just days before Spiritbox hit the road with support from Ukrainian djent band Jinjer and US metalcore bruisers Dying Wish. The tour starts at Sec Hall 3 in Glasgow on Saturday, September 12, then continues through the UK before hitting mainland Europe. The last show takes place at La Seine Musicale in Paris on October 9. See the list of dates below and get tickets via the Spiritbox site.

Spiritbox released their latest album, Tsunami Sea, in March 2025. It was met with positive reviews, including a near-perfect 4.5 stars from Metal Hammer.

“Whether they will continue to influence wider trends across the metalcore and alt metal landscape remains to be seen,” wrote journalist Rich Hobson. “But Tsunami Sea feels like the moment Spiritbox firmly step into their own as a band who could contend with the likes of Bring Me The Horizon and Sleep Token, as the next zeitgeist-setting act.”

Last September, singer Courtney LaPlante teamed up with pop-metal solo act Poppy and Evanescence frontwoman Amy Lee for a standalone single called End Of You. Produced by ex-Bring Me The Horizon member Jordan Fish, the song was a viral hit; it currently has more than 15 million views on YouTube.

In February, Tsunami Sea track Soft Spine was nominated for the Grammy Award For Best Metal Performance. It lost to Turnstile’s track Birds.

After the European tour, Spiritbox will support Metallica at an intimate show at Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut on November 21. They’ll play three Australian dates as part of travelling heavy metal festival Good Things from December 4 to 6.

Spiritbox 2026 European tour dates:

• Sep 12: Glasgow SEC Centre Hall 3, UK
• Sep 14: Nottingham Motorpoint Arena, UK
• Sep 16: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
• Sep 17: Cardiff Utilita Arena, UK
• Sep 19: London OVO Arena Wembley, UK
• Sep 22: Berlin UFO im Velodrom, Germany
• Sep 23: Gliwice Gliwice Arena, Poland
• Sep 25: Prague Forum Karlín, Czech Republic
• Sep 26: Vienna Gasometer, Austria
• Sep 28: Zurich Halle 622, Switzerland
• Sep 29: Munich Zenith, Germany
• Sep 30: Frankfurt Jahrhunderthalle, Germany
• Oct 02: Hamburg Sporthalle, Germany
• Oct 03: Amsterdam AFAS Live, Netherlands
• Oct 04: Düsseldorf Mitsubishi Electric Halle, Germany
• Oct 06: Esch-sur-Alzette Rockhal, Luxembourg
• Oct 08: Antwerp Lotto Arena, Belgium
• Oct 09: Paris La Seine Musicale, France

“Before Elvis there was nothing,” said John Lennon, although the man who would be King didn’t actually invent rock’n’roll – Bill Haley & His Comets had already figured out what made the teenagers tick, with their international smash Rock Around The Clock.

The chubby, middle-aged Haley was no teen dream, however. What Elvis Presley brought to the table was sex. The excitement the ridiculously good-looking kid from the Memphis projects generated at his concerts in the 1950s was frighteningly intense, with girls hurling themselves at the stage and leaving behind urine-soaked seats. Overnight, this sweet southern kid became public enemy number one. And all because he liked to swivel his hips.

Presley cut his first records at Sam Phillips’s Memphis Recording Service [aka Sun Studio] in Memphis in 1954. Ultimately, the kid was too big for Memphis, and in 1955 Phillips sold his contract to the RCA Victor label in Nashville for $35,000. After cutting hits such as Heartbreak Hotel and Hound Dog at RCA, there wasn’t a soul on the planet – including John, Paul, George and Ringo – who didn’t know what an ‘Elvis Presley’ was.

After he finished his stint in the US Army in 1960, Presley’s career never quite recovered until he blasted back into killer form in 1968 with the Comeback Special. After that came the Vegas jumpsuit years and a slow decline in physical health, albeit while recording some fantastic music.

While the ‘Fat Elvis’ image has stuck, The King Of Rock’n’Roll defied his poor background and death threats from the KKK – and some truly terrible movies – to change the world for absolutely everyone, with no exceptions.

Recovering from the punk movement’s gatecrashing of an increasingly self-indulgent and self-important late-70s music scene, the early 80s saw a swing back towards the other extreme. In the US there was a sudden onslaught of hot-shot guitarists, bolstered by the arrival in Los Angeles in February 1983 of a cocky 19-year-old Swede by the name of Yngwie Malmsteen.

The musical imagination of the Stockholm-born Malmsteen had been fired by Jimi Hendrix, and before long he was a devotee of Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore as well, while also having his ears pricked by classical composers such as JS Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven and Mozart.

Malmsteen arrived in LA to join Steeler, who were fronted by Ron Keel, but before long the Swede had traded up to Alcatrazz, who were led by former Rainbow singer Graham Bonnet.

However, Alcatraz too failed to satisfy the precocious guitarist, and in 1984 he began a solo career backed by long-time friend and keyboardist Jens Johansson and sometime Jethro Tull drummer Barriemore Barlow. Not surprisingly, Malmsteen’s debut all-instrumental Rising Force album showcased his neo-classical heavy metal and staggering technical ability. Impressively, the album also won the guitarist a Grammy nomination.

In the next two years Marching Out and Trilogy followed, with Mark Boals and then Jeff Scott Soto on vocals. But it was with 1988's Odyssey that Malmsteen broke into the mainstream. Having brought in former Fandango and Rainbow vocalist Joe Lynn Turner, Malmsteen immediately headed in a more commercial direction under the guidance of producer Jeff Glixman.

On Odyssey, Malmsteen fuses his lightning-fast fretboard technique with some of his most accessible material. While the thunderous opener Rising Force, Riot In The Dungeons and Faster Than The Speed Of Light are self-explanatory, the overtly commercial Heaven Tonight (with multi-tracked vocals), the delicate (at least initially) ballad Dreaming and the inherently melodic Déja Vu, Crystal Ball and Now Is The Time managed to reach beyond guitar-mag obsessives.

Joe Lynn Turner and Malmsteen parted company after a tour that produced the excessive live album Trial By Fire: Live In Leningrad. Since then Malmsteen has employed a dizzying number of vocalists and other musicians. The studio albums which immediately succeeded Odyssey – Eclipse and Fire & Ice – retained some commercial elements, but soon Malmsteen focused on a heavier approach: 2000's War To End All Wars and 2002's Attack!! contain all the subtlety their titles suggest.

A long-time resident of Miami, Malmsteen’s popularity these days is mostly confined to Japan and continental Europe, but with an impressive work ethic – and a towering ego to match – he continues to record and tour, and his 23rd solo album, Hell Or High Water, is due in November.

Ex-Arch Enemy singer Alissa White-Gluz’s new band Blue Medusa made their surprise live debut at a German club show on Friday (September 4).

The five-piece, who emerged in March, played four songs at the Huxleys Neue Welt concert hall in Berlin: the originals Flying Monkey, Crocodile and Checkmate, plus a cover of White-Gluz and ex-Alice Cooper guitarist Nita Strauss’ 2023 collaborative single The Wolf You Feed.

The gig, put on by local record label Corrupted Blood Records, also featured sets from Kreator and Heaven Shall Burn, with each performance being live-streamed on Twitch. Watch the Blue Medusa show below.

Corrupted Blood made multiple announcements over the course of the concert, including their own festival for summer 2027, Corrupted Blood Open Air, with a 10,000-person capacity. They also revealed an exclusive merch drop in collaboration with Kreator. Items are available to buy now via the Corrupted Blood website.

Blue Medusa – rounded out by guitarists Alyssa Day and Dani Sophia, drummer Delaney Jaster and bassist Alicia Vigil – are one of a number of projects to which White-Gluz has dedicated herself following her Arch Enemy exit. She ended her 11-year tenure in the international melodeath firebrands on November 23, later explaining that she couldn’t treat music “like just another day at the office”.

On the same day, she released her debut solo single, The Room Where She Died. She launched Blue Medusa on International Women’s Day, March 8. Marketing materials said that fans “can expect the same signature ferocity, theatrical energy and vocal firepower that have defined White-Gluz’s career, now unleashed in a fresh, expansive and electrifying setting”. Checkmate, their first single, followed on March 20.

Blue Medusa dropped their latest song, Crocodile, on September 4, the same day as the Corrupted Blood show. White-Gluz said the thrashy track “is about that feeling that you’re being watched... that instinctive dread when you know something dangerous is nearby, even though you can’t see it”.

“It’s the feeling that something is lurking just beneath the surface of what appears to be safe or familiar,” she added. “That tension between what you perceive and what you sense; that is where the song lives.”

As well as starting her solo career and forming Blue Medusa, White-Gluz announced in May that she’d joined UK power metal beloveds Dragonforce as co-lead singer, alongside continuing frontman Marc Hudson. She previously collaborated with the band on an alternative version of their 2024 single Burning Heart, from the album Warp Speed Warriors.

Dragonforce have yet to release further music with White-Gluz but they’re gearing up for a tour celebrating 20 years of their breakthrough 2006 album Inhuman Rampage. See dates and get tickets via their website.

Sammy Hagar has reacted to his former bandmate Alex Van Halen calling him "a complete idiot".

The former Van Halen drummer made the comment during an interview with Brazilian music journalist Marcelo Vieira for Roadie Crew magazine.

Vieira, who translated Van Halen's 2024 memoir Brothers memoir into Portuguese for sale in Brazil, asked the drummer for his opinions on the the autobiographies written by his former bandmates David Lee Roth and Hagar. While Van Halen praised Roth's Crazy From The Heat memoir as "a very interesting perspective on that era", he was less complimentary about Hagar.

"I don't know what he wrote, and I don't wanna know," he said about Hagar's book Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock, adding, "In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot."

The comment was picked up by instagram account Rock Celebrities and posted online. Hagar subsequently responded to the post, writing, "This comment and post is so unnecessary at this time in our lives, but I guess the truth hurts sometimes. Peace already".

Last year, Hagar spoke about his famously difficult relationship with former Van Halen bandmate to Rolling Stone. When writer Andy Greene suggested that the reason for the fractious relationship is that Van Halen is an intensely private individual, while Hagar has always been happy to speak publicly about their relationship, Hagar responded, "I don’t think that’s it."

"I’ve had this conversation with a few people, including [former VH manager] Irving Azoff," he continued. "I’ve asked him, 'What’s the problem?'

"And some people have said to me, 'Oh, Cabo Wabo [the nightclub company founded by the members of Van Halen in 1980]. At one time, Van Halen, when you built it, you guys were all partners in that. And then they didn’t want it anymore when it was losing money, and they gave it to you [Hagar bought out his bandmates in 1990], and you turned it around and made hundreds of millions of dollars on it. And they’re angry. Alex is angry about that.'

"To that I said, 'How the fuck could they be angry about that? They gave me the damn thing, they walked out on me, left me with it. And they made me indemnify them in case I got sued and lost everything. They made me sign off big time.' And I’m going, 'I hope it’s not that.'"

A collection of Oasis recordings worth over one million pounds will be auctioned off next month, and Noel and Liam Gallagher are said to be 'unhappy' at the prospect.

The set of collection of 63 concert recordings, over 100 hours of rehearsals tapes, soundcheck recordings, and "unfiltered" conversation between band members is owned by the Manchester band's former sound engineer Huw Richards, who worked as the front-of-house sound engineer for Oasis from 1995 to 2001. It includes 209 DAT tapes, 73 analogue cassettes and three MiniDiscs, and is being sold by Richards’ son, Owain.

Littleton Auctions believes that the previously unheard archive will cost a potential buyer between £1.2m and £1.6m when it goes under the hammer on October 3. The collection includes internal tour itineraries, original setlists, a band-played Epiphone guitar and an original Kangol Oasis Tour parka.

The auction house's managing director admitted that the Gallagher brothers had "expressed concerns" over the upcoming auction.

Ben Homer from Littleton Auctions said in a statement: "The Oasis camp is aware of the auction and has expressed concerns, which is entirely understandable given the scale and significance of the material.

"We're handling everything with full transparency and proper legal process.

"Our focus is simply on presenting these items responsibly, with verified provenance, and allowing collectors and institutions to engage with an important part of British music history."

Homer addeed, "Oasis remains one of the most beloved and closely followed bands in British music history, and the level of interest we're already seeing reflects that. Alongside the memorabilia and recordings of other legendary artists in the collection, this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for fans and collectors alike."

"Dad labelled everything, recorded everything and backed it all up to cassette, over and over," says Owain Richards. "I grew up listening to these recordings. Oasis were part of the family as much as they were part of the culture. I was in a band myself back then, and this music meant something to me before I ever understood what it represented. These tapes have been in my care for the last twenty years. It feels like the right time to pass them on to people who’ll understand exactly what they are."

Richards also suggest to The Times newspaper that the Gallagher brothers "don't want" the collection sold and that they want the tapes "back in their possession."

Whoever purchases the collection would not be able to commercialise the archive without co-operation and permission from the band.

Given that Oasis '2025 reunion tour grossed $405,428,435 according to Pollstar, the Gallagher brothers are not short of funds to purchase the collection.

Watching footage of Jimi Hendrix setting fire to his guitar onstage, 15-year-old Devon schoolboy Matt Bellamy had an epiphany: "I suddenly realised that music didn't have to follow rules but could be full of chaos," Muse’s frontman recalled. "Essentially, we approach music the same way Monty Python did comedy."

Eight consecutive UK number one albums testify to Muse’s mainstream appeal, but not since Queen has there been a major league British rock band so wholly unfettered by notions of taste and restraint, an attitude wholeheartedly endorsed by Brian May, a long-time fan. "I like the way they let their madness show through," Queen's guitarist once stated. "That's always a good thing in an artist."

"Most bands are scared of ridicule - we embrace it," Matt Bellamy told me 20 years ago."But some of the best ideas come from having the fearlessness to go with the silliest ideas."

Here are Muse’s ten studio albums ranked from worst to best.

10. Drones (2015)

With famously-disciplined studio veteran Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange (AC/DC, Def Leppard) hired as co-producer with a mandate to curb Matt Bellamy’s more outlandish flights of fancy, the advance word on Muse’s seventh studio album suggested that Drones would represent a ‘back to basics’ approach for the Devon trio following 2012’s dubstep/electronica-influenced The 2nd Law.

Such talk was relative: the ten-minute The Globalist opens with whistling and Ennio Morricone atmospherics, segues into a thundering heavy metal midsection and closes as a grandly ostentatious piano ballad. Good luck pulling that off around a campfire on an acoustic guitar.

The Devon trio’s first overt concept album, Drones is a none-too-subtle meditation upon authoritarian repression, political manipulation, militaristic aggression and the struggle for personal liberty – familiar Bellamy obsessions unlikely to give Noam Chomsky new food for thought. Fortunately, the bombastic, gleefully raucous energy harnessed on the riff-heavy Reapers and The Handler over-rides trite lyrics such as ‘I’m just a pawn, and we’re all expendable.’

Elsewhere, on nodding terms with Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms and U2’s One, Aftermath is the album’s twinkling, phones-aloft stadium ballad, while Dead Inside is a feisty opener, with obvious allusions to the break-up of Bellamy’s marriage to actress Kate Hudson.

9. Simulation Theory (2018)

Following on from the heavy-handed Drones, Muse allowed a little light and levity into their relentlessly pessimistic world view on Simulation Theory. From its Tron /Stranger Things-inspired artwork through to its emphasis on pulsing synth-rock, the band’s eighth album is an unashamed tribute to the 1980s, a sci-fi diorama concerned with the quest for human connection in an increasingly cold digital world.

Featuring retro production from Timbaland and Swedish pop producer Shellback among others, this on-brand Giorgio Morodor-soundtracking-Black Mirror approach is a little too pat, and only fleetingly successful. Bellamy’s attempts to channel Prince (on Propaganda) and Janelle Monae (on Break It To Me) fall flat, but the slick AOR of Something Human and the snappy Pressure suggest the trio's decision to reset the dials and pivot away from riff-rock isn’t wholly without merit.

8. Will Of The People (2022)

Anticipation of Muse returning to their guitar heavy roots on album nine was whetted when Matt Bellamy posted an excerpt of its riff-heavy first single Won’t Stand Down on Instagram showing his 10-year-old son Bingham headbanging to the song in his father’s car. Belllamy subsequently talked up the collection as "a greatest hits album – of new songs”, saying, "It’s a montage of the best of Muse."

And if Will Of The People doesn't quite live up to that heady billing, it undeniably features some of the heaviest songs of the Devon trio's career, including fan favourite Kill Or Be Killed and the glam rock stomp of the title track, which Bellamy described as a "fictional story set in a fictional metaverse on a fictional planet ruled by a fictional authoritarian state."

There are more subtle moments too - piano ballad Ghosts (How Can I Move On), the Danny Elfman-esque kooky spookiness of You Make Me Feel Like It’s Halloween - but OG fans only needed to look at the title of the album's closing track - We Are Fucking Fucked - to know that they had the 'old' Muse back.

7. The 2nd Law (2012)

As Muse commenced the recording of their sixth studio album, Matt Bellamy teased fans by declaring that the trio were intent upon making a “Christian gangsta rap jazz odyssey, some ambient rebellious dubstep and face-melting metal flamenco cowboy psychedelia.” Truthfully, had they done so, at this point in their career no-one would have batted an eyelid.

Featuring the official song of the 2012 Olympics (the gloriously OTT Survival), two understated songs about quiet man bassist Chris Wolstenholme's new found sobriety (Save Me and Liquid State), Skrillex-style dubstep, slinky U2 knock-off Madness and a sweetly sappy lullaby for Matt Bellamy's new born son Bingham (Follow Me), the self-produced The 2nd Law is, respectfully, all over the place, an uninhibited, Jackson Pollock-esque gush of ideas which would have benefited from more judicious editing and tighter quality control.

6. The Wow! Signal (2026)

It might seem ridiculous to use the phrase 'back to basics' when discussing Muse, but with the trio having invested heavily in synth-rock on more recent records, their tenth studio album will sound reassuringly familiar to anyone who joined the party circa Origin Of Symmetry or Black Holes And Revelations.

Naturally, this doesn't mean that Muse have dialled things back in any way. Kicking off an album titled in reference to the excitement generated in 1977 by the discovery of what astronomers considered a possible radio transmission from an extraterrestrial civilisation with a song which features a choir chanting in Latin, orchestral strings, a Knights of Cydonia-esque bass gallop and prog-metal guitar isn't exactly displaying Ramones levels of restraint. But while Nightshift Superstar once again finds Matt Bellamy indulging his love of Daft Punk, much of The Wow! Signal - not least singles Unravelling and Cryogen, with its Plug In Baby-style intro - is old school Muse, and pleasingly so.

5. The Resistance (2009)

Extrapolating upon the doom-laden warnings contained within Black Holes And Revelations' Invincible - key lyric: "During the struggle they will pull us down" - The Resistance comes weighted with exhortations to resist tyranny and repression in all its state-sanctioned forms, and dark prophesies of what "they", bastards known and as-yet-unknown, have in store. "Will they find our hiding place?" Matt Bellamy frets on the title track, seemingly not entirely convinced by his own insistence that love will conquer all.

Muse's most recent album, Will Of The People concludes with a track called We Are Fucking Fucked, but to be fair, that's an assessment they'd already reached here, with Bellamy's three-part, 12-minute orchestral masterpiece Exogenesis: Symphony, wherein our bold protagonists decide that our time on earth must, of necessity, come to an end, and we must "breach the outer sphere" in order to start anew.

Which is all very well, except that much of what precedes this epic climax - most notably the irresistible glam stomp of Uprising - serves up rallying calls for heroic stands against our shadowy oppressors. Cowards! Splitters! Traitors! Etc,.

Ludicrous and fabulous in equal measure, then, The Resistance is peak Muse, and an unmitigated joy.

4. Showbiz (1999)

Heavily indebted to Radiohead and Jeff Buckley, and by far the most restrained and 'conventional' album in Muse's catalogue, Showbiz deserves more love than it was afforded upon its release in September 1999. Consciously choosing to play safe by setting aside their more experimental early material for use as single B-sides, Muse ruffled few feathers with their debut album, but the quirky, hooky Muscle Museum, the gorgeous Unintended and the soaring, riffy Cave remain firm fan favourites.

Chosen as the album’s second single, Cave found favour with Type O Negative frontman Pete Steele, who told this writer, “That chick has a great voice." Informed that said 'chick' was, in fact, male, Steele said, "Woah, there goes my erection" but added "When I listen to his voice I feel like someone is tickling my penis with a feather.” Possibly not the impact Muse were hoping to make, but their caution here ensured they laid solid foundations from which to launch skywards with subsequent releases.

3. Absolution (2003)

Months ahead of the release their third album, Muse described their work in progress as "fat as fuck." Emboldened by the international success of Origin Of Symmetry, the Devon trio embraced the opportunity to indulge their most experimental urges in its creation, recording Dom Howard's drums in a swimming pool, and Bellamy's guitar parts in a field, then ransacking a castle to re-purpose cartwheels and cattle prods as 'instruments'. The result was the darkest, heaviest, boldest album of their early career.

From the apocalyptic groove-rock of Time Is Running Out to the extraordinary art-metal of Stockholm Syndrome, Absolution, the trio's first UK number one album, is the sound of an inspired, fearless, ultra-confident band who knew their time had arrived, and the world was listening.

2. Origin Of Symmetry (2001)

Well, who saw this coming? For those who had Muse pegged as timid, mannered Radiohead-copyists on the basis on Showbiz, and let's be honest, that was most of us, the band's second coming, heralded by the astonishing alt.prog thunderbolt Plug In Baby and its equally startling follow-up New Born, was nothing short of a revelation.

With the handbrake off, and Matt Bellamy given free rein to indulge his wildest Queen-meets-Rage Against The Machine-meets-King Crimson fantasies, Origin Of Symmetry was an adrenaline spike slammed into the heart of the British music scene. Even better, Bellamy now talked like a proper rock star, telling this writer, “What’s big in England is mostly simplistic bollocks." Such was the singer's new-found confidence, that he cheerfully told the band's US label, Madonna's Maverick Records, to get fucked when they demanded he re-record his vocals with less falsetto.

“I was pretty aware that this album was difficult to swallow compared to Showbiz and I thought we were taking a bit of a risk," he admitted, "but our success has given me the confidence to push things further.”

Muse would never look back.

1. Black Holes And Revelations (2006)

Having shed any lingering creative inhibitions with 2003's brilliant Absolution, Muse album four had to be one louder, more bombastic, more brazen, more bonkers. And when the release of Black Holes And Revelations was prefaced by Supermassive Black Hole – slinky, slamming eroto-funk, like Prince fronting Queens Of The Stone Age – any fears that the trio might shirk their responsibilities evaporated. Down the line, Matt Bellamy revealed that his band had actually ditched their first run at new material as "it was too mental, even by our standards." The mind boggles.

Muse's finest hour opens with Take A Bow, a dread-filled, chorus-free, space-rock symphony, all rippling synth arpeggios and multi-tracked vocals, with Bellamy warning “You will burn in hell for your sins…” Following such shock and awe, Starlight is an uncharacteristically straightforward piano-led love song, albeit one where the protagonist is being taken “far away from the memories of the people who care if I live or die.”

Less conventionally, the deceptively upbeat Exo-Politics muses upon the possibility of an orchestrated Zeta Reticulan invasion created by the New World Order, because that’s exactly the kind of subject that keeps Matt Bellamy – a man who maintains that The Beatles were a front for a clandestine think tank intent on brainwashing the youth of America – awake at night. Invincible, a rather lovely self-empowerment anthem, channels U2 circa The Unforgettable Fire, while featuring a guitar solo that sounds suspiciously like R2D2 completing a wank.

But all this, impressive as it may be, is a mere amuse-bouche for the album’s closing track, Muse’s own Achilles Last Stand. Knights Of Cydonia, the soundtrack to an imaginary sci-fi spaghetti Western, references The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, The Tornados chart-topping 1962 instrumental Telstar (on which Bellamy’s father George played rhythm guitar) and the Doctor Who theme tune, before climaxing with Bellamy repeatedly screaming “No-one’s going to take me alive!” It’s histrionic, epic and gloriously daft - quintessential Muse in other words - and the perfect climax to a magnificently realised career-best collection.

Tickets to the 2027 70,000 Tons Of Metal cruise have gone on sale, with 30 of the 60 bands set to play the nautical festival confirmed.

Public sales commenced today (Monday, September 7) at 12 midday Eastern Time and 5pm UK time. Single and group cabins are available. Head to 70000tons.com for details.

The 15th edition of the annual, 3,000-capacity heavy metal cruise will set sail from Miami, Florida on Royal Caribbean’s ship Freedom Of The Seas on January 14. It’ll make its way to Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic before returning on January 18.

Bands confirmed so far include international melodic death metal favourites Arch Enemy, California thrash metal veterans Exodus, former Scorpions guitarist Uli Jon Roth and Portuguese goth metal outfit Moonspell. The full list is available below.

In addition, it’s been announced that Finnish metal band Wolfheart will premiere their upcoming, as-yet-unannounced studio album at a listening event.

“It is an absolute honour to step on the deck of the mighty 70,000 Tons Of Metal for the third time, on one of the most majestic metal events in this universe,” says bandleader Tuomas Saukkonen. “This time we are bringing something special with us: the world live premiere of our forthcoming album!”

Organisers say that, as well as performances, “the festival offers round-the-clock entertainment, from explosive performances on the biggest open-air stage structure to ever sail the open Seas, to artist-hosted activities and events, meet-and-greets with every band, and the opportunity for fans to mingle with their heavy metal heroes in a unique environment”.

Hammer boarded the 14th 70,000 Tons Of Metal earlier this year and saw sets by Anthrax, Paradise Lost, Soilwork, Amorphis and more across the four-day trip.

“70,000 Tons isn’t a rinkydink festival on a boat; it’s more like a floating city, the Freedom Of The Seas ship offering an almost insane amount of space for a few thousand metalheads,” journalist Rich Hobson wrote upon his return.

“70,000 Tons is more like a continental festival than your Downloads or even Aftershocks. What that means is, bands go late. This year’s event sees bands starting as early as 10am, and the last band going on-stage at 5am. Ooft.”

70,000 Tons Of Metal 2027 lineup:

• Abigail Williams
• Æther Realm
• Arch Enemy
• Avaland
• Battlelore
• Brainstorm
• Brymir
• Die Apokalyptischen Reiter
• Enforcer
• Equilibrium
• Evergrey
• Exmortus
• Exodus
• Famous Strangers
• Hammerfall
• Melechesh
• Moonspell
• Mors Principium Est
• Naglfar
• Obscura
• Origin
• Primal Fear
• Rhapsody
• Sinister
• Talia Hoit
• Thulcandra
• Uli Jon Roth
• Warbringer
• Wolfheart
• Ye Banished Privateers

TesseracT vocalist Daniel Tompkins and Chimp Spanner’s Paul Ortiz have harnessed the healing properties of music on their latest collaboration, Prince Of Failure. The pair have combined spacious arrangements, electronic textures and powerful guitar-work with intimate vocals on their extremely personal debut album. Here, they open a window into their working process and reveal this is just the beginning for the studio-based project.

For much of their lives, TesseracT’s Daniel Tompkins and Chimp Spanner’s Paul Ortiz have wrestled with the voices in their head that often make them feel conflicted and uncertain. In their new project, Prince Of Failure, music serves as a tool for self-discovery. And this is just the beginning.

“Prince Of Failure is what happens when experiences go unnamed for years,” says Tompkins. “If you have a shadow in the back of your mind, giving it a name can be a very empowering thing, to separate yourself from it. That’s what I’m giving shape to with this project. I’m 42 years old, and I’m discovering a side of myself that has been a mystery for a long time.”

The singer has reunited with Ortiz to put their mental struggles and a love for 2000s rock – which soundtracked important periods of their lives – at its tender core. A cinematic, ever-shifting sound punctuates its brutal honesty, delivering an experience full of rage and release, anger and acceptance.

Having released a synthwave album together as Zeta in 2019, Tompkins enlisted Ortiz for Ruins, a guitar-centric reworking of his 2019 solo record, Castles. Prince Of Failure was originally intended as another Tompkins solo outing with Ortiz producing. But the project changed after Tompkins was diagnosed with ADHD with autistic traits, and Ortiz became his confidant. “It’s been a poignant moment in my life – it’s made me question everything,” the singer says. “All my insecurities, I’m starting to understand, were born from this.”

Giving Prince Of Failure a name, he adds, has “allowed me to almost exorcise that part of me that was always telling me that I was doing something wrong. There’s been a lot of soul searching because I’m in an environment where relationships and being sociable are very important. But actually, growing up with this condition, having such an intense desire to be a singer and trying to force my way into this industry and build relationships, but also have that incredible awkwardness and anxiety – I can’t believe I went through with that.”

Many people living with ADHD also deal with rejection sensitivity, where just the thought of failing can create a debilitating emotional responses. Tompkins has been at war with himself: one part of him is driven to succeed in the industry, while another feels like an imposter, scared to enter in a place of potential harm.

“I want the bright lights; I want the chaos,” he admits. “But on the flipside I have these traits that tell me to step away and hide. So the album is about learning to stop fighting parts of myself. I spent years thinking I was failing at things because people found life easy, while I struggled with focus and overthought everything. I felt out of sync with people and I didn’t have the language for it.”

Ortiz hasn’t had a diagnosis, but screening results suggest he should get one. While writing their album the pair trauma-bonded, and the music is born of that. “I’ve had a lot of displacement,” Ortiz says. “I left home, came back home, went through a whole bunch of stuff with that, and you can hear that as the album transforms from warm nostalgia to something more introspective and gothic. The music has reflected our journeys. It’s very personal and sincere.”

There’s a powerful subversion of their struggles in their willingness to livestream and write in real time in front of their fans. On the surface, it shows their determination to succeed despite their challenges. Dig deeper, and it’s clear that they need those dopamine hits to quell the voices in their heads that tell them they aren’t good enough.

“I’d go on Twitch and livestream me writing an idea to the point I could send it to Dan,” says Ortiz. “Then I’d see that he’s live on Twitch, and he’s writing the vocals for it – sometimes within half an hour!” The pair often exchanged ideas in that way, evolving the songs right before their audiences.

“There are a lot of people who shy away from that because they feel like they’re going to get ripped off, or they’re giving things away too soon,” Tompkins says. “But, actually, that community is everything.”

Ortiz agrees: “Inviting people in helped keep us excited, because we were seeing their reactions and getting feedback. It’s a very new experience for me and I’ve loved it.”

There’s still a sense of mystery pertaining to the finished article, with the pair “closing the curtain” as they head into pre-production. But, as Ortiz says, “it’s an important antidote to the instant gratification of AI.” He continues: “I see a lot of charges from people – ‘Musicians are just mad because they can’t gatekeep music any more.’

“I don’t want to gatekeep anything. We’re showing people that the joy is in the process, not in jumping straight from nothing to finished product for likes and comments.”

The Prince Of Failure story avoids specific genre tropes; Ortiz says the prog lurks “in the background for a little bit of spice and complexity.” The music plays host to everything from dark, vampiric atmospheres stabbed with industrial crescendos to Holy Fawn-inspired “weird post-rock, shoegazey and black metal aesthetics” which darken its latter stages.

Daedric vocalist Kristyn Hope delivers a stunning duet on the disquieting Horizon, but ultimately the music serves a much larger, far more personal purpose. The rage, the pain, the uncertainty behind the songs is tangible; it fizzes and cries out of the speakers. “The more we worked on the album together, the more honest it became,” says Tompkins.

“We were able to explore our insecurities together and get really deep with it. I think that we better understand each other now. There’s been very few times in my musical career where I’ve clicked with someone as I do with Paul. Without him, it’d be like losing an arm.”

There’s a fascinating sub-plot at play too – when TesseracT and Periphery emerged as frontrunners in the djent scene of the 2010s, Ortiz, operating under his pseudonym Chimp Spanner, was rightly regarded as one of the movement’s progenitors. Over time, his status has been eclipsed and he retreated into corporate music gigs. Tompkins provided a lifeline.

“Before we did Ruins, I hadn’t picked up a guitar and written anything for years,” Ortiz admits. “I was in a proper slump and it’s been the same with this: he’s saved me from feeling like I can’t do it any more. Twice.”

Tompkins calls their ability to confide in one another “liberating.” It’s a feeling neither wants to go without: “Prince Of Failure is something we’ve built with a long-term vision in mind,” says the singer. “We’ve already got reams of folders and old ideas; we’re evolving the project with every song.”

Don’t expect them to announce a tour, though – Prince Of Failure will remain a studio project for the foreseeable future, so they can write without limitations. “We can really push things if we’re not looking at something that has to be represented on a stage,” says Ortiz. “There’s scope for us to do things that are a lot more experimental.

“As someone who has these big pendulum swings between loving what I do and feeling like I could happily sell my guitars and never do it again, it’s really affirming to have a body of work that we’re both really proud of. That gets me excited and inspired to do more.”

Prince Of Failure is on sale now.

Famously, in August 2000, Bon Jovi were the last band to play the 'old' Wembley Stadium, the one which hosted Live Aid, the 1966 FIFA World Cup Final, and every global superstar from Bruce Springsteen to Madonna in the 1980s. But when Jon Bon Jovi returned to England's national stadium in the summer of 2019, it seemed highly likely that the next much-loved institution soon set to crumble into dust would be his band. That night, the New Jersey hard rockers didn't sound great at all, the problem, sad to say, very obviously being their frontman's voice. And although it clearly stung when I told him so to his face five years later, the superstar singer took the criticism with commendable good grace.

"Yes, it wasn’t like it was in 2000 or 1995," he admitted. "Or any of the other times I played in that building. I knew that. I won’t argue with you.

"It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with," he said, looking genuinely upset. "Imagine knowing it’s not working right, and you can’t figure out why. It was tough... It was fucking tough."

Tonight though, that gleaming million-dollar smile is back on Jon Bon Jovi's face, and it'd take a heart of stone not to feel pleased for the man. Not least when, in an acknowledgement of the fans who stood loyally behind him while he recovered from major vocal cord surgery in 2022, his band open the first of their three sold-out shows back at the national stadium with a powerful cover of Lennon and McCartney's With a Little Help From My Friends.

By his own admission, Jon Bon Jovi is feeling "caffeinated" tonight, and with his post-op vocals largely sounding strong and true - at least from our vantage point in block 201, where absolutely no-one is complaining - he has the demeanour of a man who's finally shifted a huge weight from his shoulders.

At one point, he tells the 90,000-strong crowd he's going to take us back to 1986 song-wise, and jokes that his "pants are a little tighter" than then. But if he wanted to guarantee a home run tonight, JBJ could have absolutely stacked his band's setlist on their first stadium run in seven years with selections from Slippery When Wet and New Jersey, and to his credit, he doesn't take that easy option. Granted there are seven songs from that era written in black type on the 22-song setlist at his feet, but the multi-generational crowd also get songs from five of the ten albums the band have released this century. And if it's true that, say, Legendary isn't met with the same whoops of joy as You Give Love A Bad Name, then neither is it a cue for thousands to hit the bars.

If tonight isn't peak Bon Jovi, it's still a brilliantly staged, slickly produced, state-of-the-art stadium rock show, delivered by a band in full control. It's hard not to escape the feeling that Jon Bon Jovi needed this tour, that he felt that he had something to prove tonight, and was seeking some personal validation and redemption. Well, he got it, and when 90,000 voices help him over the finish line on a slightly shaky Always, it's clearly an emotional moment for the man. Don't imagine that all superstar rockers are happy to dial in mediocre performances as they hit the twilight of their career: this still means something to Jon Bon Jovi, and tonight, it's only the demons of the past which feel irrelevant.

Steve Hackett stars in the new video from Robert Reed's Kompendium project, a director's cut of whose Beneath The Waves was released last week through Tigermoth Records. Hackett features on an extended version of the track Lilly.

The original album was released in 2012, and alongside the former Genesis guitarist also featured the likes of Gavin Harrison, Nick Barrett, Jakko Jackzyk, Francis Dunnery, Chris Fry, John Mitchell, Nick Beggs, Troy Donockley, Mel Collins, Steve Balsamo and Angharad Brinn.

The album also featured The English Chamber Choir conducted by Guy Protheroe, the London Session Orchestra conducted by Dave Stewart (Egg, Hatfield And The North, National Health) and renowned opera singers like Rhys Meirion and Shan Cothi.

"The album was a labour of love, Reed tells Prog today. "I thought that the format of making a classic rock album had been lost, where artists like Jeff Wayne and his War Of The Worlds album would bring in the best singers and best session players and make an album without compromise. These days it's all out of a computer and file sharing. I wanted as much to be real and benefit from what each singer and player brought to the table with their talent.

"It took over 3 years to make, and I had so many highlights. Recording the same choir that sang on Rick Wakeman's Journey and King Arthur albums, in the famous Abbey Road Studios being one. Recording a full string orchestra in Angel Studios, arranged by Dave Stewart, was equally amazing.

"I always thought the album was one of the best things I’ve ever done, so as it was out of print, I thought it would be a great opportunity to get the album to a new audience. Also, there were some compromises made with the original album, as there always are towards the end of making any album. Some songs are left off because of time constraints, some not finished, and other choices made in the mix, as you really run out of time and have to say it's finished at some point. So with fresh ears, it's been great to address some of these issues and put it back as a more complete album, with the missing tracks all finished up. This also meant that I could bring in a few more contributions from great players, like Peter Jones and Les Penning. It really is complete now and probably the best album I've ever made."

Kompendium's Beneath The Waves - The Director’s Cut is available as a CD packaged in four-panel digifile format and as a Deluxe Edition featuring the Beneath The Waves CD, a 28-page 7-inch book and album artwork postcards, signed by Reed

Get here.

Prominent members of the wrestling, hardcore punk and heavy metal communities have paid tribute to former Every Time I Die guitarist Andy Williams following his death aged 48.

Williams, who played in metalcore band Atomic Rule and wrestled for All Elite Wrestling (AEW) under the ring name The Butcher, died on Saturday, September 5, after suffering a medical emergency at an independent wrestling event and being taken to hospital.

TMZ announced his death the following day, and AEW verified the news shortly afterwards. The promotion wrote in a social media statement: “All Elite Wrestling is saddened to learn of the passing of Andy Williams, AKA The Butcher.

“A trailblazing musician with ETID and Atomic Rule, Williams made a successful transition into the world of professional wrestling and was incredibly respected by his peers both in and out of the ring. Our condolences go out to Williams’ family, friends and fans.”

Multiple wrestlers have paid tribute to Williams, including his AEW colleague Brody King, who called him “effortlessly funny, kind, and [a] supporter of all things his friends were into”. Matt Hardy, who used to perform in AEW as well as its chief rival WWE, said, “Andy was a joy to work with: he was a kind, funny and deep individual who was an extremely talented musician & wrestler.”

WWE wrestler Paige, who used to appear in AEW under the name Saraya, called Williams “one of the best human beings” on X (formerly Twitter). Fellow ex-AEW star Danhausen shared a photo of Williams and wrote, “Rest in peace, sweet man,” while WWE’s Matt Cardona remembered, “I wasn’t lucky enough to know him well, but he was always super cool to me when we saw each other. I was mad at him when he shaved his head because his Butcher figure had long hair and became inaccurate.”

In the world of music, metalcore supergroup Better Lovers, which features several of Williams’ ex-Every Time I Die bandmates, celebrated him as “a true one-of-one human being in every aspect of life”. Progressive metal band Between The Buried And Me posted a lengthy tribute on Facebook and Instagram.

“No one in our world will ever stop talking about Andy Williams,” they wrote in part. “And that’s the closest thing to immortality anyone could hope for. Our heart breaks for his family and those who were closest to him, particularly his wife Hana, who adored him beyond words. RIP to one of the nastiest riffers of all time.”

On X, Chris Motionless of Motionless In White remembered Williams as “one of the nicest and funniest people we’ve ever toured with”, and Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta said, “Life can be cruel and unfair, and that’s why we need people like Andy Williams around.”

Born in Buffalo, New York, in December 1977, Williams co-founded Every Time I Die in 1998 and was a constant member during their 24-year run. He appeared on all nine of their studio albums, including 2021 swansong Radical, before the band imploded due to a schism between singer Keith Buckley and the other members.

Following ETID’s split, Williams teamed up with former members of The Acacia Strain to start Atomic Rule. Their three-song EP, With Skull-Crushing Force, came out last September. Hours before his death, Williams posted a video to Atomic Rule’s social media accounts saying that the band had written and recorded new demos. They’re booked to play three shows with Gwar in November; it’s unclear whether they’ll still go ahead.

A longtime wrestling fan, Williams made his in-ring debut in 2015 and later formed a tag team with Jesse “The Blade” Guilmette. The pair debuted in AEW in November 2019.

Williams compared his career in music with his wrestling endeavours in 2022, telling Canadian broadcaster Reneé Paquette on her podcast: “Wrestling, to me, is like writing a song. Once I kind of understood how to write that ‘song’, it was like, ‘Oh, OK, that’s cool – there’s an intro, there’s an outro, there’s a chorus.’ It really does work like that.”

Korn have recorded drums for their upcoming 15th studio album.

During drummer Ray Luzier’s recent appearance on YouTube channel Drumeo, his drum tech, Mark Bennett, shows off Luzier’s setup and lets slip that he’s tracked his parts for the follow-up to 2022’s Requiem.

“This is what we just finished recording the new record with,” Bennett says while lifting a Pearl Copper Free Floating snare. “They discontinued this drum. You can’t get it anymore. Thankfully, we have five of them.”

Bennett doesn’t offer any more details on the upcoming album, including whether or not other members of the pioneering Bakersfield nu metal band have recorded yet.

Updates on Korn’s new album have been thin on the ground, but in April the five-piece released Reward The Scars, their first new song in four years, in collaboration with role-playing video-game Diablo IV and its expansion pack Lord Of Hatred. Talking to Loudwire in February, guitarist Brian “Head” Welch said that the band were in no rush to put out another record.

“I really love the fact that it’s taking a long time,” he said. “I always told management that I wish that we would wait a little bit between albums. We’re just so addicted to the studio that we get in there and we’re putting albums out every two or three years, ever since I rejoined. And so I love that there’s been delays.”

Korn’s impending album will be their first without longtime bassist Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu, who parted ways with the band shortly after recording Requiem. On the Shady Characters podcast earlier this year, he revealed that his refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and his resultant inability to tour internationally, caused the split.

“COVID happened,” he said. “That’s it. I’m like, ‘I’m not going out there.’ That’s what happened, ’cause it was new. Now. I didn’t get vaccinated or anything – but when you reflect on it, that’s what happened. They’re like, ‘We’re going to Florida,’ and I’m like, ‘I’m not going to get vaccinated. I’m not going.’ I go, ‘People, this is weird right now.’”

Even though Korn have yet to announce their new album, they’ve confirmed a headline run across Europe, their first time touring the continent in more than a decade, from October to November. The shows kick off Hanns-Martin-Schleyer Halle in Stuttgart on October 18 and conclude at the Unipol Forum in Milan on November 21.

Architects will support, with Youth Code opening up to November 4 and Pixel Grip replacing them for the remainder of the shows. Full list of dates below. Buy remaining tickets via the Korn website.

Korn 2026 European tour dates:

• Oct 18: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
• Oct 19: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
• Oct 21: Cologne Lanxess Arena, Germany
• Oct 23: Paris Accor Arena, France
• Oct 26: Leeds First Direct Arena, UK
• Oct 28: Birmingham Utilita Arena Birmingham, UK
• Oct 30: Newcastle Utilita Arena Newcastle, UK
• Oct 31: Manchester AO Arena, UK
• Nov 02: Dublin 3Arena, Ireland
• Nov 04: London The O2, UK
• Nov 08: Amsterdam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
• Nov 09: Antwerp AFAS Dome, Belgium
• Nov 11: Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
• Nov 13: Hanover ZAG Arena, Germany
• Nov 14: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
• Nov 16: Prague O2 Arena Prague, Czech Republic
• Nov 17: Krakow Tauron Arena, Poland
• Nov 19: Vienna Wiener Stadhalle, Austria
• Nov 21: Milan Unipol Forum, Italy

Taking inspiration from the rainbow-hungry goblin protagonists of a 1970s children's book, Primus released The Desaturating Seven in 2017. Les Claypool told Prog about the band’s seventh album, another madcap concept work designed to spook and spellbind in equal measure.

In 1978, Italian illustrator Ulderico Conte Gropplero di Troppenburg published a children’s book. The Rainbow Goblins was a vivid affair that told the story of seven evil characters named after the colours of the spectrum: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet. They traverse the land, stealing the colour from rainbows with their lassos, filling their bellies with its kaleidoscopic goodness. It all comes to a surprisingly violent conclusion for the miniature protagonists, but the story doesn’t end there.

While Ul de Rico – as he’s more commonly known – went on to publish a sequel (The White Goblin, in 1996) and work as a designer on Hollywood blockbusters The NeverEnding Story and Flash Gordon, the goblins have made something of a comeback: their story is retold in new Primus album The Desaturating Seven.

“I’m getting older,” says Primus mainman Les Claypool, speaking to Prog from his home in Sonoma County, California, punctuating his conversation with suitably maniacal cackles. “I’m figuring I need to pull some of the pots off the stove, and this is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

”My wife used to read The Rainbow Goblins to my kids a lot when they were little. I remember going through it and thinking how amazing it was: the artwork, the colours, the beauty… and yet the darkness, and the creepiness, and the message. It was just an amazing piece of art.

“It was inspiring to me and I wanted to supplement it with my obscure interpretation and perspective. Obviously it’s also fairly relevant to what’s going on today. It just seemed like the right time.”

Thinly veiled political sentiments aside, the album manages to capture the book’s prismatic yet black-hearted vibrance perfectly. The ominous spoken-word introduction is read by Tool bass player Justin Chancellor (“the champion goblin,” says Claypool) to the chilling denouement, it’s an album that conjures up images of peculiar lands, epic journeys and dark, sinister activity with some considerable degree of skill.

From the stumbling lurch of The Valley, with its spookily disembodied vocals that sound as if they were recorded underwater, via the stuttering The Seven – a song with a cadence that makes it feel like a demented, foreboding sequel to John Walter Bratton’s Teddy Bear’s Picnic – to the off-kilter, racing drama of the climactic The Storm, it’s full of squirting rhythms, lolloping basslines and enormous mischief.

It’s like a nursery rhyme set to some form of alien, disjointed jazz, but it somehow succeeds in breathing life into Ul de Rico’s deviant story.

“That’s what I’ve always tried to do with Primus stuff,” says Claypool. “We’ve never been about dance floor lyrics. It’s always been about visuals and trying to evoke some interesting pictures through music. The visual element has always been a very strong part of what we do live, given the parameters of what we can afford.

“We’re not Radiohead, who have a little bigger production budget than we do, but we come up with some pretty cool stuff. For me, the images Ul de Rico painted for this thing are so spectacular and so strong I just really wanted to support that as best I could and not detract. At times it was incredibly easy, and at times it was difficult.

“The biggest challenge was to write lyrics about goblins and rainbows and it not to come off like a Tenacious D song. It could easily be interpreted as some form of parody, and if you look through the lyrics I don’t often mention goblins and very rarely mention rainbows. Instead I use the notion of the metaphors that are implied in the story.”

Given the epic nature of the tale, it’s something of a triumph that in an age where attention spans are lower than ever and yet 70-minute albums are the norm, Primus managed to bring the album to a frothing climax in just over half an hour. “That, to me, is the folly of CDs,” says Claypool. “I don’t want to hear 20 songs by my favourite artist. I’d rather hear 10 songs and get to suck them in. For me, one of my all-time favourite records as a kid – it was also my first concert – was Hemispheres by Rush, and this record is either a minute or 40 seconds shorter than that.

“Of course, part of the reason that albums were shorter back in the day was that the more information you put on a disc, the more you included, the more the quality dropped. The grooves got closer together, and you lost the bottom end. So I wanted to make sure it sounded great on a single album.”

Rush aren’t the only band referenced by Claypool as he talks about the album. Lead single The Seven, with its corrugated rhythms and wobbling bass, definitely has an air of Discipline-era King Crimson about it. “There are different eras of Crimson,” says Claypool, “but when I discovered them it was 80s Crimson, the Adrian Belew, Tony Levin Crimson era. That, to me, was Crimson. So when I heard the earlier stuff, I was like, ‘Woah! This is quite a different chapter!’ But those 80s Crimson songs are just spectacular.

“They were very powerful for a young man to hear: Tony Levin and Bill Bruford playing those rhythms together, just the whole package. They’re one of the greatest bands ever. They’re all monsters and they have this chemistry together. When you get a group of individuals – no matter how strong they are separately – and they don’t have that chemistry when they come together, it can be quite interesting. But if they do have that chemistry, it just takes it beyond.”

In August, Claypool and Sean Lennon released the four-track EP Lime And Limpid Green, the follow-up to The Claypool Lennon Delirium’s whimsical debut album of last year, Monolith Of Phobos. Alongside covers of Flower Travellin’ Band’s Satori, Pink Floyd’s Astronomy Domine and The Who’s Boris The Spider was a faithful version of Crimson’s The Court Of The Crimson King. “It’s a phenomenal song to play, record and perform,” says Claypool.

“Any time you do a project with other people, you grow, hopefully. Working with Sean, he and I pushed each other in directions that we probably wouldn’t go on our own. He has this incredible ability to form vocal melodies and harmonies, and that was very helpful for me on The Desaturated Seven.”

Another different approach Claypool brought to the recording of the album was by creating a storyboard to lay out the goblins’ tale for the other members of the band, guitarist Larry “Ler” LaLonde and drummer Tim “Herb” Alexander, before they came up with their parts. Aside from that, it was business as usual.

“We do everything in my house,” says Claypool, “where I’ve assembled all this old vintage gear. Every now and then I need to kick things to keep them going, but I’m the only one who knows exactly where to kick them, so I’m the only guy who can run it.”

Have his kids heard the album? “They’re adults now,” says Claypool. “And like everything else I do, my daughter thinks it’s incredibly weird, whereas with my son, it’s right up his alley. When I played The Residents in the car when they were little, my daughter would cry and say it was scary, while he loved it and wanted to hear it again.”

The band have been in touch with Ul de Rico, (“a thoroughly eccentric fellow,” says Claypool) to licence the artwork. “My manager was emailing with him there for a while because we needed his permission. To me, a huge part of the pie is utilising all those images. He painted all that stuff on these wood panels, and we’ve had a couple of people do some reproductions of some of it, and it just doesn’t look nearly as good as what he came up with.”

The fruits of the collaboration will be seen when Primus take the goblins on the road, and if all goes according to plan, it’s going to be spectacular. After all, the band set the bar high with the tour for the Primus & The Chocolate Factory album, which reimagined the soundtrack to the classic children’s film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory.

“We have a pretty amazing team that have been part of our visual world for a while,” says Claypool, “and when we did the Wonka thing, we put together a pretty interesting stage show. It started off with us going out and doing the stripped-down production version of Primus, before we opened the curtains of this magical world that was Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory, with Oompa Loompas jumping around and lots of video visuals. We’re going to do something similar to that on this. Obviously there’s going to be a lot of rainbows and lots of goblins. Not a lot of helicopters on this one.”

Prog asks if Claypool is familiar with synaesthesia, the neurological condition in which real-world stimulation is experienced by more senses than would normally be the case. Those affected might see a picture of the sea and immediately taste apricots, or unfailingly think of January as being yellow. One variant, chromaesthesia, results in different musical notes provoking the listener into visualising involuntary, simultaneous bursts of colour.

It sounds like the kind of thing Claypool might have a theory or two about, given the visual impact of Primus’s new album and the brilliance of Ul de Rico’s images, but he’s not biting. “I see music in the form of sandwiches,” he chortles, before asking how to spell synaesthesia and writing it down. Don’t be surprised if it shows up on the next album.

Or maybe it won’t. Primus are nothing if not unpredictable. “I’ve no idea what kind of music I play,” says Claypool. “Maybe I’ll start telling people I play Beatles music… but sideways.”

The same year his ex-Buffalo Springfield/CSNY colleague Neil Young was scaling commercial heights with Harvest, guitarist Stephen Stills offered up his own country rock collection. Manassas, released in 1972, reached the US top 10 and remains a gem.

Amassing a talented group of musicians around him, including ex-Byrd Chris Hillman, Stills explored four musical avenues on four sides of vinyl. The Wilderness section is primarily country and bluegrass, although the folk vibe of Consider and the closing Rock & Roll Is Here To Stay stray into country rock.

Perhaps too expansive for its own good, time has served Manassas well. Stills has always maintained that the band struggled for success because Atlantic Records would rather focus on the Crosby, Stills and Nash (and sometimes Young) gravy train, and the band's first album (a second, Down the Road, followed in 1973) remains one of rock's half-forgotten treasures. Some argue it's the best album Stills ever released.

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

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Other albums released in April 1972

• Rio Grande Mud - ZZ Top
• Graham Nash, David Crosby - Crosby & Nash
• Raspberries - Raspberries
• Mardi Gras - Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Three Friends - Gentle Giant
• Dr. John's Gumbo - Dr. John
• Number 1 Record - Big Star
• Argus - Wishbone Ash
• Matching Mole - Matching Mole
• Comin' Thru - Quicksilver Messenger Service
• Henry the Human Fly - Richard Thompson
• Kossoff, Kirke, Tetsu and Rabbit- Kossoff, Kirke, Tetsu and Rabbit
• Mountain Live: The Road Goes Ever On - Mountain
• On Record - April Wine
• Phantasmagoria - Curved Air
• A Possible Projection of the Future / Childhood's End - Al Kooper
• Procol Harum Live: In Concert with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra - Procol Harum

What they said...

"Although a certain amount of throwaway is always present in any double-LP set, Manassas always remains admirable if not exciting. The musicianship is generally excellent, with the only pitfall being that the droning Stills’ vocal pervades all but one of the LP’s sixteen cuts." (Cameron Crowe)

"A sprawling masterpiece, akin to the Beatles' White Album, the Stones' Exile on Main St., or Wilco's Being There in its makeup, if not its sound. Rock, folk, blues, country, Latin, and bluegrass have all been styles touched on in Stephen Stills' career, and the skilled, energetic musicians he had gathered in Manassas played them all on this album. What could have been a disorganised mess in other hands, though, here all gelled together and formed a cohesive musical statement." (AllMusic)

"Yes, Steve has gotten it together a little, even deigning to cooperate with real musicians in a real band, and yes, some of this four-sided set echoes in your head after you play it a lot. The only problem is you're never sure where the echoes come from." (Robert Christgau)

What you said...

Andrew Cumming: There must have been times when Stephen Stills couldn't figure out why Neil Young was so much more successful than he was. Is his old Buffalo Springfield and CSNY bandmate really that much better a songwriter? Well, maybe. And he had Heart Of Gold. But Stills shows himself time and again to be a very capable songwriter and musician. Of course, he didn't have a Crazy Horse to back him. And maybe the Manassas Band should have been his Crazy Horse.

This record is a great listen. All Music Guide reckons it has the sprawling feel of Exile on Main Street or the White Album, and there's a lot to be said for this argument. The four sides (of vinyl) all have a very different feel - from blues, to country/bluegrass, to folk rock, to blues rock. It's a good listen; however, it lacks stellar songs (hits). And I wonder if that's the real nub for Stephen Stills. He's got some great songs (Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, Love The One You're With, etc). But Neil Young just has more great songs.

That said, this is a decent album and an enjoyable listen.

Mike Canoe: Well, this one was an education. I'm used to occasionally not recognising a club pick, but they usually don’t have a pedigree or commercial success like Manassas. Maybe most surprising was that this was considered an important comeback for Stephen Stills, who was strangely, improbably considered damaged goods after a wanly received second solo album and the ugly breakup of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Yet I’d never heard of the band or the album (or the drama) until now.

Listening to it this week, and you probably saw this coming, it sounds like a CSNY album with a whole lot more S. While the four album sides supposedly have separate musical themes, it all sounds like Stills’ rootsy, folksy Americana complete with the trademark vocal harmonies, just done by other guys this time around. I know I’ve listened to the Flying Burrito Brothers before, but they didn’t really make an impression, and so it goes with Chris Hillman. A song may sound a little more country here or there, but nothing seems outside of Stills’ already established comfort zone.

Favourites include Johnny’s Garden, So Begins the Task, The Love Gangster, and Blues Man. On the whole, it’s one of those albums that gets better with each listen but is also one I’m not likely to listen to past this week. Too much music, too little time!

John Davidson: As a teenager, I was aware of Neil Young from his flirtation with the UK charts and the harder-edged rock of Rust Never Sleeps, but I was never a fan and had zero interest in exploring the sort of blues-infused Americana that was CSNY.

I hadn't heard of Stephen Stills, so it's no surprise that this album was complete news to me. That said, it is exactly what you'd expect. Pretty laid-back West Coast country blues. It has plenty of gas in the tank, but it's content to drive along the highway well within the speed limit.

I'm more tolerant of this sort of languid music than I was in the 1970s, but it's still not something I'm likely to play often. While none of the songs are clunkers, there's nothing that makes me want to listen again right away. 6/10.

Robby Jackson: The music is beautifully arranged. Great album to listen to on a Sunday morning.

Chris Elliott: It's been a while since I heard this as an album - yet it's part of a playlist I listen to a lot.

It's a flawed, sprawling album - but still a lovely thing. His voice doesn't really do blues - the classic CSN-type tracks forget C&N aren't there, and the harmonies don't have that perfection. And, given it's the early 70s, there are two jamtastic horrors best placed in the recycle bin. Equally, there are moments of where did that come from (every time I hear the Bert Jansch guitar bit, it's wonderfully odd).

It bookends Chris Hillman's golden period – from Sweetheart Of The Rodeo through the Flying Burrito Brothers and then this – a series of great and influential albums that were all commercial flops.

As I started with, it's an album I know, but it's normally shuffled along with the equally flawed but wonderful Sweetheart Of The Rodeo and Gene Clark's No Other (flawless but you end up sitting under a tree and fuck all gets done). Put the three together, and you can wander along for hours.

Adam Ranger: Always been a fan of Crosby, Stills and Nash (and of course Young). This Stephen Stills album has some great moments and some lovely harmonies. It's almost like CSN at times. Stills' guitar playing is – for the most part – top-notch.

My issue is that this could have been a killer single album instead of an OK double album with some good tracks. It starts very well and ends strongly, but the middle two sides let it down. Perhaps it's the country thing that I never really got into.

I understand that a lot of the songs may have been cathartic. Dealing with his breakup with Rita Coolidge, something that must have been doubly hard as Coolidge started a relationship with his friend and ex-bandmate Graham Nash!

Still (excuse the pun), I feel some of the tracks are a little bland, and I lost interest. But when it's good... boy is it good!

Martin Painter: This album is near perfect, and so many people have never heard it! If you are one of them, do your ears a favour and give it a go.

Keith Jenkin: Highly interesting document of this fairly short-lived outfit consisting mostly of Stills' touring band and ex-members of The Flying Burrito Brothers. The double album is split into four loosely themed sides - The Raven (mostly classic rock), Wilderness (mostly country), Consider (a mixture of styles and Rock n Roll is Here To Stay (mostly bluesy rock).

Many of the more personal songs relate to Stills' recent relationship with Rita Coolidge. I found this a fantastic record to lose myself in when I first discovered it in the eighties, and I think many would enjoy it fifty-odd years on from release. If I were being critical, the melodies are not the most memorable, but if there is a record out there that has a legacy that better sums up that bedevilled American rock scene of 1972, I am not aware of it.

Sebastian B-c: I just heard this album last month, and it’s fantastic. Stephen Stills is the man!

Brenda Hagen: The beauty and flow of this album. Each side tells a story. I still have this on my playlist after many years. Give it a fresh listen. I hope generations behind me find it.

John Bowman: A fantastic album. Love the way it flows across the four sides.

Greg Schwepe: Except for his work with his friends Crosby, Nash, and occasionally Young, I have not ventured much at all into the solo work of Stephen Stills. Love The One You’re With and Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth are really the only songs of his that I’m familiar with since both of those seem to be classic rock FM radio staples no matter where you live.

So I dove headfirst into Masassas and immediately liked what I heard. Song Of Love ended, and Rock and Roll Crazies/Cuban Bluegrass came next and had me excited about this album. Jet Set (Sigh) was more of the same.

At that point I got a little ahead of myself. I scribbled down “Cool, funky, laid back groove” and “listen again and set on repeat” in the notes for my review. But then, it happened…

I got to Fallen Eagle and, uh oh, my pedal steel meter got tripped. This gets noted in all reviews where there is excessive pedal steel involved. And I can take it to a point, and then the meter gets tripped, and my interest in the song takes a nosedive. Usually when there is too much pedal steel, the song gets a little too twangy and too country for my taste. This is sometimes accompanied by too much fiddle.

So from Fallen Eagle to Don’t Look At My Shadow, I was basically half listening; “Pedal steel…again?” Almost scratched out my previous notes on the piece of paper I was writing on and crumpled up the paper.

But not all is lost, because by the time we get to It Doesn’t Matter, we were back in that cool, funky, laid-back groove once again for the remainder of the album. All was not lost! Paper uncrumpled and smoothed out.

To wrap this up, you whack out those six songs in the middle, and you’d have a killer Stephen Stills album. What’s left is the Stills vibe I really, really like. But the album as it is, with the excessive twang in those songs, will get a 7 out of 10 from me.

Philip Qvist: I am not a huge fan of Stephen Stills or some of his projects such as CSNY, which is not to say that I cannot fault him as a songwriter or musician, while even I would agree that he has produced a huge amount of impressive songs throughout his lengthy musical career. It does mean, though, that Manassas, another early 70s Supergroup of some sort, has hardly featured on my music radar.

Side one (The Raven) was my pick of the album, thanks to songs such as Song Of Love and Anyway, while – thanks to songs such as the eight-minute The Treasure – side four (Rock & Roll Is Here To Stay) was my other pick.

It is sides two (The Wilderness) and three (Consider) that let the album down somewhat. Too many country-influenced songs, complete with pedal steel guitars and mandolins, and too few songs that rock.

It isn't bad at all, and it is worth a spin or two, even if only for the aforementioned sides 1 & 4; at just 72 minutes long, Manassas is pretty brief for a double album. A 6, perhaps a 7, from me.

Final score: 7.89 (38 votes cast, total score 300)

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Tony Iommi has recalled his last ever conversation with Ozzy Osbourne – the night before the Prince of Darkness' death.

The Black Sabbath frontman died on July 22 of last year, just weeks after his Back To The Beginning retirement show held at Villa Park in his hometown of Birmingham.

Sabbath guitarist Iommi spoke with Ozzy on the phone the night before his passing and says the singer was exhausted.

Iommi tells Loudwire Nights: "I spoke to him the night before he passed.

"He said to me, ‘I really feel tired and really worn out’. I said, ‘Well, you’re bound to really, it’s been a lot of stress and pressure and stuff like that’.

"And the next thing, the next day, gone."

Iommi admits he has struggled to accept Ozzy is no longer around and that, at times, he still feels his presence.

"It still feels like he’s there," he says.

While the Back To The Beginning celebration was a huge success that fans and artists on the bill were thrilled to be part of, Iommi reveals it was difficult for him to see Ozzy performing from a seated position when he had been such a live wire for decades.

He adds: "It was difficult because seeing Ozzy sitting in a throne is not the way I see him.

"Always when we’ve been on stage, he’s been running around, and he’d run up to Geezer and pull a face jokingly and come over to me and pull a face or the drummer or whatever.

"We always had a little laugh on stage and enjoy when he’d run about.

"But at Back To The Beginning, of course, he’s in a throne, and I couldn’t see him, which felt very unusual.

"But it was a great moment, and I’m really glad we could get the opportunity to do it, because I mean, God, we didn’t know he was going to go that quick."

Farnham trio Kit Trigg are about to embark on their first headline tour, and we hope they'll be buoyed by the news that their recent Down To Earth single is the latest winner in our Tracks Of The Week fandango. Indeed, we hope they mention it every night.

Danielle Nicole and Grace Potter picked up the silver and bronze medals (disclaimer: there are no actual medals), and an exciting new batch of rockers and rollers are now eagerly awaiting your ears. They're below.

Sweat - Open My Eyes

Pittsburgh’s bell-bottomed, curly-cabled brigade evoke the freewheeling, anthemic heat and richness of The Who circa Who’s Next (along with some tasty 70s organ action and swirls of psychedelia) on Open My Eyes. And is that a touch of Elton John’s Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting we hear? Tried n’ tested classic rock sensibilities, lovingly cooked up to commanding effect. A vibrant, fulsome three minutes and forty-seven seconds.

Bleeker - Feel It Again

A big, hard-kicking rocker, full of teeth and swagger, the Canadians’ latest sounds like something that belongs in arenas and on festival stages. It’s anthemic but gritty; the riff and central hook are relatively simple, but they jazz it all up with dynamics and subtle touches (e.g low-key backing vocals, pacing shifts) that elevate it above standard pop/rock song territory. Check out more on its parent album, Elephant, which has just come out.

Gen & The Degenerates - Hotter On The Internet

A raw, garage-fresh hit of New York art punk riffing (from the North West of England), Hotter On The Internet kicks, sidles and struts with the same power, self-deprecating humour and sensuality captured in Genevieve Glynn-Reeves’ deliciously satirical lyrics. The synthed-up, dreamlike bridge section feels a bit out-of-the-blue, but just about works. Either way, a lip-smacking cocktail, teasing their next album Earthly Delights, which comes out in January.

Europe - Scandinavian Eyes

One of our favourite tracks from the Swedes’ excellent new album, Come This Madness (their first since 2017’s Walk The Earth), Scandinavian Eyes finds Messrs Tempest, Norum, Leven, Michaeli and Haughland going full Deep Purple – in the best way. Think galloping riffage with fiery organ lines and beats in hot pursuit, plus theatrical flourishes in the form of orchestral layers. Nice growl from Opeth mainman/friend/fan Mikael Akerfeldt, too.

Airbourne - Kid In A Candy Store

Ahhh Airbourne, doing their Airbourne thing in such a straight-shootingly likeable manner of which has never shifted and is not about to change now. Accordingly, Kid In A Candy Store finds the Aussie foursome rocking the bejeezus out of a big fat A-chord boogie, complete with drums that charge forth like dinosaurs gatecrashing a school sports day, and lyrics about using ‘the back door’ and ‘69 on the seventh floor’ that make Def Leppard sound like Shakespeare. Imminently reliable fun.

Scarlet Rebels - Chains

Captured on film as headliners at Chepstow Castle, the Welsh rockers fly high on this upward-punching new single. The sort of moody, euphoric banger that lifts them up a league. It all sets the stage in style for their next album, Flawed By Design, which comes out in November. “This song dropped out of the blue, quite literally,” frontman Wayne Doyle says. “I picked my acoustic guitar up at home, hit the first chord and sang ‘Set my soul on fire again’. It went from there. This was the first song we started to work on for the record.”

Stanley Simmons - Cold

Stenley Simmons have now released an estimated eight singles (to be honest, we've lost count), and the quality shows no sign of dropping. The latest, Cold, has a Fleetwood Mac vibe, with the sweetest of harmonies and the kind of relaxed, impossibly breezy vibe you only get with Californian types and those attempting to sound Californian. Lovely guitar solo too. The pair's debut album, Dancing While The World Is Ending, is out on physical formats now.

Silvertomb - Graves In The Sky

American doom metal supergroup Silvertomb (featuring members of Type O Negative, Inhuman, Agnostic Front and Empyreon) have come up trumps on a new single that sounds like Black Sabbath (expected), Pink Floyd (less so, but not a surprise) and Oasis (probably an accident). The end result works well, with Kenny Hickey's Ozzy-ish vocal matching both the spectral vibes of the first half of the song and the Gallagher-ness of the second. New album The Interpretation Of Nightmares will surface in November.

The Darkness have confirmed that their forthcoming 'best of' compilation album Crock Of Hits will be released via Warner Music on November 27. News of the album first broke in May, when the band released their epic theme song for this year's Masters Of The Universe movie.

To celebrate the album's release, Justin Hawkins & Co. will play the Moth Club in East London on September 17. The club has a capacity of just 300, whereas the band's next scheduled appearance in London will be staged at the 20,000-capacity O2 Arena.

Pre-sale tickets for the show at the Moth Club will go on sale via Dice at 10am UK time on Tuesday, September 8, with the general sale kicking off 48 hours later.

"The first rule of Moth Club is, don’t fly into the lightbulb," says Justin. "Just kidding - nocturnal Lepidoptera rejoice! We’re coming to play at the Moth Club. That thing about burning yourself to a crisp is more of a guideline than a rule, so come celebrate The Darkness on this special night and listen upon our works ye mighty and rejoice!"

Due to what Dice are describing as "an error", tickets to the show originally went on sale on Friday, prior to the band's official announcement. These orders have been cancelled, and purchasers will be refunded.

Crock Of Hits will be available in four different configurations – single vinyl, double vinyl, single CD and triple CD – with the extended formats containing live tracks, radio sessions, and a new edition of the Masters Of The Universe theme featuring Queen’s Brian May. Full tracklists below.

“Crock Of Hits will startle you," proclaims Justin. "Hold you as you tremble. And gently force you to succumb to its aural splendour. A 'best-of' curated by us, so you can be certain it’s the bestest of the bestiest. Suck it up, people!"

The band will promote Crock Of Hits with a UK and Ireland arena tour in December, with support from American country rock band Brothers Osborne and fellow Lowestoft rockers A at the Scottish, English and Welsh shows. Full dates below.

The Darkness: Crock Of Hits tracklist

Vinyl LP
1. I Believe In A Thing Called Love (Single Version)
2. Growing On Me [3:30]
3. Love Is Only A Feeling
4. One Way Ticket (Radio Edit)
5. Barbarian (Radio Edit)

1. Open Fire (Radio Edit)
2. Heart Explodes
3. Nobody Can See Me Cry
4. The Longest Kiss
5. Rock And Roll Party Cowboy
6. Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)

Double LP
1. I Believe In A Thing Called Love (Single Version)
2. Love Is Only A Feeling
3. Growing On Me
4. Get Your Hands Off My Woman
5. Friday Night [2:56]
6. One Way Ticket (Radio Edit)

1. Is It Just Me?
2. Every Inch Of You
3. She Just a Girl, Eddie
4. Barbarian (Radio Edit)
5. Open Fire (Radio Edit)
6. Solid Gold

1. Japanese Prisoner Of Love
2. Rock And Roll Deserves To Die
3. Heart Explodes
4. Motorheart
5. Nobody Can See Me Cry

1. The Longest Kiss
2. I Hate Myself
3. Rock And Roll Party Cowboy
5. Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)
6. Masters Of The Universe (Full Version)

Single CD
1. I Believe In A Thing Called Love
2. Love Is Only A Feeling
3. Growing On Me
4. Get Your Hands Off My Woman
5. Friday Night
6. Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)
7. One Way Ticket
8. Is It Just Me?
9. Every Inch Of You
10. She Just A Girl, Eddie
11. Barbarian
12. Open Fire
13. Solid Gold
14. Japanese Prisoner of Love
15. Rock And Roll Deserves To Die
16. Heart Explodes
17. Nobody Can See Me Cry
18. The Longest Kiss
19. I Hate Myself
20. Rock And Roll Party Cowboy
21. Masters Of The Universe (full version)

Triple CD
1. I Believe In A Thing Called Love
2. Love Is Only A Feeling
3. Growing On Me
4. Get Your Hands Off My Woman
5. Black Shuck
6. Friday Night
7. Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)
8. I Love You 5 Times
9. One Way Ticket (Radio Edit)
10. Is It Just Me?
11. English Country Garden (Live)
12. Knockers
13. Every Inch Of You
14. She Just A Girl, Eddie
15. Street Spirit (Fade Out) (BBC Session)

1. Barbarian
2. Open Fire
3. Hammer & Tongs
4. Million Dollar Strong
5. Roaring Waters
6. All The Pretty Girls
7. Buccaneers Of Hispaniola (Live)
8. Solid Gold
9. Japanese Prisoner Of Love
10. Lay Down With Me, Barbara
11. Rock 'N Roll Deserves To Die
12. How Can I Lose Your Love
13. Heart Explodes
14. We Are The Guitarmen
15. Confirmation Bias

1. Welcome Tae Glasgae
2. Nobody Can See Me Cry
3. Motorheart
4. You Don't Have To Be Crazy About Me… But It Helps
5. Speed Of The Nite Time
6. The Longest Kiss
7. I Hate Myself
8. Rock And Roll Party Cowboy
9. Hot On My Tail
10. Walking Through Fire
11. Masters Of The Universe (Full Version)
12. Mortal Dread
13. Masters Of The Universe (Featuring Brian May)

The Darkness The Best Of... UK and Ireland tour 2026

Dec 01: Belfast The Telegraph Building, UK
Dec 02: Cork The Savoy, Ireland
Dec 03: Limerick Live At The Big Top, Ireland
Dec 08: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Dec 09: Leeds First Direct Bank Arena, UK
Dec 11: Manchester AO Arena, UK
Dec 12: Birmingham Utilita Arena, UK
Dec 13: Cardiff Utilita Arena, UK
Dec 15: Brighton The Brighton Centre, UK
Dec 16: London The O2, UK

Find The Darkness tickets.

Catherine Anne Davies, aka The Anchoress, explores past, present and future generations of her family on As We Once Were. The album finds her making peace with trauma and tackling temperamental analogue gear in the studio. She tells Prog about its creation, and the old recordings that inspired it.

Catherine Anne Davies has rebuilt her relationship with trauma. On 2021’s The Art Of Losing she approached trauma with a strange twang of longing. Throughout the critically acclaimed release – a triumph of string-embellished agony and layered prog pop suffering – she untangled a web of her darkest, most life-altering tragedies. But alongside the pain was a yearning to mend.

At the time The Anchoress was split in two: the record presented a version of herself after her grief and trauma, while placing the before version of herself on a pedestal. “I think there’s a toxic idea of the tortured genius that persists in music,” she reflects. “We must sit in that space of suffering, and we must sit in that space of reflection and continue to self-destruct. There’s much more value to be found in putting yourself back together.”

Her new album, As We Once Were, concludes that to succeed in the art of losing you have to make peace with what’s been lost,“rather than continuing to break yourself” – that only prolongs the pain. “When certain things happen to us, we cannot be the same as we once were,” she says. “Our initial response is to want to try to repair. We want to go back to the pre-broken version of ourselves. That isn’t possible.”

Peel back the layers of astute musical eccentricity, and Davies’ core is one of logic. In her mind, the importance of acknowledging and retaining trauma makes sense on a grander scale, beyond ourselves. “Evolutionary speaking, it’s useful to remember the mushrooms are poisonous,” she notes. Once we learn that fire is hot, we know not to place our hand over a flame. The same applies to generational trauma.

Her family history includes the drownings of her mum’s older sister and and two others in the River Severn, and she remains cautious of bodies of water, especially when considering the safety of her young child. “I feel my grandmother’s trauma at the loss of her five-year-old daughter,” she says. “It kind of means I’m not gonna let mine go anywhere near water. Those traumas help us survive.”

While The Art Of Losing served as her way of proving herself – a “stubborn refusal to collaborate” – As We Once Were sees her actively seeks the help of feminine pillars in her life to unpack and process trauma. Four generations of Davies ladies are heard in the music; her own voice is accompanied by recordings of her late gran, more recent recordgins of her mum and clips of her own daughter singing.

“It was really emotional, finding those old tapes of my grandma,” says Davies. “I had vague recollections of my sister recording her in the lounge for her history homework, so I knew there was a tape somewhere. Then I found it at my mum’s house… It was almost like it was delivered to me. It was really chewed up, lots of sound reversal. I spent about a week doing audio restoration in the studio.

“I originally wanted to retrieve my grandma’s voice for my mum, but when I first sent her a snippet, it was so moving I cried. Then, as I was listening to it, I realised what the interview was really about – being a woman across the 20th century – and it was inadvertently quite political and transgressive.”

The recordings showed how strongly gran and granddaughter were aligned, not just by blood, but in their beliefs. When she began choosing clips for songs, it felt like an “epiphany,” she recalls. “Then I brought my mum’s voice into it as well, and obviously when you have a small child, you’re always recording little bits and pieces.”

Opening track Du Temps Perdu (Introduction) bridges the gap between generations. There’s a gentle, childlike innocence in its twinkling keys and nostalgic synths, oozing a comforting memory that’s just out of reach. As her grandmother’s voice fades into Davie’s excitable child, it’s asserting a “generational column of steel” – an interwoven structure that both reminds Davies where she comes from and what to look forward to.

“I took a little inspiration from what Kate Bush did with the voice of her son, Bertie, which is woven quite tastefully into 2005’s Aerial,” she explains. “Frank O’Hara had this idea in his collection In Memory Of My Feelings – the title of the album I did with Bernard Butler in 2020 – that a memory of a person can take on another life of immortality through art.”

There are plenty more literary nods to dig into; Davies is a university professor of English, after all. Throw Over Your Man contains Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West’s love letters to each other in a tambourine-jangling act of seduction. She explains: “I’ve always felt a little bit guilty about my music career: it’s a very working-class guilt. So it’s nice when your work does something good for society, even if it’s just encouraging someone to dive deeper.”

The record isn’t just Davies flicking through the family photo album and wistfully reminiscing. Hand To The Tide is one of its darker moment – and its ominous, creeping sense of fear captures the horror of her relatives who were died in the “freak tidal wave accident.” Stop The World is her most vulnerable track to date; she approached it like a wounded animal, as if it could attack at any moment. The work is defined by a sound that’s actively “embracing the imperfect.”

Rather than using perfected digital synth models, Davies went to Pete Townshend’s studio to get hands-on with some of his analogue synths to capture the feeling. “There was this sort of dual congruence with my old recordings and these old analogue instruments from the 70s and 80s,” she says. “I almost thought I should put, ‘This record was made by humans’ in the credits.

“When you work with an old analogue synth, it can take two and a half hours to get to a specific sound. With modern synthesisers, you can save your preset and go back to it, but with old synths there’s this sense of grabbing gold dust as it’s coming through your fingers. The circuits are so unstable. Nobody else could get exactly the same sound as you, and it feels like if you don’t record it in the moment it’s going to disappear. That felt so conceptually resonant.”

She points to the midpoint track, All I Really Want Is Peace. As it says on the tin, she’s now beyond the drama – and the piece closes out into a glitching, liminal meadow clearing, as intimate recordings of her daughter signal the beginning of Stop The World. It makes the Richard Rohr quote paired with All Fall Down feel particularly poignant: “If we don’t transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it, usually to those closest to us.”

As We Once Were is that transformation, as Davies summarises: “If I’m not making something new and useful for myself and my daughter, what’s the point?”

As We Once Were is on sale now.

In 1985, Heartland created a series of Monster Toys, palm-sized rubber faces which could be distorted into many grimaces, simply by placing your fingers into the back of the toy.

There were four to collect, each more hideous than the last. Some toy historians say they came with an animatronic body which held a red, glowing axe and moved around to the strains of When the Saints Go Marching In, much to the annoyance of anyone in close proximity. It was a different time.

Heartland had also created an iconic thrash metal mascot, quite by accident.

Following the release of Spreading the Disease, which emerged in the same year as Monster Toys, Anthrax had their own gurning anti-hero; a moustachioed maniac would appear on their tour shirts. He'd later appear on album and single artwork, too, as well get inked into drummer Charlie Benante's upper left arm.

"I remember one day we were in a store in Boston, and we see the little doll," singer Joey Belladonna recalled during a 1988 interview. "You ever seen the thing before? And then Island records had put a thing out on Spreading The Disease that said 'By George, I think he's got it'; it was his face and we figured we'd have him along with us basically. Nothing really big, he just happened to be around us. He'll be in the new video!"

"You could buy it at any novelty store," remembers Scott Ian. "We all thought it was cool. Nobody tried to name him. He just became the Not Man."

But why 'Not Man'? And not something similar to Murray, like Dio's demon pal?

“I knew this kid, Alan Luckman, and he used to say it all the time in about ’74, ’75. And that’s what made me say it," Ian told Guitar World in 1993. "That’s how it became Scott Not and all that kind of crap."

Metal mascots were largely serious brand extensions of globally successful bands. Iron Maiden had Eddie, Megadeth had Vic Rattlehead, while Dio had the evil-sounding demon Murray.

The Not Man was a case of the band planting their tongue firmly in their cheek. After all, the band were wearing Bermuda shorts, recording rap singles and employing legendary MAD magazine illustrator Mort Drucker to draw their new mascot cradling the band on the back of their 1988 album State of Euphoria.

International versions of their single Antisocial depicted the Not Man spray painting a wall. In the accompanying video, their drum tech John Tempesta (who'd go on to join Exodus, Testament, White Zombie, The Cult and Helmet) wore a big papier-mâché head and enthusiastically high-fiving the crowd. As a joke, the head was removed at the end of the video to show it was a legendary vocalist was under there all along. Spoiler: he wasn't, really.

"We got Ozzy to wear the Not Man head," laughs Ian, still seemingly in disbelief decades later. "He agreed to do that! Ozzy was stoked. It’s hard to explain how stuff like that felt because it was unbelievable."

While Not Man has made fleeting appearances over the years, he has remained an iconic part of Anthrax's visual history. He appeared in the band's 2021 graphic novel Among the Living, and in 2023, a zombified version also featured in Iron Maiden's mobile game Legacy of the Beast.

"We couldn’t be happier to be featured in this game," read a statement from the band. "When the idea came up, we were completely taken aback by it, like, ‘are you serious?’ You have Eddie, one of the greatest mascots of all time, and the Not-Man!"

In coming months, the band will publish their forthcoming book NOT: The Illustrated Oral History Of Anthrax through Z2 comics, and is heavily featured in early glimpses of the artwork, including a very cheeky parody of the DC Comics one-shot Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, and John Higgins.

What the hell is Emperor’s 1994 track I Am The Black Wizards all about?

“I came up with this sort of parallel universe, this dark dimension that was very Tolkien-esque. I wanted to use it for a concept record for Emperor. One of the ideas was for it to have this massive tower with incredibly deep dungeons, housing, amongst other things… these strange wizards controlled by a hive mind. Everything is connected, and that’s where the title comes from.”

Presumably there was a big Tolkien influence on the Mortiis mask…

“Yes and no. I knew that I wanted to do something beyond corpsepaint. I’d grown up with Kiss and W.A.S.P. and Mötley Crüe – these big-image American bands – so that was something I’d always liked, but I was definitely into The Lord Of The Rings.

The early version of Mortiis was just me finding things I could mould into noses and ears and all of that, and then putting make-up on top of it. To get the long nails, I would cut out the bendy ends of soda pop bottles, then paint them and glue them to my fingers.”

How do you feel about this current crop of masked bands, like Ghost and Sleep Token, becoming some of the biggest names in metal?

“I don’t pay a lot of attention to it, but Tobias [Forge] has done really cool stuff with Ghost. I’ve only met him once but he seemed like a very nice person. He was quiet. I’m only aware of Sleep Token because people talk about them. I see a shitload of masked bands fly by on my algorithm. The weird thing is, I feel like I’m the only guy who wears a mask but still has a face.”

What are the masks like to travel with? How many airport security guards have you shocked over the years?

“They pull my stuff out a lot. I usually carry weird electronics, and they think it’s a bomb or something and scan it, like, three times. I’ve half-expected sometimes for them to go, ‘What’s inside this box?’ and then all of a sudden there’s a face staring back at them. Ha ha! It’s never happened, but, then again, these people, can you imagine all the weird shit they must see every day?”

You’ve travelled all over the world. Who’s the weirdest person you’ve ever met?

“I met a guy in the 90s who was completely tattooed, top to toe, and he had 12 kids in 12 [US] states. This was back when I was still drinking, and I drank with him all night. He was like a living piece of art and he was super-nice, but I was thinking, ‘How the hell do you even get to the point where you have 12 kids in 12 different states?!’”

Must’ve been a bit of a vagabond type.

“I guess! Maybe he just travelled around and… he must have been a very charming person.”

You were charmed enough to drink with him all night.

“Yeah, I didn’t have kids with him, though. Ha ha ha!”

You’ve been Mortiis for more than 30 years now. What keeps it fun?

“I’m a stubborn motherfucker, that’s for sure! I love trying new things musically. Even as I was completing [new album] Ghosts Of Europa a few months ago, I already had a whole bunch of other, different-sounding music on my hard drive. There’s, like, three more albums I’ve started: some similar, some vastly different. It’s the ability to explore new ideas and see where I can go with it.”

When you’re not Mortiis, you’re a healthcare worker. What do your colleagues think of the Mortiis music and presentation?

“When I started that gig, early on, some of them probably didn’t quite know what to make of me. I walked in there scruffy-looking, with long dreads. But I’m gonna believe my boss when she tells me that I’m a fairly well-liked employee. You try to have a good attitude and just be a fairly comfortable person to be around. That’s a big part of the job. If you’re an uncomfortable person to be around, you’ve failed the first test! Ha ha!”

What’s the most rewarding part of that job?

“Getting paid. Ha ha ha! But, in all seriousness, it’s nice to be nice, man.”

Ghosts Of Europa is out now via Prophecy.

Gryphon experienced a remarkably busy periods in 1974. The release of not just Midnight Mushrumps but also Red Queen To Gryphon Three found them reaching a bigger audience than before, aided by a North American tour with Yes. In 2024 founding members Brian Gulland, Graeme Taylor and Dave Oberlé recalled those early years, and explained why they were still going.

In the history of prog there’s never been a band quite like Gryphon; and in the history of Gryphon there’s never been a year like 1974. Over 12 months, the group released not one but two fantastically ambitious albums; they also embarked upon a spectacular North American tour as the opening act for Yes.

Formed two years previously, the band’s genesis went back even further. Co-founding guitarist Graeme Taylor was nine when he first heard The Beatles, and describes the feeling as “like a cannonball [that had] hit me.” His parents promised to buy him a guitar; and, on Christmas Eve, “I woke up in the middle of the night and went halfway through the instruction book by about five in the morning. From then on, I was just fanatical about this instrument.”

He met fellow co-founder Richard Harvey at Tiffin’s boys’ school in Surrey. Not only did they share a number of interests, but they were both also involved in ensembles inspired by medieval and Elizabethan music. A few years later, Harvey encountered Brian Gulland while both were studying at the Royal College Of Music, and soon the trio began playing together.

Gulland was also young when his journey into music began. At eight, he enrolled in the Canterbury Cathedral Choir, where he enjoyed “five years of the most fantastic musical training.” During the first term, he recalls, “We were allowed to sit up on the lockers and watch the orchestra rehearse. I became inveigled by the deep farting noises of the bassoon.”

However, during his second year at the Royal College he decided to leave – much to the shock of his teachers and peers. “They were absolutely horrified, because nobody leaves; you have to fight to get in there. ‘What do you think you’re going to do, then?’ ‘Well, sir, I’ve got these vague ideas about playing Hammond organ in a rock band.’”

It was Harvey who persuaded Gulland to invest in a different instrument. “He came rushing up to me and said: ‘Come on, you’ve got to buy a crumhorn.’ I said, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’” He soon found out.

The band’s original incarnation was completed by percussionist Dave Oberlé. “I’d been a rock drummer,” he explains, “and to suddenly be confronted with all these very strange instruments, it was a question of how I was going to adapt.”

Oberlé had been another early starter. At 12, his parents bought him a snare drum and he was soon playing in local rock bands. He formed a group of his own, Juggernaut, “playing quite heavy rock with proggy influences.” When Taylor, Gulland and Harvey recruited him, it was, he says, “a baptism of fire” – but it wasn’t long before he settled in.

The quartet were playing local folk clubs when Transatlantic Records talent scout Laurence Aston approached them. “It didn’t take very long for him to spot us,” says Taylor, “because we were unusual. We suddenly found ourselves with a recording contract in a makeshift studio, making our first album.”

Gryphon’s self-titled debut, released in June 1973, caused quite a stir with its fantastical blend of medieval and modern instrumentation. “Suddenly we became a household name,” recalls Taylor, “big pictures, centre-spreads; everyone knew who Gryphon was.”

Transatlantic’s press officer, Martin Lewis, was a key factor in their raised profile, too. “He was an absolute genius,” affirms Oberlé, “mad as a box of frogs, but a great marketing man.” It was through Lewis’s efforts that Gryphon became the first band to be played on all four BBC radio stations in the same week. Yet their biggest success was still to come.

During 1974 they released two further albums of startlingly inventive music – Midnight Mushrumps and Red Queen To Gryphon Three. By now, bass player Philip Nestor had joined. Both sets were recorded at the Chipping Norton Recording Studio in Oxfordshire, engineered by Dave Grinsted, the mastermind behind Caravan’s In The Land Of Grey And Pink. Musically, however, the two Gryphon records were put together on the fly.

“It was highly irresponsible in retrospect,” says Gulland. “These days you wouldn’t do it. But yes, we didn’t have any of that ‘getting it together in the country’ in a cottage for months. We went in and we cobbled together bits and pieces as we went.” This organic approach was made easier by the studio’s live-in accommodation and 24-hour access.

“We used to go up into Brian’s room,” recalls Taylor, “just sit there on the bed composing. We never really wrote it down, or if we did it was on the back of a fag packet. We’d work for half an hour and then go down to the studio to record it – we’d get Dave Grinsted up.”

“We were pretty adept at interpreting and performing each other’s material,” adds Gulland. “We thought, ‘Oh, this is a good challenge. I need to practise this for 30 seconds.’ Then we’d try and record it. There was some manuscript paper flying around as well as the backs of envelopes.”

The atmosphere of spontaneity was clearly inspiring and resulted in some beautiful and intricate material. The free-wheeling spirit even extended to the Midnight Mushrumps cover. “It was actually shot in Windsor Great Park in the middle of the night,” explains Oberlé, “which is why, if you look at the sleeve closely, you’ll see bright red noses because we were absolutely freezing.”

The flamboyant clothing they wore for the shot also came from a surprising source. “We’d stolen lots of costumes from the National Theatre wardrobe and carted them into the park,” says Taylor. “I remember making the crêpe-paper mushrooms with chicken wire and lots of old newspapers soaked in gum.”

Released in April, Mushrumps featured five original numbers, plus a cover of the traditional Ploughboy’s Dream. Fleshed out by Nestor’s pulsing bass, the band sounded even more polished and adventurous than on their debut. The title track – an intricate 19-minute suite – was partly adapted from music they’d composed at the request of renowned theatre director Peter Hall, to accompany a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

That led to another first for Gryphon: they became the first rock band to play a live gig at London’s historic Old Vic Theatre; they remain part of a select number of musical artists to have played there. “We had Ivor Cutler supporting us,” remembers Gulland, “Jon Anderson, Steve Howe and Chris Squire of Yes came along, too.”

Gulland had formed a friendship with Yes a few years previously. He recalls seeing them play at the Roundhouse in Dagenham: “My cousin said, ‘Brian, I think you’d really like this band.’ So we jumped into his Austin-Healey Sprite and whizzed up to this little club. They’d just brought out The Yes Album, and it blew my socks off. Soon there was a kind of mutual admiration society going on between the two bands.”

It was a connection which would soon prove fateful. But first, Gryphon returned to the studio to work on third record Red Queen To Gryphon Three. “We thought of that as our concept album,” Taylor remembers, “loosely hung on a game of chess. The approach to recording was much the same.”

Consisting of four extended tracks, each a multi-segmented masterpiece of astounding variety, Red Queen was destined to become a cult classic and remains one of their most popular albums, even now. Given the extraordinary standard of playing across a whirlwind of sonic twists and turns, it’s not hard to understand why.

At the recommendation of fellow Royal College alumnus Rick Wakeman, Gryphon scored a new manager, Brian Lane, and soon found themselves supporting Yes on their 1974 North American tour. “It was absolutely spectacular,” says Oberlé of the experience.

Gullard adds: “33 gigs in 38 days with a plane-hop in between each one.” The frantic schedule took some adjusting to, as the band were ushered between soundchecks, gigs, hotels and airports over and over again.

“You didn’t know where you were,” remembers Taylor – and it wasn’t only the pace that was challenging.

“I think the first place that we landed was Madison, Wisconsin,” Oberlé says, “and I distinctly remember walking into the gig, looking around and thinking, ‘My God, I’ve never seen anything quite like this!’ You suddenly thought, ‘We’re going to be playing here in front of thousands of people.’”

The Dane County Coliseum – now known as Veterans Memorial Coliseum – is part of a multi-venue complex used for sporting events and expos as well as concerts. Gulland recalls that the main arena where they played was a huge basketball arena, which “looked like a UFO from the outside. I think in terms of the size of the gigs, it was comparatively small. It was probably 10 or 11,000-seater, but it looked enormous to us.”

Despite the schedule, the band still found time to relax, absorbing and recording music from the multitude of radio stations across the country. Taylor and Gulland even brought themselves ghetto blasters in Miami. “I got seriously into the Grateful Dead,” says Taylor, “listening with speakers held up on either side of my head.”

Back in the UK, Gryphon continued their support tour with Yes and recorded another album, Raindance, the following year; but things weren’t quite the same. Taylor left shortly afterwards, and the band recorded one final album, 1977’s Treason, before disbanding in the shadow of punk.

“The whole thing just changed that fast,” says Oberlé. “We knew the writing was on the wall. Had Gryphon started a little earlier we might have survived. Yes and Genesis managed to get through it, but we hadn’t really gotten to that point.”

As Taylor neatly puts it: “It became fashionable to not be able to play your instrument very well. Unfortunately, we weren’t bad.”

There followed a lengthy hiatus until a surprise reunion in 2009, prompted by the discovery of a flourishing fan community. “A guy called Eduardo Mota started the website,” Oberlé explains. “We saw it had been hit by about 200,000 people. We thought, ‘Oh my God, there’s something going on.’ Otherwise, why would people bother?”

“We’d forgotten about ourselves by then,” adds Taylor. “We’d forgotten about Gryphon. It became evident that the rest of the world hadn’t.”

Fifteen years on, Gryphon are flying high with an updated line-up that includes Taylor’s daughter, Clare, on vocals and violin; reed player Andy Findon; and Rob Levy on bass. Although Harvey left to pursue other avenues, the new-look band are back on the road and are working on the studio follow-up to 2020’s Get Out Of My Father’s Car!

They’re clearly thriving, and Oberlé thinks he knows why: “There is still nothing quite like Gryphon – even now.”

Andy Williams, former guitarist of New York metalcore innovators Every Time I Die and professional wrestler, has died aged 48, it has been reported. Williams collapsed while performing in a wrestling match at an event in Pennsylvania yesterday, Saturday September 5, according to TMZ. No official cause of death has been confirmed.

A founding member of Every Time I Die upon the band's formation in Buffalo, New York in 1998, Williams and his bandmates would emerge as one of the most influential forces in 21st century metalcore. Williams served as the the band's rhythm guitarist throughout their entire time together right up until their surprising implosion in 2022.

Every Time I Die produced nine studio albums, the most recent of which, Radical, was released in 2021 to critical acclaim.

Williams was also a longtime professional wrestling fan and harboured ambitions of becoming a wrestler himself. He realised that dream after making his professional debut on the independent wrestling circuit in 2015, taking on the moniker of 'The Butcher' and forming a tag team with Jesse 'The Blade' Guilmette. The duo would receive international recognition upon appearances with powerhouse company All Elite Wrestling from 2019 onwards.

In a 2022 interview, Williams compared his career in music with his wrestling endeavours, telling Reneé Paquette's podcast: "I don't know how to read music. I just picked up a guitar and it just made sense. To me, it was more like Tetris than anything. I would just make these shapes up in my head and I would play these shapes.

"If I wrote out music, it would only make sense to me and the dudes I was in the band with. A lot of it is like X's and O's, or I'll use squares for certain things and triangles for certain things. It really turned into more of, like, a video game to me than making music."

"Wrestling, to me, is like writing a song," he added. "Once I kind of understood how to write that 'song', it was like, 'Oh, ok, that's cool - there's an intro, there's an outro, there's a chorus.' It really does work like that."

Some of the world's best ideas, and far too many of the world's worst ever ideas, have been hatched under the influence of alcohol. Exactly where on the sliding scale of 'genius' to 'thick as a brick' AC/DC's attempt to hunt down one of the world's most legendary mythical beasts might be best placed is not for us to stay, but, as told by frontman Brian Johnson, it's unquestionably a memorable and entertaining anecdote.

Speaking with NME back in 2020, AC/DC's long-time vocalist recalled that he and much-missed former AC/DC bandleader Malcolm Young hatched a plan to hunt down the legendary Loch Ness monster during a trip around Scotland with their wives during an unspecified period of downtime from the Australian hard rock legends.

“We both had these Land Rovers and we’d taken them for a trip around Scotland – Malcolm loved his fireworks and he’d taken a big box with him,” Johnson remembered. “One night, we were four sheets to the wind and staying at this hotel right on the side of the loch. Mal just said, ‘C’mon, let’s go and find the Loch Ness monster! I’ve got fireworks and it might attract it!’

Painting a vivid picture of the night in question, Johnson continued, “There we were, going straight into the water in our shoes, up to our knees, and it was freezing! Mal had a drink in one hand, a box of fireworks in the other, and was trying to set fire to the loch. We were just howling. By the time we got back to our wives we had straw in our hair and were covered in mud.

“What a night!”

Sadly, unlike past occasions where they've written songs based on real-life incidents -Whole Lotta Rosie, for instance, or Bedlam In Belgium - AC/DC elected not to commemorate this frustrating evening on vinyl.

Happily though, their former tour mates Judas Priest have written a monstrous epic in tribute to 'Nessie'.

“A beastly head of onyx,” Rob Halford sings on Lochness,
“With eyes set coals of fire. It's leathered hide glides glistening, ascends the heathered briar."

“Lochness confess your terror of the deep,” the chorus runs. “Lochness distress malingers what you keep. Lochness protects monstrosity. Lochness confess to me.”

Powerful stuff!

The hunt continues...

AC/DC's sold out show at Rogers Stadium in Toronto on September 16 is in doubt after the venue suffered significant storm damage this week.

The Canadian city was battered by weather on Wednesday, with flooding and heavy winds causing widespread chaos.

The Australian rockers' 2026 Power Up world tour is scheduled to roll into the 50,000 capacity venue in a few weeks. But that performance may not go ahead according to one local politician.

Promoters Live Nation Canada have been served with an "order to remedy unsafe building" by the City of Toronto after an inspection was carried out on Thursday.

Pictures show a large part of one of the venue's temporary stands has collapsed.

Councillor James Pasternak, who represents York Centre, tells the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC): "This stadium collapsed in a major storm event, and the question is, can they reconstruct it and repair it so that it's satisfactory, so that it's safe.

"They may not be able to get AC/DC in this year."

The venue has been controversial since it opened last year, with fans bemoaning the difficulty they face getting to the site, which is on a former air field.

Rogers Stadium – not to be confused with the downtown Rogers Centre which is home to the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team – is said to be one of North America's few venues of its size that is not also home to a sports team.

Coldplay's Chris Martin described it as a "weird stadium in the middle of nowhere" when his band played there last year.

It was built as a temporary stadium, due to be demolished in 2030 to make way for new housing.

Live Nation Canada say: "Our teams are continuing to assess the extent of the damage. We will provide more information as it becomes available."

AC/DC remaining world tour dates 2026

Sep 08: St. Louis The Dome at America's Center, MS
Sep 12: Montreal Parc Jean-Drapeau, QC
Sep 16: Toronto Rogers Stadium, ON
Sep 25: East Rutherford MetLife Stadium, NJ
Sep 29: Philadelphia Lincoln Financial Field, PA

The wah-wah guitar pedal was a relatively new invention in 1968, when Jimi Hendrix used it to devastating effect on the unforgettable introduction of Voodoo Child (Slight Return), and while that intro is the song’s most memorable feature, Hendrix treats the entire composition as a vehicle for expression.

He alternates between rhythm and lead playing at the blink of an eye, and both riffs and solos frequently pan from left to right to add to the swaying, hypnotic nature of the performance. His guitar parts are backed up by the solid, unwavering playing of bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, who allow him the breathing space he needs to take the dynamics down and up.

"If you listen to Voodoo Child, you can hear the way the room just resonates," engineer Eddie Kramer told The Recording Engineer's Handbook. "That’s because I had mics everywhere, and the fact that Jimi was singing live too! I wasn’t afraid of recording an artist in the room live as he was cutting. To me, anything that was in the room was fair game to be recorded. Don’t forget that I had an artist who was an absolute genius, so it made life a lot simpler."

Released in a format somewhere between a single and an EP – Voodoo Child (Slight Return) was backed with Hey Joe and Hendrix’s immortal cover of Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower – the song remains another reason for Hendrix’s reputation as a man for whom a guitar was not simply an instrument.

As his devotees believe, his iconic Fender Stratocaster was a vehicle for the expression of his essential soul. Which legendary guitarist hasn’t played at least part of this song at some point or other in their career? It has been hailed as an all-time classic by Joe Satriani among many others, who praised it as the very peak of guitar creativity, and has been covered by players as varied as Yngwie Malmsteen, Stevie Ray Vaughan – who employed it to quell a bottle-throwing crowd at the Reading Festival in 1982 – and Mick Mars of Mötley Crüe.

Other bands who have taken a shot at the track include Extreme, Pearl Jam, Earth, Wind & Fire, Neal Schon, Tom Morello and Pride And Glory, the last of whom featured Hendrix devotee Zakk Wylde. In the world of hip-hop, it's been sampled by a plethora of A-listers including Mos Def, 2 Live Crew, the Beastie Boys, Schoolly D, Ice-T and Del the Funky Homosapien.

Note that this song is not to be confused with Voodoo Chile, a much longer and more freeform blues workout played alongside the great Steve Winwood. Both songs are found on Electric Ladyland (1968), the third and final album recorded by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Indeed, …Child was based on …Chile, as a shorter, more succinct song that grew from the longer original, with the addition of several key parts such as that heavily wah-wah’ed introduction.

Just to add to the complexities, Voodoo Child was actually released as a single after Hendrix’s death in 1970 under the title Voodoo Chile, without the distinguishing (Slight Return). As the man himself said, was this love or just confusion?

Fittingly, Voodoo Child (Slight Return) was the last song Hendrix sang, at the Love + Peace Festival on the Isle of Fehmarn, off the coast of northern Germany in the Baltic Sea. Ironically, the final lines of the song – the final lines that Hendrix would ever sing in public – almost preshadowed his death: ‘If I don’t see you no more in this world/I’ll meet you in the next one and don’t be late, don’t be late.’

A dimly lit club in Spain. Mark Kozelek stands alone with an acoustic guitar and begins playing What’s Next To The Moon. The audience hears a melancholy folk ballad. Nobody hears AC/DC. Nobody hears hard rock. One listener later swears it’s a Leonard Cohen song. Only afterwards comes the reveal: the songwriter they’re admiring is Bon Scott.

When we caught up with Kozelek at his hotel, he played haunting acoustic arrangements of Rock ‘N’ Roll Singer and Riff Raff. But the songs became something altogether different. Reflective. Fragile. Almost haunted. Yet somehow they lost none of their power.

Best known as the founder of Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon, and recognisable from his appearance as bassist Larry Fellows in the film Almost Famous, Kozelek built a career mining heartbreak, isolation and the darker corners of the human condition. A gifted and often polarising figure whose own life and career have not been without controversy, he heard something in Bon Scott that many others failed to see: not a frontman, a writer.

“There was just something sinister and dark," he said. "There was just something so ragged and raw about it. Honestly, the Bon Scott era is only the era of AC/DC that I’m really familiar with. For me, Highway To Hell and Powerage were the best records.”

Kozelek was listening for storytelling. Years later, he found himself returning to Bon’s songs with nothing more than an acoustic guitar. What began as an experiment quickly became a revelation. The songs didn’t resist the transformation; they welcomed it. “I found that the Bon Scott lyrics were just so conducive to folk-style playing. The lyrics just sort of fall out and fall into this place for me that’s just very comfortable to sing them.”

Song after song underwent the same strange metamorphosis. Take away Angus Young’s guitar. Take away the amplifiers. Take away the high volume. What remained were vivid characters, detailed observations and complete stories. “They’re very poetic and very descriptive. He tells an interesting story in all of his songs.”

The more Kozelek played them, the more he realised he wasn’t reinventing the songs so much as uncovering another side of them. “The Bon Scott songs translated naturally to what I do. I always connected with the storytelling. The lyrics stand on their own. It’s as if they’re my songs.”

Perhaps the greatest validation came when those recordings eventually found their way back to AC/DC’s inner circle. “Malcolm Young heard the record and liked it. Brian Johnson was supportive of it as well.”

A songwriter known for intimate folk confessionals had taken some of the loudest music ever recorded, stripped away nearly everything that made it recognisable, and earned the approval of the men who knew those songs best and had played them hundreds of times.

The remarkable thing wasn’t that Mark Kozelek could make AC/DC songs sound like folk music, it was that Bon Scott’s songs were strong enough to survive the transformation.

Mark Kozelek's album of AC/DC covers, What's Next To The Moon, was released in 2001.

When they were finding their feet as a band in the industrial town of Fagersta, Sweden, The Hives would look to New Jersey garage punks Electric Frankenstein for clues to unlock the vast potential bubbling away in their rehearsal space.

"We could never figure out what they did – every part either twice or four times as long as you're supposed to do," guitarist Nicholaus Arson told Vice. "It was kind of a joke, like, to see how long you could play the riff before you felt like you needed to go to another part. You have a riff, you play it for 10 seconds, and then people expect you to switch to a different riff. But if you keep going for a minute, people go bananas for that."

The band already had an arsenal of catchy riffs in their locker, but there was something about their single Hate to Say I Told You So that made people go absolutely bananas.

When the band first went into the studio to record their second album, 2000’s Veni Vidi Vicious, producer Pelle Gunnerfeldt said an early version of the song sounded like "a Swedish ZZ Top or something", according to vocalist Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist.

"He didn’t like the song," the singer told The Guardian. "He thought it was boring trite rock, so he made all these sonic changes like adding the swooshing effects, which were all the way through the song at one point. I got him to remix some songs with me and we changed the arrangement. Having less of the swooshy, fast guitar made the end more intense."

Veni Vidi Vicious was released in April through Burning Heart (the one-time home of fellow countrymen Refused), with Hate to Say I Told You So following as a single in November.

"It’s pretty easy to get, it’s total spinal rock," Almqvist later told Entertainment Weekly. "There’s nothing intellectual about it. It hits your reptile brain. Plus, it’s fairly monotonous, and I think people need that on the radio."

Following the closure of Creation Records, Alan McGee launched Poptones at the turn of the millennium, just as the garage rock revival was picking up steam. After watching the video for Hate to Say I Told You So on German TV, he quickly signed the band to his label and repackaged the Fagersta five's first two albums (including their 1997 debut Barely Legal) and an EP as a compilation album titled Your New Favourite Band, which peaked at number seven in the UK albums chart.

"The title was ballsy and funny because we didn’t actually have any hits, but maybe if you say something enough people start believing it," remembers Almqvist.

Following the single's re-release in February 2002, the band's profile in the UK gathered pace, helped along by an exhilarating appearance on Top of the Pops later that month.

"We were an underground punk-rock band; a hit in our world was 500 people having our record and 400 of them we didn’t know," Almqvist told Louder. "We expected it to do that but not to be so massive.

"When we put it out, contemporary music made no sense to us, it was only a year or two later when The Strokes and The White Stripes got popular that it seemed like we had a place in the popular world," he added. "Becoming famous overnight was like old-school Frank Sinatra, New York New York — it was awesome! You go on television and everyone sees you.”

The band was later caught in a major label bidding war, and went on to sign a deal with Universal Music, worth a reported $10 million and praise from boss Jimmy Iovine.

"They created a buzz on their own," Iovine told Spin once the ink had dried. “I respect that. I will pay for that. I will let them drive.”

The song is their most popular song on Spotify, with over 303 million streams, and remains an integral part of their set 26 years on. Not bad for a “fairly monotonous” song.

When President’s name appeared on last year’s Download poster without explanation, speculation ran rife. With the release of first single In The Name Of The Father, online sleuths deduced that they shared management with Sleep Token, and sought to reveal the identity of their masked singer. When that festival appearance arrived, the hype meant the crowd was spilling out of the tent.

Just three months later, President released an EP, King Of Terrors. Now comes their first fully formed vision in debut album Blood Of Your Empire – and that vision is bleak. The man behind President started the band as an outlet to process the emotions that came after losing his Christian faith, and the subsequent questioning of all institutions that hold power – hence the President, who in the US famously rules one nation under God.

Dark Heaven is the most explicit track here on both subjects, with a chorus line of ‘I used to stare at the cross and cry out for God, but I’m not the person I was’, alongside references to tariffs, worshipping flags and religion’s influence on children. That idea of influence surfaces again on Pink Noise, where a sample explains Plato’s allegory of the cave: prisoners watch shadows on the wall cast by a fire and mistake them for reality.

President’s voice is autotuned in parts and disappointingly less rich, but bursts forth when moving from lyrics about numbness to being alive. The autotune, the mask, the building of atmosphere only to break it down… it’s easy to see why people keep comparing President to Sleep Token. But while they’re in the same modern metal djent-goes-pop category, there’s much to distinguish them.

Throughout, Blood Of Your Empire has a cold, hostile quality where riffs stab and loop, leaving only President’s voice to passionately soar. There are nods to Bring Me The Horizon and Architects on the danceable Doom Loop, but the most obvious touchpoint is Deftones. Mercy and Dionysus hit a dark, thrilling Steph Carpenter spot while Angel Wings features a blatant Chino Moreno ‘Woo!’.

Chino’s side-project, Crosses, also comes to mind for vibe and aesthetics. This Will Divide Us embraces piano and brass, while Sleepwalker is destined to get lighters waving. Hate Figure, guest starring self-described ‘prog hop’ artist and labelmate Ando San, is the most dramatic change of pace – a catchy rap song with post-hardcore screams.

Channelling the same energy as Architects’ Seeing Red, which called out fans for demanding angry/heavy music, it targets perceived persecution by the media: ‘I used to be a hate figure / Put up with your shit / Had to navigate piss bottles thrown from the pit / It’s been 21 years now / Are we in a reprise?’ If there’s a moment where President’s conceit fails and the illusion falls away, it’s here. Every fan knows who’s rumoured to be behind the mask, and a casual Google will bring newcomers up to speed.

On the whole, though, Blood Of Your Empire generates the kind of discomfort that arises when your illusion of security is shattered. Sometimes it feels like losing all executive function and bed-rotting under a weighted blanket, at other times it feels like screaming into the void and not knowing if the void will scream back. It’s a collection of songs befitting the pervasive doom of 2026, but earwormy enough to make you glad you exist.

Blood Of Your Empire is out now via Warner Bros UK / Atlantic. President are on tour in the US now, with UK dates set for November. For the full list of dates visit their official website.

The following is a true story.

It’s the summer of 1990, and this writer finds himself on a date with a beautiful girl from Ireland's County Kildare. Both parties are working in Douglas, Isle of Man for the holiday season, and conveniently staying in the same hotel, and as the evening has been rather agreeable, a night-closing drink in the room I've been sharing with my best mate is offered, then accepted.

As we sit at a Catholic nun-approved distance from one another on the edge of my bed, conversation eventually turns to music, namely the music that has been blasting at obnoxious volume all summer from this very room.

“Do you guys only listen to heavy metal?” Debbie enquires.

“Not entirely,” comes the reply, a little too smugly. “Faith No More and Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden aren’t heavy metal bands, you see. Now, to you, they might sound like heavy metal bands, but what they’re doing is different, it's smarter, and darker, and more subversive than heavy metal.”

To prove this undeniable argument, I press ‘Play’ on our tape deck, which currently contains a cassette of Soundgarden’s second album Louder Than Love. With unfortunate timing, the cassette is cued up on a track on side two called Big Dumb Sex.

“I know what to do,” wails vocalist Chris Cornell. “I’m gonna fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck you, fuck you.”

Two mildly mortified Irish teenagers sit in awkward silence as the song draws waaaaaaaay too slowly to its conclusion.

“I’ll see you tomorrow Paul. Goodnight.”

Soundgarden always did confuse people.

Formed in 1984 with the express aim of being “Black Sabbath without the parts that suck”, the group had a polarising effect on the Seattle rock community, who couldn’t quite decide whether their dirgey Sabbath/Stooges/Zeppelin inspired-sound was intended as a lusty celebration of classic rock or a straight-faced piss-take. Naturally, Chris Cornell and Kim Thayil never apologised and never explained.

When the group quit America’s most respected punk rock label SST to become the first band from their peer group to sign to a major label (A&M), suspicions of their motivations and intentions only intensified. And that’s before anyone had heard their new music.

Given the context in which it was made, and the career moves which subsequently followed – most notably the quartet’s decision to tour with Guns N’ Roses in 1991 – it has become fashionable to claim that Louder Than Love was Soundgarden’s attempt to edge closer to the rock mainstream. This is revisionist nonsense. A full two years before what was later dubbed ‘The Year That Punk Broke’, the mainstream was Pump, Dr. Feelgood, Skid Row and Sonic Temple, and though a new ‘alternative’ sensibility - spearheaded by NIN, FNM, Dinosaur Jr., Jane’s Addiction and Sonic Youth – was gaining traction, Louder Than Love was a particularly obtuse and awkward release, even by the standards of the latter group.

Bassist Hiro Yamamoto’s agonisingly uncomfortable I Awake (opening line: “Woke up depressed, I left for work, you have a good day, it’s not your fault”) is possibly the album’s most off-kilter composition, but there are unconventional, unorthodox ideas at play throughout. For proof, listen to Kim Thayil’s one-note drone guitar which runs for a full two minutes through opener Ugly Truth, the lurching time signatures and tempo changes destabilising Gun - written about Cornell's occasional desire "to grab some rich broker and rip his head off" - through to the creepy spoken word drawl running beneath Cornell’s melody lines on Big Dumb Sex.

“That song is a parody of the sexual innuendos of disco records,” Cornell told Melody Maker in 1989. “Instead of beating about the bush, I decided to be bold, to actually come out and say, 'Yeah, I'm gonna fuck'. I guess it was good to get it out of my system so that I'll never write something like that again.”

Louder Than Love marks the point at which Cornell began to assume the dominant role in the band. Where the songwriting credits on 1988’s Ultramega OK were evenly split between the singer, Thayil and Yamamoto, Cornell’s contributions are given increased weighting on the band’s second album (a situation which hastened Yamamoto’s departure from the group) and it’s these tracks – Ugly Truth, Loud Love and Uncovered, in particular – which shine brightest from the sludge.

With the later addition of bassist Ben Shepherd and with drummer Matt Cameron’s blossoming as a songwriter of note, Soundgarden’s group dynamic would shift again on 1991’s Badmotorfinger, but here Cornell emerged as the band’s focal point at precisely the point where MTV’s 120 Minutes had identified a new breed of charismatic figureheads - Mike Patton, Trent Reznor and Perry Farrell among them - on the fringes of the mainstream.

Upon its release, on September 5, 1989, Louder Than Love didn’t set the world on fire, peaking at number 108 on the Billboard 200. But its impact went beyond mere chart stats, for it pushed Soundgarden to the forefront of a new musical vanguard whose influence would be keenly felt in the decade that followed. On a personal level, for this writer it became one of the key bridging points between metal and alt. rock, opening my eyes, ears and mind to a whole new universe of music that would genuinely change my life.

The Seattle quartet would gain greater poise and power, but Louder Than Love marks the point at which Chris Cornell's group transitioned from ungainly local heroes to self-aware architects of their own future.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Slipknot’s Iowa changed the metal landscape. Twenty-five years on from its release, it’s impossible not to see Gojira playing the Olympics, Knocked Loose popping up on late-night TV or Bring Me The Horizon becoming a chart-topping, arena-filling act without tracing it all to the Iowan nine-piece’s own second album, still the most extreme record to top the UK charts.

Reuniting with Ross Robinson – no stranger to landscape-altering releases thanks to his work on Korn’s debut and Sepultura’s Roots – they increased the intensity and made their extreme metal allegiances even more obvious, yet still continued to thrive in the mainstream. To celebrate 25 years of this landmark release, Hammer sat down with Ross to explore the story behind how the album was made.

After the success of Slipknot, was there ever a discussion about whether going heavier for album #2 was a good idea?

“I’ve never done a record with an intention of hits or thinking about what the listener is going to do. That’s just not part of the equation. It was just, ‘How can we go deeper?’ Roadrunner really wanted another Spit It Out, but we were looking to help Norway burn some more churches. We wanted to join that extreme metal club!”

What made Slipknot different to the other bands you’d worked with previously?

“I just connected so much with their music – I wasn’t doing Korn or Limp Bizkit anymore, I’d disconnected from that world. But then here come Slipknot that’s something totally fresh. Later you’d get all the copy bands, your Papa Roaches or whatever, everybody was blazing on top of the charts and taking over, and I was out. Slipknot were the answer to all of that, partially because they were so isolated from it all.

“At the time for me, I felt like I was stepping back into my 80s thrash roots. They were pretty much the only band using double-bass [drums] at that point who weren’t in the underground. But it was the ferocity, too – they were more ferocious than anybody else. Nobody on planet Earth could step up to that level. They had this extreme voice as a unit.”

The band have talked about how much tension there was between them all around the time of Iowa. Did you see much of that?

“I did get a complaint from Paul [Gray, bassist] or maybe Joey [Jordison, drummer] at one point before we recorded, where they were like, ‘We’re just not getting along. We’re gonna break up.’ So I flew out to them. Corey [Taylor, frontman] took me out and was showing me Stone Sour stuff. It was like, ‘Erm, this is cool… but it’s not Slipknot.’

“That transition from having this vision from nothing, to it becoming so extreme as far as success and everything goes… Nobody goes to school for it, there’s no education for how to deal with everybody suddenly kissing your butt no matter what you do or say. Girls that would never have looked at you, suddenly paying you all this attention… it’s very confusing. It was tough on these innocent Beavises!”

Were there any flare-ups in the studio? Were you called on to mediate?

“It could be tough. Some of the guys would be doing so much, while others had to wait around for ages to do anything. There was some anxiety in that. That’s all part of that confusion surrounding a monster that big. I’m older than them a little bit and I think they trusted my experience. But as somebody who didn’t want anything from them beyond making some great music, I could just be honest with them and say what I felt.”

What part of recording sticks out most to you?

“I remember that the title track, Iowa, came from this jam. They came in one day with these bottles of [buzz-inducing cold medication] NyQuil – the only time anybody was actually under the influence in the studio. They wanted me to drink it but I had to work, so I was like, ‘Fuck that shit!’

"They pounded that bottle and we went into this room in Sound City where Fleetwood Mac recorded, Nevermind was made and whatever. There’s a side room that’s supposed to be haunted, all mouldy and shitty, covered in this carpet. I stuffed the whole band in there, opened the door so we could get some room mic and just talked about ideas.

“They started jamming and there was this vibe and presence that was the foundation for the whole album. I’m pretty sure that the version you hear on the record is exactly how it went down at the time – we recorded it in one take. What metal band on planet Earth jams like a jazz band on record?”

Corey’s said he ended up rolling around naked on the floor, cutting himself with glass, recording that. How true is that?

“I remember he did that on vocal overdubs, but I can’t remember if it was Iowa specifically that he did it for. He had to strip his soul all the way. I do remember seeing him naked a lot. We’d get all woo-woo around the lyrics, go deep into the meaning and the tone of everything, so I’d have chills by the time I hit record.

The dude is a clear vessel for whatever comes through him – I called him ‘the bulletproof neck’, because he had this big, thick fucking neck that never quit on him no matter how much he put it through.”

While the album was being recorded you broke your back in a motocross accident. Is it true you only took one day off and then just came back in?

“Yeah.”

Wasn’t there a point where you thought, ‘Fuck it, somebody else can do this’?

“No, that’d be impossible. It was actually really good for the record because the guys were being taken out in Hollywood, hanging out with all these big stars and shit. When I broke my back and showed up anyway, it put a very next-level diligence into those guys. Joey said to me later, ‘It was the greatest thing that ever happened to us.’ It was really tough – I’d get home and just lie there watching The Big Lebowski until I passed out. I was in so much pain, but I’d get to the studio and it’d be, ‘Let’s get it the fuck on!’”

What was the hardest part of doing that?

“I remember we spent almost a month just getting the drums edited. We were razor-blading and pasting these bits of tape because there weren’t computer tools to do that. So I’d be there marking every tom, kick and snare on the record, which was a big job in itself because of how Joey plays. My secret was to cut these little slivers out, so it almost sounded rushed and even more extreme. I was doing that on a fresh broken back, then by the time we got to guitars I was finally able to sit down properly again.”

Why pick People = Shit as the first proper song on the album? It’s hardly easing people in gently.

“Well, the whole ‘Here we go again, motherfucker!’ thing was Corey’s genius. There’s always this thing inside of me that wants to compete with anything they can do at a live show. I always wanted to capture them at their deepest, most full-tilt slam so they couldn’t just easily top the record. The easiest way to do that was to make it almost violent, with shit flying through the air and having fun making chaos.

“We weren’t going, ‘Let’s make this sound good.’ Fuck that! Does it give you chills? Does it make you laugh or cry, do you get scared? I wanted people to worry they were going to die listening to this record!”

What was the most difficult part to record?

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

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

Isn’t he also doing that on (515) too?

“They’re actually outtakes of the backgrounds we recorded for People = Shit. It’s the sound of true unfiltered grief, but also the sound of pure love.”

What impact did it have on the metal scene at the time?

“I didn’t really get time to appreciate it, because I was making other records. I was out of the loop when it comes to statistics. I’d just get the occasional email like, ‘Hey, buddy!’ It’s crazy to me how big it is now, though – I think it’s bigger now than it was when it was actually released. I miss Joey and Paul so much, so those guys getting to live on through that is a dream.”

Twenty-five years on, what do you consider to be the legacy of Iowa?

“Fearlessness. They jumped into the unknown and did the exact opposite of what a bean-counter would want them to do, but still got multi-platinum status with this record. We were treading new water with this, but it gave me the same excitement thrash did in the 80s.”

Why are we still talking about it today?

“When you’ve got a band slamming as hard as they possibly fucking can, not giving a damn about mistakes or perfection, it creates a living, beating heartbeat that has something infinite to say, no matter how many times you’ve heard it. Mystical things happen – you’ll hear something different every time you hear it, because none of that stuff was planned out.

“Before we did this interview, I played a couple of tracks and it’s still so alive – a living, breathing force. It holds the essence of my friends’ lifeforce, you know? If you want to know if life can last forever, or you wanna feel Joey and Paul? Press play. It’s right there. It’s so beautiful.”

Along with Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple were the third in the holy trinity of bands who laid down the blueprint for hard rock and heavy metal in the late 60s and early 70s. In 2012, singer Ian Gillan and drummer Ian Paice looked back on the band’s turbulent history, tangled family tree and sometimes overlooked legacy.

By the early 1970s, the spiralling number of music sub-genres led to different movements lining up over each other to sign up new recruits. Whatever kind of freak you were, you had a home to educate you on which bands to listen to and which drugs to take. Space-cases and acid goblins flocked to Pink Floyd. Black Sabbath attracted doomsday occultists, schoolyard burnouts and advanced demonologists. Funky sex machines had James Brown. Pill-shovelling biker pigs and sci-fi weirdos fell in with Blue Oyster Cult.

But what about the less-conflicted children of Woodstock? The beer-drinkers and hell-raisers, the clock-punching ham’n’eggers in dirty denim, living for the weekend? What was the colour of hoi polloi in the age of Aquarius? It was purple, brother. Deep Purple.

While they were never metal in the clinical, goathorns and hellfire sense, Deep Purple were always heavy, and got heavier along the way, carving out a path of sonic excess that would spawn the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal and its culture of headbanging true-believers.

If any one band was responsible for ushering in the era of long-haired, ear-shattering, spectacle-creating Rock Gods, it was Deep Purple. With early-career smashes like Highway Star, Speed King and Smoke On The Water – a song so ingrained upon rock culture that heavy metal kids can hum the signature riff in the womb – the band toured the world, pummelling audiences with thick slabs of groin thunder, establishing themselves as the preeminent emissaries of the new cosmic heavy.

However, as the 70s wore on, the trappings of success did their damage, and Deep Purple’s perfect rock’n’roll machine began to throw off Spinal Tap-esque sparks. Ego wars, revolving-door lineups, betrayals, bad records, lean-times, death and disease, all were hurled into Purple’s thorny path as the decades rushed past. And yet, half a lifetime later, they’ve endured, highway stars to the end.

“Think of it as a journey, an expedition,” says Ian Gillan, Deep Purple’s longest-running and best- known frontman. “We were going somewhere, and there was no map. We made it up as we went along.”

Gillan’s journey with Purple began in the summer of 1969. The band had already been together for a year, but after an initial brush with success, they were stalling out. Their debut album, Shades Of Deep Purple, was released in July 1968 and spawned a surprise American hit with their cover of Joe South’s Hush. Seizing the moment, they toured the US with Cream and rushed out a second album, the spacey Book Of Taliesyn.

While it sold respectfully in the US, it spawned no hits, so the band tried again with 1969’s self-titled Deep Purple. They marked their first foray into heavier sounds. Wrapped in a nightmarish Bosch cover, the airy acid- delica of ’68 was sloughed off in favour of tribal thumping and menacing riff-rock. Songs like Chasing Shadows and Bird Has Flown were stark stabs of proto-metal bludgeon. It was clear that the band had found their direction.

The album tanked, but the die was cast, and a rift developed within Purple’s ranks. Guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, drummer Ian Paice and keyboard player Jon Lord wanted to continue exploring the thick, fuzzy sounds of the new album; vocalist Rod Evans and bass player Nick Simper weren‘t so willing to embrace this new era of overkill. Within months, they were cast out into the wilderness. Simper went on to form Warhorse; Evans moved to the US and joined space-metal freaks Captain Beyond. As for Purple proper, around that time they happened to catch Ian Gillan’s pop-psyche band Episode Six, and suddenly the clouds parted. Gillan and Episode Six bassist Roger Glover were poached, and the hustle was on.

“We had some great musicians,” explains Paice, Purple’s only constant member, “so there was never any question about our musicianship. What we didn’t have were great songwriters, which is what we got with Ian and Roger.”

“I think my range was a bit more adventurous than Rod’s, let’s say,” says Gillan, “which is what they were looking for. They wanted to let loose.”

After a couple of odd distractions – Gillan was recruited to record the part of Jesus for the Jesus Christ Superstar album, and the whole band performed with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – Purple’s revamped lineup hit the studio to record 1970’s In Rock. A watershed moment in heavy rock history, it spawned two classics: the raucous, ramshackle Speed King, and the throbbing 10-minute stoner epic Child In Time. The album eventually scraped the top five rock charts in the UK, secured Purple’s position as heavy rock pioneers and propelled them into a period of unparalleled productivity and success. But as Gillan explains, it certainly didn’t feel that way at the time.

“They didn’t want to know about us in England. We were playing in the same halls as we were with Episode Six. Nothing from the first three records, Hush or anything, interested anyone in England. But we knew we were on to something, so we kept at it.”

“It was a huge leap into another dimension, musically,” says Paice. “We had no idea if it’d be successful, but it was great fun to play.”

The next two years found Purple on a punishing schedule of relentless tours and frequent trips to the studio. Hot on the heels of In Rock came the proggy Fireball, their first record to hit the number one spot on the UK charts. Six months later, just in time for Xmas 1971, Machine Head hit the bins, cementing Purple’s status as the kings of 70s metal. The album opened with the furious Highway Star, still the ultimate road-dog anthem.

“We were very prolific,” Gillan says of their early days. “Music was oozing out of us. We used to write songs on our way to gigs, and perform them that night. Highway Star was one example. People wouldn’t believe it, but fortunately we had a few journalists on the bus. One of them asked, ‘How do you write the songs?’ and Ritchie started playing one note on his guitar, as a joke. And I started singing, as we drove down the highway. It wasn’t exactly the same as it was on the bus, but we performed it that night in Portsmouth. That happened a lot.”

Machine Head boasted Smoke On The Water, too, a song with perhaps the most recognisable riff of all time. It was based on an incident the band witnessed in Switzerland while they were recording in a mobile studio. Frank Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention were playing a gig at the Montreux Casino when an overzealous fan shot off a flare gun, starting a fire that burned the casino down to the ground. Purple watched the mayhem from the safety of their hotel, with Roger Glover noting how the smoke snaked across Lake Geneva. This oddball ode to accidental arson became Purple’s biggest hit, and shot Machine Head to the top of the rock charts all over the world.

“Smoke… was a seven-minute song. It never got played on any radio station, anywhere in the world, until someone at Warner Brothers thought they could do an edit. It didn’t do anything at all to the song, apart from make it worse,” chuckles Gillan. “The edit followed the rules of the radio, and it became a hit.”

1972 was another action-packed year for Deep Purple. After a particularly punishing gig at the London Rainbow Theater, Purple was recognised as the loudest band in the world by the Guinness Book Of World Records, an enviable honour for any hard rock band.

“The Who were probably louder,” admits Paice. “We were just the first to have meters to record our volume levels. Still, you needed something to stick out those days, and loud worked.”

In August, they released the double-live Made In Japan album. With seven songs spanning four sides, it illuminated the jammy aspects of Purple’s gigs, the flash of Blackmore’s guitar heroics, and the tribal cosmic funk of the band’s backline. More importantly, it revealed the global appeal of the band, and why their music resonated so deeply with so many people.

Purple weren’t sexy like Bowie or sinister like Sabbath; they didn’t require a cocktail of chemicals, a working knowledge of the Tolkien universe or protest signs to enjoy them. This was everyman’s hard rock, the weekend release valve for wage slaves, high school zeroes and pinball wizards. These were the people who covered their jackets in Purple badges, wore Purple t-shirts daily and grew their hair just as long as mum or the boss would allow. In years to come, they would spawn the modern diehard metal fan, he who tattoos ‘Slayer’ on his arm or spends half a year’s pay to see Kiss perform on a boat. But in ’72, they were simply Deep Purple fans, and they were legion.

“We’ve always been popular with working class people,” says Paice. “They always loved us in places like Detroit.”

But with success came its nasty trappings, and for Gillan, it was time to walk away. He finished another album with the band, 1973’s Who Do We Think We Are, but by the summer of ’72, he’d announced his departure from Purple.

“I was very sad and uninspired,” he says. “The music became formulaic. Also, everyone had girlfriends, and the chemistry changed. The girlfriends didn’t get along and they didn’t get along with management, and management wasn’t happy that we weren’t getting along. We travelled separately, ate separately and the only time we ever saw each other was when we were needed professionally. Once that’s broken, it’s broken. I thought I’d quit while I was ahead.”

For a time, Gillan gave up rock completely. “I dabbled in motorbikes, built a hotel. I never thought about being a singer ever again.”

The rest of Purple soldiered on, but the loss of Gillan proved a dizzying blow. Roger Glover left in 1974, replaced by former Trapeze bassist and singer Glenn Hughes. Future Whitesnake singer David Coverdale was drafted to fulfil frontman duties, and the new line-up went out to conquer America. They played the California Jam in April 1974, a rock fest that included Sabbath and boasted over 250,000 punters. It was also broadcast on US television, making Deep Purple a household name there overnight. No wonder, as their performance was explosive, in more ways than one.

“We had some histrionics, for sure,” recalls Paice. “We had an exploding Marshall cabinet that went a bit over the top. The roadies put too much gasoline in it, and it almost blew Ritchie off the stage. It blew my glasses off my face.”

The so-called Mark III version of band released two albums in 1974, Burn and Stormbringer. Both went gold in the US, with Burn cracking the Top 10. They sold equally well back home. Purple’s sound had changed significantly since Gillan’s departure, however, embracing the technical excess of prog and leaning heavy on Coverdale’s affection for soulful blues.

Blackmore, who had served asthe band’s musical director since its inception, had had enough. He left in ’75 to form Rainbow with Ronnie James Dio, leaving only Paice and Lord as original members. Blackmore was replaced by flamboyant American guitar-slinger Tommy Bolin, a relative unknown with a fluid, bluesy style. The new lineup recorded and released an extremely funky album, 1975’s Come Taste The Band. It sold poorly and, worse still, Bolin’s drug use fractured the band further.

“We had guys who needed help just getting on the stage,” remembers Paice. “It’s difficult keeping things together in those circumstances. Being in the band ceased to be fun."

Deep Purple called it quits at the end of a UK tour in March 1976. Tommy Bolin died of a heroin overdose a few months later. And that, for all intents and purposes, should have been the inglorious end of Deep Purple. But it wasn’t.

By the early 1980s, Ian Gillan had returned to rock’n’roll, fronting the Gillan Band. It was after a gig at London’s Hammersmith Odeon when inspiration struck.

“One of my heroes, a footballer named Rodney Marsh, came to the show. We went out for dinner afterward and he said, ‘Wow, what a show! Great band! Mind you, you’re not as good as Deep Purple.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’re probably right.’ So he said, ‘Well, why the fuck don’t you get them back together again?’ If the greatest hero in your life said something like that to you… well, I figured I must at least try it.”

Gillan contacted Jon Lord, and the seeds for a reunion were sown. Gillan had something to attend before they could act on it, however…

“I got drunk with Tony [Iommi] and Geezer [Butler] and ended up joining Black Sabbath,” he laughs. They released the Born Again album in ’83 and toured the world with a Stonehenge stage prop. While successful, the whole affair was too awesome/ridiculous to last.

“The die was cast,” says Gillan. “After my year with Sabbath was up, I went back into Purple.”

Old wounds had healed nicely, and the classic line-up of Gillan, Blackmore, Lord, Paice, and Glover convened to write and record the excellent Perfect Strangers album in 1984.

“It was fantastic because everybody wanted it,” says Gillan. “But we were concerned… would it work? Would it have the same sense of adventure? After all, years had gone by. So we met in secret and had a rehearsal. It was obvious within 20 minutes of jamming that everything was gonna be fine.”

“It was a no-brainer for me,” says Paice. “I’ve worked with a lot of great bands in my career, but I’ve always come back to Deep Purple. Playing with Purple is like being home.”

Purple’s reunion was wildly successful. Perfect Strangers was a smash hit in the US and the UK. The band toured the world and released two more albums, 1987’s House Of Blue Light and 1988’s live Nobody’s Perfect. But Gillan and Blackmore found themselves at odds, and by 1989, dysfunction had set in.

“Things had gotten pretty bad on a personal relationship level between he and I,” says Gillan. “I think it came about quite simply because I said we should be touring more. I illustrated my point by banging my fist on the table, and that was it. Ritchie was being contradicted, publicly, and so he went back and said, ‘I can’t work with that guy anymore.’ Those were the words, I was told. So they had to make a choice, him or me. They chose him.”

Gillan was out again. He was replaced by former Rainbow vocalist Joe Lynn Turner, and this new line-up recorded one album, 1990’s Slaves & Masters. Fans and critics merely shrugged, considering it more of a minor Rainbow record than a Purple one. Meanwhile, the band was about to reach their 25th anniversary, and Purple’s core didn’t want to celebrate this landmark event without their (real) lead singer. After some ugly backdoor negotiations, Gillan rejoined the band as they recorded their new album, the ironically titled The Battle Rages On. The album, their 14th, was released in 1993. At this point, relationships within the band were so toxic that Ritchie quit on the eve of a Japanese tour.

“He tore up his Japanese visa,” Gillan recalls. “Very dramatic. So, we had to figure out what to do. We decided to continue on, and it became a thing of joy again. It became fun.”

Joe Satriani was recruited to help Purple finish their ’93-’94 tour schedule, but prior commitments made it impossible for him to join the band permanently. Former Dixie Dregs guitariist Steve Morse was signed on in 1994, and the band released Purpendicular a year later. There is a heady joy to the music of this album, which Gillan prescribes to the mood of the band at the time.

“It was fantastic. I could see the reemergence of Jon Lord and Roger Glover’s and Ian Paice’s personality, “ Gillan remembers. “It was as if a storm had passed, and the sun came out.”

There was one more significant line-up change: keyboard player Jon Lord retired in replaced by former Ozzy keyboardist Don Airey (Lord died in 2012) Purple has continued on, releasing a string of studio albums and steadily touring. Weathered and matured they may be, but four decades on, not much has changed. Styles shift and occasionally there’s a new voice in the choir, but Purple is still Purple after all these years.

“You don’t have to worry about egos anymore,” says Ian Paice. “Now all you have to worry about is remembering the songs.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 237, October 2012

Today is Labor Day in the US – a Federal holiday that celebrates the American workforce. And as always, it's a day that's accompanied by big online sales events, with websites introducing discounts across a whole heap of products.

I've had my eye on some brilliant turntable bargains courtesy of Best Buy, including 28% off this automatic Victrola record player. It’s down from $279.99 to $199.99 making this an excellent early deal to grab over the weekend.

And that’s not all, because the website has also slashed prices on a range of vinyl storage, with my eyes immediately drawn to the three-tier Gymax turntable stand which is down from $179.99 to just $74.99. This deal only applies to the unit in black, but there’s also lesser discounts on the Coffee, Walnut, White and Natural colour variations.

I’ve picked out several other Labor Day turntable deals that I think are well worth a closer look – and all from household names in the audio sphere. But with the sales window closing just as Labor Day ends, grab something quick before the deal disappears.

If you’re a fan of the Sony brand, then the good news is there’s a 25% saving right now on the two-speed Sony PS-LX3BT at Best Buy. It’s down from $399.99 to $298.99 and it’s an all-round excellent turntable. It can easily connect to your Bluetooth devices, has fully automatic playback, can convert your vinyl to digital via USB and has been made using more than 80% of sustainable materials.

Sticking with Sony, and you can secure a 15% discount on the Sony PS-LX5BT at Best Buy. The price has been cut from $499.99 to $423.99. This is a belt-driven, two-speed unit with Bluetooth functionality and it comes with a year’s warranty.

I mentioned Victrola earlier, and there’s another decent discount to be grabbed on their Eastwood model. There’s 14% off the list price, taking things down from $189.99 to $161.99. This three-speed, belt-driven, manual turntable has Bluetooth, a built-in speaker and an Audio Technica AT-3600LA cartridge. An excellent choice for music fans just starting out on their vinyl journey.

And speaking of Audio-Technica, there’s a 10% saving on the AT-LP60X-BK at Best Buy – that means you can pick up this smart performer for $179 rather than the usual price of $199. It’s a three-speed, automatic, belt-driven record player and like all Audio-Technica turntables, sounds fantastic and is rock solid.

If you're after more options, take a look at our guide to our favourite budget turntables, and for more vinyl storage solutions, we have you covered right here on Louder.

September is here! Today sees the release of the new records by Chat Pile, Sleep and President, kicking off a real rush for the Autumn release calendar. The next few weeks look pretty stacked for new releases, so we're here yet again with a round-up for this week's best new metal songs.

Speaking of which, the results of last week's vote! There were some big names in the running last week, but as ever that isn't always enough to sway your vote on what songs excite you most. Amon Amarth galloped into third place with Eight Legs Of Thunder, but were beat by a hair by black metallers I Helvete. Our overall winners for the week however were In This Moment, the industrial/metalcore mash-up of I Want To Believe taking the crown.

As ever we've got a diverse selection for your listening pleasure this week, from sludge to black metal, alternative to death metal. Check out the selection of new songs below, and don't forget to vote for your favourite - the big end of year lists are just around the corner now!

Blue Medusa - Crocodile

Alissa White-Gluz might’ve teased that she could go proggier with Blue Medusa when speaking to Hammer earlier this year, but Crocodile is pure annihilating force. Slaughter Of The Soul-style melodeath, it gallops in at thrashy pace and hits like a speeding cement mixer. For all the ferocity, Alissa doesn’t do away with melody entirely - there are some great cleans in the chorus and little quirky sonic asides that show this project is looking to do something different. Keep your eyes out for their debut next year, we reckon.

Fear Factory - Roboticist

It’s been a funny few years to be a fan of Fear Factory. The departure of Burton C. Bell in 2020 shook the band up immensely, and even with new vocalist Milo Silvestro joining in 2023 and the band heading out on tour, it was hard to imagine what new material would sound like. Turns out, pretty much the same as the old material. Sounding like they’ve got a fire lit under their arses, Roboticist delivers well on FF’s foundational sound with gattle-gun beats and a relentless sense of force. Silverstro sounds more like Robb Flynn than Bell, but the difference is negligible - if you’re a diehard fan of the band, it’s hard to see you not loving this.

Evanescence - Tell Me When You’ve Had Enough

Picking up where 2021’s The Bitter Truth left off, Evanescence’s new album Sanctuary is as fired up as we’ve ever heard the band. Don’t believe us? Check out new single Tell Me When You’ve Had Enough, a slick and hard-hitting track that proves not only did Amy Lee and co. survive nu metal, but they don’t need to look back to create something vital and powerful. Vive le Evanaissance.

Blind Channel - Stars We See

So your singer quit to make Rasmus-y pop rock with, erm, one of the blokes from The Rasmus. What’s a band to do? If you’re Blind Channel, you knuckle down and lean in on your metalcore elements and kick out a few bangers. That’s where the Finnish band are at with Stars We See, at least, an emotional track that brings to mind the arena-sized singalongs of Architects. It might lack the nu metal bounce of their last album, but it suggests the band are starting fresh on new album Painstream (out October 30).

Lacey Sturm - Forever & Ever (feat. Lindsay Stirling)

Lacey Sturm’s been kept busy with Flyleaf in recent years, but clearly not so much that she hasn’t had time to hit the studio and make new songs. Forever & Ever sees Sturm reunite with violinist Lindsay Stirling, the pair having worked together on 2023’s Kenotic Metanoia. With Eastern European-like folk melodies and thumping, hefty guitar lines, it’s a track that has great - and dramatic - sonic range, proving that even with her return to Flyleaf, Sturm isn’t abandoning the work she’s done since.

Saxon - Gods Of Thunder

Saxon have been kicking out heavy metal tunes for over half a century and they’re not about to stop now. Unlike many of their contemporaries who are slowing down on releases, the boys from Barnsley are keeping up the pace with Gods Of Thunder coming on January 22. Lead single - and title track - Gods Of Thunder is very much Saxon as we know and love them, an implacable march with some howling guitars laid atop like sonic ballista.

Boss Keloid - Landslide

Given how much of stoner rock is dedicated to mind-altering substances, the amount of novel invention remains disappointingly low. That is, until you get to Boss Keloid - the UK’s answer to the cosmic sludge of Mastodon. Landslide is a typically dextrous and trippy track, chucking up delightful, stompy riffs in a 9-and-a-bit-minute epic that feels like a full sonic journey in itself. New album Float & Aperture is due October 23.

Hansen - Wait And See

Considering he’s best known for his work with Helloween, you might be surprised at the sound of Kai Hansen’s Wait And See. There’s no power metal nor fantasy themes in sight (though we do detect a little of the iconic Halloween theme in the keys). Instead the track has the slick, almost industrial tone of turn-of-the-millennium metal (though crucially, not nu metal) with a massive riff front and centre and an irresistible beat that’ll make you want to headbang, mosh or just shake your ass. Hansen’s new album Born With A Hammer is out September 18.

Illan Kaapan - The Rising Tide / Keeps Me Alive

Sri Lanka isn't an obvious hotbed for hardcore, or maybe it is and we're just idiots for overlooking it. That's the prevailing thought after hearing Illan Kaapan this week, the Aussie/Sri Lankan band putting out easily one of the most refreshing beatdown tracks we've heard in a while in The Rising Tide / Keeps Me Alive. Put it down to the frantic, tribe-like drums that skitter beneath the lumbering riffs, or just that this track swings like its got wrecking balls for arms. New EP Undeniable is out now and if it's half as ferocious as this, we could be looking at new stars of the scene.

Jasmeno - His Rebirth (ft. Bart Krysiuk)

What the hell can you classify something like Jasmeno's His Rebirth as? Doom metal, prog, symphonic... there's little bits of all of the above and more crammed into the song's five minutes and 39 seconds. It's wild and unique, droning vocals suddenly meeting cosmic synths, which give way to gorgeous, glorious guitar solos. The Polish band's new album Assemblage of Cinematic Idioms is out next week (September 11) and we reckon you need to hear it.

Nails - Dollar Bin Generation

Need a palate cleanser after that absolute headfuck? Leave it to Nails, the grindcore brutes dropping a surprise double-single this week and serving up no frills nastiness that'll put a massive grin on your face. It's fast, it's hard, it's heavy... it's Nails.

Love Sex Machine - The Herd

Oppressive and menacing like a bad neighbourhood given a nervous system, Love Sex Machine's The Herd is exactly the kind of song you don't want to listen to when walking home alone at night. Set somewhere between industrial (albeit Godflesh/Ministry's end of the spectrum - no dancing here!) and sludge it's a real brute of a track.

Autumn’s creeping in, which means shorter days and colder temperatures. But, worst of all, it means that festival season is over. This year’s summer was crazier than most, witnessing auspicious headline debuts such as Limp Bizkit at Download and Green Lung at Desertfest. New events emerged, like Ankea in Finland, while others underwent sea changes, as Arctangent in Bristol and Mystic in Poland both bade farewell to their longtime sites. Plus, who didn’t get swept up in the controversy of Slaughter To Prevail topping the bill at Bloodstock?

There’s a lot to reflect on. So, as the leaves turn orange and the clouds grow greyer, we sat down members of the Metal Hammer team and got them to reminisce about the best sets they saw in 2026. From Linkin Park to Blood Incantation, we got quite the range of responses…

Halestorm (Sonic Temple, USA; May 15)

It’s always been obvious that Lzzy Hale has enormous star power. Having watched Halestorm claw their way up from small clubs to headlining arenas, it felt fitting to finally see them in a stadium. Even though they brought more production to their Download set the following month – who doesn’t love a bit of pyro? – the Pennsylvanians were on top form when they played Ohio’s Historic Crew Stadium in May. Tight, powerful and showy without being ostentatious, it was an essential performance which proved that Halestorm are long overdue their chance at the big leagues. Rich Hobson

Sergeant Thunderhoof (Desertfest, UK; May 15)

One of the worst aspects of the human experience is that sometimes you forget how much you love something. When I saw Sergeant Thunderhoof again at Desertfest this year, I remembered it all. They stepped in on quite short notice, after Rubber Snake Charmers dropped out, and what a performance! Their music is effortlessly epic while managing to be crushingly heavy: a veritable smorgasbord of the best doom metal has to offer, and they continue to go from strength to strength. They played for an hour, but I could talk about why I loved their show for way longer than that. Kiarash Golshani

Oranssi Pazuzu (Ankea, Finland; June 6)

Tampere’s psychedeliacs didn’t officially headline this debuting prog metal festival in their hometown, but they may as well have. Taking the second stage early after Katatonia ran 15 minutes short, the quintet played an extended set before a rapt crowd. Their noise/extreme metal/krautrock fusion, dizzying at the best of times, proved even more disorienting through the oppressive volume. Meanwhile, the video backdrop screened footage abstract and vibrant enough for the opening titles of Doctor Who. Even though I’ve never done hallucinogenic drugs, now that I’ve taken this multimedia trip to the outer reaches of music, it feels like I have. Matt Mills

Linkin Park (Download, UK; June 14)

If there were any remaining doubts that Emily Armstrong is the perfect person to lead Linkin Park into a new era of success, they’d have been quashed with this triumphant showing. Armstrong became the first female singer to headline Download festival since its 2003 launch (and to headline Donington Park in general), and the nu metal superstars marked the occasion with a jaw-dropping setlist of hits and deep cuts, transporting everyone back to the 2000s. No drink, drug or medical intervention will ever replicate screaming Numb at the top of your lungs as the sun sets over 80,000 people. Yasmine Summan

Blood Incantation (Beyond The Gates, Norway; July 31)

Blood Incantation had seemingly been touring Absolute Elsewhere for aeons, but the last visitation of their European leg, at Bergen’s Grieghallen concert hall, brought their cosmic travelogues to a new level of spectacular. Yeah, Pompeii was probably fine, but it didn’t have lasers. Here, they criss-crossed the auditorium in their multitudes, as if it were a parade for some intergalactic emperor. They formed wireframe worlds in tribute to the 70s planetariums where Pink Floyd would be the go-to soundtrack. Add to that the immaculate acoustics and a band whose vast, mind-melting reaches instil a singular sense of belonging, and the result was 2,200 souls teleported to a new frontier of awe. Jonathan Selzer

Arch Enemy (Wacken Open Air, Germany; August 1)

Following in the footsteps of one beloved metal singer can be hard work. Following in the footsteps of two of them – three if you count OG vocalist Johan Liiva – is a hell of an ask. But that’s exactly what was demanded of Lauren Hart when she was announced as Arch Enemy’s fourth frontperson earlier this year, replacing Alissa White-Gluz. At by far their biggest show so far with their new recruit, the melodeath brutes were greeted like returning heroes, smashing through a triumphant set in front of tens of thousands. Hart seemed at home while bellowing her way through Ravenous, Nemesis and War Eternal. Recent single To The Last Breath sounded every bit as colossal live as those classics. As a fan of some 25 years, the gig left me excited for their future. Merlin Alderslade

Body Count (Bloodstock Open Air, UK; August 9)

What’s the anatomy of a great festival set? You need the setting: a packed Bloodstock main stage in the blazing sun would do it. How about some star power? Few are more iconic than OG gangsta rapper Ice-T, backed by his Body Count crew. And, obviously, you need the tunes. Imagine the chutzpah to open with Body Count’s In The House, then launching straight into a Raining Blood cover. You also want a memorable one-off event. Ice grabbing two kids out of the crowd and getting them to yell “talk shit, get shot!”, along with all other manner of profanities, along with him will live long in the memory. On all counts, the set of the summer. Stephen Hill

Deftones (All Points East Presents Outbreak, UK; August 23)

In an uncertain, over-stimulated world sporadically punctuated by shocks, violence and lingering trauma, you can see why Deftones’ whisper-to-scream, nightmare-to-dream dynamics make sense to more people than ever. At APE/Outbreak, the excitement displayed by thousands of Gen Z fans obviously seeing the band for the first time added to the sense of occasion, while older loyalists were in agreement that Chino Moreno’s band have never sounded better. Was it as intense as when I saw them play a 90-minute, White Pony-dominated set for an audience of just three in their Sacramento rehearsal space in the summer of 2000? No, admittedly. But more than a quarter of a century later, Deftones have aged magnificently. Unlike me… Paul Brannigan

In 1974 Supertramp released breakthrough album Crime Of The Century. It was welcomed by fans and critics alike, securing them a place in the UK Top 5 – but it nearly didn’t happen. To coincide with the Blu-ray release of the accompanying live show, Prog asked ex-bandmates John Helliwell and Bob Siebenberg about the highs and lows behind the record’s creation.

Early summer, 1974: Supertramp’s classic line-up is go – but as they track future single Dreamer at Ramport Studios in Battersea, London, Roger Hodgson isn’t happy. Four years earlier the co-frontman had demoed the song at his mother’s house in Portsmouth, adding primitive cardboard-box percussion to its ace Wurlitzer piano. Now, though, Hodgson feels that whatever magic the song once had is fading.

“Roger had a bad case of demo-itis,” recalls Supertramp’s Californian drummer, Bob Siebenberg, today. “We were like, ‘Yes, the demo’s charming, but you can’t put it out. The sound quality isn’t good enough.’” He says the solution was to play to the demo, preserving its feel, but gradually replacing its constituent parts. “That’s how we cracked it.”

Sure enough, Dreamer reached No.13 in the UK in March 1975, and helped give wings to 1974 breakthrough LP Crime Of The Century. But not every hiccup in the Supertramp camp was resolved so satisfactorily. Issues arising from the group’s differing backgrounds, personalities and ideals would eventually waylay their genius, with Hodgson eventually quitting to go solo.

Prog’s audience with Siebenberg, along with horns and woodwinds whizz John Helliwell, arises from the Blu-ray release of Crime Of The Century: In Concert At Hammersmith Odeon 1975. Director Derek Burbidge’s superb, no-frills film is further proof, were it needed, of the classic line-up’s majesty. Like bassist Dougie Thomson, Siebenberg and Helliwell were relatively new recruits; fresh foils for Hodgson and his fellow frontman/ keyboardist Rick Davies as the pair’s songwriting skills blossomed, reaching new heights on future classics Bloody Well Right and School.

“I was last in,” recalls Helliwell. “They never officially asked me to join – I just kept going back after my initial blow with them in July ’73. I’d played with Dougie in The Alan Bown Set; he told me Rick and Roger weren’t happy because their first two albums [1970’s Supertramp and 1971’s Indelibly Stamped] hadn’t done much.

“Dougie had a good business head on him and he convinced them to try one more album. Rick and Roger knew they need a line-up change but were frightened of sacking people, apparently. They’d just break up and reform.”

Siebenberg had moved to London in April 1971and joined Bees Make Honey, part of the capital’s burgeoning pub-rock scene alongside Brinsley Schwarz and Ducks Deluxe. Rick Davies was a BMH fan, and clocked the drummer’s facility with a blues shuffle. Packing up his kit at The Kensington pub in west London one evening, Siebenberg was headhunted by Davies and Hodgson. The pair proposed “a blow” in the rehearsal-space basement of The Furniture Cave, an antique shop on Chelsea’s Kings Road.

“I was told later that they couldn’t bear to go through more formal auditions,” says Siebenberg. “I remember they were pleased I could nail the little ‘bap, bap!’ bits at the start of Bloody Well Right. They showed me that and Crime Of The Century and I was in.”

Supertramp were wondering whether to recruit a brass/woodwind player or a second guitarist. Guitar-wise, Siebenberg had a pal in mind: his future brother-in-law Scott Gorham. “We’d been best friends in Glendale [California] growing up,” the drummer says, “finishing each other’s sentences and playing in bands together. Scott was still working in a warehouse; I played him some early Supertramp demos and he really liked them. I said, ‘If you can follow me over to London...’”

But by the time Gorham arrived in 1974 the ship had sailed. Supertramp had recruited John Helliwell, whose multi-instrumentalist skills – and talent as a live MC who could compensate for Hodgson and Davies’ shyness between songs – make it impossible imagine the band’s classic era without him. Gorham joined Thin Lizzy that June. Fate, it seemed, knew best.

It was former A&M records man turned Supertramp manager Dave Margereson who suggested the new unit get it together in the country. He rented Southcombe, a spacious but primitive two-storey farmhouse near Thorncombe in Dorset for £20 a week. This canny move distanced Supertramp – plus their wives, children, pets and gifted sound engineer Russel Pope – 140 miles from record company interference.

“Dougie was down the hall with his wife and their brand-new baby,” says Siebenberg. “John and his wife Christine were upstairs; so was I. Rick and Roger had rooms downstairs. We ran all these cables through a room full of farm implements to the nook where Russel sat with our two-track and our little mixing console. All the wives got on; initially there was no tension from any quarter.”

“Everybody had brought their favourite records,” Helliwell adds. “So we were listening to The Dark Side Of The Moon, stuff by Procol Harum, Spooky Tooth and Loggins And Messina. I remember Bob wasn’t keen on the milk because it was straight from the cow. ‘Cholera juice,’ he called it! But me and Christine kept re-filling an empty bottle of pasteurised milk with it and he was none the wiser.”

New material, including Hodgson’s Hide In Your Shell, a pointedly honest song about loneliness and insecurity, was taking shape nicely; while Rudy, a song they’d played live for years that documented Davies’ own feelings of isolation and alienation, was being beautifully reshaped. “We didn’t have all the transitions between sections of different songs together yet,” Siebenberg says, “but you could feel the magic: all the potential we had following Rick and Roger’s lead. It was this peaceful, bonding time, with me and Rick taking long walks across the fields to the pub in our wellies.”

He also recalls a thunderstorm and a “too-close-for-comfort” lightning strike that blew the cottage’s telephone off the wall one night. It could have been an omen for what happened next. “The good vibes are flowing and the record company’s nurturing us – then Roger says he wants to pack it all in and go to India,” remembers the drummer. “It was like a hand grenade going off. Obviously Roger didn’t go that time, but it was a really weird vibe for a few days, rehearsing and knowing what he’d been thinking. John once said Roger was always trying to leave the band. I don’t know psychologically what that was about, but it’s true.”

Supertramp teamed up with producer Ken Scott to record Crime Of The Century at Trident studios and Ramport studios. His most recent production gigs had included David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. He’d initially been reticent to work with Supertramp after hearing some rather disjointed demos, but once he caught a live A&M Records showcase, he realised their huge potential. Less immediately apparent, though, was the complex inter-band dynamic that lurked beneath the surface. “We were all pretty friendly together, but there were certain factions,” says Helliwell. “Roger was probably more friendly with Ken and the lighting guys and Rick was more of a loner, more self-contained. I was friendly with everyone.”

Siebenberg adds: “I’d describe Rick and Roger’s relationship as one of healthy competition rather than rivalry. Roger has a posh voice and he had this privileged public schoolboy upbringing; Rick was a working-class kid from Swindon. Roger would talk about crop circles and UFOs he’d seen and Rick would say, ‘Yeah, right; pull the other one.’ They kind of filled in holes in each other’s personalities. Even back then Roger was a different kind of guy. We watched him change and move away from us down a path of spiritualism and Eastern philosophy.

“Roger was always searching for something and it was a serious business for him. We were fine with that, even if we poked fun at him initially. But by [1979’s] Breakfast In America – even before that, actually – it just wasn’t funny any more.”

After Crime Of The Century Hodgson would record four more studio albums with Supertramp. He quit the band when the tour for ...Famous Last Words... wrapped in September 1983. He released his first and most successful solo album, In The Eye Of The Storm, 12 months later. However, periodic speculation about the full classic line-up reforming circulated right up until Rick Davies’ death last year at the age of 81. Both Helliwell and Siebenberg miss him greatly. “Sadly there was no funeral,” says Helliwell.

“It was crushing,” says Siebenberg. “A world without Rick in it makes me want to fall down. He used to call me ‘The king of the hi-hat.’”

The pair were already been mourning Supertramp’s former manager Dave Margereson, who’d died a couple of weeks earlier. “Dougie and myself went to his funeral,” says Helliwell. “Unfortunately Bob couldn’t come because of work commitments.”

And Roger? “Roger is out there in the ether somewhere,” Helliwell adds, widening his eyes. “I don’t know if he’ll ever come down.” What chance is there of the remaining trio working with their former bandmate? “Highly unlikely,” he says. “He’s part of a religious organisation in Florida and doesn’t communicate.

“Well, we have had some contact – Dougie, Bob and myself took Roger to court a few years ago. It was actually quite nice to see him. There was an issue with the small amount of publishing royalties he and Rick had agreed to give us, which after a period of decades had stopped. We lost the case and it was ridiculously expensive. Then we appealed and won, but we’re still waiting. These things move slowly.”

Siebenberg is still gigging around Ventura and Santa Barbara, playing drums in Sleeping Chief. John Helliwell steps out with his Super Big Tramp Band and his Dutch jazz quartet Don’t Ever Leave Me. Both retain especially fond memories of Crime Of The Century, Supertramp’s big breakthrough. “It’s the beginning of the good period and I love the enigma of it,” says Helliwell. “What was the crime of that century?”

“It set a great standard for all of our records to come,” adds Siebenberg. “The camaraderie between us was still so great. It’s amazing what you can achieve when nobody cares who gets the credit!”

The Crime Of The Century Blu-ray is on sale now.

A pre-fame John Lydon may have famously scrawled ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ on a t-shirt, but behind the punk posturing lay an appreciation for music that pushed boundaries. While th likes of Yes and Genesis were off the menu, the then-Sex Pistols frontman championed the genre's more adventurous outer fringes, citing Hawkwind, Van der Graaf Generator and Krautrock pioneers Can as major influences.

The brand new issue of Prog magazine reveals just how far that admiration went. In an interview with Can co-founder Irmin Schmidt, the keyboardist reveals a tantalising ‘what if?’ moment in rock history: Lydon actively tried to join the band – and the only thing that stopped it was Can calling it quits.

“He was phoning and leaving messages at night, and he really wanted to become the singer of Can,” Schmidt tells Prog. “And I had to tell him, ‘It’s too late. We finished together. We don’t get onstage anymore.’ I know he wanted to sing with us, it was a brilliant idea. In life, there are situations where you can say, ‘What if?’ What would have happened if Johnny Rotten had become the singer? It’s an interesting thought.”

Irmin doesn’t specify when this happened, though Can split in 1978 – the same year Lydon left the Sex Pistols and abandoned his Johnny Rotten persona. That union may not have happened, but the singer’s next project, Public Image Ltd, shared Can’s boundary-pushing approach on albums such as First Issue and Metal Box.

Schmidt, who releases his new solo album, Requiem, on September 26, also address his view on the sometimes contentious ‘Krautrock’ tag, used to describe Can and countrymen such as Neu! and Kraftwerk.

“I don’t care about this term: it’s like lemonade, now it’s used all over the world,” Schmidt tells Prog. “There were a bunch of painters called the Fauvists, which was pejorative, but now nobody thinks about it. It’s just a category and journalists need categories.”

Read the full interview with Schmidt in the brand new issue of Prog, on sale now. Order it here and have it delivered to your door.

Before he became the fast-talking, weed-dealing half of slacker icons Jay And Silent Bob alongside childhood buddy-turned-movie director Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes grew up listening to hard rock and heavy metal. The Clerks/Mallrats/Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back star talks us through the albums that changed his life..

The First Album I Bought

King Diamond – Abigail (1987)

“My older brother used to buy all the tapes, and I learned what kind of metal I liked through him. So he used to loan me his tapes, but the first one I actually bought was Abigail. That album is my flying music! For some reason it eases me when I’m on a plane.”

The Album That Defines Metal

Slayer – Reign In Blood (1986)

“I would say Slayer, because they’re heavy but they’re not too heavy. I can listen to Death or Deicide, but there are a lot of people you’d play that to who would think, ‘Who is this guy? I can’t stand that screaming, I don’t like this!’ Slayer is still the harder side of metal, but you can still hear the words and enjoy it.”

The Album I Break The Speed Limit To

Sublime – Sublime (1996)

“I dunno about speeding, but I feel like my car music is dancehall and reggae! But for now let’s say Sublime – I know it’s not heavy metal, but I can picture myself breaking the speed limit to it. I know that doesn’t sound crazy but that’s what I listen to in the car!”

The Album No One Will Believe I Own A Copy Of

Björk – Post (1995)

“I’m trying to think what I have here… I have so much crap, ha ha ha! Stuff like Boys II Men, Oasis, The Cranberries… but let’s say Björk. It was when we were doing Mall Rats, there was this girl called Carmen who was really into them, and I really dug it.”

The Greatest Movie Soundtrack

Various - 8 Mile (2002)

“The soundtrack was so good that I actually wanted to go out and buy the CD. 8 Mile! It wasn’t just Eminem on there, but I definitely like Eminem.”

The Album I Wish I’d Made

Ozzy Osbourne – Blizzard Of Ozz (1980)

“I think you can go to the smallest island in the middle of nowhere, where people are washing their clothes in a river, and they’ll still know who Michael Jackson is – and I feel like Ozzy’s pretty close to that, too. So, I would say I wish I made Blizzard Of Ozz because I think Black Sabbath and Ozzy are amazing, but I also think that Ozzy is known all over the place.”

The Album That Should Not Be

The White Stripes – Elephant (2003)

“I always feel like there’s at least one good song on every album. When burning CDs came in, that was amazing to me, because I don’t really like every song on an album! I like the White Stripes’ song Seven Nation Army, but when I got the album I didn’t like any other song on it. But you can’t hate on that, or any artist who puts out a whole album.”

The Album That Has Soundtracked My Life

The Beatles – Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

“I would say The Beatles, if it’s going through my life. There were times I was on drugs on and off, and I remember their song Strawberry Fields Forever was really trippy. With all the songs they had, you could probably put a montage of my life to that, ha ha ha!”

The Album I Want Played At My Funeral

The Beatles – Help (1965)

“If I have friends and family there, they have to be able to tolerate it. So let’s say The Beatles. I think most people can get into a Beatles song… Ticket To Ride! A ticket to ride to the pearly gates!”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 231 (May 2012)

First of all, Bat Out Of Hell isn’t even the best song on the album. But it is the title track, and therefore the most representative of that mammoth, life-changing, world-eating magnum opus. Is there any other album ever produced that is viewed so favourably as one recognisable, self-standing entity? Did it even need singles? It was meant to be devoured in one ravenous sitting, and that’s exactly how we all did it.

If anything represents the concept of “album rock”, it’s Bat Out Of Hell. It is album rock. And it’s probably the greatest stand-alone rock album ever made. It’s also completely ridiculous, albeit in the best way possible. Consider the source: Meat Loaf, a sweaty, overweight leather-lunged theatre kid hungry for an arena, and Jim Steinman, the piano-plinking, black-gloved, Wagner-worshipping trickster who wanted to create immortal rock'n'roll death operas.

"Meat was the most mesmerising thing I'd ever seen," Steinman told Classic Rock. "He was much bigger than he is now; he was fucking huge, and since I grew up with (German composer Richard) Wagner, all my heroes were larger than life. His eyes went into his head, like he was transfixed. [At the audition], he sang "You gotta give your heart to Jesus"… I can seem arrogant at times because I'm certain of things and I was certain of him."

In any other era, they’d be sent to the loony bin or the unemployment line. Instead, they were locked in a room with Todd Rundgren, and gold was inexplicably spun in vast quantities.

Of course, no one knew it at first. Here’s the crazy part. Well, the crazier part. Bat-the-album was released in 1977. Bat-the-single wasn’t released until two years later. And let us not forget it’s 10 minutes long (sure, there’s a four-and-a-half minute radio edit, but everybody knows that one is bullshit). Bat is completely inexplicable in every way, and yet it was perfect for the time, place, emotions and parlances of the day. 1979 demanded Bat Out Of Hell, and when it finally got it, it steamed up countless cars blasting the song at make-out points all over the US and the UK.

The structure is your basic teenage death ballad, complete with leather-clad street gangs, gleaming motorcycles, a breathlessly beautiful teenage virgin, and ‘even young boys down in the gutter’ foaming from the heat. Who knew you could foam from heat?

It starts out as a theatrical piano ballad, but you just know from the first chord that it’s eventually going to explode into an orgy of over-amped hard rock madness, and that’s just what it does. It entangles you in its drama, shakes you back and forth like a wolf with a rabbit, and leaves you bloody, bruised, and thoroughly satisfied. Steinman originally wrote it for a Peter Pan musical. We should all be eminently thankful that Meat showed up in his life.

"I never really saw classical music and rock 'n' roll as different. I still don't," Steinman told Classic Rock. "I grew up liking extremes in music - big gothic textures. I never have much regard for more subtle stuff. Dire Straits may be good, but it just doesn't do it for me. I was attracted to William Blake, Hieronymus Bosch, I couldn't see the point in writing songs about ordinary, real-life stuff."