Sandwiched between a highly anticipated opening set for Spoon at Central Park Summerstage and the Oct. 9 release of its fourth album, NYC quintet Bodega came to Elsewhere Rooftop last week for another hometown show.

For the first time in its 10-year career, the band recorded outside of New York and headed to Leeds, England, to make “All Inside Aquarium,” which will be released on Chrysalis, to track in a deconsecrated church.

Despite its reputation as a post-punk group, the goal for the LP, says Bodega’s Ben Hozie, was: “Let’s go back to melodic tunes, let’s be more of a proper rock band.” Sonically, the band aimed for “this late ‘80s/early ‘90s Stone Roses-meets-Jane’s Addiction thing, with more riffing and guitar solos.”

A first single, “Pick Up The Check,” was released in May, followed by the title track and video.

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It’s a gloomy morning in Dumbo, Brooklyn, when Beatrix arrives for an interview. The first thing we talk about is death. You see, one night earlier, during a spellbinding performance at Sleepwalk in East Williamsburg, she introduced an unreleased song called “Grow Wings” by telling the audience about her deep fear of her life ending.

“Death is my worst fear, and it’s something that I really like to avoid thinking about,” says Beatrix, whose real name is Arielle Kasnetz. “Anytime you really do think about it too much, you just kind of end up having a panic attack, and it’s not great. But I found with music that it kind of bypasses some sort of fear mechanism within me and goes to a much deeper place of acceptance. So I don’t know; I’m trying to tap into the place that feels most peaceful within me, which is where I go when I write. It’s kind of my safe space to explore anything that scares me, and this happens to be my worst fear. So it’s taken me a second to be able to confront it.

“It’s not any less terrifying because I’m exploring it. I just think it’s important to look at the things that scare us.”

The New Jersey-born, Los Angeles-based artist is working on her third album, the follow-up to the haunting “We Swallowed the Sky,” released earlier this year. A classically trained vocalist, Beatrix draws on her academic background, an affinity for artists like the Canadian singer-songwriter Andy Shauf and life experiences, some of them dark, such as a physical attack that triggered a near-death experience. Her atmospherics and lyrics can feel otherworldly, but they are grounded in reality.

“We Swallowed the Sky” was inspired by the end of a romantic relationship. The forthcoming LP, she says, will move away from that theme.

“The new stuff is not about that relationship at all. I feel like I’ve gotten out everything that I wanted to say, and that’s why it felt appropriate to call it an album and put these songs together in such a way that it’s just like I’m exorcising this period of time and putting it all together, and I don’t feel like I need to write about that anymore after this. I paid many therapists over the course of 10 years, and none of them helped me as much.”

Before attending Vanderbilt, where she studied voice, Beatrix grew up in Short Hills. Her earliest musical memory is from when she was 3 years old.

“My mom played ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ on our stereo system, and I remember finding the volume knob and realizing that I could turn it up and make it make it really loud. So I put it on full blast and I was running around the house, pretending I was a bumblebee. So classical music was a very early influence for me. My grandma loved opera. She loved Pavarotti. And then whenever I would go to my dad’s parents’ house, my other set of grandparents, my nana really loved musical theater and to entertain me she would roll out this TV set and play this old tape of ‘Cats’ on Broadway. So I loved the musical ‘Cats,’ like this kind of darker sound. And then I was a big choir kid growing up, so I was in choir outside of school. I did all-state, I did all national, I did region, I was just very, very into choir.”

However, early piano lessons — her parents’ idea — did not keep her engaged. “I could not pay attention and sit still for that long,” she says. “I remember sitting with my teacher, and she had two cats and I would just get up and go pet the cats. It was just a waste of my parents’ money.”

She moved to vocal lessons after she became obsessed with “Annie.” “I wanted to be Annie so badly,” Beatrix recalls. “I was like, ‘Mom, take me to an audition, please,’ and she didn’t do that. But I begged for voice lessons and I started when I was 8.”

The pandemic hit during the middle of her senior year of college. She moved back home to New Jersey, and with not much to do, started learning guitar — she could already play piano. She moved to LA in 2022, where she started writing her own songs.

Asked if her early love for classical music and her academic training have shaped her sound, she says:

“I’m influenced by everything I’ve ever heard in my whole life, you know? But I think you can trace it. You know, ‘Cats’ was the first kind of dark inkling of something that I was attracted to in music and classical music, a lot of it. Also I’m Jewish, so I grew up going to synagogue and a lot of that music is very somber, so I think that has had an influence in some of some of what I’m drawn to in music.”

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The third LP, “EVEN WITH MY EYES CLOSED,” will be released Oct. 23. A new single, “ALL THE WAY DOWN,” is out today, and she’s announced a tour that will hit Mercury Lounge, with The Women’s National Hockey League, on Nov. 2.  

“The [previous] albums have been just collections of songs that I’ve written from random moments in my life and were kind of thrown together in a piecemeal sort of way that didn’t allow for any cohesion or unifying theme,” she says. “That was identified after the album was already recorded.”

For the new record, her first since “Hive Mind” in 2023, she told her co-producer, Bryan Vanderpool at Golden Bear Studios in Des Moines: “I want to make a dream pop-inspired record, and I want to approach it like the artists that I admire seem to approach theirs, as a cohesive project.

“So the through lines of this are sort of nostalgia. It’s writing the music that I liked to listen to in my late teens and early 20s growing up in the Midwest suburbs with all of the fun stuff, all of the exciting moments of that, but also all of the kind of hard bittersweetness of that as well.”

I recently chatted with DeTaeye while she was at home in Iowa rehearsing with he band. Here are some highlights of our conversation.

Where did “ALL THE WAY DOWN” come from?

So “ALL THE WAY DOWN” is positioned near the top of the record. And this was inspired by a book. That’s like my other life, I work for a book publisher, so literature is like a large part of my life. It was inspired by a book originally, but when we started building it out sonically, it felt very much like a song that I would have pumped through my car driving home from college or like over summer break with all my windows down. It’s very high energy and it feels like a belting song in the way that I’m trying to think of some examples, but the lyrics are bitter.

There’s a track on the album called “Love You, Bye Babe,” which is a recording of a voice mail. Who is speaking?

So that’s my aunt. We lost her last year, unfortunately. Her name is Sharon, she was one of my biggest supporters, like from the time that I started. So putting out the record, I mean, it was kind of a twinkle in my eye. She knew I kind of wanted to do something and she was at every show that she could have been at. It felt like a good fit to be able to memorialize her. I mean, truly, I had this voicemail that I didn’t know what to do with. It was kind of like my last part of her. I didn’t know how to save it so that I would always be able to listen to it. And so as we’re talking about nostalgia and revisiting earlier times in your life, she is a large part of that for me. so it felt like a good segue into some of the more bitter nostalgic moments near the end of the record. And then also selfishly, it’s like a way that I know I’ll always be able to listen.

The songs are very atmospheric and sonically rich. How do you start a song and how does it end up sounding the way it does when we hear it on the album?

They all start just with me and one instrument, whether that be acoustic guitar or piano. And then for the pre-production for this record, it was a lot of me sitting in GarageBand on my laptop building out the harmonies. I was a choir kid growing up, so I love to stack the harmonies and use that as sort of an instrument. And then Bryan just has this incredible ear for building atmosphere and harmony, so then a lot of that just comes from playing in the studio together as well. And my favorite figure to throw out about this, because it’s kind of incredible for us, is we recorded the bulk of the record over the course of two and a half weeks in late 2025, early 2026, and we ended up putting in like 100 hours over the course of, wow, three weeks. So it was truly just a lot of like fucking around in the studio, which is exactly what I wanted. I wanted it to feel pretty organic and everything recorded one after the other and cohesive. And I think we did that and I couldn’t have done that without Bryan. He’s amazing.

What were some challenges or adjustments you dealt with when you moved from Iowa to New York?

I mean, I was prepared, I had a lot of friends that lived there before, past or present. I was told the pace of the city is different, but I don’t think you can truly understand that until you’re going to work there and going out. And I remember the first few months living there, I would get home from work and then needing to stop at like a grocery store on my way home and just getting home and truly feeling exhausted, right? Just becaus everything takes longer, and the social energy of just being in the proximity of so many people, it cannot be stated how you need to build up your stamina for that, right? So yeah, that was very shocking to me. And so now I feel like I’m in shape, I can do it, amd I don’t feel like I have to collapse on the floor.

What are some Midwestern traits you have that will never change?

I’m actually in the Midwest right now for band practice and stuff, and I am going to the Iowa State Fair like three times this week. So I love the Midwestern urge to celebrate anything and everything. I think I have that. I think I can be a little passive aggressive. I won’t lie, I think that dies hard. But ultimately I just think that people are genuinely very accommodating. At least the people that I grew up around. There’s a sense of community and genuine goodwill that you have towards other people. And I hope that I embody that.

Photo by Hannah Rosalie Wright

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Shelley is happy to speak about Sonic Youth, and it’s part of his job as the head of the band’s record labels Sonic Youth Recordings (SYR) and Goofin’. But he speaks with just as much enthusiasm – possibly more – about his parade of current projects that follow in the spirit, if not always the sound, of his famous band.

There’s Riviera Gaz, the multinational trio with Gustavo Riviera and Paulo Kishimoto, who today release their second album, “Catacroma,” on Shelley’s label (yes, there’s another label he operates) Vampire Blues.

There’s Sick Gazelle, comprised of Bruce Lamont, Eric Block, Shelley, and Tortoise bassist Douglas McCombs, which in June released its sophomore record, “Veld,” also on Vampire Blues.

There’s Winged Wheel, the “experimental super-band” that released its third album, “Desert So Green,” at the beginning of 2026. And there’s Cat Casual and the Final Word, the Brooklyn-based psych rock group he’s been gigging and recording with since the late 2010s.

How does Shelley decide whether to accept an offer to work on a new project?

“I guess if I like the people, I would say yeah. And if I like the people and something about about the music that I felt I could contribute to, then then I’m usually in, and my schedule, even though you think I’m busy, my schedule is pretty free, so I’m able to do stuff these days.”

Shelley recently chatted with us during a late-night phone interview about his philosophies as a musician and record label operator, how Riviera Gaz, Sick Gazelle and Winged Wheel made their newest albums and the day-to-day of running Sonic Youth’s labels.

When you are recording your parts, are you concerned about sounding too much like you did on another project?

Not so much. I try and open my mind and avoid anything that I might have done the last time, which is maybe the hardest thing of playing in multiple band, just freeing my mind. I know with with some of the Winged Wheel recording, I took a microdose of mushrooms and that that was really, really helpful, and not that it changed me or anything, but it changed my hang-ups, and so I felt much more at ease, you know, playing with new people, and I wasn’t as self-critical while recording, and that felt really good. But I wouldn’t recommend that to everyone.

Was that the first time you had done that when recording?

Yeah. It was. It didn’t make me a better musician, but it helped me not beat myself up. When you get together with new people, you’re searching and you want it to be good, and you have a desire for all these things.

Riviera Gaz

I understand that Riviera Gaz material usually starts with songs Gustavo brings in. How did this work on the new album “Catacroma?”

It still started a lot with his songs, but we kind of dissected them for a year and a half over long-distance mixing, so Paulo mixed a good deal of the record, if not most of it. So we did a lot of arranging long-distance I guess.

How did you initially connect with these guys?

Paulo had been in this group called Forgotten Boy. That was Gustavo’s main band, so they had been doing that for a while, and Paulo was brought in as an auxiliary guy, I think he was playing keyboards and extra stuff. They went on hiatus and Paulo and Gustavo were not busy, so they start this side project called Riviera Gaz, and when I was in Brazil, they invited me to work on it. So we started working on these recordings together. And the reason that I knew Paulo was I had been visiting Brazil for a few years either with Lee’s solo group or Thurston’s solo group, and Paulo and I had been introduced by a mutual friend, and whenever I had a day off in Sao Paulo, Paulo and I would drive around and he’d show me the city and we’d go to these really strange places to eat. Eating can be a big part of getting in a group or playing with someone too. So food was a big angle for how we started off.

It’s funny, because Paulo and Gustavo live in Sao Paulo and we would compare notes. You know, it seemed like Bolsonaro was in office, but then we had Biden but then then Trump’s back in office and Bolsonaro was in prison. So we had been comparing notes on our fearless leaders and so on.

Sick Gazelle

Was “Veld” more of an improvisational situation than the previous record or kind of the same process?

Kind of the same, maybe a little bit more mapped out? Because we had Doug joining us for the first time. We had a bass; I forget if he played Fender six some of the time, but he was grounding us, obviously, in that bass way, so I felt like we were refined a little bit. It became a little bit more song-like even though they were very much the immediate compositions. They weren’t worked on that week or anything, they were worked on that day.

And you’ve known Doug since the ‘80s, right?

Yeah. I met Doug when I was still living in, when I was a drummer living in Michigan.

Had you done much work together before Sick Gazelle?

No, I don’t think we’d recorded together. We might have played together, but I don’t think we’d ever recorded.

How did adding a bass to the band impact the way you approach your drum parts?

Oh, I love it. It was great. It gave me a lot more freedom and it gave me a lot more of something to tie together. So both of those I enjoyed, and even playing back the record, like a couple days ago, I just love hearing Doug’s tone, and his choices are always like, “yeah, that’s a good choice.” He’s really easy to listen to.

Winged Wheel

How did you meet Cory Plump, from the bar and venue Tubby’s, who is a member of Winged Wheel?

I think I emailed Cory and asked him for a gig at Tubby’s. Like at the end of Covid, I was playing with Ernie Brooks from The Modern Lovers, we had a combo called Tape Hiss, and we were playing like street fairs and stuff in New York because bands were still playing outside and we weren’t really gigging indoors yet. And I had hit up Cory to see if we could play up there, and we became friends and several of my bands went up there to play, and he invited me to come to this Winged Wheel session in Kingston. I didn’t know him that well and he was surprised that I said yes. And so we went up and we recorded for a day and a half in in Kingston for that record. The “Big Hotel” record.

Tell me about how you guys made “Desert So Green.”

That was a little bit of everything. We actually went to Eric Block’s studio from Sick Gazelle and we recorded for two afternoons, so that was kind of more hi-fi than what we had worked with before. And Fred [Thomas] took that stuff home and people either flew in odds and vocals or he grabbed things from our studio recordings. So it’s a real mishmash but just lovely recording. I love what he did with it. It’s one of my favorite records that I’ve appeared on.

What is your mission statemen for your label Vampire Blues?

Just to put out fun, weird stuff.

Are you finding a resurgence in physical sales or anything or is digital still the primary way where people are getting this music?

I think it’s changing. It’s constantly changing. A vinyl scene or physical seems to be on an upswing, but it’s not anything like it was for me in the ‘90s. So yeah, it’s strong out there right now, and there’s lots of things to do, but it’s a fraction of what it was before the digital revolution. So it’s different, it just keeps changing. You know, you gotta roll with it.

Are you doing everything yourself with the label or do you have some staff?

I don’t have staff, I have help once in a while, but I do all the physical stuff.

You’re also running the two Sonic Youth labels, SYR and Goofin’. What are the philosophies of each label? How do you operate these entities?

So they’re all basically the same, they just have different names and they just have different styles of material. Like SYR was mostly instrumental stuff for a long, long time. There is some vocal stuff in there, but it’s mostly instrumental stuff. And Goofin’ was we started reissuing our official records when we got the licensing back from various labels, and so “Bad Moon Rising” and “Evol” and “Sister” or “Daydream Nation” are all on Goofin’, which is they’re basically the same office, right, SYR or Goofin’, and we’ve been working on an archive for Sonic Youth lately. And so there’s been these archival reissues and Ethan [Miller] put one out on his label that was really, really well-done called “Live in Brooklyn,” and then the next year, Ethan helped me put out this “Walls Have Ears” double live record on [Goofin’].

Is there a physical office for SYR and Goofin’?

Sort of. Yeah. In my apartment.

How are the other Sonic Youth members involved when it comes to the labels? Do you have the keys to do this however you want, or is there an occasional check-in?

Well, yes and no. They’re all involved. They all listen and agree on anything that we put out, so I don’t just do whatever I want. But they don’t order records or get them to the distributor or, you know, talk to the publicist or things like that.

What does it feel like to be the archivist of your own music and what is it like to hear this stuff from years ago when you’re going through it?

I think more sort of just being a bit of a caretaker of some of this stuff. We have a tape room, so there’s a of lot of physical stuff that we do take care of, but I’m sort of more interested in the relics that might be useful to us and other people, so I’m not into just hoarding or storing stuff.

Sometimes it’s really surprising and you forget that something was well recorded and it sounds really great. It’s fun at times. Sometimes it’s not, sometimes it’s boring, it’s hard to listen to your own band hundreds of times. There’s a lot of recordings that aren’t special and just like you kind of have to trawl through them.

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“The misconceptions out there just keep multiplying because of the internet,” notes Lawrence Gowan, singer and keyboardist with the group since 1999. “I’m not disparaging of it. We wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t for it. But I think misconceptions are one of the vital things that drive a band forward these days.”

He surmises there are two types of people who come to see Styx, like those turning up to see the band’s current gigs co-headlining with Chicago, dubbed The Windy Cities Tour: diehards who “know more than we do” about the band, and “the great other portion that know less than we do, which makes us feel a little bit smart” in comparison, he jokes.

“The majority of people, and this is just my guess, they just love classic rock and the notion that they can go and see a band that they’ve probably heard of all their life, like Styx or obviously Chicago or Foreigner, all these various bands, Def Leppard. They’re not into the minutia of what it is to kind of get that band to the stage and what all the elements are. They just want to hear those songs and they want a great rock show.

“My little philosophy is there’s no better entertainment than I’ve ever encountered than a great rock show and Styx, and now I’ve seen Chicago, they’re able to do that and make people happy. I can see people in the front row that aren’t even close to 30 years of age who are singing all the words to the songs and weren’t even born in that era.”

He notes that “Crash of the Crown,” the group’s 2021 album, reached the top of the Billboard Rock Albums chart, but a lot of people don’t know that. “We actually have to mention it in the show because there’s a misconception: They haven’t made any records [recently]. Well, here’s the number one from Billboard just in the last few years.

“And it’s OK. It’s not like we’re giving an exam before you come in. But I think the show helps to dispel a lot of those, as you put it, misconceptions, because people then retroactively go back and start to really kind of dig into it, because that’s what happens after I’ve seen a great show, I start digging into this band that I would have seen and I get to know a lot more about them.”

Styx released its 18th album “Circling From Above” just about a year ago, its first record to feature Will Evankovich and Terry Gowan, Lawerence’s brother, as members. It is a concept album in the progressive rock tradition and features writing from all seven members.

“The great thing about Styx is they had a wide musical palette all along,” says Gowan. “First of all, they were the first progressive band that I ever noticed that were not from the UK and were being successful. But you’ve got this progressive side, you’ve got this heavy rock side, and then you’ve got this pop sensibility to where they can mash all that together into a very catchy song with lyrics that you can easily relate to at any time. And that to me, that’s a great band, long before I came into it.

“The writing team is now primarily myself, Tommy Shaw, Will Evankovich, and Will and Tommy write some songs together without my involvement, but about half the album. We each have our little tug of war. I want the progressive side of it as much as possible. Tommy definitely has the commercial aspects of it and what’s going to really communicate directly with people, which is a great gift that he has. And Will is kind of right in the middle with amazing ideas and tremendous production opportunities that present themselves depending on where the song is getting pulled. So that seems to be working when all three of us end up with a smile on our face and then when the other guys come in and go, ‘I really like this song,’ and then they add their significant contributions. That’s kind of where the band is today.

“And honestly, I look at my favorite Styx album from the past, which is ‘Pieces of Eight,’ and there’s a record that really strikes that balance to me incredibly well. It’s progressive. It’s musically adventurous, really relatable. And I look for that in the last three albums I’ve done, I think we’ve kind of found that balance in this new millennium with the records that sound like they’re from the classic rock era.”

Gowan has been playing with his younger brother since 1985. The elder Gowan’s second album went to the top of the charts in their native Canada, and within a few weeks he was asked to open for The Kinks at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. The players on the album included bassist Tony Levin, drummer Jerry Marotta and guitarist David Rhodes, all from Peter Gabriel’s band, but they were working on a new Gabriel record and unavailable for the show.  

“So suddenly Terry comes home, he’s got a Chapman stick, and he learned to play the whole thing. And I’m like, holy shit, I guess I guess it’s going to be you. He was only 19 at the time.”

In 2010, when the elder brother rebooted the project he simply calls Gowan, Terry and Styx drummer Todd Sucherman formed the rhythm section and developed a tight bond. So when Styx was looking for a bass player after Ricky Phillips left the group in 2024, “Todd immediately suggested Terry. And then I heard from Will, because Will said, ‘Yeah, he might be a really good choice. I hear really great things about him.’ And I stood back. I just kind of went, yeah, well, just hear him play the stuff and see if you want him.

“And then basically he nailed that. First time we played together perfectly, we never even repeated one song. It was like the quickest run-through of a show we’ve ever done, and he was note-perfect and kind of has been ever since. Actually, he might have made a mistake about 100 shows ago, which I have yet to point out. I’m keeping that one in the bank. As an older brother, you always have to keep that card and play it when you really need it.”

Chuck Panozzo, the band’s original bassist, is still a member of the band but only performs sporadically due to health issues after having been diagnosed with HIV in 1991. His twin brother John, the group’s original drummer, died 30 years ago.

“Chuck comes out for usually two, three songs right now, and on this tour, he’s coming out toward the end of the show so we can play that card at the very end. The band started in his house with him and his brother John and Dennis DeYoung. It really comes down to when he’s got the energy, because he loves doing these shows. I have to honestly say as well, he and Terry really bonded over the bass parts on these songs. Chuck was really pleased with Terry’s approach, and that’s continued on, and the two of them kind of go back and forth with various notions and whatever bass players talk about, and that’s been really great to see. His enthusiasm hasn’t dampened one bit. He’ll always be part of the band.”

Styx and Chicago have shows this week in Texas and Oklahoma and will wind toward the west coast for four dates in California, including at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles on Sept. 6.

Earlier this month, Styx announced it will return to Miramar Beach, Fla., for the second annual Rockin’ In Paradise With Styx & Friends Beach Weekend, Oct. 8-10 2026. The weekend will feature two Styx performances as well as sets by Tesla, The Marshall Tucker Band, 38 Special, The Outlaws, Jefferson Starship, Edwin McCain and Yacht Rock Revue.

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The touring outfit, taking its name from Allman Brothers Band album “A Decade of Hits 1969–1979,” will again be led by The Allman Betts Band, featuring Devon Allman and Duane Betts, the sons of ABB founding members Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts. A revolving cast of guests will include Robert Randolph, Sierra Hull, Judith Hill, Andy Frasco, Luther Dickinson, Jimmy Hall, Steel Beans, Larry McCray, Cody Dickinson, Alex Orbison, Abby Stahlschmidt and more.

Each show will feature two sets: the first will honor the ABB’s original lineup and its songs from the 1970s, while the second will focus on the group’s 1990s output.

Speaking to Highway 81 Revisited in 2024 to promote his solo album “Miami Moon,” Devon Allman called the Allman Betts Band “a really good home base that we can always kind of activate when we want to. If we want to take a year or two for ourselves, we can. … I think it’s in a really sweet spot. We’re not clobbering it over the head.”

A few years earlier, Betts described his approach to playing live in an interview with Highway 81 Revisited at the time the Allman Betts Band was releasing its debut album, “Bless Your Heart.” “I just try to have fun,” he said. “When I’m playing, I  just want to create melodies on the spot. If I do that, I feel like I’m doing my job. Just give me a canvas, and one night I’ll do something completely different, knowing that my goal is to kind of back myself into a corner and try to get out of that corner. Try to be a Houdini and get out of a trap I set for myself. That’s when I’m really having fun.”

Tickets and more info are available at AllmanBettsFamilyRevival.com.

The post ALLMAN BETTS FAMILY REVIVAL RETURNS FOR 10th YEAR appeared first on Highway 81 Revisited.

“When I went to see Deep Purple and when I went to see Yes, I never looked at them and thought that I could do it,” Hook, a founding member of Joy Division and New Order, says in a video call from his home in Alderley Edge, south of Manchester. “Never in a million years did I think it. And when I read about them, I used to read the music papers incessantly, I never thought that I could do that. Never.”

This changed in 1976, when he witnessed the Sex Pistols at Free Trade Hall in Manchester, a gig that has gained legendary status because the future members of Joy Division, Buzzcocks, The Smiths, The Fall and Simply Red were there.

“The only thing that attracted me to the Sex Pistols was that the newspapers were reporting that they had a fight at every gig. And I was like, you know, it’s not something you’d expect Jimmy Page or ELP to do. I thought that was weird. And it felt more like my world, which was struggle for survival.”

The musicianship of the Pistols that night was not what inspired him.

“I thought they were fucking terrible,” he says. “They sounded awful. And Johnny Rotten just kept telling us all to fuck off. ‘Fuck off, fuck off, Manc bastards. Fuck off.’ And I thought I could do that. I could tell everyone to fuck off.”

Hook has harnessed that punk spirit for 50 years, as the bassist and a main songwriter for the short-lived but monumental Joy Division as well as New Order, the pioneering synth-pop group who has sold millions of records.

His history also includes the Manchester nightclub The Haçienda, a partnership between Factory and New Order. He’s been depicted in “Control,” the Anton Corbijn film about the late Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, and “24 Hour Party People,” the 2004 comedy about the Manchester musical community, centered on Tony Wilson of Factory Records, the label behind Joy Division, New Order and groups like Happy Mondays, A Certain Ratio and The Durutti Column.

The bassist also has written three books: “The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club,” “Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division” and “Substance: Inside New Order.”

His band Peter Hook & The Light will perform at Brooklyn Paramount on Sept. 5 on a tour that is to feature performances of New Order’s 2001 album “Get Ready” in full along with additional material from New Order, Joy Division and other Hook projects, such as Monaco. Fans can get a feel for the tour, which will include a stop at Union Transfer in Philadelphia on Sept. 7, on the recently released live album “’Get Ready’ Live at O2 Victoria Warehouse Manchester.”

The covers of New Order’s “Get Ready” (2001) and Peter Hook & The Light’s “‘Get Ready’ Live at O2 Victoria Warehouse Manchester” (2026)

In November Hook will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Joy Division and New Order, the latter of which has been performing without him; Hook left New Order in 2007 and the remaining members Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert reformed the group in 2011.

“Get Ready” was a pivotal album for New Order, who had gone eight years since releasing an album, “Republic,” which was a commercial success but strained the relationships within the band to a breaking point. Hook says working on “Get Ready” with singer and guitarist Sumner, known to his mates as Barney, rekindled the pair’s partnership.

“It reminded me of those days when I turned up at his gran’s house with my bass and him with his guitar, just sat there playing,” says Hook. “It actually came down to that level. Barney had been off doing Electronic. I’d been off doing Revenge and I’d just gone into Monaco. So the thing is we’d both been very busy in our own rights, but to actually come together was like a second honeymoon. And even though I joke about it by saying once the sex was gone, it was over, it was a fantastic time for us to work together. And I will unashamedly say it rekindled our friendship and we became very, very close over the making of ‘Get Ready,’ which made it very pleasurable.”

The album opens with “Crystal,” built on a heavy guitar riff that announced that New Order was no longer the strictly synthesizer-dominated group of “Republic.” As proof that the band was still influential more than 20 years on, a young Brandon Flowers would suggest his band call themselves The Killers, after the name on the bass drum of the fake band in the song’s music video.

Hook recalls how producer Steve Osborne, whom he credited with keeping him and Sumner both involved in the recording of the album, helped turn the song into a rocker.

“I remember being woken up at 4 in the morning by Steve Osborne, who said to me, ‘OK, we’ve changed “Crystal,” because ‘Crystal’ was actually quite a little bit — I hope he doesn’t mind me saying it, Barney — but an insipid sort of electro song. And he changed it and he said to me, ‘You’ve got to come on and put some bass on it.’ And I’m going, ‘Mate, it’s 4 in the morning. I’ve been asleep for two hours.’ He said, ‘No, you’ve got to do it now. You’ve got to do it now.’ And he made me go in the studio and we got the bass break and got the low bass on it, and it turned into the great song that it is.

“I had not had a moment like that with New Order for a long time. We didn’t enjoy making ‘Movement.’ I suppose ‘Power, Corruption and Lies’ would be the closest we were. But we got further and further apart, for whatever reason, up to and including ‘Republic,’ when we couldn’t have been further apart. Each one of us had been in a different bleeding studio.”

New Order’s chaotic existence was born out of the tragedy and shock of the death of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, who died by suicide in 1980. Joy Division had released its seminal debut “Unknown Pleasures” in 1979 and “Closer,” in 1980, followed after Curtis’ death. The band was about to tour America for the first time when Curtis died.

“From a third LP point of view, we were on ‘In a Lonely Place,’ we were on ‘Ceremony,’ both fantastically, diversely different songs, but both great songs in their own right,” Hook says. “We also had a song called ‘ICB’ going as Joy Division — I’ve got a tape with Ian singing on it — which we used as New Order. So there’s three tracks for the next LP that were very up to standard. I think the thing that I would love to imagine is that we would have been as big as The Doors, and I think if we could have made it to America and got Ian over that hump,

“I think even if Ian and Joy Division wouldn’t have lasted, I would love to be able to sit here and have you ask me, ‘Oh, and what’s Ian Curtis up to now?’ and for me to say, ‘Oh, he’s got a bookshop in Brighton.’ You know, I would love to be able to say that, but it’s just not happened.”

With both bands set to take their place in the Hall of Fame, Hook notes: “The weird thing about Joy Division is that New Order actually succeeded in dragging themselves out of the ashes by ignoring Joy Division, and ignoring Joy Division did not keep it down. And I think I can safely say now that Joy Division are as well known, if not more well known in some quarters, than New Order. More appreciated than New Order in many quarters.”

He says he and the other New Order members were united in promoting the band’s candidacy for the Hall of Fame when they were first nominated in 2023 but his former colleagues did not back the subsequent nominations in 2025 and 2026.

“But the fans did it anyway, and I must give them every accolade for doing that,” Hook says. “That’s what I expect from a fan. I expect tenacity, I expect loyalty, and I expect joy in finally converting somebody to thinking how good the group that you love is, because I am exactly the same. So I am delighted by it. I’m really looking forward to getting in there. I don’t know what the hell’s going to happen. As far as I know, the others aren’t coming.”

Hook is thrilled, however, that his daughter and son, who plays in The Light as well as Smashing Pumpkins, will be attending. The Pumpkins have a gig in LA on Nov. 12 and the induction ceremony is two days later.

He’ll also be sharing Manchester pride with Oasis, who will be inducted in the same class of honorees.

One of the group’s first gigs as Oasis after changing their name and with Noel Gallagher having newly joined his brother Liam’s band was as a support act for Hook’s group Revenge at Middleton Hippodrome in Manchester in the early ‘90s.

“I remember talking to Liam at the gig and he went, ‘We got our kid in the band now. I changed the name.’ They were called Rain before that. They were shite, and we were shite, funnily enough. So we were all in good company on that particular night. And I keep reminding Noel in the hope of getting a support gig, but it seems to fall on deaf ears. We might be appearing in one of these nights at Knebworth.” (Oasis is rumored to be playing a record six-night stretch at London’s Knebworth Park, south of London, in 2027.)

“I’m very happy they’ve put Manchester back on the map and they’ve put The Haçienda back on the map. It all helps our reputation, if you like. So yeah, I’m absolutely fine. And I think that Noel as a songwriter is fantastic, and I think that Liam as a front man is fantastic. I’m happy to be there. I think we’re in good company.”

The post PETER HOOK REFLECTS ON NEW ORDER, JOY DIVISION AND ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME INDUCTION appeared first on Highway 81 Revisited.

The Delaware-based blues guitarist and singer JP Reali adds his spice to the stew this summer with a new EP called “Grateful Blues.” The six songs are what you’d want from a tribute: recognizable but not rote. Reali’s love for the Dead’s music shines through the six tracks, and he and his musicians’ facility with the blues makes them sing anew.

“Easy Wind” is an easy choice for a blues record, and Reali and company deliver, taking the old Pigpen-sung tune in some new directions. The drum-and-bass groove, lead piano and tasty backing vocals, make “Loose Lucy” as fun as ever. 

“West LA Fadeaway” is a standout. A repeated organ line in the verses adds a sense of foreboding to the latter-era Dead tune, and Reali’s solo comps the melody of the vocals and sounds very little like the way Garcia played. “I Need a Miracle” puts an even bluesier foundation down than the original. The last minute of the tune is a platform for Reali to solo before he double-times into a sweet surprise of a few measures of “Bertha.”

“Mr. Charlie,” like “Easy Wind,” was a blues tune before Reali got his hands on it, but he still finds a way to bring something new to it. His plain vocals are well-suited for the storytelling nature of the song, here and on all of the tracks, and are mixed in a way that they don’t take a backseat to the instruments, which sometimes happened with the Dead, especially in concert.

For “Tennessee Jed,” Reali switches to an acoustic guitar, which he plucks over a stomping drum beat. “Drank all day, gonna pick all night,” he sings, taking some liberties with Robert Hunter’s lyrics. While the original became a big-chorus singalong on the stage, this version sounds like it was recorded on a porch on a hot summer day.

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The lights went down, the crowd roared, they were loud and they were ready to rock with Billy Idol, who performed the first show of his newly announced dates at The Pavilion at Montage Mountain in Scranton with opening act Devo.

Idol opened the show with “Still Dancing” from his album “Dream Into It,” which was released in 2025. “Eyes Without a Face” was performed early in the set and led into Steve Stevens’ guitar solo, which featured a recognizable snippet of Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption.” The solo led into The Tommy James & the Shondells song “Mony Mony,” which Idol had a hit with in 1985, in which Idol’s backup singers performed at the front of stage with him.

Idol performed one of his biggest songs, “Rebel Yell,” which had the crowd rocking hard. Idol and his band exited the stage but he was not done yet, returning to the for the encore which consisted of four songs, including the iconic “Dancing With Myself” by Generation X, Idol’s 1970s punk rock band. They closed out the show with “White Wedding,” in which a stained-glass window appeared on the big screen behind the band.

At age 70, Idol sounds amazing, along with the rest of his band. Fans can catch his It’s a Nice Day to…Tour Again up until September 27 with opening acts varying by date.

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In the moment of creation, however, Simon was in no way convinced his concept would work, never mind become a cultural pivot point.

“I think that Paul is someone who is always second guessing himself and putting himself through a process that maybe he would not want to do again,” says author Ashley Khan, whose book “Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland” is published today. “I think the real lesson from ‘Graceland’ is that what he was working with had both rhythm and harmony, and he had to find melody to make it work, and it just added this extra layer of challenge. He was self-doubting. This is the guy who did two versions of ‘Think Too Much’ on his previous album.”

“Hearts and Bones,” the previous album, was a commercial flop, adding to the pressure on Simon to deliver the goods. He took financial and reputational risks to follow his artistic vision, decamping to South Africa to work with local musicians after becoming entranced with the music on a cassette of music from the country that was given to him.

Kahn, who co-wrote Carlos Santana’s autobiography and has won a pair of Grammys for best album notes, takes readers on Simon’s initial trip to Johannesburg, where national rules prohibited black and white musicians from performing together in public, and subsequent work in New York and on a world tour.

Simon was taking a chance on working with strangers not familiar with modern recording techniques, some of whom didn’t speak English, but they were taking a chance on him as well, considering the political tensions and related violence.

While Simon was determined to get the sounds he was hearing in his head, he gave the African players freedom to find it.

“He dealt with different musicians in different ways,” Kahn says. “So there was a whole wide variety of how he would collaborate and whether he was sort of running stuff from the control room and giving direction or if he was in the live room with the musicians actually making music with them. Every group, every situation was different. On ‘Graceland,’ he gave himself the flexibility to work in many different ways. As you know, I’m not privy to how, let’s say, Peter Gabriel worked with Youssou N’Dour. I’m not privy to how Sting worked with Cheb Mami, one of the top raï singers and musicians of that moment.

“The difference with Paul, I think, is that one, it was much more transparent. He did many interviews back then. He would do press conferences before each and every concert. His collaborative approach was something that he was very open to talking about.”

Kahn notes that Simon could have more easily made the album with New York session musicians from his inner circle who were “certainly up to the task.”

“He said to himself from the start, ‘I want to work with the musicians who are on this bootleg cassette that I’ve fallen in love with.’ He had come off a not-so-great-selling album, and in all my research and in Robert Hilburn’s biography, etc., Paul makes the effort to zero the books so that when he’s now working on this new project, one, it’s not a Simon and Garfunkel project as the album before had initially started to be, so he’s clear on that, and he’s very clear on what he wants to do. He wants to work directly with these musicians.”

The book details the backlash the ensuing tour met from some in the anti-apartheid movement, as it broke the UN’s cultural boycott, which was intended to isolate the country from international culture and sports and in turn force the government to end apartheid. Some activists accused Simon of stealing from African culture for his personal gain. Paul Weller and Billy Bragg joined protests in London.

“He was acutely aware of who he was, his stature, and of course, the sense of entitlement that this is someone who can write a check and then make a project happen,” Kahn says. “What dials back the appropriation charge is credit, and Paul bent over backwards to make sure credit was given, and compensation, and the idea of sharing the copyrights and giving not only credit where it was due, but money where it was due.”

Among the many South African musicians Simon enlisted to play on “Graceland” was Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the all-male vocal troupe who sing in the local isicathamiya and mbube styles. In “Days of Mircale and Wonder,” Simon is shown to be nervous about inviting the group to participate, and he holds its leader and founder, Joseph Shabalala in very high esteem. After the two first meet, Shabalala remarks that it was the first time he had hugged a white man, an embrace that could be seen as emblematic of the coming together of cultures.

“Listen, things were about to change, and things would have changed with or without ‘Graceland.’ I don’t want to give ‘Graceland’ too much, you know?” Kahn says. “But at the same time, ‘Graceland’ did throw an extreme spotlight on the South African situation, which was already in the news. It kind of humanized the whole situation, so it wasn’t like another Ethiopia, ‘let’s help the struggling famine victims.’ It was, wait a minute: This is a hugely vital, well-established culture that is there with its incredible music that is so life-affirming and positive.”

Kahn, who was Ladysmith’s tour manager when the group was part of Simon’s band on the “Graceland” tour, teaches at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute for Recorded Music. His research for the book included interviews with more than 100 musicians, record label staffers and others who witnesses the making of “Graceland.” Simon, the central character, was not one of the interview subjects. To help paint a full picture, the author relied on historical interviews the singer-songwriter did in conjunction with the release of the album and a subsequent anniversary edition.

“One, Paul is talked out on this topic. It’s very clear,” Kahn says. “Two, I know the management and it was agreed upon that I was going to work towards just that: I would interview everyone else. My driving imperative was simply the idea that there’s so many witnesses, participants, etc., and their voices have never been heard. So I wanted this kind of virtual roundtable where information, facts, insights and memories were coming from a variety of different places. There’s also this thing of editorial independence that Paul has spoken about, especially the controversial aspect, so that it was much more valuable to get his words from when all of this stuff was happening in real time.”

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