The sexual assault court case against Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler will have to be rescheduled, as the judge due to preside over the legal proceedings has unexpectedly stepped down.

Judge Patricia A. Young was due to hear the opening arguments in Los Angeles on September 28.

Plaintiff Julia Misley - formerly Julia Holcomb - is accusing Tyler sexually abusing her from 1973 to 1976, starting when she was 16-years-old, and he was 25. She allege that Tyler coerced and persuaded her into believing that their three-year relationship, which began in 1973, was a 'romantic love affair". Her legal team filed the lawsuit in December 2022 under California's Child Victims Act, suing Tyler for sexual assault, sexual battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress

At the time the lawsuit was filed, Misley’s attorney, Jeff Anderson, said that the music industry has "permitted, protected, and profited from severe violence for decades", adding "It’s time to face the music. It’s time for reckoning."

Tyler denies the claims and is seeking to have the case dismissed, arguing that the pair primarily lived together in Boston, where the age of consent was 16.

In May, Judge Young dismissed the majority of the lawsuit under statutes of limitations – meaning too much time had passed since the alleged crimes were committed.

Now Young has recused herself from the case, without specifying the exact conflict of interest which forced her withdrawal.

"As a result of the parties not waiving, I will officially disqualify," Judge Young said. "Once I discovered the basis for my disqualification, I did not take any further action, so anything that was an open question as of last Friday … I have not ruled on those, and I will not rule on those."

It is not yet clear when the next stage of the trial will begin.

Metallica have announced another run of North American M72 dates for 2027. The quartet will play a dozen stadium shows in May and June next year, kicking off at BC Place in Vancouver, Canada, on May 8, and concluding on June 19 at the Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The support acts for the 12 dates – which are in addition to Metallica's previously announced residency at Sphere in Las Vegas and a pair of shows at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut, this November – will be nu metal legends Limp Bizkit and Swedish stars Avatar.

Avatar previously supported Metallica on this year's European leg of the tour, which ended in July, when Metallica took to social media to sing their praises.

"Master of ceremonies Johannes [Eckerström, frontman] and the crazy Swedes from Avatar brought something completely new to the #M72 stage," they wrote. "Every night was a spectacle. Thank you so much for raising the bar and keeping the audiences in Europe and the UK thrilled!"

Fan Club presales for the newly announced shows will begin on Monday, September 21 at 10am local time, with additional presales running throughout the week before the general onsale begins on Friday, September 25 at the same time.

For information regarding tickets and additional packages, visit the Metallica website.

Metallica live shows 2026/27

Oct 01: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 03: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 08: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 10: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 15: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 17: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 22: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 24: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 29: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 31: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Nov 05: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Nov 07: Las Vegas Sphere, NV

Nov 19: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 21: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT

Jan 28: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Jan 30: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 04: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 06: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 18: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 20: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 25: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 27: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Mar 04: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Mar 06: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Mar 11: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Mar 13: Las Vegas Sphere, NV

May 08: Vancouver BC Place, BC
May 13: San Diego Snapdragon Stadium, CA
May 18: El Paso Sun Bowl Stadium, TX
May 22: San Antonio Alamodome, TX
May 26: Fayetteville Razorback Stadium, AR
May 29: Kansas City Arrowhead Stadium, MO
Jun 02: Raleigh Carter-Finley Stadium, NC
Jun 05: Indianapolis Lucas Oil Stadium, IN
Jun 08: Buffalo Highmark Stadium, NY
Jun 12: Madison Camp Randall Stadium, WI
Jun 15: Cleveland Huntington Bank Field, OH
Jun 19: Salt Lake City Rice-Eccles Stadium, UT

Find Metallica tickets.

Warren Zevon died as he had lived: fearlessly. After being diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2002, he refused to wallow in depression or self-pity. Instead this most mercurial of musicians released a final, valedictory album, The Wind, and embarked on a series of interviews in which he treated his impending demise as a source of black comedy and philosophical rumination.

But then Zevon was never your typical singer-songwriter. Born in Chicago but coming of age in 60s Los Angeles, he could easily have carved out a successful career as a straight-down-the-line piano man like Elton John or Billy Joel, were it not for his caustic wit, chemical-induced instability and general contempt for the world. He gravitated towards life’s losers, underdogs and addicts, maybe because he saw something of himself in them. “I’m insane. I’m fucked up. I have problems,” he told one interviewer. “But I don’t get depressed and I don’t get bored.”

Zevon’s career was anything but predictable. His underwhelming 1969 debut album, Wanted Dead Or Alive, proved to be a false start, and it would be another seven years before he released a follow-up. The 1978 single Werewolves Of London propelled him to fame, but it remained his sole hit – something that proved a source of frustration and amusement to the man behind it. The 80s and 90s were equally erratic, commercially and personally, and although in the early 00s he underwent a mini-renaissance, it was soon cut terminally short.

By all accounts, Zevon wasn’t an easy man to be around. He was vain and combustible, egotistical and petty. But he was also charismatic, funny and more often than not the smartest guy in the room. His magnetic personality attracted an astonishing array of collaborators over the years: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, David Gilmour and R.E.M. were just a few of the people who worked with him.

Zevon never made a ‘perfect’ album. But perfection was never the point; he was the rare artist who was defined as much by his flaws as by his successes, and it was those flaws that made him one of the most fascinating musicians America has ever produced.

Zevon died in 2003, aged 56. He was quipping to the end: “I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years. It was one of those phobias that really didn’t pay off,” he told longtime super fan David Letterman. He was never big enough and far too inconsistent to qualify for ‘American National Treasure’ status, although he’d probably bristle at the suggestion that he was a cult artist. The best description of Warren Zevon is that he was just Warren Zevon.

And one to avoid...

Following on from Phil Collins’ memories of his early days, he goes on to tell Prog about the progress Genesis made from a group of seeming misfits to a streamlined organisation capable of creating 23-minute masterpieces.

After you joined Genesis, the band went on to prove a productive, enduring blend of talents.

It was strange at first. I lived with Mike and his parents while we rehearsed in what was then a derelict farm. Just the four of us – before Steve Hackett – running through their ideas.

It’d be going fine, but suddenly someone would stand up, walk out, disappear for half an hour. I’d think, “What happened? Did I blink and miss something?” They were highly strung individuals, who could very easily get on each others’ nerves.

A lot’s been made of that in the past. But look, everybody is a totally different person now. Everyone’s mellowed out! We’re all a product of the way we’re brought up. They were raised to be officers and gentlemen; I was just living by the skin of my teeth. But that story’s become something of a cliché. That was just the early days.

You made extraordinary things together – not least Supper’s Ready.

We always pushed the limitations of a record. A 23-minute song was a cutting engineer’s nightmare! Our writing was... meandering. I was more of an arranger at that stage. I could see how things could be adapted or reprised. But we did like to stretch. Not with endless solos though – We never had that “let the guitarist go mad for ages” thing, ever.

Supper’s Ready was the first time we decided we could go that long. When we first heard it all edited together at Island Studios, later Trevor Horn’s place, we thought, “Oh, that’s great!” We were slightly surprised!

I always think we were better live, as we used to tense up in the studio when the light was on and the clock was going. When we got our own studio, of course, that changed.

Apocalypse In 9/8, at the end, is one of my favourite pieces of music that we did. Mike and Tony were playing in different time signatures, so sometimes I’d join in with one, sometimes the other – whichever I fancied! It all sounds very clever and arranged but it was a stroke of luck, really. Genesis were really good at that: playing together, improvising. It all started as free-flowing stuff, then we’d hone it.

The band itself streamlined as time went by, it’s fair to say.

Yeah, and I always used to get the blame for that, because it kind of coincided with me being the singer. People think the singer does everything! Not true. A band like Genesis is a writing commune, really. And as they’ve said, in the early days, before I even joined, they wanted to write hit singles.

We all grew up with The Kinks, Beatles, Stones: three-minute blasts. It’s just we weren’t very good at it! We were good at something else, so that’s what we did. Later, occasionally, we struck gold with something in that format, like I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) and Follow You Follow Me. But they were written first and chosen as singles second.

After Brian Eno contributed to The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, did you play on his record as a kind of trade-off?

That’s right, no money involved! But that sparked a lovely friendship. Eno and I got on pretty well, and he called me to play on not just Another Green World but Before And After Science and Music For Films – me, Percy Jones from Brand X, Robert Fripp, all kinds of interesting musicians.

Eno would come in with something he’d done the night before at home, just an abstract idea, and we’d use that and play with it. The fact that he brought things from home intrigued me. So when I started to do my music – basically trying to find something to do with my time because I was going through that post-divorce thing – I started working at home in my little studio.

And I was quite happy – in fact I became insistent – on using my home demos, copying them onto the multitrack. It didn’t matter if there was a bit of click or hiss. It’s more a case of, “Is it good?” I’d seen Eno do that. So the demos became the foundation of Face Value. And the same with subsequent albums.

By the time of Both Sides, which was ’93, my equipment had got more sophisticated and I did most of the album in my bedroom upstairs. Doing it when the mood strikes. It’s very freeing.

I’d sing rubbish until I sang something that felt right. Sometimes when the moon’s in the right place and all that stuff, you come up with something. In The Air Tonight was mainly improvisation. That’s what I sang when I opened my mouth that particular day. It’s like verbal jazz: when a saxophone player gets up and plays, he’s just playing what he plays. Often that was the case with my voice and words.

“Going back to your question about what I feared most when parting ways with him,” says Bill Kelliher, softly, “it was that he’d pass away.

On August 20, 2025, that fear became reality. Incendiary Mastodon guitarist Brent Hinds was killed in a motorcycle accident in Atlanta at the age of 51. It was a devastating punctuation mark to a 25-year creative partnership that had fractured just five months prior, with Brent acrimoniously quitting the band and taking his grievances to social media while the band remained silent.

In the recently released 35-minute documentary, The Mastodon In The Room, the surviving members addressed the messy reality of Brent’s departure and subsequent death with remarkable candour. But while that film looks backwards, sitting down with Hammer this afternoon, the conversation repeatedly drifts somewhere else entirely: forwards.

Spain is currently baking beneath a relentless, tarmac-melting heatwave, but backstage at Rock Imperium Festival, in Mastodon’s air-conditioned enclave, guitarist Bill is the very picture of chill.

“The tour has been going really, really well,” he says, leaning back. “Every single night is better than the last.”

Among all members of the band, the emotional baseline is identical. Drummer Brann Dailor is a blur of kinetic energy, plopping down on the couch with drumsticks in hand, hammering out a lightning-fast, spitfire rat-a-tat on his thigh, then nodding with approval; after a month of shows, this suffices for his readiness check.

“There’s a heatwave ripping through Europe and we’ve been following it closely, so it’s been pretty steamy,” he says. “But the shows have been awesome and it’s been a lot of fun.”

Grinning beneath his baseball cap, bassist Troy Sanders adds, “Usually people are getting grumpy by now. But the joy is real. We truly enjoy each and every show. It’s a real treat.”

Considering all that Mastodon have endured in the past 18 months, such boundless optimism sounds almost jarring. To understand how the band arrived here, we need to rewind.

Last year put the boot in as soon as it began. In February 2025, Brann lost his mother, Michele, after a lengthy period of ill-health. It was a tragic prelude to the tumult ahead.

Six weeks later, the other shoe dropped. In March, Brent quit Mastodon, severing a bond that had been buckling under progressive, heavy strain for years. As the band discuss in The Mastodon In The Room, the downward spiral had become impossible to ignore: missed cues, erratic onstage outbursts, and a widening social gulf driven by Brent’s escalating battles with alcohol.

For a long time, the remaining trio hesitated to act, holding onto memories of the early years when they were just four guys trying to make each other laugh in a cramped tour van. But by 2021, around the Hushed And Grim tour, the collective enthusiasm had withered.

The end, when it came, was abrupt. During a tense band meeting in their rehearsal space, as members discussed the impact of Brent’s behaviour, the guitarist rose up and stormed out, never to return. For Brann, it was an emotional haymaker after the loss of his mother.

“I was definitely struggling just being a person,” he explains. “Then the turmoil with Brent just made everything worse. I had this big, heavy grief cloak on, dragging my carcass around, and I wasn’t having fun.”

Fortunately, the raw material that would eventually emerge as the band’s latest album, Marrow Deep, had already taken shape. By the time Brent left the band, the skeletons of 23 songs had already been written – without Brent’s involvement.

“It had already been quite evident that Brent’s interest in participating was waning,” adds Troy. “We didn’t want to continually invite a dark cloud to come loom over us while we’re trying to be creative. We just kept doing it where the excitement and energy were at 100%.”

Two days after announcing Brent’s exit, the band drafted YouTube guitar virtuoso Ben Eller to handle immediate touring commitments, bringing a welcome predictability back to an erratic live engine. But while Ben provided vital onstage stability, the permanent role required something beyond pure technical proficiency – it needed the creative friction of two wildly disparate guitar personalities.

“Ben’s style is a little too similar to Bill’s,” Brann explains. “It would be like having two Bills. The special thing about our band was that Brent’s playing was so wildly different.”

Enter Nick Johnston. A virtuoso within the progressive instrumental scene, he wasn’t a standard metal journeyman; he was the necessary creative counterweight.

“We wanted a yin-and-yang situation,” Brann says. “Somebody who could emote during solos and bring a different side of the coin. Nick approaches the instrument like nobody else I’ve ever heard.”

“Nick’s been wonderful,” says Bill. “He’s one of the nicest humans I’ve ever met. He brings things to the table that I’d never come up with, and vice versa.”

Nick arrived in May 2025, working alongside longtime touring keyboardist João Nogueira, whose atmospheric textures added a fresh dimension to the arrangements. Rather than merely mimicking the past, the two began reshaping the transitions and interludes. Together, Nick and João injected a sophisticated progressive flourish –a level of intricate, fluid musicianship that felt striking even for a band with Mastodon’s formidable technical pedigree.

Amazingly, after 25 years, Mastodon were expanding their sonic palette. But the ultimate test of this new five-piece was fast approaching. In August, just 10 days before they were scheduled to enter the studio to record the album, the news broke from Atlanta: Brent was gone.

Word of his fatal accident spread rapidly. A subsequent Atlanta Police investigation concluded Brent had been travelling at nearly 70mph – twice the legal speed limit – and that excessive speed was the decisive factor in the crash. For the surviving members, whatever resentment had built up during the public fallout of the split evaporated the moment the news broke.

“I was immediately shocked and saddened,” says Troy. “But unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised. I don’t mean that in any distasteful manner, whatsoever. I’ve done everything I could as a friend and as a bandmate over the years. I don’t know what else I could’ve done, so I’m kind of forced to just let go.”

“I wasn’t surprised that it happened, but I was shocked,” adds Bill. “I just didn’t think it was going to happen like that.”

The fact was that they began grieving Brent long before the crash. Reflecting this afternoon, there’s only a quiet sadness and a deep, genuine fondness.

“Whenever someone rides by on a loud motorcycle, I think of Brent first,” says Bill. “He was omnipresent in my life. Even though we didn’t always see eye-to-eye – more times than not we did – I cared about the guy. I always thought
he would outlive us all, because he had nine lives and got away with everything.”

“When Brent was in a good mood – his normal, happy
self, not hungover Brent – it was so much fun,” Brann adds. “We were the funniest people we knew. I miss that aspect of it: the camaraderie, the jokes, and the fun. And musically, he would just rip some solos – snatch them right out of the sky and make you cry. I miss all of that.”

Barely a week after his passing and still reeling from the news, Mastodon entered the studio. “It was difficult. It was dark. It was sad,” Troy says. “But it was also necessary.”

Historically, Mastodon have processed personal tragedy through a cinematic filter of concept albums and mythology – Moby Dick, czars and villainous emperors – using grand metaphors to absorb the concussive force of real-world pain. On Marrow Deep, the masks are gone, the lyrics replaced by a stark, collective honesty, with the word ‘we’ frequently overtaking the insular ‘I’.

“It probably wasn’t intentional,” Troy says, considering the shift. “But that’s where we all were.”

Across towering tracks such as Your Ghost Again and Moth And Bone, grief and the wreckage of their fractured friendship with Brent are laid bare. When Troy roars, ‘Our faces hit the wall again… the wound is cutting deeper’ on the latter, there is no protective imagery left to hide behind. The nerve is fully exposed.

That starkness crystallises halfway through the album, on In The Ruins. Built around a long-gestating riff from Bill, the track took shape when co-producer Patrik Berger suggested slamming from its quietest moment straight into its most punishing movement.

“When Troy put his lyrics over the top, it shot to the top of everybody’s list,” reveals Brann. “He is pulling from his own experience there. He lost his home and all his possessions in a Florida hurricane. It’s something he’s very quiet about, but it was devastating.”

Conversely, A Vampire’s Demeanor offers a blast of straightforward metal built around a driving main riff written by Brann.

“Every time we played it in the rehearsal space, I just wanted to play it forever,” Brann says. “To me, that’s a festival song. I can already see a crowd jumping in unison at Download.”

The band’s newly unlocked chemistry really speaks for itself.

“If you want an example of the new dynamic, look at a song like Poisonous Weapons,” says Bill. “I threw a ‘riff grenade’ into the room to see what Nick and João would come up with. In the middle section, they turned my basic formula into this incredibly proggy space jam. It’s the same on The Three Fates – the placement of that part at the end of the song is a hint of what’s to come.”

That forward-looking outro anchors the album’s closing epic – a track that ultimately bridges the band’s raw new reality with their signature move. Because for all of Marrow Deep’s unvarnished realism, they couldn’t completely resist the gravity of ancient myth.

“I did squeak in some mythology anyway,” Brann laughs, tracking the origin of the song back to the Greek Moirai – mythological sisters who spin, measure, and inevitably snip the thread of human life. “I look at Brent and my mom as being similar in the way they both did a good job of hiding from that third sister with the scissors,” Brann muses. “One of them on purpose, and one of them not on purpose.”

It’s a telling inversion. Once, mythology was Mastodon’s shield against the world. On Marrow Deep, it arrives only as a postscript, after the band have already bared their souls in plain English.

“Hopefully,” Brann continues, “it ends the record on a hopeful note.”

Having navigated the brutal gauntlet of the last 18 months, the grief hasn’t vanished, but for the first time in years, Mastodon feel bound together by something far greater than mere survival. They are looking to the future.

“All five of us want to be here for all the right reasons,” Troy says. “All five of us are very much in sync. We’re all extremely happy to be here and so grateful for every fucking show.”

If Marrow Deep serves as the definitive, bruising conclusion to a traumatic chapter, it also kicks the door wide open to a thrilling new era. Because Nick joined the fold after much of the album was already sketched out, the next Mastodon record will be the first built from the ground up by this newly minted five-piece – a prospect that electrifies Bill.

“I feel like the next record, in another year or two, will showcase even more of Nick and me playing off each other,” he says. “Toward the end of Brent’s time in the band, I was writing most of the rhythms and song structures anyway, and he would come in like a finishing carpenter to add the crazy solos. It’s a similar set-up with Nick, but Nick is much more receptive and absolutely full of fresh ideas.”

“You’re never going to truly replace Brent,” Brann says. “He was a unique unicorn to the 10th power. But Nick is his own kind of unicorn; I love that about him. I love his playing, and I’m excited to dig in more with him writing-wise.”

But it isn’t just the promise of new riffs that has breathed life back into Brann. Given all that’s transpired, we ask him what’s making him happy these days.

“Besides my awesome wife, my cool dog, and all my amazing friends?” he replies. “It’s my kickass band. I feel more confident than ever going onstage knowing that the show is going to be fucking awesome.”

Troy agrees: “Coming off the stage, we look around and get to hug and high-five, because we’ve done this thing that I’ve always called magic. It’s just like, ‘Oh, wow, that was unbelievable. So beautiful. Thank you. I love you.’ ‘Fuck, I love you too, man!’ It’s great.”

“Mastodon now is the band I’ve always wanted to have,” says Bill. “It’s five guys who are all on the same page, who all want to be here, and who want to do what is best for the group. We love getting onstage, making people rock out, making awesome-sounding records, and continuously pushing ourselves. It’s a joy to go out there and do what we do best, which is play some heavy-ass metal and prog rock.”

The scars are permanent, but the uncertainty is gone. Mastodon have spent a quarter of a century turning tragedy into high art, but the view down the road is no longer defined by what they’ve lost – it’s defined by the vast, uncharted territory waiting to be conquered. For a band who have spent their entire existence screaming into the void about death, loss, and the cruel impermanence of time, this might just be the most subversive outcome of all. Not mere survival, but glorious, undeniable renewal.

Marrow Deep is out now

Brian May says that he's still weighing up the idea of an ABBA Voyage-style immersive avatar show for Queen.

Staged in the 3,000-seat ABBA Arena, a purpose-built venue in east London, ABBA Voyage features 'ABBAtars' based on the Swedish pop superstars as they appeared in 1979, alongside a 10-piece band, performing over 20 hit songs. The project took six years to realise, but within weeks of its launch in May 2022, the attraction had sold more than 380,000 tickets, and continues to sell out performances four years on.

At the final Kiss show, at New York's Madison Square Garden on December 2, 2023, the band announced their own avatar show, scheduled to launch in 2028, co-produced by Kiss and Pophouse Entertainment, the Swedish company behind ABBA's show. The Kiss show will be staged in Las Vegas, with avatars created by the George Lucas-founded visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic.

In a new interview with Absolute Radio, Brian May was asked if he might consider working on a similar virtual concert residency for Queen.

"Yeah, like the ABBA Voyage thing?" the guitarist responded. "It's not really a hologram, but it's an immersive experience, right? Yes, we looked at it very seriously, particularly after I saw the [Las Vegas] Sphere and what the Eagles did with the Sphere, which I thought was amazing. And I spent a lot of time planning out what I thought could be a Queen show.

"I've kind of backed off now because you can't do it without massive use of A.I., with all the consequences of that," May continued. "Now, in some ways, I don't wanna be stealing the work of other people. If you're stealing your own work, I'm not quite sure where I stand on it, 'cause you would be stealing from the Queen oeuvre, you know, which maybe is okay because that's ours. But at the same time, you're adding to the stresses that A.I. is putting on the world.

"So, I don't know," he admitted. "I'm not so keen as I was. I think it would be great to have a permanent place where people could go and feel like they're seeing us play live in our peak, maybe all over the world, maybe at all points in time. The doors are open, but I don't know if we're gonna walk through."

A film of Queen's July 27, 1986 gig at Budapest’s Népstadion, the first Western stadium rock show to take place behind the Iron Curtain, is to be screened in cinemas worldwide on October 7.

Queen Budapest is of major significance to Queen fans as it represents the last filmed live performance of the band with Freddie Mercury, showing the quartet at the height of their powers as a live act.

The band are planning to use a screening of the film to recreate the atmosphere of a Queen show for fans in London.

Across two screenings at London's iconic Roundhouse on October 3, the newly restored film will be shown on a giant LED screen, with the visuals augmented by surround sound and synchronised lighting. A range of original Queen merchandise will also be on display.

"It’s going to be definitively the most real experience ever of us, Queen, in our glory days," says May. "I think people will get lost in it and even forget they’re watching a film."

The much talked-about Back To The Beginning concert movie, capturing Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s farewell show, has finally got an official release date.

Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back To The Beginning will get a global cinema release on October 28, for a limited time. Shot at Villa Park in Sabbath’s hometown of Birmingham on July 5, 2025 and directed by Ben Wainwright-Pearce, who was also responsible for Taylor Swift’ The Eras Tour concert movie, the film’s producers say it “definitively captures the triumphant final live performance from Ozzy Osbourne and the original Black Sabbath lineup.”

The Back To The Beginning show featured the first performance by the original Black Sabbath line-up of Ozzy, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward in 20 years. It also marked Ozzy’s last ever solo performance – the singer died just over two weeks later, on July 22.

“It was a closure for the band and it was a good way to go out, I think,” says Tony Iommi of the show, while Geezer Butler adds: “To me it was like pure love. It was just a wave of love. It’s the only way I can describe it really. I mean I could feel it as if it is like tangible.”

As well as sets from Ozzy and Sabbath, the Back To The Beginning bill also featured a Who‘s Who of rock and metal, including Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Tool, Slayer, Halestorm and more. Speaking to Metal Hammer recently, Sharon Osbourne said that footage of the other bands’ sets also appears in the film.

“Back To The Beginning came about because I asked Ozzy what would really make him happy,” says Sharon. “And he said the only thing that would make him happy was if he could perform again and say goodbye to his fans. That’s all he wanted to do. He wanted to say goodbye and thank you.”

“There’s never been anything like that that’s happened in the history of rock and roll,” adds Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello, who was musical director of the Back To The Beginning show and helped pull the bill together. “There’s never been a precedent for a show like this… [Black Sabbath] gets to play their final show basically in the Ground Zero of where they created heavy metal.”

Tickets for Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back To The Beginning go on sale Thursday September 24 at 3pm BST/7am PT/10am ET / 4pm CEST, and are available from backtothebeginning.com.

Kelly Osbourne has opened up about the last time she spoke to her dad Ozzy Osbourne before he died.

Ozzy passed away on July 22, 2025, just 17 days after he played his last ever show at the Back To The Beginning gig at Villa Park in his hometown of Birningham.

In an emotional interview with on the We Need To Talk podcast, Kelly reveals that doctors had warned Ozzy not to play the Back To The Beginning Show

“They told him, ‘If you do this show you’ll die’, but he chose to do it anyway” she tells host Paul C Brunson. “Because it meant more to him than anything.”

Asked what her last conversation with her father was, Kelly says: “He sat me down, and this was about three days before he died, and he goes, ‘You can live the rest of your life knowing there was one man on this planet who truly loved you.’ I started to cry and said, ‘Please don’t talk like this.’ Cause he said, ‘You know I’m not going to be here forever.’”

She adds that the Back To The Beginning shows, which also featured Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Tool and several other rock and metal A-listers, came from Ozzy’s desire to say goodbye to his fans, and credits her mother, Sharon, with making it happen.

“My mom allowed him to die the happiest I’ve ever seen him,” says Kelly. “All he wanted before he left this planet was one last show. My mom worked he arse off to make that happen, and it was one of the most incredible moments in music in music history.

“There’ll never be anything like that again. It was all the people who got to be who they are because of him coming to pay tribute to him, and he got to say goodbye. And then he let go.”

Sharon Osbourne recently told Metal Hammer that a film of the Back To The Beginning show would be released this year, featuring appearances from all the bands who played, including Black Sabbath and Ozzy himself.

“It’s coming. It will be out this year,” Sharon says. “The most precious thing that people can give you is their time, and they all took time out of their summer to come and do this show. Everybody deserves to be seen and heard.”

She also confirmed to Metal Hammer that Ozzfest would return in 2027 – and that it would take place at Villa Park.

“It’s going to be at Villa Park again,” said Sharon. “Whether it’ll be two nights [in Birmingham], that’s up for the fans to tell me.”

At the time of going to press, no date or festival headliners had been announced. “Of course we’re speaking to people,” she told Metal Hammer. “I can’t let that out yet, but it’ll be soon.”

Film director Danny Boyle wanted to reunite the original Sex Pistols and The Undertones line-ups to perform at his opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics in London.

And The Undertones came tantalisingly close to reuniting with original frontman Feargal Sharkey for the occasion, drummer Billy Doherty has revealed in an exclusive new interview with eonmusic.

The Derry punk legends, who are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year, were approached about performing as part of a planned celebration featuring bands representing the four regions of the United Kingdom.

"They wanted to have bands from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland," Billy Doherty recalls.

"It was us, I think the Pistols, I think it might have been the Manic Street Preachers, and it might have been Simple Minds... [and] Feargal agreed to do it."

Although the original idea ultimately fell through, Boyle retained the concept: in the end, the four regions were represented at the ceremony on July 27, 2012, by Duran Duran [England], Stereophonics [Wales], Snow Patrol [Northern Ireland] and Paolo Nutini [Scotland].

The original proposal represented the most significant opportunity to put Feargal Sharkey back on stage with his former bandmates since The Undertones originally split in 1983. Sharkey went on to embark on a successful solo career, while Doherty, Michael Bradley, John O'Neill and Damian O'Neill returned to the stage in 1999 with new frontman Paul McLoone.

In his interview with eonmusic, Billy Doherty recalls in the mid-1980s, The Undertones were offered what he describes as "lottery money" for five reunion shows, but Sharkey refused to participate.

"He didn't want to know," the drummer recalls. "We contacted John Peel for John Peel to influence him. That actually made matters worse."

A second offer followed the next year, with even more money on the table, but Sharkey again declined.

The Undertones continue to tour with McLoone on vocals and are marking 50 years since their formation with an extensive UK and Ireland tour this autumn.

Danny Boyle later fulfilled his dream of reuniting the Sex Pistols... but only in his fictional FX drama Pistol.

The TV drama caused a huge row among the Sex Pistols, with John Lydon distinctly unimpressed by the director’s love letter to his band, calling the series "the most disrespectful shit I’ve ever had to endure".

Lydon’s former bandmates Steve Jones and Paul Cook, took the singer to court after he attempted to ban the use of Sex Pistols songs in the drama, and won.

Jones, Cook and Glen Matlock are currently touring the US with Frank Carter on vocals.

Nightwish keyboardist, co-founder and songwriter Tuomas Holopainen admits that the band were blamed “for good reason” for how they handled the dismissal of original lead singer Tarja Turunen.

Turunen, who fronted Nightwish from their 1996 founding until 2005, was let go via a scathing public letter from her bandmates. It alleged that “business” and “money” had become more important to her than the emotion behind the band’s music, and that her “attitude and behaviour” had changed due to the influence of her husband/manager Marcelo Cabuli. The couple denied the allegations.

Looking back in an exclusive interview with Metal Hammer, Holopainen says that Nightwish “get blamed for what happened, for good reason” but insists that “there was no future” for the band with Turunen: “We were just operating in survival mode and plagued by these dark thoughts.”

He adds that the remaining members “got completely butchered in the media” after the open letter was published. The split became such a hot-button topic that Finland’s then-prime minister, Matti Vanhanen, was asked to comment on it in parliament.

“It was like we were these evil neanderthals who’d hurt our wonderful ex-singer,” Holopainen recalls. “I got some really interesting letters, let’s put it that way.”

The keyboardist now has a civil but distant relationship with Turunen: the pair have exchanged a handful of emails over the years but not had any further interactions. He dismisses the possibility of reuniting with his ex-singer.

“It was a divorce, and an ugly one at that,” he explains, “so I think we have our own lives now. Someone did say to me if we got Tarja and Marko [Hietala, bassist/vocalist who left in 2020] back in, we could tour just South America for a year straight. That’s not gonna happen.”

Now fronted by Dutch singer Floor Jansen, Nightwish put out their latest album, Yesterwynde, in 2024. Holopainen revealed to Hammer last month that he has six songs written for the follow-up release.

“I feel more inspired than ever – proof of that is that I’ve already got six new Nightwish songs done,” he said. “Every time I sit in front of my keyboard, I’m like, ‘Ah yeah, this is great! Just wait till everyone hears this.’ It’s exhilarating.”

He added that the band have “reserved things” for 2027, hinting that they’ve booked studio time. He also suggested that 2028 will be the year that they end their ongoing hiatus from live shows, which started in summer 2023.

“Next year is too early to be going back on tour. The year after, possibly? I want to do another album before any live shows, and that’s definitely happening. We’ve already reserved things for that next year.”

Following her Nightwish exit, Turnen launched a solo career. Her latest album, Frisson Noir, came out in June. She will perform a special show with an orchestra at the Ancient Theater in Plovdiv, Bulgaria on September 18, then tour Europe from September 30 to October 25.

The Enid have announced they will no longer perform as a live band, and that Robert John Godfrey and fellow Enid musician Jason Ducker are currently working on a farewell album from the band

In a statement on the band's social media pages, Robert John Godfrey stated, "The Enid cannot continue as a functioning live band, and there are no plans for any future events/concerts.

As such, we cannot, in good conscience, continue to take money from our fans via a subscription. We have decided to close the Enidi bank and PayPal accounts.

For my part, I continue to compose. This morning, Jason and I have committed ourselves to creating a final Enid recording.

Many thanks for giving me the life I hope I have deserved and the one which has suited me best.

My love to you all.

Robert et al at The Enid."

The band's last studio album, U, was released in 2019, and the band have only performed sporadically in recent years, performing their last live show at The Stables in Milton Keyens last May.

Robert John Godfrey was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 2012, and announced he was retiring from touring with the band in 2016, saying, "The time has come for me to cross the footlights and devote myself to building our wonderful fan club, The Enidi, into a force to be reckoned with. I still have a few things up my sleeve before the sun sets upon my life’s work.”

In 2018, he announced that a brain scan had shown no presence of Alzheimer's and he subsequently returned to performing with the band.

At The Gates singer and melodic death metal icon Tomas Lindberg died on September 16, 2025, aged 52, after being diagnosed with a rare oral cancer. In early 2026, before the posthumous release of his final album The Ghost Of A Future Dead, his bandmates told Metal Hammer about his life, impact and endless curiosity.

No one else in Gothenburg looked like Tomas Lindberg. When twin brothers Anders and Jonas Björler first met their future At The Gates bandmate at a bus stop in 1989, he stood out like a snow-plough in the Sahara. His hair – bright blond at the time – flowed past his shoulders, he was wearing a knee-length leather trench coat and a t-shirt featuring the name of some obscure and long-forgotten death metal band, and he had the bushiest beard that the Björlers had ever seen on a 17-year-old.

“I’d never seen anybody who dressed like that,” remembers bassist Jonas, the older brother by 15 minutes. “With that huge beard as well, he looked like an old man.”

“When we went to his room at his parents’ house, he had obscure demo covers and fanzine clippings all over his walls,” adds guitar player Anders. “He had a cast of a human skull, because he was interested in the occult in his early days. It was like entering this weird kind of new world.”

It was impossible to know at the time, but that striking character would soon be the face of the city’s most important metal band. With Tomas’s anguished snarl and imposing stage presence front and centre, At The Gates became masters of the Gothenburg Sound: a reinvention of death metal that fused the harmonised guitars of classic metal and the rampaging speed of thrash.

In their original incarnation, At The Gates only lasted from 1990 to 1996, but they made a huge impact – their landmark fourth album, 1995’s Slaughter Of The Soul, influenced a generation of American bands, including Trivium, Killswitch Engage and Lamb Of God. They reunited in the late 2000s and continued to record and tour, until Tomas underwent surgery to treat adenoid cystic carcinoma, a rare cancer of the mouth and palate, in early 2024. Following complications in his recovery, he died last September, aged 52.

At The Gates’ new album, The Ghost Of A Future Dead, is an epitaph to their late frontman. Written in 2023 and recorded the following year, it uses vocal demos that Tomas tracked before his surgery – some parts, the day before. He approved every detail, from the artwork to the sequencing, before his death.

“He went into surgery just as I started drum tracking,” says drummer Adrian Erlandsson. “It was like, ‘OK, that was a good take’, and I was straight on the phone: ‘How’s he doing? How’d the surgery go?’ It was an uncertain time and a bit unsettling, but I don’t think there was even a consideration that he wasn’t going to make it.”

To people who didn’t know him personally, the man nicknamed Tompa seemed like the most intense person in the world. He strode all over every stage he played, often making war-faces at the crowd as he did so, and he screamed lyrics about suffering, politics and existentialism with intimidating ferocity. But what his bandmates remember about him first and foremost is how kind he was.

“He wasn’t only this metal singer and the godfather of the Gothenburg scene,” says Anders. “Everybody that met him knows he was a really humble guy. He was always making sure, if somebody was left out, that they were introduced and felt welcome.”

Born into a middle-class family on October 16, 1972, Tomas grew up in Billdal, a suburb half an hour south of central Gothenburg. He had two sisters, but was 15 years younger than them. “They moved out pretty early in his life, so he was alone with his parents,” says Jonas.

As the only kid in the house, it’s no surprise that his two favourite pastimes by his mid-teens were solo activities: reading books and listening to music. He enjoyed shoegaze, post-punk and everything under the Sub Pop Records banner, but his greatest loves were metal and hardcore, which he discovered through school friends blasting Metallica’s Kill ’Em All. He started writing and editing fanzines about the Stockholm death metal underground not long after.

“He really enjoyed discovering new things,” says Adrian, “and that’s something that went on throughout the years. He’d discover a new genre of music and he’d go deep in to find the root of where that scene came from. With death metal in particular, there was an aura around it – horror, death, decay – that suited him to a tee.”

With that same insatiable curiosity, he was constantly picking up books and putting other ones down. Through metal, he found horror greats Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley and H.P. Lovecraft. Then came a short-lived Aleister Crowley obsession (hence the occult stuff and the skull in his room), and from there it was a blur no one could keep track of.

“I remember when he was writing lyrics for [At The Gates’ 2014 comeback album] At War With Reality, sending me excerpts of books he was reading,” says Adrian. “I was just like, ‘Man, I really don’t understand!’ Ha ha ha! I was into techy things like games consoles, and when we were travelling, he’d be like, ‘How can you be bothered to carry these things with you?’ And I didn’t understand how he could take six to eight books with him on a tour, read them all and buy more along the way.”

Wanting to bring the Stockholm death metal sound to his hometown, the singer formed Grotesque with guitarist Alf Svensson in 1989. One of their gigs was a Christmas disco at Anders and Jonas’s school. They played three songs before being forced offstage.

“The PTA stopped the show because Grotesque were so Satanic,” Jonas recalls. “They had corpsepaint and one-metre upside-down crosses.”

“People were surprised,” adds Anders, “because the local scene back then was all white sneakers and thrash: Testament, Exodus, Metallica-style.”

After Grotesque split in 1990, Tomas and Alf started At The Gates. They took the name from the Fields Of The Nephilim song At The Gates Of Silent Memory, which sampled an Aleister Crowley speech. The Björlers joined soon afterwards, with Adrian completing the line-up after meeting Tomas on a coach to a Morbid Angel show.

“He told me, ‘You can’t be in the band! You’ve got short hair!’” the drummer laughs. “But then we had a few beers and he asked, ‘Can you play double-bass [drums]?’”

Their early albums were bizarre by their later standards, featuring violin solos and riffs that Alf wrote by playing old demos backwards, but Tomas’s lyrical identity was clear from the off. The title track of 1992 debut The Red In The Sky Is Ours voiced his left-wing beliefs and called for revolution.

Even though At The Gates simplified their songwriting after Martin Larsson replaced Alf in 1993, with the new approach reflecting Tomas’s roots in thrash and punk as well as the Björlers’ love for early-80s metal, that political focus carried on. Lines throughout ’94’s Terminal Spirit Disease and Slaughter Of The Soul spoke about how contemporary society was corrupting the human spirit.

The latter album put At The Gates on the map, but, barely in their 20s, they couldn’t deal with the sudden demand. They toured for eight months nonstop, hitting the US with Morbid Angel and then Napalm Death, yet made next to no money. Burnt out, Anders quit. Rather than continue without a founding member and key composer, the band broke up.

“[The schedule] affected me more than anyone else,” he reflects, “and I think the other guys were really let down by my departure. But I’m really easily bored. I need constant change. I can’t stand waiting around at airports and sitting on tour buses. I felt like a travelling salesman.”

Jonas admits that the brothers and Adrian didn’t talk to Tomas for a couple of years. “We had different friend groups,” he explains.

Post-At The Gates, the Björlers and Adrian reunited in thrashers The Haunted, whereas Tomas, true to his restless nature, joined an array of projects, including crust punks Disfear, hardcore/metal band The Great Deceiver and grindcore supergroup Lock Up. He settled down with his first wife and her daughter, had a son and pursued a career as a social studies teacher. Adrian reconnected with Tomas at the frontman’s wedding in 1998.

“It was like time had stood still,” he remembers. “There was some house band playing, and I asked him, ‘Should we play a few songs?’ I think everyone was too drunk at that point to pull anything off.”

With the fences mended, Tomas started attending local Haunted shows and talking to the Björlers again. Jonas says that the singer’s newfound fatherhood made him more “mature”, and as interest in Slaughter Of The Soul continued to grow amidst a new era of bands touting its significance, they began talking about a reunion. In 2008, At The Gates played their first shows in 12 years.

“The chemistry was great,” Jonas remembers. “Everybody was friends. The main intention was to make sure that every fan got to see us but, egotistically, we kind of missed doing it.”

Tomas lived something of a double life, balancing his role as a death metal screamer with a career in the classroom. The two rarely intersected. The singer told Loudwire in 2021 that he wanted to be a “nice-but-a-bit-boring teacher”, although he did let his students stand side-stage for an At The Gates show in 2015.

“They looked really freaked out,” Adrian laughs. “I think it’s quite a lot to take in: seeing your teacher screaming at the front of a stage when there’s a few thousand people in the crowd.”

At The Gates’ first three post-reunion albums tapped into what Tomas was reading in some way. At War With Reality was about the literary genre of magic realism, 2018’s To Drink From The Night Itself was based on Peter Weiss’s antifascist novel The Aesthetics Of Resistance, and 2021’s The Nightmare Of Being was inspired by texts on philosophical pessimism. Written before the singer’s diagnosis, The Ghost Of A Future Dead bucks that trend and digs into his greatest fears.

“What frightened him the most was the vastness of the universe and the deep sea, and combining those things with the smallness of man in the grand scheme of things,” says Jonas. “We had a general idea of what he wanted to do, but it’s too bad we never got to ask Tomas about it, because we never thought it would end like this.”

Tomas was told he had adenoid cystic carcinoma in December 2023, although he kept his condition hidden from fans. Plans to record vocals in the studio in late 2024 were scrapped, as he’d need time to re-learn to speak and sing after surgery. Despite the initial shock, Adrian remembers morale being surprisingly high.

“We were just like, ‘It’s going to be tough but he’s going to pull through,’” he says. “After the surgery, they said they’d cleared all the cancer off, he’s going to have a prosthetic piece [on the roof of his mouth] and everything’s going to be fine.”

But from that point until his death, Tomas endured a series of dramatic ups and downs. In April ’24, after he’d been put on disorientating opiates to help him through radiotherapy and the after-effects of his surgery, he was so concerned that he may never be able to sing or teach again that he suggested the new album be called The Ghost Of A Future Dead. But in early ’25, he was cancer-free and went out for dinner with Anders, Jonas and Martin – their first time seeing him in-person since he started treatment.

“He told me it was the first time he’d eaten a slice of pizza since his surgery,” remembers Jonas. “He was in really high spirits and looking forward to the release.”

Adrian, who now lives in the UK and has a day job driving trucks, wasn’t given the time off to visit his friend.

“My boss was having none of it,” he says, the frustration audible in his voice. “It was pretty shitty, because that was my one chance to see him in good condition.”

Then, in late spring 2025, Tomas got the news that his cancer had come back, and he returned to hospital. He contracted infections, one of which spread to his brain, and complications from another surgery led to him being put on life support. He died on September 16, a month and a day after the band publicly announced his diagnosis.

Reports of Tomas’s passing started circulating on social media that morning, followed by a wave of tributes from fans and peers. Trivium’s Matt Heafy called him “one of the most important singers/screamers of any metal band”.

“As a frontman… he was awesome, plain and simple,” said Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt, adding, “Intellectually, he seemed to be a step above and beyond your generic metal musician.”

At The Gates confirmed the news that afternoon and remembered him as a “true friend, both compassionate and sympathetic”. Today, the Björlers can’t talk about their emotions around Tomas’s death. Adrian is is choked up as he recalls getting a phone call from Anders on the day that Tomas had died.

“I was driving and I couldn’t answer it,” he says. “When I saw that it was Anders, I knew. It was shit, to be honest.”

Although some on social media have speculated about the band carrying on in some way or putting on a tribute show, none of the members have discussed what’s next with each other, because the idea of At The Gates without Tomas Lindberg just feels wrong.

“He was the heart of At The Gates, really,” says Adrian. “I can’t even imagine what we’d have sounded like without him. Even if you don’t consider his voice, just without him, I have no idea what the outcome would’ve been. He was the crown of the band.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 413, June 2026. The Ghost Of A Future Dead is out now. The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra will perform At The Gates, In Flames and Dark Tranquillity songs at Göteborgs Konserthus on December 4 and 5.

Ian Gillan has spoken to Classic Rock about Ritchie Blackmore's unexpected cameo performance with Deep Purple at the Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, New York, last month.

“I wasn’t really surprised it happened,” Gillan says. “I’ve been in touch with Ritchie for quite a long time now, and we’re on very good terms. All the nonsense from the past is now water under the bridge. We’re getting on great. So as we were in the area, I wasn’t that surprised [to see him], but I was very pleased.”

Blackmore had last shared a stage with Purple way back in November 1993, in Helsinki, during promotion for their aptly titled studio album The Battle Rages On. Bitterness and recrimination from both sides followed the guitarist’s mid-tour resignation, and any number of examples would serve to back up the theory that this was a wound – primarily between Blackmore and singer Ian Gillan – that was never going to heal.

We were wrong. A couple of days before the Jones Beach concert, Gillan had received a message from his former bête noire: “It said: ‘I only live around the corner. Do you mind if I come and jam with you?’” Gillan informed the audience in Wantagh, to massive cheers.

The request actually asked: “How would you feel about it if I got up just for an encore? Just one of the songs. I don’t want to intrude. No pressure, just for old times’ sake.”

After Purple happily accepted the olive branch in the spirit it had been offered, Blackmore divulged the plan – to the incredulity of the rock world – via his social media pages. Following the thirteenth song of the night’s set at Jones Beach, Space Truckin’, the stage went quiet as roadies scurried around with torches. The audience went wild when current Purple guitarist Simon McBride enticed Ritchie onto the stage.

The Man In Black placed his hat on top of the amps and, at first unaccompanied, delivered the most famous rock riff of all time. Six minutes later it was all over. It was probably not the best version of Smoke On The Water that Purple ever played, but as the smiles on stage and off confirmed, few are likely to have been more emotional.

“It was an absolute pleasure to have back on stage the founder member, the great legend, the immortal Ritchie Blackmore,” Gillan told the still-disbelieving audience. “Thanks, Ritchie. I must say it was a great pleasure. I’ll see you in the bar.”

Who bought the first round in the bar?

“Well, I brought along a bottle of whisky and had a couple of drinks for the first time in years at the venue,” Gillan revealed.

Was there time to talk?

“Yeah. We had about half an hour. But we’ve been in touch, as I said earlier, for some time now. Having said that, it was nice doing it face to face. And I’ll probably see Ritchie again next time I’m in the area.”

As well as delighting rock fans, presumably the on-stage reunion brought closure.

“To the public, probably yes,” Gillan responded. “But as far as I’m concerned, the closure was years ago, so I hadn’t even thought about it. But definitely it was a public demonstration of friendship, and good memories.”

The million-dollar question, of course, is whether something similar could ever happen again.

“I don’t know,” Gillan admitted. “The reason we did it there was because Ritchie only lives around the corner. So, I don’t know. If we play Jones Beach or New York again, possibly. Ritchie lives on Long Island but he’s always welcome.”

The following day, Blackmore wrote on social media: “A good night was had by all, I hope. I know that I had a great time. Thanks a lot, lads. Carry on and have a good tour.”

“It was a moving experience because I went on very quickly and had to play immediately,” Blackmore later told Guitar Player. “I couldn’t warm up, but I wasn’t there to play correct notes. I was there to see old friends I hadn’t seen in forty years, and we’re all getting older. I think we realised it could be the last time we see each other, maybe.

“It was tricky. I didn’t play anything too technical, as I felt I should stick to the rudiments of being simple,” the 81-year-old added. “I still lost my place at one point, but it’s not why I was there. I was there to heal any wounds – but there weren’t any wounds. Everyone was like we were in the army all along the Western Front, and we were all getting together again. [It was a] very emotional moment.”

On September 14, papier-mâché-headed alien duo Angine de Poitrine made their US TV debut on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

Of course, their detractors will say that guitarist Khn de Poitrine and drummer Klek de Poitrine are actually a pair of musicians from Saguenay, Quebec. But we're happy to suspend our disbelief. We like polka dots, alright?

The microtonal merchants, who released their second album, Vol. II, in April, debuted a brand new song titled Zugzegk on Fallon's show. The episode also featured guests including neuroscientist/podcaster Andrew Huberman, actor Salma Hayek Pinault and singer Becky G.

Enough with the facts, earthlings! Watch Angine de Poitrine perform Zugzegk in the video below and do that triangle shape with your hands.

The band are currently touring planet Earth until December. Catch them at the following venues across North America and Europe.

Sep 15: Washington The Atlantis, DC
Sep 16: Philadelphia Underground Arts, PA
Sep 17: Washington Lincoln Theatre, DC
Sep 19: Chicago Riot Fest, IL
Sep 20: Richmond Iron Blossom, VA

Oct 13: Bristol Prospect Building, United Kingdom
Oct 14: Glasgow SWG3 Galvanizers, United Kingdom
Oct 16: Dublin Opium, Ireland
Oct 18: Leeds Project House, United Kingdom
Oct 19: London Troxy, United Kingdom
Oct 20: London Troxy, United Kingdom
Oct 21: Paris Élysée Montmartre, France
Oct 22: Paris Élysée Montmartre, France
Oct 24: Lyon L’Epicerie Moderne, France
Oct 25: Antwerp Trix, Belgium
Oct 27: Berlin Festsaal Kreuzberg, Germany
Oct 28: Hamburg Molotow, Germany
Oct 29: Heidelberg Metropolink, Germany
Oct 31: Amsterdam London Calling Festival, Nertherlands
Nov 01: Groningen Vera, Netherlands

Nov 05: Toronto History, ON
Nov 06: Quebec Imperial Hall, QC
Nov 16: Brooklyn Brooklyn Steel, NY
Nov 17: Brooklyn Brooklyn Steel, NY
Nov 18: Brooklyn Brooklyn Steel, NY
Nov 19: Boston Royale, MA
Nov 20: Philadelphia Franklin Music Hall, PA
Nov 22: Mexico City Corona Capital 2026, Mexico
Nov 25: Atlanta The Masquerade, GA
Nov 27: Nashville Brooklyn Bowl, TN
Nov 29: Chicago The Salt Shed, IL
Nov 30: Chicago The Salt Shed, IL
Dec 01: Minneapolis First Ave, MN
Dec 02: Minneapolis First Ave, MN
Dec 04: Los Angeles The Wiltern, CA
Dec 05: Los Angeles The Wiltern, CA
Dec 07: San Francisco The Castro, CA
Dec 08: Oakland Fox Theater, CA
Dec 10: Portland Crystal Ballroom, OR
Dec 11: Portland Crystal Ballroom, OR
Dec 12: Seattle Showbox SoDo, WA
Dec 13: Seattle Paramount Theatre, WA

Find Angine de Poitrine tickets.

Sheffield's finest Def Leppard have launched the fourth volume of their ongoing series of album box sets. The cleverly titled Volume 4 includes 2015's self-titled album, 2022's Diamond Star Halos, and the following year's Drastic Symphonies, plus a fourth disc of rarities curated by frontman Joe Elliott.

"At last! It’s here!" exclaims Elliott. "Volume 4 gathers together our remaining studio albums and some very interesting bonus material. Some of the bonus bits are quite recent, but there is also something that was lost in the vaults for over 33 years until earlier this year. We’re extremely excited to finally put this box set in front of you. It’s a great listen and a good read too!"

The first of the rare tracks to be given a public outing is a cover of The Beatles' classic Revolution, which was recorded for an unnamed advertising campaign but never used. The original, recorded in 1968, was the first Beatles song to be licensed for use in a TV commercial when Nike paid $500,000 for the rights to use the song for a year in 1987.

The other tracks appearing on the Rarities discs on Volume 4 include the six tracks recorded for iTunes in 2006 (later released as The Lost Session in 2018), three live tracks recorded at Abbey Road in 2008 (later available as a Record Store Day release in 2018), three studio songs recorded for the 2011 album Mirror Ball – Live & More, and versions of Rock Of Ages, Pour Some Sugar On Me, and Hysteria recorded for Apple in 2012-13, and several more demos, radio edits and cover versions. Full tracklist below.

Def Leppard: Volume 4 - 2015-2023 is available as a six-CD and 11-disc vinyl edition, and can be pre-ordered now.

Def Leppard: Volume Four

Format: 6-CD Box Set
Disc One: Def Leppard
Disc Two: Diamond Star Halos
Disc Three: Drastic Symphonies
Disc Four: Rarities 
Disc Five: Rarities
Disc Six: Rarities

CD One: Def Leppard
Let’s Go
Dangerous
Man Enough
We Belong
Invincible
Sea Of Love
Energized
All Time High
Battle Of My Own
Broke‘N’Brokenhearted
Forever Young
Last Dance
Wings Of an Angel
Blind Faith

CD Two: Diamond Star Halos
Take What You Want
Kick
Fire It Up
This Guitar
SOS Emergency
Liquid Dust
U Rok Mi
Goodbye For Good This Time
All We Need
Open Your Eyes
Gimme A Kiss
Angels (Can't Help You Now)
Lifeless
Unbreakable
From Here To Eternity

CD Three: Drastic Symphonies
Turn To Dust
Paper Sun
Animal
Pour Some Sugar On Me (Stripped Version)
Hysteria
Love Bites
Goodbye For Good This Time
Love
Gods Of War
Angels (Can’t Help You Now)
Bringin' On The Heartbreak
Switch 625
Too Late For Love
When Love And Hate Collide
Kings Of The World

CD Four: Rarities
Let It Go (Live iTunes Session)
Foolin (Live iTunes Session)
Bringin' On The Heartbreak (Live iTunes Session)
Rock On (Live iTunes Session)
When Love And Hate Collide (Live iTunes Session)
Promises (Live iTunes Session)
C'Mon C'mon (Live At Abbey Road, 2008)
Rock On (Live At Abbey Road, 2008)
Rocket (Live At Abbey Road, 2008)
Undefeated (From Mirrorball)
Kings Of the World (From Mirrorball)
It’s All About Believin' (From Mirrorball)
Rock Of Ages (2012 Re-Recorded Version)
Pour Some Sugar On Me (2012 Re-Recorded Version)
Where Does Love Go When It Dies / Now / When Love And Hate Collide / Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad / Two Steps Behind (Acoustic Medley, 2012)
Hysteria (2013 Re-Recorded Version)

CD Five: Rarities
Undefeated (Demo)
Last Dance (Demo)
Wings Of An Angel (Las Vegas Demo)
We Belong (Joe Only Vox)
This Guitar (Demo)
Hysteria (Spotify Session, 2018)
Miss You In A Heartbeat (Feat. Ian Hunter) (Retroactive Outtake)
We All Need Christmas
Take What You Want (Radio Edit)
Kick (Radio Edit)
This Guitar (Joe Only Mix)
Goodbye For Good This Time (Avant-Garde Mix)
Lifeless (Joe Only Mix)
Angels (Can't Help You Now) (Covent Garden Mix)
Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad
Animal (Radio Edit)
Just Like 73 (Feat. Tom Morello)

CD Six: Rarities
Personal Jesus (2026 Mix)
Revolution (Abandoned TV Ad)
“Heroes" (2026 Mix)
Stand By Me (From Bank of Dave 2)
Bad Motor Scooter (Feat. Sammy Hagar)
Helen Wheels (from “The Art Of McCartney” album)
Drive In Saturday (Feat. Mike Garson)
Seagull (Full Band Version)

Format: 11LP Boxset
Album One: Def Leppard (2 X Lp) 
Album Two: Diamond Star Halo (2 X Lp) 
Album Three: Drastic Symphony (2 X Lp) 
Album Four: Rarities (2 X Lp)
Album Five: Rarities (3 X Lp)

Album One: Def Leppard
Side One
Let’s Go
Dangerous
Man Enough
We Belong
Side Two
Invincible
Sea Of Love
Energized
All Time High
Side Three
Battle Of My Own
Broke‘N’Brokenhearted
Forever Young
Last Dance
Side Four
Wings Of an Angel
Blind Faith

Album Two: Diamond Star Halos
Side One
Take What You Want
Kick
Fire It Up
This Guitar
Side Two
SOS Emergency
Liquid Dust
U Rok Mi
Goodbye For Good This Time
Side Three
All We Need
Open Your Eyes
Gimme A Kiss
Angels (Can0t Help You Now)
Side Four
Lifeless
Unbreakable
From Here To Eternity

Album Three: Drastic Symphonies
Side One
Turn To Dust
Paper Sun
Animal
Pour Some Sugar On Me (Stripped Version)
Side Two
Hysteria
Love Bites
Goodbye For Good This Time
Love
Side Three
Gods Of War
Angels (Can’t Help You Now)
Bringin' On The Heartbreak
Switch 625
Side Four
Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad
Too Late For Love
When Love And Hate Collide
Kings Of The World

Album Four: Rarities
Side One
Let It Go (Live iTunes Session)
Foolin (Live iTunes Session)
Bringin' On The Heartbreak (Live iTunes Session)
Rock On (Live iTunes Session)
When Love And Hate Collide (Live iTunes Session)
Side Two
Promises (Live iTunes Session)
C'Mon C'mon (Live At Abbey Road, 2008)
Rock On (Live At Abbey Road, 2008)
Rocket (Live At Abbey Road, 2008)
Side Three
Undefeated (From Mirrorball)
Kings Of The World (From Mirrorball)
It’s All About Believin' (From Mirrorball)
Side Four
Rock Of Ages (2012 Re-Record)
Pour Some Sugar On Me (2012 Re-Record)
Where Does Love Go When It Dies / Now / When Love And Hate Collide / Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad / Two Steps Behind (Acoustic Medley, 2012)
Hysteria (2013 Re-Record)

Album Five: Rarities
Side One
Undefeated (Demo)
Last Dance (Demo)
Wings Of An Angel (Las Vegas Demo)
We Belong (Joe Only Vox)
Side Two
This Guitar (Demo)
Hysteria (Spotify Session, 2018)
Miss You in A Heartbeat (Feat. Ian Hunter) (Retroactive Outtake)
We All Need Christmas
Side Three
Take What You Want (Radio Edit)
Kick (Radio Edit)
This Guitar (Joe Only Mix)
Goodbye For Good This Time (Avant-Garde Mix)
Side Four
Lifeless (Joe Only Mix)
Angels (Can't Help You Now) (Covent Garden Mix)
Animal (Radio Edit)
Just Like 73 (Feat. Tom Morello)
Side Five
Personal Jesus (2026 Mix)
Revolution (Abandoned TV Ad)
“Heroes" (2026 Mix)
Stand By Me (From Bank Of Dave 2)
Side Six
Bad Motor Scooter (Feat. Sammy Hagar)
Helen Wheels (from “The Art Of McCartney” album)
Drive In Saturday (Feat. Mike Garson)
Seagull (Full Band Version)

In February 1976, Fleetwood Mac began work on the follow-up to their self-titled tenth album at the Record Planet studio in Sausalito, California. Six months earlier, Fleetwood Mac, their first record to feature vocalist Stevie Nicks and guitarist/vocalist Lindsey Buckingham, had reached the top of the Billboard chart, giving the Anglo-American band their first US number one album. Since then, however, the band had been beset by personal problems, and relationship difficulties, and studio engineers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut could hardly fail to notice the tension as they commenced work.

“I thought I was going to be making a regular album,” Ken Caillat told MOJO magazine writer Mark Blake when discussing the making of Rumours in 2013. “Then I heard this yelling, and saw Chris [McVie] throw a glass of champagne in [former husband's] John's face. Then Stevie and Lindsey started having an argument over the microphone. Then Mick [Fleetwood] walked in with tears in his eyes as he'd just got off the phone to his wife [who had confessed to an affair with his best friend]. I started to think it was contagious.”

Caillat has now written a book - Making Rumours: The Inside Story of how Fleetwood Mac Made a Masterpiece -about his experience making the 40-million-selling album, and, as you might expect, it's a fascinating read, laying bare the drama and magic at the heart of the record. The sessions were challenging for all involved, not least the then 29-year-old Caillat, who was promoted from engineer to co-producer during the recording.

At one point in the book, he reveals that, during the tracking of Go Your Own Way, Lindsey Buckingham was frustrated by his own attempts to record a guitar solo, and requests that Caillat and Dashut tape over his first run at the solo. He's equally unimpressed with his second take, however, and asks that Caillat replays his first attempt, at which point the engineer reveals that he has taped over it as requested. A distinctly unimpressed Buckingham then storms into the studio control room and starts strangling Caillat.

"'You’re an idiot!' Lindsey screamed at me, his hands tightening around my throat," the engineer writes.

"His veins were popping out of his neck," Caillat recalls in a new interview with The Times newspaper. "Christine goes, 'Lindsey, you told him to erase it!' Of course he was coked and stoned and everything else. He used to roll joints all the time. He’s a very nervous man."

Caillat also reveals to The Times that band members would schedule their arguments, so that they didn’t eat into recording time.

"They had to figure out when they would have their fighting meetings," he remembers. "I would say, Who feels like fighting today, and who feels like working? Then we might do some keyboards, or some vocals, while the others went outside to yell at each other."

"There were fights, breakups, drinking, drugs..." he once recalled to Music Radar in 2012. "We all indulged in substances. But I had to be a therapist and record producer. When everything was insane, I had to be sane. If there was a rule book, nobody gave me one."

Making Rumours: The Inside Story of how Fleetwood Mac Made a Masterpiece by Ken Caillat and Steve Stiefel is out now, on Monoray.

On July 29, 2026, Universal Studios announced a new haunted house inspired by Ozzy Osbourne for Halloween Horror Nights in both Orlando and Hollywood. The announcement was met with excitement from many Ozzy fans - for them, an opportunity to step inside the mythology of one of metal's most beloved figures, with an actor-led experience recreating highlights from his musical career, seemed like a dream combo.

There was, however, also a little cynicism. For some, the timing felt uncomfortably transactional. Is turning a recently deceased musician into a theme-park attraction simply another way of cashing in on their legacy while the grief is still fresh?

Going off the rails on the gravy train?

That sentiment was particularly pronounced on social media, where some fans accused Osbourne's family of turning his name into a commercial asset:

“He died and his family IMMEDIATELY turned him into a theme park attraction!"

“His family is just using his name on everything they can to get paid!"

You get the gist. There’s a major problem with this argument, though: Universal Studios had been doing Ozzy Osbourne-themed attractions long before his death.

The theme park titans had already incorporated Ozzy and Black Sabbath into a haunted house at Halloween Horror Nights more than a decade ago. In 2013, Universal Studios Hollywood featured Black Sabbath: 13, an attraction inspired by the band's then-new album and its occult imagery. Ozzy himself even visited the attraction at the time, giving it his own seal of approval by saying it’s “great, scared me a couple of times.”

Ultimately, there’s only one way to find out if the Ozzy Osbourne: Prince of Darkness haunted house is a loving tribute or a cynical cash grab, and that’s to head over to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Orlando and experience it for myself. So I did.

No more fears!

Imagine being able to step inside your favourite piece of album artwork. The thrill of being surrounded by its dark beauty, taking actual footsteps within its brooding world. That’s exactly what the Ozzy Osbourne: Prince of Darkness haunted house is. It’s the gothic fantasy visuals of heavy metal realised in tangible, 3D form.

The indoor walkthrough experience begins with a beautiful facade of gothic church ruins. Look down and there’s Ozzy’s face projecting through the water while Straight to Hell from 2020’s Ordinary Man plays in the background.

Then we jump back to 1988’s No Rest for the Wicked in the first scene, with Bloodbath in Paradise blaring as we walk beneath a temple of cloaked cultists wearing masks bearing Ozzy'S symbol.

Next, we tiptoe nervously through claustrophobic dungeons, strobe lights flash red and the soundtrack fittingly switches to Patient Number 9. Actors leap out to jump-scare from behind bars, disappearing back into the shadows too quickly to for us to fully appreciate their artfully crafted makeup and prosthetics.

From this point onwards, things descend into full-scale glorious madness in the most Ozzy ways imaginable. An enormous bat descends from the ceiling and bites the head off of the Prince Of Darkness (no, this isn’t a fever dream). Werewolves dressed as Ozzy leap out from behind giant tombstones as Bark At The Moon plays at full volume (no, this still isn’t a fever dream)

Then, lights on a full-sized train carriage flash brightly, illuminating a wide-mouthed Ozzy actor towering over us on stilts. He is dressed as a train conductor, and ushers us aboard. We are actually stepping on to the Crazy Train (at this point, is there anything I can possibly do to convince you this wasn’t a fever dream?).

Sure, stepping onto an actual crazy train is ridiculously literal. But it’s also ridiculously fun. And that’s, ultimately, is the tone that sums up the Ozzy Osbourne haunted house experience. It salutes his musical legacy in a theatrical, playfully dark way.

Despite the final scene featuring the throne from his very last concert, the attraction never feels like a sombre tribute that says “we miss you.” Instead, it’s a loud celebration that says “we loved you” with a wild grin on its face.

There’s also a variety of Ozzy-themed snacks for fans to enjoy at the event, including a milk chocolate bat with a raspberry-filled head, a mini black carrot cake (Ozzy’s favourite) and a Black Rain tequila-based drink, amongst others.

While the keyboard warriors will inevitably bemoan the Ozzy haunted house from a viewpoint that is, frankly, misinformed, the attraction itself champions his musical career in unique and special ways. It’s a legacy handled with love and respect. You suspect the man himself would have approved.

The Ozzy Osbourne: Prince Of Darkness haunted house will be at Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Orlando Resort and Universal Studios Hollywood until November 1, 2026

Deftones have had one of the most varied and experimental careers of any band in modern music. From their early days as part of the nascent nu-metal movement, through to the ambient post-metal of today, it’s been one hell of a ride.

Here we present the Sacramento, California quintet's back catalogue ranked in order.

10. Koi No Yokan (2012)

Coming off the back of the critical acclaim of 2010’s Diamond Eyes, this was less instant and contained fewer moments for fans of heavy music to get really excited about. But there is still enough in Koi No Yokan to consider it a success; Entombed is a beautiful as anything the band have ever put their name to, and any album that starts with the monstrous Swerve City can’t be that bad.

9. Saturday Night Wrist (2006)

It seems that the world is finally catching up with Saturday Night Wrist. Made by a frustrated and bickering band, and unloved by much of its fanbase, the main talking point for many is it being the final album to feature original bassist Chi Cheng before his ultimately fatal car crash. But, listening to it today, there are plenty of excellent moments on Saturday Night Wrist, most of them are epically, achingly melodic and brilliantly brooding. Take a listen to Beware or Xerces and re-evaluate.

8. Gore (2016)

Many of the experiments made on Saturday Night Wrist were revisited a decade later on the divisive Gore album. No doubt the band are more adept and capable of nailing those elements here, although the reaction from some people suggests that Gore may be another slow burner.

7. Ohms (2020)

There were murmuring of discontent from fans that Gore sacrificed too much in the way of heaviness. Their most recent album corrects that course by taking an extensive tour of the past. Ohms stings like a butterfly and floats like a bee, switching between the blissful and the bristling, frequently within the space of the same song. It doesn’t point the band in any new directions or draw on any new influences, but then Deftones long ago proved they were leaders in a field of one.

6. Deftones (2003)

Given the impossible task of following up the massive success of White Pony it’s obvious why Deftones self-titled opus is regularly overlooked. But don’t for a second think that this is an artistic failure. The heaviness was back in spades, maybe more so than ever, on opener Hexagram and the totally brutal When Girls Telephone Boys, but the new found love of exploring new musical spaces and textures were all over Minerva. A lost classic.

5. Private Music (2024)

Having blown up on TikTok to become bigger in the modern era than they have at any time in their career, it seems fitting that Deftones released an album of such quality for their tenth studio effort. Private Music is the perfect distillation of what makes them such a special band; the fantastic, woozy drawl of Moreno sounding as unique as ever, the crunchy riffs of Carpenter, their soothing shoegaze morphing into scabrous metal, it’s all here and it’s all wonderfully captured by Nick Raskulinecz’s superb production job. From the Smashing Pumpkins-esque Ecdysis to the driving bounce of Milk Of The Madonna, bands of this vintage have rarely sounded as good as Deftones do on Private Music.

4. Diamond Eyes (2010)

Considered by many as the album that put the band back on an upward trajectory after the trauma of Saturday Night Wrist. Diamond Eyes sounds oddly back to basics when put up against much of their latter period, but how can you argue with the quality of songs like Rocket Skates or Cmnd/Ctrl? It’s an album that recalls the excitement of the band’s first two releases as realised by an older, wiser band.

3. Adrenaline (1995)

One of the great debuts of the 90s. Nu-metal wasn’t a thing until Korn and Deftones arrived on the scene and changed everything. Whilst both bands were responsible for shifting metal’s aesthetics, Korn dealt purely in nihilism, pain and brutality. Whereas Deftones on Adrenaline showcased influences from gangster rap to skate punk. Songs like Bored and 7 Words became anthems of youthful alienation for a whole new group of kids, who were bored of grunge and wanted their own sound. They soon got it.

2. Around The Fur (1997)

An album that turned Deftones into the hottest band on the planet (certainly in the UK), Around The Fur is more thoughtful and features greater depth than Adrenaline. But still was as heavy as any metal band around, as heard on the breakneck lotion or hearing Chino Moreno trading vocal lines with Max Cavalera on Headup. Crucially though, Around The Fur features at least two of the times most anthemic songs in Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away) and the awesome My Own Summer (Shove It), which are still staples in their live set today.

1. White Pony (2000)

What else could it ever be? One of modern music’s most challenging and definitive statements. White Pony turned Deftones from one of the best bands in a rapidly oversaturated scene into a genre all of their own. New member Frank Delgado brought a whole new set of subtle sonic touches to the band, Moreno captivates throughout with a haunting, beguiling vocal performance and drummer Abe Cunningham keeps an irresistible rhythmic tattoo rolling from the first second till the last and even guitarist Stephen Carpenter, the one member openly unsure of the bands attempt to break free from the shackles of metal, manages to crowbar in enough jaw dropping riffs into the album. The closest thing metal has ever had to an album like Radiohead’s Ok Computer, and the most compelling reason for why Deftones exist in a bubble all of their own making.

Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera is considering the re-establishment of his prog quartet Quiet Sun, after they reconvened to oversee the expanded reissue of their only album, 1975’s Mainstream.

Manzanera originally formed the band on the fringes of the Canterbury scene in the 60s alongside former Dulwich College schoolmate and later Matching Mole bassist Bill MacCormick, future Gong/This Heat drummer Charles Hayward and keyboard player Dave Jarrett.

They went their separate ways in 1971 – but three years later, when Manzanera was making solo album Diamond Head, he got Quiet Sun back together to record Mainstream at the same time, with track titles including Trumpets With Motherhood, Rongwrong and Mummy Was An Asteroid, Daddy Was A Small Non-Stick Kitchen Utensil. Additional help came from Brian Eno and Bill’s brother, author Ian MacDonald.

Although it was their only album, Manzanera later noticed it had developed a cult following. “The minute anything was mentioned on my website, people would come out of the woodwork from all over the world, partly because of Charles and Bill and their work with Robert Wyatt and Gong. I always felt we were part of that Canterbury school.”

When Manzanera and his old bandmates found the original analogue tapes, they were impressed. “The musicianship was amazing considering we hadn’t played together for five years at that point, and I don’t think I’d rehearsed at all for those sessions.”

They took the opportunity to create a 21st-century product with remixed and remastered versions, as well as unheard material and a 60-page book. “We felt like we had the opportunity to make it a definitive package,” says Manzanera. “We thought, ‘Let’s add in as many new bits of bric-a-brac as we can find.’ We rinsed all the pictures and stories we had.”

That may not be the end of the Quiet Sun story. The quartet who made the original album wound up working on new studio material, which could see the light of day soon.

“We still have to decide if it’s any good!” Manzanera says. “There’s about nine extra people involved, so it’s a bit like a collective. It’s been very interesting to come back to work with those guys and expand the Quiet Sun project 50 years later.”

The 51st anniversary edition of Mainstream is on sale now.

I briefly sat next to Liam Gallagher at a party once. It was after Oasis played Earls Court in 1995 – peak Oasis, before the bloat set in – and the band's label Creation had organised an after-show soiree in a club beneath a Mexican restaurant in Soho.

"Who are you?" Liam asked, after taking the seat next to me. I mumbled an introduction, but his attention was already elsewhere. On one of the walls bordering the dance floor, he'd spotted a life-size cardboard cutout of his older brother, Noel, and he didn't like it. He left his seat as quickly as he'd arrived and wandered over to cardboard Noel, studying him with equal amounts of curiosity and suspicion. He started shadow boxing, throwing jabs and hooks at his sibling. Then he pulled cardboard Noel down, tossed him onto the floor, and danced around him, arms aloft, like Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston. In a roomful of associates and hangers-on, Liam was alone on the dance floor, with his brother at his feet. Victorious.

The animosity between Gallagher Junior and Senior obviously wasn't new. Eighteen months earlier, Creation had hired the Royal Albert Hall for Undrugged, an evening of acoustic music to celebrate their 10th anniversary, and Noel Gallagher – three months before the release of the debut Oasis album Definitely Maybe – played a short set while Liam heckled him from the audience, just as he would in 1996 when they appeared on MTV's Unplugged. And two weeks after the Earls Court show, Wibbling Rivalry, a seven-inch single featuring nothing more than the brothers arguing during an NME interview, climbed to number 53 in the chart. Friction was part of their commercial appeal.

It still is. That sibling rivalry is front and centre in the new movie, Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger. It's presumably why they hired a screenwriter, Steven Knight, whose credits include Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and Peaky Blinders, to massage the narrative and tweak the drama, as if the brothers were lead characters in a carefully choreographed docu-soap.

While it's not exactly Keeping Up With The Gallaghers, it's not exactly revelatory either. No new details are provided about the infamous Paris fracas that led to the band's disintegration in 2009, and there's no real insight regarding the pair's reconciliation. It's as if it's enough to know that something happened, but not how or why.

The truce isn't the only part of the story that's glossed over. Noel has happily come to recognise the importance of Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs to the band's sound, but the guitarist isn't interviewed and remains a peripheral character in the film, only marginally less prominent than the onstage cutout of then-Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola. And while the band rightfully pay respect to Stone Roses/Primal Scream bassist Mani after his death, there's no mention of Bonehead's abandonment of the tour to seek treatment for prostate cancer.

A crowd singing an impromptu version of Don't Look Back In Anger at the vigil held outside the Manchester Arena following the 2017 terrorist bombing is sold as a great unifying moment, but Liam's public criticism of Noel for not performing at the subsequent One Love concert isn't revisited, nor is his description of Noel's set at the venue's reopening as "a PR stunt" (Liam later claimed his Twitter account had been hacked). Of course, there's no mention of the dynamic pricing fiasco which saw some fans pay more than double the advertised price for reunion tour tickets (although Liam does joke about the lack of "cheap seats").

There's also some severe clunkiness, including (thanks to Steven Knight, presumably) a scene where a vicar delivers an Oasis-themed sermon about forgiveness to a scant congregation of dozing pensioners.

In the end, none of this takes the gloss off what's an extremely powerful movie. The brothers play their part, of course – the scene where Liam arrives at his first rehearsal and immediately demands the removal of acoustic panels on the drum kit is a clear claim for territory; he may as well have cocked a leg and urinated. Or, even more bizarrely, the times Liam balances his tambourine on his head like a crown. Filmed in silhouette, he looks like an alien god. "If I did that, I'd look like an utter cunt," admits Noel. "But he does it, and it's the greatest thing I've ever seen."

More than the Gallaghers, this is a movie about the impact of their songs. On the big screen, pumped through multiple cinema speakers, their great songs (Live Forever, Wonderwall, Acquiesce) sound utterly immense. Their decent songs (most of the rest) aren't far behind. Even Roll With It, a three-chord boogie so rudimentary Francis Rossi might have baulked at releasing it, sounds like it was handed down from Mount Olympus. Never have a band sounded so much more than the sum of their parts.

The true star of the movie is the audience. They seem to be split fairly evenly between fans returning to the band they loved in the 90s, and those who've picked up Oasis via their parents rather than first-hand exposure. The cameras roam the crowd looking for fans overcome by the occasion, and they find plenty. Grown men weep. Strangers embrace. Couples kiss. Even the ticketless are part of the experience. The impact is clearly generational.

Best of all, at the end of the first show in Cardiff, the camera settles on the face of a young man who probably wasn't born when Oasis played Knebworth. He looks as if he's experienced some sort of religious encounter and isn't quite sure whether it's over. His face is a mixture of bewilderment and rapture, but instead of cutting quickly to the next disciple – as less brave filmmakers almost certainly would have – the camera lingers as his confusion and ecstasy slowly fade and he reengages with the real world. It's a genuinely wonderful moment.

Oasis: Don't Look Back In Anger might be the best film ever made about music's ability to emotionally impact vast crowds. It's also brilliant, Olympic-level marketing: Just days after the cinema release came news of another run of gargantuan outdoor shows. Eleven Etihads. Four Knebworths. And so on. Staggering numbers. You, too, can be part of this!

The press release accompanying news of the tour boasts that the band will "once again return to lift the spirits of the people", and, in a business driven by bullshit and hyperbole, it actually sounds like the truth.

Fans have clamoured for Amy Lee, Courtney LaPlante and Poppy to tour together since last year's End Of You collab broke the internet, and it's finally happened - albeit a little split up, with Evanescence taking Spiritbox with them on some dates of their ongoing world tour, and Poppy jumping on for others.

It's Poppy joining the fun at the O2 in London tonight, alongside alt singer-songwriter K.Flay K.Flay has featured on a myriad of other artists’ songs, though it seems she’s never quite carved out a proper niche of her own; sited somewhere between indie, grunge and pop rock with fuzzed-out bass and laid back vocal delivery, it’s not an immediately obvious fit for an Evanescence crowd, but the room filling out and front rows nodding along indicates it’s at least going down reasonably well.

Poppy strides onstage confidently as her band opens with the arena-sized metalcore of Have You Had Enough. The equally mammoth The Cost of Giving Up follows, both polished bangers greeted by a horde of phones filming up front.

The famously reticent singer doesn’t initially speak much between songs, though it seems less like the robotic Poppy character of old, rather that the music is left to speak for her. Gone are the prerecorded, vocoder-laden interludes; instead she packs the set with as many songs from her recent two albums as she can, though an early Scary Mask is a glimpse into the more experimental artist she used to be as it flits from bubblegum pop ballad to searing metal to electronica.

It takes until VAN for the first pit to appear but, to Poppy's credit, she manages to incite a much larger one for finale New Way Out that finally sees her own stage energy levels returned by the crowd. By the end of her 50-minute set, she’s clearly having a blast.

Three decades into a career and over two since smash hit 2003 debut Fallen, Evanescence could well have spent the time since resting on their laurels and touring the hits. It’s to their credit that tonight’s setlist includes the entirety of new album Sanctuary woven through it.

Opening with its title track and Tell Me When You’ve Had Enough, it’s gratifying to see a crowd so up for new material despite Fallen’s long shadow. It barely needs saying but Amy Lee sounds phenomenal: a generational, immediately recognisable voice that’s propelled the band to legendary status.

Perhaps it’s an indication of this crowd’s average age now but they’re strangely immobile for the headline act, heads nodding and one small pit present, but little else. Despite this, everyone's enjoying themselves - plenty are bellowing choruses back. Naturally, the older material still gets the biggest reactions, with Going Under receiving deafening cheers, while the venomous Call Me When You’re Sober offers a sumptuous light show at odds with its restrained fury.

The band is joined by K.Flay for rebellious, feminist anthem Fight Like A Girl, while End Of You has lashings of pyro and a surprise guest spot not only from Poppy but Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante herself, the trio greeted by screams of adoration.

It’s easily the highlight of the set in terms of sheer spectacle and the huge audience pop, but Evanescence are on top form throughout tonight. The arena lights up with phone torches for the tender My Immortal, creating an air of melodramatic splendour, and while there's a noticeable number of people leaving during final song Wide Open Heart, it's still ultimately been a triumph of an evening, driven by some of rock’s most enduring, iconic songs.

Slaughter to Prevail frontman Alex Terrible has denied that he is a Nazi in a lengthy post on Instagram.

The Russian-born vocalist, whose real name is Aleksandr Shikolai, has been dogged by persistent allegations that he has far-right links. These accusations stem from two tattoos associated with white supremacy, namely a Black Sun and an Othala rune.

And just weeks after dismissing these rumours in a recent Metal Hammer interview at Bloodstock last month, the frontman has written a statement denying any affiliations with the far-right political ideology.

He wrote: “I want to make something very clear to anyone who works with me, wants to work with me, or is considering doing business with me in the future.

"I have big plans for my music, my career, and everything I’m building around it. Over the years, some people and companies have chosen not to work with me because of controversies surrounding my past. Some of them have even told me privately that they respect me and support me, but they’re afraid of how being associated with me might affect their reputation.

"I understand that. Everyone has the right to make their own decision. But I also want people to understand exactly where I stand. I am not a Nazi. I have never considered myself a Nazi, and I never will.

"When I was a teenager in Russia, I spent time around right-wing people and the football hooligan subculture. I knew what the Black Sun was and I knew its history. But within the specific subculture I was part of in Russia at that time, I did not perceive wearing that symbol as a declaration of Nazism or fascism. To me, it represented something extreme, rebellious, and connected to the environment I was surrounded by.

"Looking at it now as an adult, I understand that my personal interpretation of a symbol doesn’t erase its history or what it represents to other people. I understand why people see it and immediately make certain assumptions about me. I also understand that choosing to put that symbol on my body was my decision, and I take responsibility for that decision. But it does not mean that I was, or am, a Nazi.

"At that point in my life, I could barely even leave my house because of panic attacks, depression, and heart problems after an overdose.

"And I’m saying this clearly right now: I am not right-wing. I am not left-wing. I am a musician, a father, and a husband who is trying to understand himself and become a better version of himself every single day.

"If you don’t want to move forward with me or work with me because of the controversy surrounding my past, I understand. But I also won’t work with you in the future.

"A lot of people turned their backs on me in the past, but once I became successful, suddenly they wanted to work with me despite the exact same controversy. No, thank you.

"And to everyone who has worked with me and continues to work with me — every label, band, company, and every person involved — I truly appreciate you. I understand that sometimes you’re putting your own reputation on the line by standing beside me.

"Thank you, genuinely, for not turning your backs on me because of the mistakes I made in my past, and for believing in me as a human being."

The band are currently on tour until December 20.

Tony Iommi has revealed that he turned down the opportunity to record a final Black Sabbath album with the band's original lineup.

In an exclusive interview in the new issue of Classic Rock, Iommi reveals that Andrew Watt, who produced Ozzy Osbourne's final two albums, 2020's Ordinary Man and 2022's Patient Number 9, had approached him in the early 2020s about making a Sabbath album with the original lineup.

“I’d met Andrew Watt when he was producing Ozzy,” says Iommi. “He was very keen and a bit too excited. He also didn’t know what it was like working with the original Sabbath, working with Bill [drummer Bill Ward]. Also, we’d done 13, and I didn’t like the idea of: ‘Now here’s another album.’”

Iommi has also admitted that he had doubts about Black Sabbath performing at last year's historic Back To The Beginning show at Villa Park in Birmingham. The metal legend reveals he was initially dubious when Sabbath were asked to reunite for the show, which saw Metallica, Pantera, Guns N’ Roses and Tool among those lining up to play a tribute to Sabbath, with proceeds going to several charities.

“I said to Ozzy: ‘I don’t think we should do it.’ I said: ‘We should just let the other bands play our stuff, and us come out at the end and say thank you.' But it was for a good charitable cause, and eventually we said okay.”

Iommi had last seen Ozzy when the two of them performed Paranoid at the closing ceremony of the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. The singer had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2003, but only made his condition public in 2020 when his symptons worsened.

"I hadn’t seen Ozzy for a bit, and it was difficult seeing him like that,: Iommi says. “Fucking hell…” He adds that he didn’t want Ozzy to play a solo set before Sabbath’s closing performance, either: “I was concerned he was going to blow himself out, and by the time we came on he’d be struggling.” Read more from Iommi - including the inside scoop on his new solo album - in the new issue of Classic Rock, on sale now. Iommi’s forthcoming album, From The Dark, is due for release on October 23 via BMG.

Satyricon vocalist Sigurd “Satyr” Wongraven has looked back on the strange night his diabolical black metal band played at a Norwegian fashion show.

The Oslo duo performed their 2006 single K.I.N.G. on the catwalk at the 2011 edition of the Nordic World Ski Championships, playing the snarling metal track as models walked past in high-end dresses. Looking back during an interview with Metal Hammer, Wongraven, 50, calls the booking “bizarre” and admits he still has no clue who came up with the idea.

“The production was done by NRK, which is Norway’s equivalent to the BBC,” he explains. “And if you do anything with NRK, they will do it exactly the way that they want to. They’re not gonna sit down with a band and go, ‘How do you want it, guys?’”

The only theory Wongraven can come up with is that the organisers wanted to blend skiing, something “deeply rooted in our [Norwegian] sporting culture”, with black metal, “something else that is uniquely Norwegian”, and “show it to the world”. But, “I have no idea who came up with the idea to blend it with a fashion show!”

Elsewhere in the interview, Wongraven talks further about the creation of K.I.N.G., the lead single from his band’s 2006 album, Now, Diabolical. The heavy, groovy track – sometimes referred to as ‘black’n’roll’, a term Satyricon reject – saw the band remove keyboards and technical drum parts from their sound.

“Now, Diabolical was trusting more that a song could be more powerful if we strip it of unnecessary elements,” Wongraven recalls. “When you think of Iron Man by Black Sabbath or Let There Be Rock by AC/DC, you think of the signature riff, and when you have a riff that can carry a whole song on its shoulders, everything from this point onwards is about what complements that part.”

Upon release in April 2006, Now, Diabolical was the band’s biggest commercial hit, reaching number two on the Norwegian charts. It also charted in Finland, Sweden and the UK. K.I.N.G. became their biggest song: at time of publication, it has 19,800,000 Spotify streams, more than double their next-biggest track, 2002’s Black Crow On A Tombstone.

Satyricon’s last album, 2022’s Satyricon & Munch, marked a stark departure from their black metal sound. It was a single, hour-long, atmospheric song, designed to soundtrack the art exhibition of the same name that the band put on at Oslo’s Edvard Munch Museum. In 2024, Wongraven said that Satyricon’s next album will be “more conventional” but “very, very varied”.

The band will tour Europe from September to November. The first show will take place at the Floyd venue in Athens, Greece on September 18. On October 31, they’ll support Dimmu Borgir at Oslo Spektrum in their hometown, with Enslaved opening. They’re also booked to headline Damnation festival in Manchester on November 8.

Ahead of five rare UK shows, ever-present frontman, guitarist and last remaining original Flamin’ Groovies member Cyril Jordan invites us to a 50th-anniversary birthday party in honour of the Californian group’s signature single, Shake Some Action, which is often rated as among the greatest rock’n’roll singles of the 70s

Rolling Stone magazine once hailed the Flamin’ Groovies as “maybe the greatest rock’n’roll band to ever come out of San Francisco”.

We’re probably the only rock’n’roll band from there. The Grateful Dead were psychedelic improv-meets-folk rock. None of those bands were influenced by Little Richard, but we recorded two of his songs.

These upcoming dates celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the power-pop anthem Shake Some Action, and the album of the same name. What do you recall of the song’s birth?

We cut that song at Rockfield in Wales at Christmas of 1975, eleven years after the British Invasion. I like to write in sections, and over a three-month period I tried in vain to finish them. In the end I put all of my ideas together to make one whole song.

Did you recognise it immediately as a hit?

No [laughs]. Not at all.

Shake Some Action was produced by Dave Edmunds. How did you get on with him?

I had been turned on to Dave with I Hear You Knocking [1970]. Hearing it on the radio, I stopped the car and turned up the volume. When I heard it had been cut at Rockfield, which seemed to me to be the new Sun Studios [in Memphis], I swore to myself that one day I would go to Rockfield and record with Dave Edmunds. It happened, and it was fantastic.

Cited as a watershed moment in the birth of punk, Flamin’ Groovies’ 1976 headline gig at the Roundhouse in London had two notable support acts: Ramones and The Stranglers. How did that happen?

Back then we had some clout, so I would call up friends in England and ask them about the up-and-coming local groups. One year it would be the Boomtown Rats, the next The Stranglers and then Dr Feelgood. On our last tour of England it was The Damned.

Groovies lead singer of the era, Chris Wilson, once called the Ramones “Nice kids but limited players”. Do you agree?

Well, we were quite a lot older than those guys. We were advanced guitar players. We were fingerpickers. As a barre chord guy, Johnny was always amazed by that. One of the reasons the punk scene was so radical is that the players were not advanced. They made a noise. That’s what it was all about.

But it could be a special noise.

In 1972 I became friends with Malcolm McLaren [Sex Pistols manager]. Three years later we played the annual NME party at Dingwalls [in London’s Camden Lock], and Malcolm came by along with this new band he was managing. One of them proceeds to steal our briefcase which contains the band’s passports, five thousand pounds in cash and my fuzz-tone pedal.

At the hotel, one of their roadies returns the briefcase, saying it had been taken “by mistake”. We open the thing up and everything is there – except the fuzz-tone. It all made complete sense to me the first time I heard [Pistols’ debut album] Never Mind The Bollocks. Years later I found out Steve Jones had stolen it.

On this tour, apart from Shake Some Action – obviously – what else can we expect to hear?

We’ll do maybe eighty per cent of the songs from that album, plus an assortment of others that are stuck to my shoe like gum. It will be a mish-mash of earlier songs, the stuff from Shake Some Action and brand-new material that I’ve written. It’s still an energetic rock’n’roll show.

The Flamon' Groovies UK tour begins this evening (September 15) in Bristol, followed by dates in Leeds, Edinburgh, Nottingham and London. Find tickets.

When The Damned guitarist Captain Sensible was at the vanguard of 70s punk, his penchant for the proggier side of things remained undisclosed. But in 2009 he owned up to ripping off the genre he’d professed to hate – although he confirmed that some of his negativity was genuine.

“The first record I ever bought was I’m A Moody Guy by Shane Fenton, who became Alvin Stardust. I was so young that I had to get my mum to buy it – I was five or something. I still love that record! I found it on the internet recently and I still knew every bit of it. I must have played it over and over again on the family Dansette or whatever it was.

I love records like that, where every note is pure genius. I’m a huge fan of music. When I was a kid you’d save your money up for ages before you went to the record shop, so you really had to be picky. I’d go in and I’d want Blodwyn Pig and Wishbone Ash and Traffic and Soft Machine – but which one do you choose? I had that exact decision to make. I bought the second Traffic album, the one with Forty Thousand Headmen on it. I used to walk around with my albums under my arm, posing!

I’m not obsessed with vinyl at all. I absolutely love my iPod; it’s changed everything. It’s so great to be able to take your entire record collection with you, all your favourites. You never know what mood you’re going to be in. When I go to the dentist, for me it’s always A Rainbow In Curved Air by Terry Riley. It’s perfect – it lasts as long as the treatment takes, so take that and a valium and you’re sorted… ou come out of the dentist’s with a smile on your face!

I like prog, but I don’t like 20-minute drum solos. I don’t mind a bit of widdly-diddly guitar, as long as it’s interesting. That’s why I never liked Clapton! You get someone like Peter Green and he’d play a lot fewer notes, but they’d be better ones. Like Chick Corea said: it’s not the notes you play that matter; it’s the ones you leave out!

So prog should be interesting – but who decides what’s interesting? Who are the prog police? I like the Groundhogs, but I can’t stand Yes. What’s the difference between them? One of them is really inspired and passionate and the other one is singing songs about fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Tony McPhee is my hero. He sang about real stuff that actually means something. Thank Christ For The Bomb is an incredible album. It’s an ironic title, of course; my girlfriend is Japanese, so I had to explain that one to her!

These fucking public school wankers in these prog bands in the mid-70s – these Royal College of Music educated posh tossers – were singing songs about absolutely nothing because they had nothing to protest about.

I want to hear people singing about real things with passion. When punk came along, it was part of the job to destroy Genesis and Yes. I wanted to see them fuck off and die.

But I do like the Canterbury scene. I like Hugh Hopper and I love the fuzz organ on the Caravan stuff. That’s where The Damned’s I Just Can’t Be Happy Today came from. Rat Scabies was a fan of Caravan and Gong as well, believe it or not.

There was an organ sitting in the studio and we decided to chuck it through my fuzz pedal to make it sound like David Sinclair from Caravan. We’ve been ripping off the prog lot for years!

I usually say that all the best records came out in 1970. It’s such a good year. Grand Funk Railroad’s Live Album is the best live album ever made. The bass player and the drummer create these grooves that whip the audience into a frenzy. That’s all the band were designed for.

The lyrics are complete twaddle, obviously, and there’s a drum solo on here – but it's a good one! I saw them in Hyde Park [in 1971] and they were supposedly the loudest band in the world. I didn't think they were that loud, to be honest.

Everybody should check out an album called First Water by Sharks. It’s Chris Spedding and Andy Fraser from Free, and two other blokes that no one’s heard of. What an amazing bass player Andy Fraser is! He does that Chick Corea thing – he knows all about which notes to leave out. He’d leave huge holes in the songs.

On All Right Now, he didn’t even play in the verse; he only comes in on the chorus, but then he plays the most incredible riff on the solo. You’re not listening to Paul Kossoff; you’re listening to Andy Fraser.

The Sharks album is so worth getting. I probably listen to it more than anything else. Andy Fraser’s solo album is great too. It’s him on lead bass. He only plays bass solos and he’s going through this rasping distortion and it’s absolutely brilliant.

I only like Pink Floyd up until Atom Heart Mother. Then it became bank clerk music. Syd Barrett was a genius; there are so many things that he did first. It’s not just about the beautiful songs. When he made The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn – and I say ‘he’ because the other guys were lucky to be part of it – you’d go into a studio like Abbey Road and they’d all be wearing white lab coats.

When all these remarkable albums were made, the studio people didn’t understand where the music was coming from or why the musicians would disappear into the toilet every five minutes!

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at those sessions. How did it go from 1966 and Silence Is Golden to Astronomy Domine and Lucifer Sam? That’s amazing. One minute it’s trite little pop songs – no disrespect to The Move because I do like them – then suddenly it’s genius. Syd changed so many things.

It’s a shame they’ll never have me on Desert Island Discs, will they? But it would be so difficult to choose six tracks. I’d probably pick some Ravel to confuse them, but also A Visit To Newport Hospital by Egg, Eccentric Man by the Groundhogs, Slightly All The Time by Soft Machine, Hallogallo by Neu! and wacky stuff like that. That’d shake up those Radio 4 bastards, wouldn’t it!”

Unlike most musicians, when Billy Morrison asks the dreaded question: “Do you know who I am?” he’s expecting a shake of the head. For 57 years, the British guitarist has slipped expertly below the radar, managing to be both phenomenally successful and able to walk the streets unmolested – despite a solid-gold resumé that includes Billy Idol, The Cult, Camp Freddy and a talk show with best friend Ozzy Osbourne.

It’s a dual existence that the good-humoured Morrison nodded to on the title of his recent documentary Who The F%@k Is Billy Morrison?. But with his excellent new solo album Hollow building on the massive success of 2024 single Crack Cocaine, the guitarist might soon join the ranks of the A-listers he’s here to talk about.

Duff McKagan

I didn’t meet Duff when he was doing that [debauchery] shit. I met him after he had become an investor and a business brain. Early in our relationship, we were both on an overnight Virgin Atlantic flight from LA to Heathrow. Most of the plane was asleep, but in Upper Class there’s a bar. And Duff spent the whole flight teaching me about financial investments. I’m looking at him, thinking: “You’re Duff McKagan – the one whose fucking pancreas exploded – and I’m talking to you about how to invest.” But he knows his shit. It’s common knowledge that he invested in Starbucks, because he comes from Seattle. So if ever I need financial help, I call Duff.

Lemmy

I do these occasional all-star shows in LA, where we play covers with a bunch of famous people. About twenty-five years ago, Ozzy gave me Lemmy’s cell number and said: “Drop him a line, he’s easy to deal with.” So I cold-texted Lemmy Kilmister. And I’m terrified. Because I don’t know how this legend of debauchery is going to respond. I just wrote: ‘Hey Lemmy, I’m a friend of Ozzy’s. I’m doing this gig at the Roxy. Would you come down and play Ace Of Spades and Bomber with us?’ Within seconds, he responded: ‘If you have a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and an eighth of Beryl’ – that’s Beryl Reid, which is Cockney rhyming slang for speed – ‘I’ll be there.’

At that show he was everything you would want Lemmy to be. His tech brought down his famous Marshall amp. It was ridiculously loud. The cowboy hat, the voice, the volume – he killed it. I don’t think [playing under the influence] made any difference. This is where everyone goes wrong in the music business, me included. You think you’re great, but you’re shit. There are precious few – Keith Richards being one, Lemmy being another – where, actually, it makes no difference. I’ve seen the man drink a bottle of Jack and snort three grams of speed, then I’d have a conversation with him.

Ozzy Osbourne

We were friends for twenty-eight years. Best friends, life shit, y’know? The first night I met him was at one of Sharon’s parties – this was when The Osbournes was on TV – and it was the most lavish party you’ve ever seen. I mean, there were real reindeer walking around, in real snow – in LA, when it’s eighty degrees outside! I don’t know how she pulled it off.

So I’m wandering around this beautiful Beverly Hills house, just so intimidated by the opulence. I’m not very good in those social circumstances. So I just opened this door off the kitchen, walked in and shut it behind me. The room was dimly lit, but I looked over and Ozzy was sitting on the couch by himself. He just said: “Hello, mate. You’re English? Sit down.” It was the most welcoming thing. And his first gesture was saying: “Want some chocolate?” He had this huge tray full of Topics, Flakes, Marathons, every English chocolate. He was like: “You like Topics? I fucking hate ’em!”

He was the funniest man I’ve ever known. We’d be like nine-year-olds, shaking with laughter at the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame – Sharon would be like: “Shut the fuck up!” Late at night we’d be texting each other stupid, immature shit, then I’d get a text from Sharon saying: ‘Stop texting my old man, he’s laughing so much the bed’s shaking!’

Billy Idol

I’ve been playing with Billy for eighteen years. He’s a cool motherfucker. And he knows he’s a cool motherfucker. Y’know, he comes to rehearsal on a fucking Harley. He’s Billy fucking Idol, that’s who he is. Let me tell you how cool Billy Idol is. Every singer on the planet forgets the words – if you’re not miming. Or they go out of tune. Because it’s noisy up there. But not many rock stars are cool enough to go: “Hold on, stop playing.” More than once I’ve seen Billy turn around to the band and say: “I fucked that up. Let’s go from the top.” Like, the audience deserves to hear it played right, y’know?

George Clinton

This is no word of a lie. The all-star band I was telling you about had a corporate gig at an old theatre in Hollywood. So around three o’clock in the afternoon, we’re soundchecking, and I see this homeless guy wander in. As he walks closer, I’m like: “That’s fucking George Clinton.” He’s got all the multi-coloured dreads and all of that. He walks right up to the stage and goes: “I want to play.” So I ask him: “Do you know The Clash, Should I Stay Or Should I Go?” And he says: “Yeah.” Which he didn’t. He had no idea how it goes. So we play it in soundcheck, and he’s just doing some shit in the mic. Then he says: “I’ll be back later.” So off he goes, and we’re all like: “There’s no way George is coming back.”

But I kid you not. I’m in the dressing room at eight-thirty p.m., when George walks in and says: “I’m ready.” And he got up and did Should I Stay Or Should I Go. Did he pull it off? I don’t remember, but probably not. Two days later, he got arrested for crack.

Nick Cave

Nick Cave won’t know who I am. But back in the day – I’m talking mid-eighties – the drug scene was in Brixton. Nick has given many interviews about his heroin addiction. I’ve given interviews about mine, and we were all in the same place. In the heroin scene, you had a dealer and he would be living in a squat, and that squat would have thirty people in it at all times, rotating, just a constant stream of people knocking at the door. This person sold heroin to not only me, but Nick Cave, Nico from the Velvet Underground and a few others.

I mean, I’ve stepped over Nick Cave shooting smack. He’s stepped over me shooting smack. But what gives me pleasure is to see people get out of that. Nick was way too talented to just die in a squat in Brixton. It was obvious he was one of the most intelligent people. A lot of heroin addicts are, man, and that’s the sad thing. There’s a lot of lost intelligence in heroin addiction.

Shirley Manson

The way I met Shirley was at a rehearsal complex in LA when we were getting ready to go on a big Billy Idol tour. I’m a bit of a flightcase whore. I like them to look sharp. It’s ridiculous, they get banged about on trucks. But you would be shocked at the level of bling that goes into my flightcases. I’m a visual artist as well. So I was spraying a stencil of a Playboy bunny with a Star Wars Stormtrooper face onto one of my cases. And I turn around and Shirley Manson’s there. She’s down on her knees, looking at the stencil, and she’s like: “That’s fucking brilliant. Can you do one on my guitar case?” So we exchanged numbers.

She’s a female Lemmy – she takes no shit. I’ve been on the receiving end of that too, but in a very loving way. I’ve been at dinner with her, and I’ve said something, and she’s turned around and said: “Don’t talk shit.” She’ll tell you how it is. And what’s not to love about that?

The Cult

Billy Duffy has known me since my heroin addiction. And because Billy lived in Brixton, he has a story about stepping over me to get out of his house. I had OD’d in his living room, apparently. But that’s not my story, because I don’t fucking remember it.

I had a baptism of fire when I joined The Cult. I auditioned, and Duffy said: “You’ve got the gig. We’re going on tour in a month.” But the first day, I show up early for pre-production rehearsals in this huge warehouse, and Ian [Astbury] and Billy have a massive argument. No idea what about. They’re like brothers, so they argue fiercely and often. And I’m standing there, like, “Fuck, what’s going on?” Both of them walk out, they go home.

The manager texts me later, saying: ‘We’re cancelling the rehearsals.’ So my first gig is at RFK Stadium in Washington, which is seventy thousand people. It’s just: “See you on stage in Washington”, and that’s what happened.

Adam Ant

I was a huge Adam And The Ants fan, but I’m not talking about the white-stripe-across-the-nose era. Way before that, they were one of the coolest punk rock bands on the planet. The guitar player was Matthew Ashman, and he was also in Bow Wow Wow and the Chiefs Of Relief. Unfortunately, he’s no longer with us. But on the fifteenth anniversary of Matthew’s death – and this shows how stupid I am, or tenacious – I had a thought: “What would be fun is if I resurrect all three of Matthew’s bands for one night only.”

Well, I did it. I organised a one-off night at the Scala, from a tour bus in America. And Adam agreed to do the gig. But… I’m gonna try and phrase this as nicely as I can. Adam has had [mental health] episodes in the past. And on the run-up to that gig I’m not sure whether he was having an episode, but there were some really anxious phone calls between me and him about the charitable nature of this show.

It was a charity show, I donated the money. But he wasn’t sure that that was gonna happen, based on his experience at Live Aid or something like that. So there were these really heavy twenty-five-minute phone calls where I didn’t speak, and Adam ranted down the phone. But, God bless him, we did the gig, he showed up, he was fucking brilliant.

About a year later, I ran into him again at Heathrow, and he was completely different. He was like: “Oh, hello, mate, how are you?” Chit-chat, chit-chat. So I still love Adam, but it was touch-and-go there for a second.

Cypress Hill

I’m mainly friends with B-Real and Sen Dog. We invited them to come and do (Rock) Superstar with us. So we had a trailer backstage just for Cypress Hill. We were on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood, doing a PlayStation party, and they’d shut the whole street down. About an hour before showtime, I went to knock on their trailer. And this door opened, and a nuclear-sized cloud of weed smoke enveloped me.

The next thing, about thirty people start coming out of this trailer that’s built to hold ten. These guys travel with an entourage. They are the epitome of hip-hop royalty. So they’re piling towards the stage, and one of them’s got a big glass bong that he’s walking down La Brea smoking. They hadn’t even legalised weed yet.

So I’m panicked. I’m looking around. But they don’t give a shit, y’know? When you first meet them, you don’t want to be the guy that’s like [coughing]. But since then I’ve learned that I’m allowed to say: “I’ve got to get some fresh air.” Y’know, B and Sen, they respect the fact I’m sober, and when I’ve worked in their studio I literally walk out every fifteen minutes and take a deep breath.

Al Jourgensen

The first time I met him, we were doing a charity show, and it was my idea that Ministry should do Iggy Pop’s Search And Destroy. Al was like: “I love Iggy Pop, no problem.” So he comes down, he’s great, he’s gracious, he does the soundcheck and nails it. But between soundcheck and the gig, Al takes some mushrooms and smokes the strongest weed. Even he’s not sure what was in that joint. So he comes on stage and he takes the microphone, and I’m like: “This is fucking awesome.”

Then he starts singing at half-tempo. We’ve all learned to follow the singer. So, with no rehearsal, we go half-time. And we do this weird fucking version of Search And Destroy. Now, every time I see Al he tells that story and says: “I’m so sorry.” But I say: “Dude, what you did is inspire me to record it like that.” There’s a heavy version of Search And Destroy on the Ministry album Moral Hygiene, and that’s where that came from. Al is one of the greatest guys I’ve ever worked with – even through drug-fuelled mistakes.

Billy Morrison's Hollow is out now via TLG | ZOID.

Founding Van Halen members David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen have appeared together at an event organised by the TEDx Program, an initiative that hopes to research and discover "ideas worth spreading."

The pair appeared alongside contemporary artist and muralist Robert Vargas to talk about how "stepping outside of comfort zones, absorbing foreign cultures, and embracing contrasting creative approaches can enrich your work."

"It's a gas to be here," says Roth. "This is also a step towards world peace! A leap. This is momentous. A mighty time."

Talking about his approach to creating art, Van Halen says, "I think that the most important thing in art is that you do your homework and you learn the basics and then you break all the rules."

"You got to go get your heart broken," adds Roth. "Then you got to get it broken in a foreign language. And then you have to run away and join the Foreign Legion."

Roth, who grew up in a multicultural educational environment and lived in Japan between 2012 and 2014, goes on to talk about the importance of absorbing influences from other cultures.

"This is where Happy Trails [the theme to The Roy Rogers Show, covered by Van Halen on Diver Down] came from, because music doesn't really know boundaries," he says. "It's only how people perceive it that creates boundaries. And if you put it in the right light or the right context, it can go anywhere."

Last week, it was announced that Van Halen, a limited edition deluxe anthology of the band, will be published by Genesis Publications later this year. Written by drummer Alex Van Halen, the package will include a 7" picture disc featuring a previously unreleased 1974 live recording, Glitter.

Imagine if Bono suggested that 9/11 might be an inside job perpetuated by the US government. Or Robbie Williams insisted that the human race evolved as a result of aliens tampering with monkey DNA. Or Noel Gallagher maintained that The Beatles were a front for a clandestine think tank intent on brainwashing the youth of America. We'd never hear the end of it.

And yet Muse frontman Matt Bellamy offered up such opinions in the course of promoting the trio's fourth album Black Holes And Revelations without generating so much as an apoplectic Daily Mail editorial. For shame. There was a time when enemies of the state blowing the whistle on government cover-ups and media lies could have expected to meet with tragic accidents and/or freakish, fatal acts of God rather than BRIT Awards, sold-out stadium shows and number one albums.

This country.

Muse went into the recording of their fifth album in a supremely confident mood. Released in 2006, Black Holes And Revelations had sold over 750,000 copies in the UK alone, and the band were determined that album number five should be bigger, bolder, more ambitious and more adventurous. And to ensure that they pulled this off without any interference, for the first time the trio opted to record in their own "war-bunker" studio in Como, Italy, with their frontman producing.

"I wanted The Resistance to be a culmination of everything we know about music," Bellamy told Q magazine. "Every style we have ever played. Every idea we ever had."

Lyrically, part of the album's conceptual narrative had already been foretold by the band themselves. In the video for Sing For Absolution, the fourth single from their third album, 2003's Absolution, Muse were cast as fearless adventurers descending to Earth from another galaxy, ultimately finding themselves gazing in horror at the ruined remains of Britain's Houses Of Parliament, democracy having been extinguished as mankind tore itself apart.

To some degree, The Resistance can be viewed as a glossy prequel. Here, our heroes are battling to hold onto love in the midst of chaos, defiantly vowing to "rise up and take the power back" in a society where there's "red tape to keep the truth confined", before ultimately deciding that our planet is doomed and the only solution is to set the controls for the heart of... anywhere but here, to start over.

The album is full of ominous warnings. In Bellamy's worldview, humanity is permanently under surveillance by the forces of darkness: they're out there, observing, recording, cataloguing, classifying, gathering the data required to justify repression, brutality and enslavement. Our mission then, should we choose to accept it, is how to find love in this hopeless place, to paraphrase Rihanna. In 2026, with far right politicians in the ascendancy across much of the world, with peaceful protestors being jailed as 'terrorists', with western democracies complicit in, and profiting from, genocide, and mainstream media asking you to reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears, this idea seems less outrageous than it did in 2009.

"The Resistance is supposed to be less about conspiracy and the fantastical than the rational and the real," Bellamy insisted to Q magazine. "It's hopeful and positive. I have been through periods where I've felt quite paranoid about the world. But I also believe in the power of people and love to change things. There is a romance to fighting back against malevolent interests. The last album was dark and angry. This is all about resisting the corporate-ocracy."

Ahead of its release, the album was teased in the most Muse way. In July 2009, the band announced that a new song from the record could be heard once a global treasure hunt had been successfully concluded. Fans were informed that the trio had hidden USB sticks in Berlin, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Moscow, Paris and Dubai, and that each USB stick contained a code which, when logged at the PROJECT EURASIA microsite, would form a portion of a new song.After fans - sorry, 'agents' - unlocked the first six segments, the website displayed coordinates for a New York location, and Muse's global army of truth-seekers were warned that "UNITED STATES OF EURASIA WILL NOT BE RECOGNISED" unless a seventh code was entered.

The song, United States of Eurasia, was finally revealed on July 21. After which Matt Bellamy revealed that it was inspired by a book called The Grand Chessboard by Jimmy Carter-era US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who believed that Europe, Asia and the Middle East had to be controlled by America to secure the oil supply and ensure its global dominance for the century to come.

Heady stuff.

The album's first proper single, however, was Uprising, an addictive glam rock-influenced stomper featuring Bellamy wailing "They will not control use!" and massed terrace chants of "Oi!" as it nears its climax.

"It's meant to be football hooligans chanting in protest at the banking situation," Bellamy explained to MOJO.

"In the song you can hear the general feeling that we've been let down again by big institutions, which are supposed to be in positions of trust,"he told The Sun newspaper. "Politicians obviously and bankers. I've got a flat in the centre of London, which is right near all the embassies and I noticed protests on a regular basis. During the G20 protests, the UK, got closer to really making a dramatic change, a non-violent revolution. I think the UK needs one and I hope it hasn't died down. Hopefully we can flame it up again."

It's not all gloom, however. As ever with Muse, there are moments on The Resistance which are so joyously eccentric that you can't help but laugh out loud, such as the moment you realise that the title track's portentous atmospherics could easily double up as the intro to Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out For A Hero.

Undisclosed Desires, bereft of guitar, is a stark gothic take on Timbaland's stripped-down R&B template, with staccato string samples layered over Dom Howard's electronic drums, and Bellamy promising, "I want to exorcise the demons from your soul", like Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan at his most tender. I Belong To You, drawing inspiration from French composer Camille Saint-Saëns' aria My Heart Opens Itself To Your Voice from the 19th-century opera Samson And Delilah, marries R&B with cocktail jazz piano.

And all this is but a prelude to the album's extraordinary, elegant climax, Bellamy's three-part, 12-minutes-long orchestral work Exogenesis: Symphony, rising and falling dramatically as its protagonists come to the realisation that their time on Earth must, of necessity, come to and end and they need to "breach the outer sphere, the edge of all [our] fears". It's ludicrous, outrageous, pretentious and perversely life-affirming: what's not to love?

Muse fans lapped it all up. Released on September 14, 2009, The Resistance hit number one on the national charts of 19 countries and went on to sell over 5 million copies. It also earned Muse a Grammy award for Best Rock Album. Not that this success ensured that Matt Bellamy would sleep any easier at night, or curbed his more rebellious instincts.

"I think I’ve put forward the idea in the album that love and peaceful protest is ultimately the best way, but you can't help thinking that sometimes it’s not enough," he mused at one point. "But kicking a few shop windows in helps as well!"

When the Misfits split two days before Halloween 1983, the world barely noticed. The New Jersey horror-punks were the missing link between the Ramones and Boris Karloff, a bunch of B-movie fixated kids who worshipped Ed Wood, underground comics and Elvis. But they were way too strange for mainstream acceptance, even if they’d wanted it. They would get a posthumous boost from a cusp-of-stardom Metallica, who wore their T-shirts and covered their songs, but too most people they were little more than a logo.

That’s all future Journey singer Jeff Scott Soto knew of them when he got a call in 1988 from a music industry match-maker he knew. She told him that some of the guys from the Misfits were putting together a new project, and was he interested in working with them?

“I knew nothing about them,” Soto told Classic Rock in 2025. “I’d heard the name and seen the logo, but that was all. I hadn’t heard the music. I couldn’t have told you the name of any of their songs. But she was, like, ‘They’ve got a new band going on, are you interested in singing for them?’”

The LA-born Soto had made a name for himself singing on the first two albums by Swedish guitar wizard Yngwie Malmsteen, only to butt heads with his boss once too often. By the time he got the call asking if he was interested in working with the guys from the Misfits, he was out of Yngwie’s band and in need of a little cash.

“My son had just been born, so I needed money to make sure we could afford diapers,” Soto told Classic Rock. “So I said, ‘Absolutely, I’ll take their call.’”

After the Misfits imploded, frontman Glenn Danzig formed a new, more occult-themed band, Samhain, who would eventually mutate into the more successful Danzig. By contrast, founding bassist Jerry Only and his hulking, guitar-player brother Doyle, spent the middle of the decade in the musical wilderness. They had originally intended to continue the Misfits with a new singer, but ended up tangled in a lawsuit over the band name with their former bandmate.

“The Misfits name was locked down in court, and we couldn’t really get much done,” Jerry told Maximum Rock N Roll in 1995. “So what Doyle and I did, we sat back and wrote an album that was musically a step above [the Misfits]. It had a lot of riffs in it, and a lot of good drum cuts. It was kind of like Iron Maiden meets the Misfits through Motörhead’s amps.”

Except there was even more to it than that. Jerry and Doyle planned to launch a new band called Kryst The Conqueror – pronounced ‘Christ’. The songs album they were writing centred around a quasi-religious sci-fi concept, and there was talk of a comic book too. Jerry started calling himself Mocavious Kryst, later changed to Mo The Great, and shots of the pair from time show them shorn of their signature devilocks and proto-corpse paint make-up, instead kitted out in Manowar-style sleeveless leather tops.

“With the Misfits, we were seen as this dark, evil band,” Jerry told Metal Hammer in 2012. “We wanted to do something that was positive instead. It was as far away from the Misfits as you could get. We wanted Bruce Dickinson to sing for it.”

Sadly for Jerry and Doyle, Bruce was otherwise engaged. They looked elsewhere. “We went out and hired a singer that had a real Viking-type, godly voice,” Jerry told Maximum Rock And Roll. “We were trying to form ourselves in the image of the Lord.”

That godly Viking was Jeff Scott Soto, whose lack of knowledge of the pair’s previous band was outweighed by his need to put food on the table. He flew to New Jersey to meet Jerry and Doyle. “Those guys were just so nice,” Soto told Classic Rock. “I knew they wanted to go in a completely different direction and get away from Misfits territory.”

Together with drummer The Murp (aka Jim Murphy), they spent just under two weeks laying down 13 songs at House Of Music studio in West Orange, New Jersey. Tracks such as Thunder Thruster and In God We Trust were riffier, heavier than the Misfits had ever been, sitting somewhere between thrash metal and Manowar. One song, the Maiden-inspired March Of The Mega-mites, was a primitive prog metal mini-epic. “That was six minutes and 58 seconds long and it never played the same thing twice,” Jerry told Metal Hammer.

They roped in a friend-of-a-friend from New Jersey, Dave ‘Snake’ Sabo, to play lead guitar on a couple of the songs. Snake had his own up-and-coming band, Skid Row, but he was happy to help out, reputedly playing on the songs Trial Of The Soul and Spellbound, although his contract with his main group meant he couldn’t be credited for his appearance.

Soto himself would be credited as the titular Kryst The Conqueror – not because he was still under contract to Yngwie Malmsteen (he wasn’t), but because it fitted in with the comic book storyline Only had in his head. “Everybody was supposed to have comic book names, so they gave the lead vocalist that character name,” he told Brave Words.

If Kryst The Conqueror’s music was at right angles to the Misfits, the concept was the polar opposite . The band name and several of their song titles suggested there was a heavy religious bent to it that bordered on Christian metal. “We don’t want people to come out and say, ‘They were great, but they’re into that devil shit,'” Only told Yeszista zine at the time. “That’s not it, all of our songs are about going out and chasing the son of a bitch. That’s what it’s all about… if I made Kryst with a ‘C,’ people are gonna say, ‘He’s making fun of God.’ We’ve come in His name to do the job.”

Whether they’d gone the full Stryper or it was a schtick wasn’t clear, though Jerry was certainly more godly than his former bandmate Danzig. “Well, I grew up [with religion] very much so,” he told Metal Hammer. “I’ve had experiences where I feel you kind of touch the other side and realise that it’s there. Look, I don’t push it on anybody. God’s different for everyone. That’s the beauty of God.”

It turned out that Kryst The Conqueror could have done with a little divine intervention. Despite hitting it off with Jerry and Doyle on a personal level, Jeff Scott Soto wasn’t sold on the project. “I was a total gun for hire,” he told Classic Rock. “I think they thought: ‘Let’s get him down here, once he sings these songs, he’s going to be convinced to actually want to continue. I had a great camaraderie with the guys, but musically it just wasn’t what I was looking for, nor was it something I would have actually left everything else that I was doing at the time to stop and do with them.”

It was a blow, but Jerry and Doyle weren’t giving up on their passion project. In January 1990, they put out five of the tracks they’d recorded with Soto as the Deliver Us From Evil EP on their own Cyclopean Music Inc. label. Featuring a cheeseball cover featuring an angelic sword whose hilt makes the letter ‘K’, suspended in a stormy celestial sky, it wasn’t well received by the few people who heard it.

Ultimately, the odds were stacked against Jerry and Doyle. As well as not having a singer, the comic book idea proved too costly. As the 80s turned into the 1990s, Kryst The Conqueror languished in Pugatory.

Jerry and Doyle’s prayers were finally answered in the mid-90s, when the legal issues with Danzig were finally settled. The pair secured the rights to the Misfits name, and assembled a new incarnation of the band fronted by singer Michale Graves. A handful of Kryst The Conqueror riffs were recycled in some of the songs they were writing, and at least one track, Dr Phibes Rises Again, was recorded by this latest line-up (the new version was exhumed on the 2001 compilation, Cuts From The Crypt).

And that insane idea for a sci-fi-Jesus concept album with its own comic book? That was firmly shoved to the back of a dusty drawer, where it’s languished in semi-obscurity ever since, give or take the odd bootleg release of the full Jeff Scott Soto session. With Jerry and Doyle now reunited with onetime adversary Danzig and playing sporadic, money-spinning reunion shows, it’s unlikely the pair are going to revisit it any time soon. The same goes for Jeff Scott Soto, whose long career has included a mid-2000s stint with Journey.

“I haven’t heard it in decades.,” Jeff Scott Soto. told Classic Rock of the forgotten quasi-Christian metal experiment he was fleetingly involved in. “If I listened back to it, it’ll probably all come back to me, but I couldn’t even sing you a melody from it because it’s been so long.”

When The Dark Side Of The Moon became an international hit in 1973, Pink Floyd’s career path changed for ever. They shut the door on their early experimental era, and locked behind it was an intriguing concept album they’d been working on since 1970. Only a few minute of Household Objects survive to hint at what could have been, as Prog reported in 2016.

Pink Floyd’s 1975 album Wish You Were Here is filled with sounds easily missed by even the most dedicated listener. Jazz virtuoso Stéphane Grappelli plays faint violin on the title track, and the refrain from Floyd’s 1967 hit See Emily Play is heard on Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part IX. And The first sound to be heard on the record is an eerie drone created by fingers running around the rims of wine glasses, each filled with different amounts of liquid to create different notes.

For more than 30 years the tuned glasses were all that remained of Household Objects, the working title for an album started in 1970 and abandoned for good in ’74. A year earlier, The Dark Side Of The Moon turned Floyd into a top-five band in Britain, Europe and, crucially, America. Before that, they’d been a very different proposition.

The Household Objects concept had begun in 1969 via a composition called Work, which involved sawing wood and boiling kettles on stage. A year later Atom Heart Mother included the track Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast, featuring the sound of roadie Alan Styles frying eggs and bacon before ending with the hypnotic sound of a dripping tap. Atom Heart Mother was a UK No.1 hit – but as drummer Nick Mason admitted, “We were still looking for a coherent direction.”

When Floyd reconvened at Abbey Road Studios in January 1971 they were still searching. Their immediate solution was to dispense with conventional instruments and bring the found sounds of Work and Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast to the fore. At the time, future Muse producer John Leckie was a 22-year-old tape operator assigned to work with Floyd. “They spent days working on what people now call Household Objects,” he told this writer in 2006. “They were making chords up from the tapping of beer bottles, tearing newspapers to get a rhythm, and letting off aerosol cans to get a hi-hat sound.”

The ideas were catalogued before the group decamped to George Martin’s Air Studios. But they had a change of heart and returned to conventional instruments, as heard in 1971 album Meddle – which, although it utilised some sound effects, didn’t contain the torn newspapers and tapped bottles.

Two years on The Dark Side Of The Moon topped the UK and US charts. But when Floyd reassembled to start work on a follow-up in late 1973 they were in trouble. “We didn’t have an idea between us,” said Mason. After making the most accessible album of their career, their solution was to reprise Household Objects. Weeks were spent with engineer Alan Parsons at Abbey Road, creating a percussive rhythm by scraping a broomstick on a floor, hitting a piece of wood with an axe and twanging elastic bands stretched between matchsticks.

“I’ve always felt that the differentiation between a sound effect and music is all a load of shit,” Roger Waters told Zigzag magazine at the time. “Whether you make a sound on a guitar or a water tap is irrelevant.” He insisted that Floyd’s new music, using “bottles, knives and felling axes,” was “turning into a really nice piece.”

By the end of the year, though, he’d changed his mind. Mason has since suggested that Household Objects was a “delaying tactic” in the absence of any new songs.

Certainly once Waters had conceived the idea of making an album about absence – is soon-to-be ex-wife, of Syd Barrett and his bandmates’ support – Wish You Were Here fell into place, and Household Objects was forgotten. Although not everyone was happy with this decision. “I was rather disappointed it never came to anything,” said Parsons.

In 2011 Floyd released extended versions of Dark Side and Wish You Were Here. The latter contained the tuned glasses track, while the former featured The Hard Way – three minutes of what may or may not have been torn newspapers in place of drums, and what sounds like elastic bands in place of a bass. But the melodic refrain that appears several seconds in is pure melancholy Floyd.

Fans had waited decades to hear this stuff. The band themselves quickly pointed out that nowadays you could make these sounds in an afternoon on a synthesiser.

Their reluctance to attach much importance to Household Objects is understandable. After all, The Dark Side Of The Moon turned twentysomething ennui and navel-gazing into big business. But those found sounds are the last hurrah for the old Pink Floyd; the one that was young, silly and experimental.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” said Waters. It was, and it still is.

Oasis have announced 38 dates for their Live '27 world tour.

Teased over the past few weeks with a series of cryptic social media posts, the much-anticipated tour, the first the London-based Mancunian band have undertaken since their phenomenally successful Live '25 reunion tour, will include multiple nights at stadiums and outdoor arenas in Manchester, Glasgow, Paris, Barcelona, Munich, Amsterdam, Rome, Boston, Las Vegas, Slane Castle... and four nights at Knebworth, the scene of their record-breaking two-night stand in the summer of 1996.

In a statement, the band say:

"START THE CELEBRATIONS!!!!

After a period of reflection 'The Most Damaging Pop Cultural Force In Recent British History' has declared itself fit for purpose and will once again return to lift the spirits of the people.

Come witness the fitness.

It shall be a sight to behold."

Oasis Live '27 world tour dates

May 21: Glasgow Celtic Park, UK
May 23: Glasgow Celtic Park, UK
May 25: Glasgow Celtic Park, UK
May 28: Glasgow Celtic Park, UK
May 29: Glasgow Celtic Park, UK

Jun 04: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 06: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 08: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 11: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 12: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 15: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 18: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 19: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 22: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 25: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 26: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK

Jul 02: Munich Allianz Arena, GER
Jul 03: Munich Allianz Arena, GER
Jul 10: Barcelona Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys, SPA
Jul 11: Barcelona Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys, SPA
Jul 16: Amsterdam Johan Cruijff ArenA, HOL
Jul 17: Amsterdam Johan Cruijff ArenA, HOL
Jul 23: Paris Stade de France, FRA
Jul 24: Paris Stade de France, FRA
Jul 29: Rome Stadio Olimpico, ITA
Jul 30: Rome Stadio Olimpico, ITA

Aug 10: Boston Gillette Stadium, US
Aug 13: Boston Gillette Stadium, US
Aug 14: Boston Gillette Stadium, US
Aug 20: Las Vega Allegiant Stadium, US
Aug 21: Las Vegas Allegiant Stadium, US
Aug 24: Las Vegas Allegiant Stadium, US

Sep 04: Slane Castle, IRE
Sep 05: Slane Castle, IRE
Sep 11: Knebworth, UK
Sep 12: Knebworth, UK
Sep 18: Knebworth, UK
Sep 19: Knebworth, UK

Oasis sold 2,228,471 tickers for the 36 shows on their Oasis Live '25 world tour, which grossed $405,428,435.

Demand for Oasis Live ’27 is expected to be extremely high, and so a registration process has been put in place to reduce queuing times and organised ticket touting in order to give genuine fans the best possible chance to buy tickets.

Registration is open now here.

For the chance to buy tickets, fans must register before Thursday September 17 at 4pm BST / 5pm CEST / 8am PT / 11am ET.

Fans who are successful will be sent a unique, non-transferable code to access an allocated onsale window.

US on-sale windows will vary by city and will take place on Friday 25 September. Fans will be informed directly which of the onsale windows they can access, and at what time.

The registration process is the only public way to buy tickets for Oasis Live ’27. There will be no general onsale or other public presales outside of this process.

This structure has been created to ensure the purchase process is as fair and smooth as possible for Oasis fans. Standard ticket price is fixed from $122.65 - $541.05 including fees and taxes.

2009 intro

Being true to yourself is not easy in the music business. Most of the reality TV stars, singer-songwriters and half-baked indie bands that clog up the charts have to toe a company line, look cool at all costs, rip off that sound everyone’s buying into, smile for the camera, supply that next hit single… It’s always been like that – but there have always been outsiders, mavericks, who refuse to operate that way.

Steven Wilson has remained fiercely independent throughout his career, right up to Porcupine Tree’s highly conceptual 10th album, The Incident. Like his other bands such as No-Man, and his recent solo album Insurgentes, his work is progressive in the best sense of the word. It’s creative, diverse, forward-thinking music that doesn’t care whatsoever about hit singles, chart placings or gold discs – despite the fact that his band has been a slowburning success for the best part of two decades.

The key word for Wilson is “album,” and he’s optimistic about the format’s future. “That the download culture is becoming more dominant doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” he argues. “We had, for example, Mike Skinner with The Streets. A Grand Don’t Come For Free was a concept album by a British hip-hop artist. It helped change the idea that music is a three-minute pop song. If radio and MTV have no influence anymore, the idea of the single becomes less relevant; people start thinking about albums again, so you have bands like Radiohead, Tool, The Mars Volta and Mastodon more recently, even Coldplay… big bands are thinking about the album as a statement.”

Wilson was a prodigious talent from an early age, working in his bedroom, teaching himself guitar and keyboards, making tape after tape of sounds, riffs and songs. Ironically, Porcupine Tree began as a joke – an imaginary 70s prog outfit with a full discography and band biogs. But then he began releasing largely ambient and psychedelic music under the name; and when he began to attract interest from the music industry, he needed a band to tour with.

Enter some real-life musicians! Keyboardist Richard Barbieri had been in early 80s art-rock band Japan. He and bassist Colin Edwin joined at the same time in 1993, then Gavin Harrison replaced original drummer Chris Maitland in 2002. “The solo album is me, with no consideration for collaborators at all,” says Wilson. “That’s the kind of music that left to my own devices I make for myself, and it’s a bit more eclectic. But Porcupine Tree has a sound that comes from the four musicians – so although people may see the credits and think, ‘Steven Wilson writes everything and the musicians are just doing what he’s written,’ that’s not the case. I’d never ask them to play something I didn’t think they’d enjoy. I know that the sound has to be something we all agree on. Imagine a Venn diagram: the area where those four personalities cross is the sound of Porcupine Tree, so I write in that area.”

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. “If you’ve written a song, it’s your baby and you’re precious about it. Sometimes they suggest changes that aren’t what I had in mind; but I do want to know what they think. Gavin comes up with very different drum parts than I would ever have thought of. Richard is all about sound design, and a lot of the time what you’re listening to is the detail, the subtlety he’s put in there. The sound design aspect, for me, makes the records, and that’s all him. It’s very much a band, which is sometimes a frustration – that’s why I do solo projects as well. But that’s good. The compromise gives you that sound.”

Porcupine Tree have always been experimental, developing, progressing and becoming heavier over time. A sea change occurred when Wilson produced Swedish prog-metallers Opeth, after the bands toured together. But he’s quick to dispel the myth that Pocupine Tree’s 2003 album In Absentia was influenced by his connection to Opeth’s Blackwater Park. “It was the opposite,” he says.

“The reason I worked with Opeth is that I was becoming more interested in heavy music again, not the other way round. In Absentia was written before I worked with Opeth so I’d already moved towards that. The first music I ever really liked as a kid was the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. It was the first music that was really mine, in my time – bands like Diamond Head and Saxon – so it was in my DNA. Like a lot of people as they get older, I moved away from metal. I had this thing in the back of my mind that metal was something I’d grown out of, in a patronising kind of way.”

There’s a very good reason for that. “Most of the metal I was hearing was nu-metal. But then I got turned on to bands like Sugar and Opeth and I was blown away, because I suddenly realised where to find all the incredible creativity that had been missing from mainstream metal, and even progressive music. It was sophisticated, album-based music. That revitalised my interest. With In Absentia and producing Opeth, it all came together at the same time.”

Porcupine Tree’s new album, The Incident, harks back to an earlier age of prog, featuring a series of songs sequenced in Roman numerals which flow seamlessly from one to the next. It transcends any genre and its influences are wide-ranging and far-reaching – including another Wilson in the form of Beach Boys genius Brian.

“What I love about Smile is that you have a series of songs that have reccurring themes, melodies and chord sequences,” says the younger musician. “The Beach Boys were a huge influence on my vocals. I finally discovered a way that I could feel confident about being a singer. I’d never thought of myself as a singer or had the confidence to push myself forward – but listening to Brian Wilson’s great works led me to start using harmony vocals in a rock context. It was around the time of In Absentia, when we started to reach a bigger audience – there was something fresh about the fusion of harmony vocals with heavy riffs.”

He continues: “My father was into stuff like Dark Side Of The Moon and my mother was listening to Donna Summer, John Coltrane and Marvin Gaye records, which were also conceptual in the way they were structured. They became the two sides to my musical personality – and the thing they had in common was the idea of the album as a musical continuum, a journey. And then I discovered other things like Marillion and Jethro Tull. I loved anything that had an ambition to elevate the album above just 10 songs strung together. You see that influence in all of our work; but The Incident takes it to the next level: not just as an album that’s sequenced well, but as an album that’s a complete listening experience.”

From early ambient works such as Voyage 34 – a 30-minute single that combined guitars with the technological influence of similarly independent pioneers such as Future Sound Of London and The Orb – Porcupine Tree moved in a more song-oriented direction from 1999’s Stupid Dream, grew heavier, and have landed at The Incident, featuring 70-plus minutes of vignettes that can be taken individually but which also form a cohesive whole.

Sound, ambition, feel: those are the things that you sense drive Wilson, no matter what he’s writing, producing or mixing. Porcupine Tree have built up a huge following across the world, won awards, been up for a Grammy… but none of that, you sense, really matters to him. His band have helped revived interest in progressive music, and that maybe matters to him more.

Sick Of It All guitarist Pete Koller has addressed the iconic New York hardcore band’s future in the wake of death of his brother, frontman Lou Koller.

Lou died in July at the age of 59 after being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer a year earlier. In a statement at the time, the band said: “It’s with unbelievable sadness that we announce to our worldwide hardcore family the passing of our brother Lou Koller. The level of loss that we feel at this time is overwhelming.”

Now Pete Koller has revealed that his brother wanted the band to carry on after his death.

“n a video post on Instagram, the guitarist said: “Hey everybody, how’s it going? I know I haven’t been around in a bit. I’ve been… And you all know why, and it’s such a terrible, awful thing to happen. I’m still obviously super sad, and I am in total disbelief. I can’t believe that this happened, and I can’t believe that my brother is gone, and I miss him very, very much.

“Also, I’d like to thank everybody and anybody who donated a dollar to whatever, who bought a shirt, who came to the benefits, who played the benefits, all that. Everybody who helped, I thank you very, very, very much.

“Also, before Lou passed, he said a couple of things that he wanted us to do, you know. He wanted us to keep the band going, and I’m not sure how we’re gonna do that, but we’re working on it. And he wanted to tell everyone thank you for giving him like such an amazing life. Touring the world, your job is playing your favorite music, stuff like that.

Anyway, we have some things in the works, and I will keep you all posted. And thanks again for your support.”

Pete and Lou Koller formed Sick Of It All in New York in 1986. and they went on to release twelve albums, including 1994’s classic Scratch The Surface. Their most recent album was 2018’s Wake the Sleeping Dragon!.

The rise, fall and rise again of Oasis has been well documented. In 1993, the Manchester quintet wowed Creation Records boss Alan McGee with a bottom-of-the-bill performance at King Tuts in Glasgow: just three years later, at the height of the BritPop movement they helped drive, 2.6 million people, approximately five per cent of the UK population at the time, applied for tickets for their brace of summer concerts at Knebworth House in Hertfordshire.

In between, Noel Gallagher established himself as rock's finest songwriting magpie, his younger brother Liam picked fights with half the planet, and their band generated endless tabloid headlines, picked up countless awards, and delivered one of the best debut albums and some of the most perfect singles of any band in history. Now, following their phenomenally successful 2025 reunion tour, they're coming back, and the buzz around the group has never been louder.

Between 1994 and 2008, Oasis released seven studio albums, and one of the finest B-sides collections ever compiled. Here they are, ranked from the worst to the best.

8. Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants (2000)

The lowest point of Oasis’ career by some distance, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants is a bizarre album. It actually starts really well, with the introductory instrumental Fuckin’ in the Bushes (later utilised by Liam Gallagher as his live intro music), and first single Go Let It Out, which features a proper earworm chorus.

There's also Gas Panic! - written about the anxiety Noel Gallagher felt in his darkest hours following cocaine binges - which struck a chord with men of a certain age who were no longer quite as 'mad for it' as they were in 1994, and remains a fan favourite. But the drop in quality beyond this that is quite astonishing.

Two sloppy, Noel-fronted, back-to-back AOR plodders (Where Did It All Go Wrong and Sunday Morning Call) and the pedestrian glam of I Can See a Liar are bad, but nothing the band ever released comes close to the horror of Liam's first songwriting effort, the sappy, saccharine Little James. The inclusion of that terrible song alone cements SOTSOG’s place at the bottom of the pile here.

7. Dig Out Your Soul (2008)

The final Oasis album, released just 10 months before the infamous backstage ding-dong in Paris that led to the band's break-up, is a rather sad way for a once untouchable group to go out.

As with all their albums, Dig Out Your Soul features a couple of decent singles, with Noel's The Shock of the Lightning an obvious highlight, and Liam's I'm Outta Time tee-ing up expectations for his subsequent solo career. But the most damning thing you can say about the album is that the majority of it just passes by unnoticed: for a band who were once a national obsession, this was nowhere near good enough.

6. Heathen Chemistry (2002)

It’s not massive praise to say that Heathen Chemistry marked a clear upgrade from the disastrous Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, and Oasis album number five does have its problems, the most obvious one being that the band should never have been allowed to produce themselves.

But Heathen Chemistry scores high for featuring a set of hugely anthemic singles: Little By Little, Songbird and the genuinely excellent Stop Crying Your Heart Out might be a bit schmaltzy, but they manage to tug at the heartstrings in the intended manner. Chuck in the garage slink of The Hindu Times - Oasis by way of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - the enjoyable Hung In A Bad Place and Better Man, and this is a decent collection which restored faith in the band at the time.

5. Don’t Believe The Truth (2005)

The best album by the non-classic line-up by some distance, Don’t Believe The Truth is the closest that Oasis ever came to putting out a record close to the consistency of their earliest material.

Lead single Lyla, a fantastic strutter of a tune, was a great way to start getting people back onside, but Noel going full Dylan on Mucky Fingers, the punky The Meaning Of Soul and the dreamy pop of Andy Bell's Keep The Dream Alive all back it up brilliantly. Throw in Gem Archer's A Bell Will Ring, and Noel's The Importance Of Being Idle, a song many claim is the band’s final great moment, and this is a set of songs which promised much for Oasis' second act.

4. Be Here Now (1997)

Notorious for its length, its excess and its cost, Be Here Now has become a classic cautionary tale for any band who hit it big to keep their feet on the ground. It’s a fair message, as this is a record that is often laugh out loud hilarious in its OTT nature, but, listening back to it today, it’s actually aged rather well.

D’ya Know What I Mean is a monumentally huge opening statement, the chorus to Stand By Me remains iconic, and the likes of My Big Mouth and I Hope, I Think, I Know are fantastically underrated. Plus, although they’d hate the comparison, Oasis sound like a lager-fuelled Bon Jovi on Fade In-Fade Out, a compliment by the way.

We still have no idea why the mad Mancs made All Around the World nearly ten minutes long - actually, that's a lie, we do, it's blatantly down to over-indulgence with cocaine - but it doesn’t detract from the fact that Be Here Now is much better than you remember.

3. The Masterplan (1998)

Yes, we know, it's not an studio album, and ordinarily B-sides and rarities collections would not be included for consideration on a list such as this. But such was the prolific nature of Noel Gallagher’s songwriting in the early years of Oasis that it feels insane not to include a set of songs as good as this here.

The fact that the likes of Fade Away, Half the World Away, Talk Tonight and the title track are as well-known and beloved as pretty much any song in Oasis’ back catalogue says it all. Plus, The Masterplan opens with the sublime Acquiesce, a song that not only might be the finest of the band's entire career, but one which feels like the perfect encapsulation of Liam and Noel’s individual strengths.

2. (What’s The Story) Morning Glory (1995)

Naming the best two Oasis albums is something of a cliché at this point, but it’s a cliché for a reason, they really are, comfortably, leagues ahead of the rest of the band’s discography.

(What’s The Story) Morning Glory was an absolute smash when it arrived, breaking records for sales and chart positions in the UK, and delivering a set of songs that have crossed over into the lexicon of British culture to the point where you can’t imagine meeting someone who doesn’t know all the words to Wonderwall.

To be fair, pretty much every track here sounds like a single, and deeper cuts such as Hello and Cast No Shadow are just as good as Don’t Look Back In Anger and Some Might Say. But it’s Champagne Supernova that really is the superstar here, a song with a breadth and ambition way beyond anything the band had attempted up until that point. They’d never get as close to it again either. It's a cultural monolith, certainly, but this is a great album first and foremost.

1. Definitely Maybe (1994)

So, what could come above one of the best-selling albums in UK chart history? Only one of the greatest debut albums in history.

The debate between which is the superior of the first two Oasis albums has raged for decades, but in our opinion, this is something of a no brainer. Where … Morning Glory has a couple of songs that were good but not great, the weakest moment on Definitely Maybe is still a minimum 8/10, and the majority of it is 10/10 perfect.

Seriously, can you name another album with an opening trilogy like Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, Shakermaker and Live Forever? That’s a pretty strong shout for the most staggering introduction in the history of rock. And that’s before we get into Supersonic, Slide Away, Cigarettes And Alcohol... There are bands who have had careers lasting multiple decades with greatest hits collections that look puny, irrelevant and full of filler when put next to these songs.

Definitely Maybe is a timeless, ageless classic, comprised solely of huge rock 'n' roll tunes with Godzilla-sized choruses and lyrics that make you feel like you’re the centre of the fucking universe. It turned its creators into the hottest band on the planet and it’s hands down the greatest album Oasis ever recorded.

From playing stadiums with Iron Maiden to popping up at Back To The Beginning, Halestorm have climbed to the kind of peaks most modern bands can only envy. But while Lzzy Hale’s talent is undeniable, the rest of the band are just as charismatic – a testament to the strong bonds and easy rapport they’ve maintained, even after decades of hard graft on the road.

Just weeks after the band’s stellar performances at Sonic Temple and Download festivals, Lzzy and guitarist Joe Hottinger embarked on an intimate acoustic tour amid a stifling heatwave. Hammer grilled the pair with your questions until the conversation dissolved into workplace bullying…

Too long, not gonna read? Watch the full interview below:

Apart from Back To The Beginning, what is your biggest achievement?
Mandy Handforth, Facebook

Joe: “The fact we still like each other.”

Lzzy: “We’re still together after what, 23 years? Nobody’s strangled anyone yet. It’s quite the feat.”

Joe: “And we still like to hang out too. That’s better than any other show – though the Grammy [for Love Bites (So Do I)] was pretty cool.”

Would you ever do a Halestorm ‘By Request’ setlist tour?
Alcojoelics, Instagram

Joe: “We’d have to do some prep. If I don’t play a song for, like, a month, it leaves my brain and I don’t know it. So it’d take some rehearsal. We’ve been taking requests on this acoustic tour, and I don’t remember most of them.”

Lzzy: “We could get one of those bingo ball machines with the songs on it!”

Which artist outside rock/metal would you like to collaborate with?
Malli Malpass, Facebook

Lzzy: “Pink would be cool – we could bring her to the dark side. One of the albums we love that is way, way outside our genre is Prizefighter by Mumford & Sons. It’d be cool to work with them.”

What’s the story behind [2010 single] Familiar Taste Of Poison?
Erik Von Trussdell, Facebook

Lzzy: “It’s interesting how songs can change over the years. I was 19 when I wrote that, so it meant something different to me then. It was kind of a love song, but an anti-Valentine’s Day love song. We do that a lot – apparently it’s our thing.

Some fans tell me they see it as talking to their addiction, some people it’s their ex or someone they cut out of their life… For me, what’s beautiful is that I get to sing that song to an audience every night and it becomes a love song between myself and them. You guys are the special sauce!”

Will we ever get a fourth Reanimate covers EP? Vxlloria, Instagram

Lzzy: “Maybe a full album. I don’t know. We have a long-running list of covers we’d like to try our hand at.”

Joe: “Now we have our own studio too.”

Is Like A Woman Can about Joe?! [Sample lyric: ‘Why can’t you love me, like a woman can?’]
James Lee, Facebook

Joe: “Yeah Lzz, is it?!”

Lzzy: “It is not about Joe! Not yet, anyway. But there’s still time. Like I said, songs mean something different every year, so you keep behaving yourself and you won’t get on my list.”

How is Arejay [Hale, drums] not bald after all his hair colours?
Leahslastbreath, Instagram

Lzzy: “I don’t know! There was one time where he went way overboard with bleach and he showed up at rehearsal with burns on his scalp, so we were worried for a while. But he still has his hair. He’s talking about growing it out.”

What song would you give to someone who’s never heard Halestorm before?
Metalcorequeens90, Instagram

Joe: “I don’t know! Would we go with our biggest song on the streams?”

Lzzy: “I don’t think so. I always tell people to go from our latest album backwards. Love Bites is a good one. That or Rain Your Blood…, or Fallen Star off our latest record.”

Why do you favour Shania Twain over Wendy O. Williams?
Gutierrez Estevez, Facebook

Lzzy: “Maybe it’s because I heard more Shania Twain than Wendy O. Williams.”

Joe: “Shania’s Man! I Feel Like A Woman is such a well-written song from top to bottom.”

Lzzy: “As a bi woman, that was a very confusing time for me [circa 1997]. I’m like, ‘Why do I think she’s hot?!’”

What advice would you give your younger self? Dramaries, Instagram

Joe: “I would just shut up and let it happen. ‘Keep doing what you’re doing, you little idiot!’”

Lzzy: “Less advice and more encouragement: ‘You’ve got this, kid. You’re doing the right thing – keep following your gut and have fun at all costs.’”

Who rips the worst farts?
Jason Owen, Facebook

Joe: “Definitely Arejay or Josh [Smith, bass] because they’re not here to defend themselves!”

Lzzy: “I’d say Josh because he’s vegetarian and/or pescatarian. Sometimes, if there’s too many lentil beans… It’s very distinct in the bus.”

Who was your first crush or obsession?
Angeline Burton, Facebook

Lzzy: “I have a weird one! My first crush was this little Amish boy. He did not notice me at all, and that would not have worked out at all. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, so there were a lot of Amish. My first celebrity crush was a contemporary Christian artist called Michael W. Smith – I thought he was dreamy. And/or Juliette Lewis. Like I said, confusing time!”

Joe: “I really liked Katie Holmes.”

You have to add Buzz, Conflicted, Painkiller or I Come First to regular rotation: which do you pick? Andy Hoffman, Email

Lzzy: “I’m gonna have to say Buzz – I really like that one.”

Joe: “I might change the arrangement a bit, though.”

Lzzy: “Too many choruses?”

Hammer: I Get Off, Love Bites or I Miss The Misery. One has to go: which one?

Lzzy: “Miss The Misery. I feel like we’ve played that too much over the years.”

Joe: “We’ve probably played I Get Off more.”

Lzzy: “OK, I’ll give you that… for now.”

When will Lzzy bring back the keytar? Marty_666666, Instagram

Lzzy: “I feel like it’s gonna be soon. The wonderful people at Sweetwater sent me a new one and I’ve been dabbling with these new sounds. It has all these new things. Keep your eyes peeled!”

What’s your favourite song to play live?
Rick Kearney, Facebook

Lzzy: “Oh god, it changes all the time! Right now, I think it’s Shiver for me.”

Joe: “I enjoy anything where I can just be soloing. Lately everything we play I’ve just been going off, so that’s cool.

How does that guitar player keep his locks so luscious?
Thejoestorm, Instagram

Joe: “Whoever asked that, it was so nice of them to notice.”

Lzzy: “Do you prime and tease?”

Joe: “I don’t shower and I drink beer.”

Lzzy: “That’s kind of true. You shower and just don’t shampoo your hair.”

Hammer: Skullet or toupee?

Joe: “I’d rock a skullet – I ain’t scared. I’d start saying, ‘Hell yeah, brother.’ I don’t know why, it just feels right.”

Lzzy: “With the skullet you’re owning your own head like, ‘This is me now.’ With a toupee, so much can go wrong. Maybe it flies off, maybe it’s not fixed on right. I’d go skullet all the way, then add a tattoo on it.”

When will Arejay bring back the upside-down drum kit?
OfficialLzzyHale, Instagram

Lzzy: “As his big sister, I’ve been trying to persuade him to do that for years. As we’re getting older too, it might be really good for his back. It’s basically an inversion table, but as a drumkit.”

Hammer: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve done while Arejay is soloing? Pee breaks? Cups of tea? Play poker?

Lzzy: “It depends how much time we have. It can be really stressful if you have to go pee and you have to time yourself. You have to listen for the big sticks or something, that can add a bit of pressure.”

Joe: “I like to sneak behind him and scare the living shit out of his drum tech. Watching him jump is hilarious!”

Will that bassist ever expand beyond four strings? Thejoestorm, Instagram

Joe: “I doubt it! It takes a highly intelligent person to play more than four strings.”

Lzzy: “To Josh’s credit, he plays bass, keyboards and operates the pedals. So he does more than anyone else!”

Joe: “That’s why we make fun of him.”

Everest is out now via Atlantic.

John Carpenter, the auteur filmmaker behind horror classics Halloween and The Thing, is open to making a Metallica music video.

Talking to Metal Hammer, the 78-year-old reveals that he’s a fan of the California heavy metal giants, after his kids introduced him to their music via 1991 hit single Enter Sandman.

“We all loved it when it came out,” he says. “That album [1991’s self-titled album, AKA The Black Album] is just fantastic. And they are, right?”

He continues, “They were just this huge band, but I loved that album for introducing me to them. I’ve never actually seen them live,” then confirms, “I’d totally direct a music video for Metallica if they asked, though.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Carpenter celebrates rock music for being “still alive and still here” after many decades, “like me!” Although it “may be a bit less transcendent and popular than it was … it still speaks to people like it spoke to me all those years ago”.

He adds: “Music as an art form is probably the greatest thing that humanity ever created. It transcends language, going from country to country, across the world. Someone in Bangladesh can hear an American song and still love it.”

Carpenter is best known for manning the director’s chair on Halloween, The Thing, The Fog, Christine, Big Trouble In Little China, Escape From New York and other cult pictures, but he’s also a prolific musician in his own right. He composed the scores for 15 of his 18 feature films, and has been releasing standalone studio albums with his son Cody Carpenter and his godson, composer Daniel Davies, since 2015.

Carpenter put out his latest album, Cathedral, in August via Sacred Bones. The metal-inspired project came with a tie-in graphic novel but was intended to stand as its own musical statement. “That’s first and foremost,” the director said in promotional materials.

He added: “It’s all about making the music work. This is somewhat different sounding stuff that we've done, but it's done with the same desire in mind. In other words, put this thing on and imagine you're watching a movie. That’s what we want you to do.”

Carpenter released his last feature-length directorial effort, The Ward, in 2010. He then served as executive producer on David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween legacy sequel and its two follow-ups. He continues to compose for films, including the opening credits score of Studio 666, the 2022 horror-comedy starring Foo Fighters.

Meanwhile, Metallica recently completed their three-year-long M72 world tour and are gearing up for a residency at Las Vegas multimedia venue The Sphere. Performances will begin on October 1 and end on March 13.

My Chemical Romance treated the crowd at the Texas stop-off of their The Black Parade anniversary tour to a brilliantly bizarre sight when they brought out King Diamond to ‘knight’ them onstage.

The sometime Mercyful Fate singer and all-round metal deity joined MCR onstage on Saturday, September 13 at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas.

King Diamond made his appearance mid-way through the set. Introducing the Danish legend, who now lives in Texas, MCR frontman Gerard Way told the crowd: “Finally, some real royalty! Anyone can be a dictator, but not everyone can be a king.”

King Diamond then proceeded to ‘knight’ the band members with a sword, before joining them to sing on the climax of their 2006 hit Mama, from the original The Black Parade album.

Way’s reference to dictators ties in with the tour’s current concept, in which centres around the fictional nation of Draag. In the show, the band are forced to perform for the country’s dictatorship.

At the show, Way also teased a new MCR album, telling the crowd: “Just know that we’ve kind of really always wanted to make another record, so we hope that life allows us to do that. Cos you guys, honestly, you guys kept us alive so long. You guys deserve another record. I don’t know when it’ll be. But it’ll be awesome.”

Neither My Chemical Romance nor King Diamond have been in a hurry to make a new record. MCR’s last studio album, 2010’s Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, came out 16 years ago, while King Diamond’s Give Me Your Soul... Please was released in 2008.

The latter is said to be working on both a new solo album, reportedly titled Saint Lucifer's Hospital 1920, as well as a Mercyful Fate record, though no release date has been confirmed for either.

With its Roger Dean sleeve and just the hint of a concept about its eight tracks (the number from which the title is derived), Gentle Giant's Octopus could be seen as a red rag to those who loathe prog and its supposed baroque indulgences.

Prog it is, there’s no doubt (though future Human League producer Martin Rushent cut his teeth on engineering duties here). However, Octopus represents all the virtues of the genre. It’s literate – opener The Advent Of Panurge alludes to the novels of Rabelais, while A Cry For Everyone is inspired by French existentialist Albert Camus.

It’s a meticulous, dazzling, polyphonic spree of intertwined vocals and instrumentation, Zappa-esque but undercut by a very British sense of humour and self-deprecation, carrying its musicianship (sax, mellotron, xylophone and more) lightly.

It was considered a heavy rock outing in its time, but fortunately the guitar sections, the most dated of the album, are relatively sparing. Much more charming is Knots, its vocal interplay courtesy of the Shulman brothers Derek, Ray and Phil, a more intellectually coherent precursor to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

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

Join the group now.

Other albums released in December 1972

• Made In Japan - Deep Purple
• Piledriver - Status Quo
• The Grand Wazoo - Frank Zappa
• Gypsy Cowboy - New Riders of the Purple Sage
• You Are The Music... We’re Just The Band - Trapeze
• R.E.O./T.W.O. - REO Speedwagon
• World Woven - The Ides Of March
• Framed - Sensational Alex Harvey Band
• World Woven - The Ides of March

What they said...

"What's really going on in Gentle Giant's music is a kind of musical puzzle. The better you get at sorting out the puzzle, the richer the music will be. This concept was explored rather explicitly on this album's Knots, a hairy, unpleasant, dissonant-sounding thing that just keeps getting messier until, all at once, one of their most immediate and beautiful melodies pops out at you in the chorus." (The Rocktologist)

"Listening to The Boys in The Band one might consider all those time changes as ridiculous and unnecessary; after a few listens, however, one realises it's not complexity for complexity's sake, and indeed, one understands that the arabesque structure of the song is an integral and indispensable part of it, and even more notably, one realises that the song (to put it in youthful language) "rocks." It rocks differently from everything we've heard rock before it, but it rocks." (Debaser)

"Occasionally, arrangements do get overly cluttered – with each of the six band members doubling up on at least three different instruments, there's a distinct sense of overdubs for overdubbing's sake. Follow the key instruments alone, however, and the soundscapes not only make perfect sense, but so do the flourishes and intrusions that rattle around. And the end result is an album that has withstood the test of time a lot better than anyone might have expected." (AllMusic)

What you said...

Philip Qvist: The first time I heard of Gentle Giant was about six years ago when I was listening to a music blog on YouTube. Gentle Giant? Who are they, and why hadn't I heard of them beforehand? Oh, that's right, they were a prog rock band; that's why I had never heard of them until that moment.

That's not to say I don't like prog rock, but unless it is something by Pink Floyd, Rush, Kansas or Jethro Tull during their 70s peak, or the odd song by Yes or ELP, I don't go out of my way to buy an album from that genre.

So back to Gentle Giant and Octopus and the positive things first. The Roger Dean cover is great, the songs are unusually short for a prog record, and amongst the noise there are a couple of good songs, such as River or A Cry For Everyone.

I can't fault the musicianship either, but the truth is that Octopus didn't float my boat either. Not a bad album, but it's barely average. At least it isn't totally self-indulgent, but it's still a 5 from me.

Gary Claydon: True prog. Unmistakably, unequivocally, unapologetically prog. Like much of a similar ilk, Octopus can be something of an acquired taste, with its multi-faceted approach and highbrow subject matter. However, there is enough, typically self-deprecating English humour to lighten the load (even though the band contained three Scots!).

Best tracks? The energetic opener The Advent of Panurge, which is pretty much as prog as prog can be, the instrumental The Boys In The Band and the multi-layered Knots (I mean, who doesn't like a good xylophone solo?)

I was about 13 when I first heard Octopus, a year or so after its release, and, to be honest, it was lost on me. Not only did I not 'get' it; it just wasn't what I was looking for, musically, at the time. Over the years and subsequent listens, it has grown on me, though, as has some of the band's other work. I've never regarded Octopus as essential; there is a touch too much filler and fiddling about for the sake of it, but if anybody ever asks you what prog sounds like, just answer 'Gentle Giant'.

Fun fact - prior to forming Gentle Giant, the Shulman brothers and Martin Smith were the core of Simon DuPree and The Big Sound, who had a hit with the cinematic psychedelia of Kites. At one point, the band counted among their number a young, unknown touring keyboard player by the name of Reginald Dwight.

Side discussion - it was good to finally get round to listening to Steven Wilson's reworking of Octopus, and I do think it adds something to what was already a really well-engineered and good-sounding album.

Greg Schwepe: This was a bit of a head-scratcher for me. Gentle Giant are one of those bands that the Prog section of the Louder website always has articles on; band members, album anniversaries, etc. And being a fan of the normal prog rock heavyweights (Yes, Genesis, ELP, King Crimson), I figured I would check them out someday. And maybe they might turn out to be one of those ”Wow, what have I been missing?” bands and have a whole new catalogue to explore.

Sadly, that was not the case as I explored Octopus. The Advent Of Panurge started out… interesting. And nothing clicked. More of the same with Raconteur, Troubadour and A Cry For Everyone. Unlike a real octopus with tentacles and suckers, this Octopus was not sticking to me. By the time Knots came around, I determined Gentle Giant was not for me.

The vocals seemed too prim and proper, plaintive, a bit genteel, and a bit recitative at times. All prog rock seems to have elements of what you could call “chamber music”…but in this case it seemed to take it a bit too far for me. Any long instrumental sections I didn’t have a problem with. Just didn’t click.

6 out of 10 on this one for me. Oh, but I did like the cool Roger Dean cover.

Neil Immerz: I have this one. Based on a small piece on the album in Terrorizer magazine and the exploration of prog rock, I decided to find and buy the album. I was definitely intrigued. I was thinking this might be similar to Yes in terms of songwriting, song length, etc. But I was kinda surprised on first listen. I think it’s more akin to Van Der Graaf Generator, y’know, that whole “jam band” thing they had going on on Pawn Hearts.

All that said, I do enjoy the album on occasion. 7/10.

John Davidson: Gentle Giant are one of those bands whose influence on their genre is much more important than their popularity. While Yes, Genesis and Pink Floyd all entered the public consciousness, Gentle Giant remained a connoisseur's choice.

The more I have listened to this week's pick, Octopus, the more I like the music, but the vocals and vocal arrangements are a real turn-off. They sound old-fashioned, almost churchy at times.

I'm sure I would have borrowed the album from the library back in the day – the Roger Dean cover alone guarantees that – but I have no memory of the songs.

As to their legacy, I can hear echoes of Gentle Giant in the work of Big Big Train (mostly in the musical arrangements and the use of brass) and Spock's Beard (piano and vocal harmonies), but both of those bands do a better job of packaging up the best aspects of Gentle Giant and making them work for a modern audience.

Ultimately, I'm glad Gentle Giant existed, but I don't think I will add any of the songs to my personal playlists. Their legacy maybe tips them from a 5 to a 6.

Mike Canoe: Back in the club's second year, we reviewed ELP's Tarkus, which I called the "proggriest prog that ever progged." A fellow frequent contributor who I hope is still out there and will weigh in this week suggested that title go to Gentle Giant.

Who? I tried Octopus back then and I did not get it. After circling back every other year or so, I think I'm getting there. I have always had respect for Octopus, but I might be starting to actually enjoy it. Even by prog standards, Gentle Giant seem like a uniquely complex and challenging band to get into. Minstrel vocals blended with instruments that I had to Google, like mellophone intermingling with Moogs and the most vibraphones this side of Frank Zappa, all used to make twisty, nay, knotty music in songs generally running three to four minutes, interludes by the standards of some prog bands.

The closing River still gets on my nerves and, interestingly, it's the only song here over five minutes. Too much of a weird and/or twee thing? Stunned by an honest-to-goodness blues guitar solo after a half hour of everything but a conventional song structure? I don't know, but I do know that I like the opener, The Advent of Panurge, the aptly named Knots, instrumental The Boys in the Band, Dog's Life (best dog song ever?) and ballad Think of Me With Kindness, and more than tolerate Cry For Everyone and Raconteur Troubadour.

My common refrain is "too much music, too little time." Heck, I used it just last week. But every so often, there's an album that makes me want to keep trying. Octopus is one of those albums.

Mark Herrington: I’ve never heard this in its entirety before, but knew it had influenced a lot of other progressive bands.

The tracks I enjoyed were the more immediate and rockier ones, namely A Cry For Everyone and River. Also, the quieter Think Of Me With Kindness, which has echoes in years to come in the Alan Parsons Project ballads.

Other than those, I couldn’t really warm to the rest of the album, and only enjoyed small parts of individual songs. Some of these tracks were overly complex and lost my attention. At times, the vocals were a bit of an acquired taste too, although on the three songs I enjoyed they were ok.

Its influence is clear, with many moments that reminded me of subsequent songs from other bands. From the ‘cartoon chase’ elements of a section of Boys In The Band, reflected in Dream Theater’s Endless Sacrifice, to Haken’s use of a cappella in The Cockroach King.

Many of those bands have polished and refined some of the influences on here into arguably better albums. An example: Haken’s The Mountain, a great modern Prog Metal album, which I feel is more consistent than this, but is clearly influenced by Octopus.

Overall, a mixed album for me, with a lasting influence on other bands.

Final score: 6.32 (28 votes cast, total score 177)

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While Europe (the continent) increasingly shows signs of wear and tear, Europe (the band) are more cohesive than ever, and the band's epic Scandinavian Eyes single finds them in fine, early Rainbow-shaped form. So fine, in fact, that it picked up our Tracks Of The Week single with a mammoth 50% of the overall vote. So congratulations to them.

Scarlet Rebels' Chains was second, while Airbourne's Kid In A Candy Store came in third. This week? You'll need to wait an entire seven days to find out.

Steven Wilson - Requiem For A Village

Just a year or so after his Classic Rock No.1 Album Of The Year (2025’s splendid, intergalactic deep-dive The Overview), our favourite luxury-offbeat auteur is back with something completely different. Instead of outer space, we have a village. Instead of Floydian epics, we have a dark, twisty atmosphere that nods to his earlier solo work (little bit Luminol, some ominous Grace For Drowning-era shadows) 70s British folk-horror cinema and the gnarlier ends of his artistic palate in general. Scrappy yet heavy. Still cinematic, still narrative-driven, but in a quietly macabre way. Also, do check out the new website, which someone has clearly had a lot of fun making.

Gyasi - You Got The Look

West Virginia’s glam-tastic prodigal son returns to his signature glitter-infused style (having dipped into rawer blues for latest album Songs From The Holler) on this raucous, hard-strutting marriage of proto-punk, pink lipstick and no-nonsense rock’n’roll. Imagine The Stooges raiding Marc Bolan’s wardrobe and then throwing an all-nighter at some sticky, low-lit dive, and you’re in the right territory. Nice.

The War On Drugs - Who’s That

“Who’s That was written in 10 minutes somewhere between first coffee and school drop off,” says bandleader Adam Granduciel of this stirring, beautifully inward-looking swirl of 21st century alt heartland and Americana (and War On Drugs’ first new studio music since 2022). “It’s a song about trying to love yourself despite things we can’t always control, like the anxiety, depression and self-doubt that may stand in the way of living the life we truly desire.”

Split Dogs - Speed Demon

Need a dirty, hooky, punk-riddled antidote to the Back To School blues? Step into our office – or rather, the new Split Dogs house of thick, juicy riff ‘n’rollin’ good times. Plus they’re having such a blast in the video (swimming pools! Fairground rides! Crowd-surfing! Angus Young duck-walks in, like, every other shot!) it’s hard to not get at least a little swept up in it.

Twin Temple - Love You To Death

Jealousy, betrayal and the messy extremes of love are wrapped in a sumptuous package, on the ‘Satanic doo-wop’ duo’s latest dose of 50s/60s opulence and heartache. “With Love You to Death we wanted to put our own spin on two distinctly American musical traditions,” the band explain, “the romantic innocence of 1962 RCA-style pop and the darkness and brutality of the traditional murder ballad… It’s about devotion taken to its most dangerous extreme, to madness, and crimes of passion.”

Grace Bowers - Cigarettes For Breakfast

‘Cigarettes for breakfast, nothing for lunch,’ Grace Bowers sings in the catchy, 90s-fuzzed chorus of her latest solo venture, inspired by snapshots of life as a model at Paris Fashion Week. Expect skateboards, ill-fated shop mannequins, sharp guitar teeth and tonnes of attitude. Different from her earlier funky blues stylings, but packing its own baggy-jeaned punch.

The Bites - Dancing With The Devil

LA’s The Bites slam straight to the point on this juicy taste of their upcoming self-titled album, which comes out this month. ‘Go big or go home!’ they declare, making good on that statement with a combination of hard swagger and chest-thumping beats and basslines – plus a hand-clapping, shoutalong chorus. Little less 70s/80s big hair vibes compared to earlier releases, with a little more RATM-influenced bite.

Twisted Teens - When We First Met 

Now signed to Sub Pop, New Orleans-based punks Twisted Teens have just announced their third album of 2026, which is a helluva feat, but the crackling lo-fi electricity of When We First Met suggests they're not the types to be picking up the phone to Mutt Lange and booking 18 months in the studio. It's all done and dusted inside two minutes, but it packs a lot of joy into that time, and singer Caspian Hollywell's worn but impassioned voice is a genuine thrill.

Singer-songwriter Rick Springfield has spoken about killing a man during a visit to Vietnam in 1968. Springfield, who was 18 at the time and a member of the band Rockhouse, had been hired to entertain American troops and spent four months in the country.

"We had befriended some Navy guys at Marble Mountain, which is outside Da Nang," Springfield tells Joe Rogan. "They wanted connection with home, so they'd take you into the tents, and we'd play Hendrix and get stoned, and even though we're Australian, there still was a connection there."

Springfield goes on to say that his band stayed overnight with the soldiers when their encampment was attacked by Viet Cong guerrillas, and he was invited to "throw some mortars down the tube."

"It was John Wayne time, you know?" says Springfield. "I mean, as a young kid, I didn't really understand what I was doing. I said, 'Oh, yeah! Let's fire a gun!'

In his 2010 autobiography Late, Late at Night: A Memoir, Springfield describes the action.

"There's a loud whump as each mortar takes flight, then a shower of lethal red-hot sparks and blistering metal as it lands and erupts in the brush," he writes. "A radio call comes in requesting a change of trajectory, so I drop more mortars down the tube and watch them detonate, alarmingly close to us. We stay up all night. How could we sleep?"

The following morning, Springfield was told that one of his mortars had hit a Viet Cong soldier.

"Everyone is jumping around and slapping me on the back," Springfield wrote in his memoir. "I feel sick. Thinking of it now, I still do. All in all, not a real good day for anyone."

"It's hard for me to face that I was responsible for the end of a life, even though it's distant and it's war and I didn't really have anything to do with it and didn't really know what I was doing," he tells Rogan. "But it's pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it."

Cheetah Chrome, founding guitarist with legendary Cleveland punks the Dead Boys, has died at the age of 71. The news was confirmed by the band in a social media post.

"We are incredibly sad to announce the news of the passing of our beloved friend and bandmate Cheetah Chrome,” the band wrote. "Cheetah was a true original, an architect of the punk rock movement. A one-man hurricane tearing up the musical landscape with his feral guitar riffs and manic energy.

"Beyond all that, Cheetah was also just a really sweet guy who loved rock'n'roll. We extend our deepest condolences to Cheetah’s family, friends and fans around the world. His music lives on and will continue to inspire others for generations to come."

Chrome – born Eugene Richard O'Connor in 1955 – joined cult Cleveland proto-punk band Rocket From The Tombs in 1974, before hooking up with vocalist Stiv Bators, guitarist Jimmy Zero, bassist Jeff Magnum and drummer Johnny Blitz to form the Dead Boys the following year. In 1976, encouraged by Joey Ramone, they moved to New York and became a fixture in the nascent CBGB scene.

"We realised that there were a lot of people like us out there," Chrome told Classic Rock. "Why it didn’t occur to us earlier, to just jump in the damn van and get a gig out of town… we weren’t rocket scientists, we were the Dead Boys.”

Armed with several sure-fire punk anthems from his Rocket From The Tombs days – Sonic Reducer, Down In Flames and What Love Is – the Dead Boys signed to The Ramones’ label, Sire Records, and recorded their debut album, Young, Loud And Snotty.

The album was not a commercial success, and the follow-up, We Have Come For Your Children – produced by ex-Mountain bassist Felix Pappalardi – fared no better, although it did produce the classic Ain’t It Fun, later covered by Guns N' Roses on The Spaghetti Incident?.

The Dead Boys broke up in 1979, but reformed several times over the following years for a series of ill-fated reunion dates as Chrome battled drug addiction.

“We had a hard time," he told Classic Rock. "The reason that we broke up in the first place was because of reasons. So as soon as we were together for any length of time, they reared their ugly head. There was no management – we were it. And there were no band meetings, except for van rides. Who wants to argue for four hours in a van? It was unpleasant and stressful."

In 2003, Chrome reformed Rocket from the Tombs with original frontman David Thomas (leader of post-punk band Pere Ubu), while Television guitarist Richard Lloyd filled in for original singer Peter Laughner, who had died in 1977. The band released two albums with Chrome in the band: Rocket Redux in 2004 and Barfly in 2011.

Six years later, the Dead Boys reformed with Jake Hout on vocals – Bators died in Paris in 1990 after being hit by a car – and released a re-recorded version of their debut album entitled Still Snotty: Young, Loud and Snotty At 40.

In late 2024, plans were announced for a new Dead Boys album featuring Chrome alongside Clem Burke (Blondie) on drums and Glen Matlock (Sex Pistols) on bass, plus James Williamson (The Stooges) and Michael Monroe (Hanoi Rocks) making guest appearances. The band's label, Cleopatra, revealed that the project would use cleaned-up early vocal demos from Bators, but the album has not yet materialised.

An official cause of death has not been confirmed.

In 2015 Prog looked back to the short-lived neo-prog era, selecting five albums from the 80s that illustrate the power, energy and lasting influence of the British second-wave movement.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. According to the official, BBC‐approved version of rock history – you know, the one featuring footage of Rick Wakeman in a wizard’s outfit and the Emerson Lake & Palmer trucks rolling down the motorway – progressive rock was consigned to the dustbin five minutes after the Sex Pistols swore on live telly. Anyone who was remotely cool immediately binned every prog album they owned, cut their hair and got with the programme. Year Zero had arrived, and nothing that went before could ever dare to show its face again.

Nonsense, of course. But all the same, by the turn of the 1980s, there had unquestionably been a seismic shift in the UK musical landscape. All of which meant, ironically, that what had been dismissed a few years previously as the bland, complacent music of the establishment was now the ultimate outsider music. In the early 80s, if you wanted to be a true rebel, you came out of the closet as a prog fan.

In many ways, it shouldn’t be surprising that a new generation of prog bands should have come to prominence at that time. It fits in with the usual decade‐long cycle that sees those people who are fans at 13 or 14 soon pick up instruments and form bands of their own, and by the time they’re in their early 20s, they’re writing their own music informed by those teenage influences.

They soon found that there were plenty of people who wanted to hear it. Unfortunately, the neo‐prog scene’s time in the spotlight was a relatively brief one. And for that we can put the blame pretty squarely at the doors of Britain’s major labels.

Pallas, Twelfth Night and IQ all signed major deals after Marillion proved that prog could still prove a commercial force to be reckoned with – but attempts by the industry to build interest in the neo‐prog scene were half‐hearted at best. As the 80s turned into the 90s, the big deals were no longer on the table, and progressive rock’s great second wave had completely lost momentum.

But in many ways, that wave gave progressive music a lift with which to build itself back up. Later on, the rise of the internet helped bands forge more effective links with its audience and sell records and gig tickets directly to fans – a process pioneered by the neo‐prog bands. The revitalising spirit they injected into the genre is still being felt.

We present Prog’s selection of the top five essential neo-prog albums.

Marillion: Script For A Jester’s Tear (EMI, 1983)

Undoubtedly the record that put the Second Wave of British Prog on the map. Long-form songwriting and ear-catching musicianship (Steve Rothery’s guitar lines and Mark Kelly’s keyboard hooks have rarely been more sublime) were shot through with a charisma and lyrical bite not seen since the prime of a certain band beginning with ‘G’ to whom Marillion were incessantly compared.

The melancholic melodramatics shot through these six compositions were repeatedly offset by Fish’s intense, angst-ridden vocals, touching on heartbreak, heroin addiction, urban isolation and the troubles in Northern Ireland en route.

Pallas: The Sentinel (Harvest, 1984)

The Aberdeen outfit’s initial intention to make a concept album out of their Atlantis Suite song cycle was scuppered by their label switching the running order and including more commercial tunes. Yet this is still a fine record, even if the central conceptual narrative is somewhat disjointed by the rearranged tracklisting.

The driving synth-rock of Arrive Alive (Eyes In The Night) grabs your lapels with its instant hook and jumpy tempo, then Cut And Run and Shock Treatment reinforce the dystopian sci-fi theme with some gusto. But more lasting pleasures can be found in the sweeping symphonic pomp of final track Atlantis.

Pendragon: The Jewel (Elusive, 1985)

Neo-prog had gone fully overground by the time Pendragon released their first full-length album. The upbeat prog-pop of Higher Circles that opens the set reflects the distinctly radio-friendly style it was now adopting, but the plot thickens considerably on the trippy, windswept Alaska and the staccato rhythms of Circus.

Yet throughout, the stirring, heart-on-sleeve romanticism that has characterised their best work since this album is already high in the mix, courtesy of Nick Barrett’s distinctly English, folk-influenced vocals, the Moog-heavy melody patterns and piercing guitar excursions.

IQ: The Wake (GEP, 1985)

The Southampton neo-prog survivors’ second album is widely regarded as their defining early statement, and the 1985 long-player manages to marry a distinctive, soaring synth sound with a punky, agitated tempo and some seriously dizzying time signatures.

Peter Nicholls’ fragile, uneasy vocal has a drowning-not-waving quality to it that’s strangely magnetic, even if his years listening to Peter Gabriel have obviously rubbed off heavily. What really stands out, all these years later, is the sheer strength of the melodies – something that has helped IQ endure as a band to this day.

Twelfth Night: Fact & Fiction (Twelfth Night, 1982)

From the eerie, childlike singing that fills the opening bars of We Are Sane, it’s clear that this first studio album release from the neo-prog pack was taking a distinctly different tack to the Tolkien-esque textures associated with the original prog movement. The use of samples on that track and This City add spooky atmospherics to the sonic stew, and there are strong hints of Peter Hammill in Geoff Mann’s malevolent, theatrical vocals.

Mann would leave the band soon afterwards, and the group would pursue a broader, more accessible style on subsequent albums. But as a startling statement of how the new breed could shake up a supposedly moribund genre, this takes some beating.

”I watch MTV and it’s hard not to throw shit at the TV set because it’s so fucking boring. Even the bands around here in LA are the same way, the whole music industry. We meet these people and they say, ‘Do this, do that.’ And we go, ‘Fuck it, fuck you!’ Because it’s just not us. We do whatever we want to…” Axl Rose, 1986

Scene: exterior of a club, the Sunset Strip, Hollywood, an undetermined night in the mid-80s. The imaginary camera in your head pans across the sidewalk, taking in the otherworldly images. Crowds of people of unspecified and indistinguishable gender cluster in pools of neon, some of them gripping half-full beer bottles, others clutching empty shot glasses. The chatter of voices and clack of high heels is drowned out by a choir of Harley Davison engines roaring by. Someone throws a bottle over their shoulder, not caring where it lands. It arcs up and down, then smashes in the busy street. Someone laughs,and they all head towards the door.

Cut to: the club’s interior. The imaginary camera weaves around the tightly-packed crowd, cutting through the hairpsray smog as it heads towards the front of this tiny venue. On the club’s stage, five junkie-looking men in last night’s make-up and last week’s leather trousers are train-crashing through a new song they’ve just written called Welcome To The Jungle. The drape behind them reads ‘Guns N’ Roses’, with a logo to match. Besides them, a trio of barely-clothed women gyrate in their underwear. It’s hot and getting hotter…

The song rattles to a halt and the singer – a rail-thin streak of sinew and rage with an explosion of flaming candy-floss hair and a tomcat’s howl – opens his mouth. “You have to excuse me,” he spits. “I haven’t been asleep in 48 hours, I think. I am coming down on my fuckin’ dope. So this next song is about getting too fuckin’ high. This song is called My Michelle.” Welcome to Hollywood, baby.

More than 30 years on, such scenes have slipped from reality into myth. But Guns N’ Roses were all too real. They waltzed with the Devil down Sunset Strip, danced with Mr Brownstone in long-vanished clubs, and rose above Hollywood on a pillar of flame that would go on to engulf the world. They were – and still are – the great leveller; an unstoppable force in rock and metal’s evolution over the past three decades. Ask any musician from any band in any genre, and they’ll pretty much all tell you how important Guns N’ Roses are to them. In terms of music, in terms of attitude, in terms of lifestyle.

“Guns N’ Roses is my favourite band of all time,” says M Shadows of Avenged Sevenfold. “I love that band. You can compare us all you want – they’re a huge reason why I’m in a band, and even write music. My dad gave me Appetite For Destruction when it came out.”

Shadows would be the first to admit his band are standing on the shoulders of giants. Guns N’ Roses didn’t invent rock’n’roll or carnage, but they perfected it. At their cliché-defying best – that is, at any point between 1985, when they formed, and 1991, when they got so big and bloated you could see them from space – they truly were the most dangerous band in the world. “We were a train wreck,” says original drummer Steven Adler. “But you couldn’t take your eyes off us.”

Guns N’ Roses was built on chaos. In late 1982, a 20-year-old kid from the hick city of Indiana named Bill Bailey arrived in Los Angeles in search of fame, fortune or anything in-between. One of the first people he met in Los Angeles was another Indiana transplant, an old schoolfriend and budding guitarist named Jeff Isbell. Within a few months, both had renamed themselves. Bill Bailey became Axl Rose and Jeff Isbell renamed himself Izzy Stradlin’.

Axl was a bundle of trouble, even as a kid. “I remember, the first day at school there was this big fucking commotion,” Izzy later recalled. “I heard all these books hit the ground, yelling, and then he went running past. A bunch of fucking teachers chasing him down the hallway…”

At the same time as the young Axl was giving his teachers the finger, at a different school 2000 miles away two of his future bandmates were plotting their own dreams of rock’n’roll stardom. Steven Adler was a pupil at Bancroft High, just off Santa Monica Boulevard in LA. An aspiring drummer, Adler befriended an English-born, mixed-race kid named Saul Hudson. It would be a few years before Saul started calling himself Slash. But he was already on the way.

“He was one of the cool kids,” says Steven now, his slurred voice the result of a series of strokes and heart attacks brought on by a lifetime of hardcore drug abuse (though he’s currently clean). “I gave him his first guitar when he was 12 years old. He was writing songs a week later. We started ditching school three weeks into knowing him. We’d walk up and down Sunset, Santa Monica and Hollywood Boulevard, and that guitar went everywhere with him.”

For all that, it was years before they actually played in a band together. The Sunset Strip scene of the late 70s and early 80s was basically a collection of random musicians joining each others’ bands for a few weeks or months at a time, then moving on to something else. It wasn’t until the middle of 1984, when Adler joined Slash’s band Roadcrew, that the pair finally teamed up. Even then, they both had a firm eye on the competition.

“You’d walk up and down Sunset and see all these flyers everywhere,” says Steven.“Me and Slash were hanging out at the Rainbow and we saw this one flyer on the sidewalk and picked it up. The guitar player and singer looked really cool, so we went to see them at Gazarri’s.”

The guitarist was Izzy Stradlin’, the singer was Axl Rose, and their band was called Hollywood Rose – or maybe just Rose, depending on what they decided to put on their flyers. The two parties hooked up, played a few gigs… then fell apart. Slash joined a band called Black Sheep. Izzy joined perpetual no-hopers London. Axl teamed up with a guitarist named Tracii Guns in LA Guns. In April 1985, the latter would change their name to reflect their two key members: Guns N’ Roses.

By June 1985, Tracii Guns was out and Slash, Izzy and Adler were all back in, as was a beanpole bass player from Seattle named Duff McKagan. This soon-to-be-classic lineup bonded over a trip to Seattle, which started with their car breaking down 25 miles outside of LA and ended with them unsuccessfully trying to burn down the actual venue they were playing in.

Their chief role models were the big beasts of the 1970s: Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, the classic icons of the tight-trousered titans who laid down the foundation stone for arena rock and heavy metal. But there was no bloat here: Guns N’ Roses were street punks in rock stars’ clothing.

“We always read in magazines how they did it their way,” remembers Steven. “We figured that we’d do it our way, and fuck everybody else. When people told us, ‘Do it like this,’ we’d go, ‘Fuck you, we’re gonna do it like that.’ We were not going to take any shit from anybody.”

Vicky Hamilton would play a key part in the early development of the band that would become GN’R, first as their booker and then as their manager. She was working at a booking agency and managing various hopeful bands when Axl and Izzy introduced themselves to her.

“Axl said, ‘Can we come in and play you a demo?’” she recalls now. “I was, like, ‘No, put it in the mail to me.’ ‘Well, we want to bring it in and play it.’ ‘Well, I don’t have a stereo.’ And Axl went, ‘That’s okay, I’ll just bring a ghetto blaster.’ They played me the demo, and it was unbelievable.I’d worked with Poison, Stryper, Mötley Crüe. But this was a different animal. It felt a lot more dangerous. They felt like outlaws.”

Next to a bunch of pampered poodles like Poison, Guns N’ Roses were a pack of feral dogs. The two bands hated each other. They would paper over each others’ flyers until telephone poles were inches thick. “Lock me in a room with Poison, and there’s only gonna be one person walking out,” spat Axl.

Even early on, Axl was a unique figure. “He had his issues,” says Steven. “But he had this real charismatic, Jim Morrison kind of aura around him. One minute you’re in love with him, the next you’re going, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’”

It was a constant game to see who would end up on the receiving end of the singer’s hair-trigger temper. “Axl used to be one of those guys who, if he even thought someone was looking at him weird, would just haul off and smack ‘em,” Izzy later recalled. “And sometimes the people he went for weren’t even looking at him.”

But Guns N’ Roses was far from just The Axl Rose Show. This was a band of five distinct characters: the volatile frontman in Axl; the elegantly wasted, top hat-sporting Slash; the relentlessly eager, clown-ish Adler; dyed-in-the-wool punk rocker Duff; the effortlessly cool Izzy. The latter was the mystery component, even to his bandmates.

“Izzy was very quiet and he only had a small circle of friends,” recalls Vicky Hamilton. “His humour was very cynical. He was early on the drug path. He was already going to rehab before those guys even started.”

Their individual personalities fed into the songs they were writing. By the end of 1985, half the songs that would make it onto Appetite For Destruction were in their set.

“When we first started, none of us were perfect at playing, apart from maybe Slash,” admits Steven. “But it was something we really enjoyed doing, and that was more important than getting great at playing. It was a match made in heaven. Then it went right to hell.”

In most bands, there’s a ‘sensible one’. Guns N’ Roses weren’t most bands. They had five distinctly insensible ones. According to Steven, the closest they did had to a steady hand was him, which shows just how fucked-up things were.

“Man, I was the sensible one,” he laughs. “I was the one saying, ‘Come on, this is our dream coming true, let’s not throw it away.’ The whole thing was this crazy, out-of-control monster.”

In reality, the soberest member of the band was Axl. Although ‘sober’ is a relative term. “I don’t abstain from doing drugs, but I won’t allow myself to have a fuckin’ habit,” he told writer Del James in 1989. “I’ll have done blow [cocaine] for three days and my mind will go, ‘Fuck no.’ I’ll just refuse to do coke that day. The same thing with heroin. I did it for three weeks straight… with a girl I wanted to be with, and we just sat there listening to Led Zeppelin, doing drugs and fucking. I stopped on Saturday because I had serious business to attend to on Monday. I can’t hide in drugs.”

His advice to would-be druggies was “don’t get a habit, don’t use anybody else’s needle and don’t let drugs become a prerequisite to having a good time.” Unfortunately, his bandmates weren’t listening. Slash and Izzy were full-on junkies, and Adler was coming up fast on the inside. Duff, on the other hand, was a borderline alcoholic, presumably just to be different.

“I love the guy a lot, but the fact is Slash is not what you’d call your thinkin’ man’s drug-user,” Izzy said of his fellow guitarist. “He’s real careless, doing really shitty things like OD-ing in other people’s apartments. A lot.”

Sex was arguably even higher on their list of priorities, at least for some members. “The concept of safe sex didn’t exist before then,” said Slash. “I was running around, dick wet from one pussy going into another.”

The gloves were off when it came to sexual competition between the fivesome too, with various women flying through the ranks. The band would have contests to see who could get the most blowjobs in one day. “I won that every time,” boasts Steven now. “It didn’t matter if you were hard or not. If she put it in her mouth, that counted. My record was 13 in a day. Lucky 13.”

Nor were any of them worried about the spectre of AIDS – the big sexual bogeyman of the day. “I’ve been tested for AIDS a few times,” admitted Slash at the time. “But honestly, the first time I was tested I didn’t care about the result in terms of my own mortality. I was more concerned about the fact that if it was positive, I wouldn’t be able to get laid for however long it took for me to kick the bucket.”

The sexual charge that fired the band crackled onstage, too. Hollywood wasn’t short of strippers, many of whom were befriended by the band. Performances would be enhanced by dancers who were in various states of undress.

The girls had another use, too. Some of them would take band members under their wings, and sometimes into their beds. Given that your average stripper earned far more than most struggling musicians, it guaranteed them a warm meal and a hot shower alongside any other perks that may have, ahem, arisen.

“Strippers were our sustenance for the longest time,” recalled Slash of that era. “We crashed at the strippers’ houses and that’s where we got extra cash.”

When they weren’t enjoying the mothering instincts of LA’s finest exotic dancers, the band lived in a loft in their rehearsal room. It was freezing cold and there was no plumbing. They would light bonfires in the car park. They were effectively homeless people in leather trousers.

In the autumn of 1985, Vicky Hamilton got a call from Slash. “Can Axl stay on your couch for a little while?” he asked. “The cops are looking for him.” The singer had been accused of a sexual assault, and they were basically on the run from the law (the charges were later dropped).

“I said, ‘Oh boy, okay, for a couple of days,’” she says. “What was supposed to be a couple of days ended up being six months. It started with Axl on my couch, and then a few days later the rest of the band moved their gear in.”

Her one-bedroom apartment just off the Sunset Strip became the epicentre of the carnage. At any given time, there would be anything between eight and 20 people in the place: five musicians, assorted roadies, various girlfriends and any number of one-night stands. It wasn’t so much a home as an animal house. But even then there was a pecking order.

“Axl was always on the couch and the rest would be in sleeping bags in the pretend-dining room,” says Vicky. “They were terrible house guests. My roommate and I would barricade ourselves in the bedroom.”

It was Hamilton who helped Guns N’ Roses to the next level. She passed on a tape to Tom Zutaut, superstar A&R man with Geffen Records. Zutaut had spotted Mötley Crüe and turned them into superstars. He planned to do the same with Guns. On February 28, 1986, he saw them for the first time at The Troubadour nightclub. Less than a month later, he had signed them to Geffen for a $75,000 advance.

Not that the deal doused the band’s fire. On the day they were due to sign with Geffen, Axl and Steven got into a fight at Vicky’s apartment. It was a big one.

“Axl wouldn’t go to Geffen Records down the street and sign the deal,” says Steven. “I was pissed at him, and we got into it. Just destroyed the place. It was fucking crazy.”

It was also the final straw for the apartment’s long-suffering owners, who promptly evicted Vicky and her unruly house pests. “My landlord was, like, ‘Get them the fuck out of here,’” she says, laughing. “I got them a record deal, they got me evicted.”

Guns N’ Roses were too tightly bound to each other to let a fist-fight knock their accelerating juggernaut off course. “It was a gang mentality,” insists Steven. “We were one for all, all for one. The three musketeers. Or the five musketeers.” He laughs. “With guitars and a drumkit.”

Geffen half-heartedly tried to tame them. Vicky Hamilton was replaced as manager by Alan Niven, and the band were moved into a shared hovel in an effort to fire their creativity. The plan backfired when the quintet spent their advance on getting even more fucked up. The name they gave their new abode pretty much tells you all you need to know: The Hell House.“A lot of crabs were transferred in that place,” noted Slash years later.

“It was,” added Duff McKagan, “a place where the whole sleaziness of the band could fester.”Their new paymasters managed to wrangle them into the studio to record their debut EP, the mock-live Live ?!*@ Like A Suicide: a four-track, 14-minute blast of sleaze and venom with crowd noises pilfered from 70s mega-festival the Texxas Jam. Anyone unsure of where Guns N’ Roses were coming from only needed to look at the titles of two of its songs: Reckless Life and a cover of Nice Boys (Don’t Play Rock’N’Roll).

What happened next has been cut-up, chewed over and regurgitated countless times down the years. Guns N’ Roses recorded their debut album, Appetite For Destruction, with producer Mike Clink. Released in June 1987, it ultimately exploded like nothing ever had before it. By the end of 1988, it had sold in excess of ten million copies (today that figure stands at an impressive 18 million). Guns N’ Roses weren’t just the most dangerous band in the world. They were also the biggest. “We wanted to change the world,” says Steven Adler. “And we did.”

They did. Even today, if you want to get to the heart Guns N’ Roses and the era in which they emerged, just crank up Appetite For Destruction itself. It’s not just one of the greatest records ever released, it’s a document of a time, a place and a band that will never be repeated.

Now that’s Hollywood, baby.

Originally published in Metal Hammer 264 (November 2014)

Opeth had spent 20 years on the Swedish metal scene when they turned their attention to their 10th album. But 2011’s Heritage wasn’t more of the same – to the horror of some fans, they toned down the aggressive growling vocals and distorted guitars, and embraced the prog tendencies they’d always hinted at. That year, band leader Mikael Åkerfeldt talked us through the process.

You could say it was inevitable. Album after album, the death metal roots from which Opeth sprang were trimmed away, exposing a beautiful progressive rock blossom. And while the aggressive growls and heavy distortion were still tangible in albums as recent as 2008’s Watershed, there were always hints that a later release could erase their metallic inclinations.

Those hoping for a sign of brutality need only look at the cover of Heritage to give up. The artwork is an open invitation to a musical odyssey steeped in prog rock – a bountiful tree rooted from the depths of hell, built around a pastoral landscape, a flaming city in the background and a pit of skulls beneath. It’s a mammoth leap from the gothic imagery of yesteryear. Pure and simple, it’s Opeth’s proggiest album to date. Mankind might feel the tremors, but the leap is but a small step for frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt.

“It feels, without sounding pretentious, like we’ve been working our way up to this point since the first album,” he explains. “I did start writing stuff that sounded like a continuation of the last album, but I was kind of fooling myself. I had two songs and I ended up deleting them after Martin Mendez said ‘Man, that’s not good!’ He was on the same wavelength as I was, pretty much, I just needed a second opinion to get a kick up the ass. So I scrapped everything and started from scratch. The Lines In My Hand was the first song I wrote for Heritage, then I wrote the rest of the stuff in six or seven months and it was easy. I didn’t stop and think – I just wrote it.”

Be warned: Heritage is almost devoid of metal. Gone are the distorted guitar riffs and drum machine-style pedal action that leant itself to the Swedish death genre out of which Opeth were born. Clearly a brave step for a band who have been deemed heavy for 20 years; and possibly one that’s detrimental to their metal fanbase. “You can’t worry about those things,” Åkerfeldt says. “I think some fans will be disappointed – but we’ve done experiments in the past. If you know your Opeth history, this isn’t an outrageous album at all.”

Åkerfeldt essentially calls the shots, but there are four others in the merry band of brothers; and guitarist Fredrik Åkesson’s thoughts on the move from metal must be worth hearing. In fact, he’s in accordance with Åkerfeldt’s choice. “When I heard about the album I knew there wasn’t going to be any growls, and there’d be less distortion on the guitars and bass. The metalhead in me was like, ‘Are you really sure about that?’ but when I heard the stuff I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s a really cool vision!”

By shifting the focus from brutality to prog-drenched experimentation, Heritage opens up a new world to both fans and the musicians who play on the record. Without the oppressive effect of distortion, there’s leeway for other elements of the band’s sound to shine – especially for drummer Martin Axenrot.

“This time round everyone has their own space, especially Martin; he’s been aching to do an album like this fore ver,” says Åkerfeldt. “He’s only been known for his metal drumming but, he actually started out in a marching band and his drumming idol is Ian Paice. He’s never really had enough credit. So he’s all over this album doing rock, fusion, jazz and heavy metal. It’s great that every musician is there.”

Joining Opeth on Heritage are two notable guest musicians – Peruvian-born percussionist Alex Acuña from Weather Report and flautist Bjorn J:son Lindh, who’s worked with Mike Oldfield among others. “Alex was a bit of a coincidence,” says Åkesson. “A guy who was helping us with the drums knew we needed help with a percussion part, and also knew that Alex was in town for a drum clinic, so he told us about it. Alex is like, only the best percussion player in the world, so it was perfect!”

Lindh wasn’t so easy a coup; the band tried and failed several times to get him to play flute. But as he was in Stockholm when they were recording, he agreed to pop by.. Or As Åkesson puts it: “he did two takes then pissed off!” Perhaps unsurprisingly Lindh wasn’t the only famous flute player that Opeth had in mind for the record.

“I did email Ian Anderson but I never heard back. Funnily enough, when I went down to Steven Wilson’s place to mix the album, he says, ‘I just got an email from Ian Anderson. He just wants me to look into mixing Aqualung!’ But I’m really happy in retrospect that we have Bjorn, because it fits with the vibe of the record.”

One musician will not be revelling in the glee afforded by Opeth’s newest endeavour. Earlier this year long-standing keyboardist Per Wiberg left the band, the reasons for which may never be clear. Åkesson recalls Wiberg saying he’d “lost the joy of playing music” – but Åkerfeldt can’t help but feel there was something more personal involved: “I don’t think he felt comfortable with me having the final say on things,” says the band leader. “In fact, sometimes I felt like he despised me. He was calling up the other guys and going out to bars with them, but he never called me. We used to be really good friends.”

Animosity doesn’t make the task of firing someone any easier. Åkerfeldt recalls giving his dispirited keyboardist his marching orders: “I fired him, and I got terrible panic attacks after that. I was doing it through email because I was bitter and angry. Then we started emailing back and forth. He’d never said more heartfelt stuff than he did in those emails. So I asked him, ‘Would you have left anyway?’ and he said, ‘Yes’. That made me feel a lot better.”

He’s delighted with the contributions of ex-Yngwie Malmsteen keyboardist Joakim Svalberg. Although not necessarily a permanent fixture (Åkerfeldt prefers to “take things slow”) the new recruit is already proving a hit. Anyone in attendance at recent gigs will testify to his pristine vocal parts. “Our voices fit together better than Per’s,” Åkerfeldt says. “But then Joakim’s very professional in that sense. He’s not going to do anything half-arsed. He’s so prepared. He knows all the lyrics – even I forget the lyrics! – all the harmonies, and he’s really into it.”

The band are certainly making the most of Svalberg’s prowess. The opening bars of Heritage are a sparse and delicate piano piece more befitting a woeful interlude than an album’s introduction. But like the cover art, it serves as a blatant indicator that Opeth are doing something different this time. It’s more than just a ‘less metal’ version of the band; you’ll find cheeky folk ditties, vocoder passages and ominous tribal drums conveying menace in equal measure – but in an entirely different way than in the past.

“I’ve never been a big fan of happy, uplifting music. But I think sorrowful music can be uplifting,” muses Åkerfeldt. “With the production of this album it was easy to bring those things forward musically. If you do the metal thing, the few emotions that are in there come from aggression; this time it was easier to tap into more profound feelings.”

Talking tabout his thoughts on the state of the current music scene, it’s evident that he feels uninspired by today’s metal offerings. “We’re the biggest metal fans ever, and that’s why we get a bit pissed off. The contemporary scene doesn’t really offer me anything right now. I take all my inspiration from older bands.” Which might be why Heritage is their least metal album to date. Åkerfeldt’s musical interests include metal, jazz and folk, but he also attributes influence from a person who’s proved integral in Åkerfeldt’s professional and personal life.

“Steven Wilson played me an album by David Crosby that I hadn’t heard – his first solo album If I Could Only Remember My Name – and it blew my mind. It’s a jamming kind of record but it’s got the crème de la crème of the West Coast scene. Recently I went for what I like to call ‘an old man’s walk,’ where I go out and listen to music. I was listening to Rainbow Rising and my eyes were tearing up. I was like, ‘How is this possible? I’ve heard this a million times!’ Now it means more to me than ever. It’s those types of records – Rainbow’s Rising, Judas Priest’s Sin After Sin – I listen to a lot.”

There’s no doubt that Opeth will continue to reinvent their wheel at every turn. “A lot of people, once they have a career, get afraid of their own creativity,” Åkerfeldt muses. “They think they’re going to lose their jobs if they get creative. But I think our career is based on doing what we want, because that’s what we’ve always done.”

In July 1974, the 25-year-old Rick Wakeman had his first heart attack. The keyboard player, who had left Yes earlier that year following the tour for the divisive Tales From Topographic Oceans album, had been taken ill just a day after staging a show in support of his third solo album, the hugely successful Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, at the Crystal Palace Bowl in South London.

And so it was that he found himself stuck in Wexham Park Hospital in Slough, Berkshire for six weeks while he recovered. The heart specialist who was treating him advised him to stop playing and effectively retire. “I had been told that I would not be able to work again, and if I did my heart would give out,” Wakeman told Classic Rock in 2013.

Wakeman was having none of it. Defying doctor’s orders, he spent his convalescence sketching out the album that would become The Myths and Legends of King Arthur And The Knights Of The Round Table. The tale of the fabled British ruler had caught Wakeman’s imagination after being taken on holiday as a child to Tintagel in Cornwall, whose castle was said to be the site of Arthur’s court Camelot. A more recent visit to Tintagel had ignited the idea of writing an album based around the Arthurian legends.

“I was staying at the King Arthur’s Arms, and I was looking out at the ruins of the castle,” Wakeman told The Strange Brew. “I’d always been fascinated by the legends, but being there, in that atmosphere, it just felt like the right time. I wanted to do something that had a narrative but wasn't just a retelling of a book. I wanted to pick out the characters – Galahad, Guinevere, Merlin – and give them their own musical identity.”

Cooped up in his hospital room, Wakeman began devouring books on the subject, scribbling musical ideas on manuscript paper and humming them into a cassette recorder someone had smuggled into his room for him. The very first song he wrote there reflected both his health issues and the medical advice that he should quit: The Last Battle.

“It’s not really just the last battle of King Arthur but it was probably my last battle because I wasn’t going to give in,” Wakeman later said of the song’s defiant title.

The album itself was no less ambitious. “Writing Arthur was different from …Six Wives,” he told The Strange Brew, referring to his second solo album, The Six Wives Of Henry VIII. “With …Six Wives, I was painting portraits of people I could research in history books. With Arthur, I was painting legends. The music had to be grander. I remember sitting at the piano and trying to find a theme that sounded ‘ancient’ but with a modern, progressive edge.."

Even at that early stage, he had big plans for both the record and a huge live extravaganza to accompany it – a King Arthur Day, held in the grounds of Tintagel Castle on Easter Monday.

“I’d like it to be more of a pageant than a rock show and involve the local people in making it a complete show, with jousting, medieval bands and knights,” he told Melody Maker journalist Chris Welch at the time. “It’s got to be planned in advance so we can cater for 100,000 people,” he added optimistically.

Wakeman began recording the new album in earnest at Morgan Studios, Northwest London in November 1974. He was joined by the so-called English Rock Ensemble – vocalists Ashley Holt and Gary Pickford-Hopkins, guitarist Jeffrey Crampton, bassist Roger Newell, drummer Barney James and percussionist John Hodgson. They were joined by narrator Terry Taplin. And then there was the 45-piece New World Orchestra and the 48-strong English Chamber Choir. The latter pushed Wakeman’s label, A&M, over the edge.

"The label thought I was mad. I told them, 'I want an orchestra, a choir, a rock band, and narrators,’” Wakeman told The Strange Brew. “They said, 'Rick, that's going to cost a fortune.' And I said, ‘Yes, but it's King Arthur! It can’t be small.’ We were pushing the boundaries of what a concept album could be. It wasn't just about the music; it was about the spectacle.”

Among Wakeman’s arsenal of keyboards was a Mellotron, which was duly deployed to evocative effect. “The Mellotron was essential for King Arthur…,” he told The Strange Brew. “It has that slightly eerie, haunting quality that fits the Lady of the Lake or the mystery of Merlin. I used the choir tapes and the string tapes to create this wall of sound that felt like you were in a great hall or on a misty battlefield. It gave the album its atmosphere – that feeling of being half-real and half-dream.”

The finished album delivered on the grand yet dreamlike atmosphere. From the mysterious, sombre drift of the opening Arthur onwards, it struck an enchanting balance between complexity and melodic heft, as surging Mellotrons and squelching Moogs collide with real choirs, vivacious orchestral interventions and the exhilarating of sound live guitars, bass and drums.

Wakeman certainly didn’t sound like a man who had recently had a brush with death. His synth solo on Sir Lancelot And The Black Knight is one of the most outrageous things he has ever recorded, not least the moment when its underlying pulse is hijacked by a brief burst of hip-shaking samba.

Elsewhere, a labyrinth of layers and contrasting keyboard tones gave the ominous Merlin The Magician an ethereal quality in keeping with the mystical overtones of the King Arthur story, while the pomp-fest of The Last Battle is 10 minutes of euphoric grandeur.

The Myths And Legends Of King Arthur And The Knights Of The Round Table was released in March 1975. Although it didn’t replicate the phenomenal success of Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, it still did more-than-respectable business on both sides of the Atlantic, reaching No.2 in the UK and No.21 in the US. And while Wakeman’s vision of a huge King Arthur-themed gig in Tintagel never materialised, he did something arguably even madder: a live show… on ice.

After Wakeman’s suggestion for a one-off gig at Wembley Stadium was deemed too ambitious, they settled on the smaller Wembley Empire Pool, which stood nearby. Three shows were planned between May 30 and June 1, 1975. There was just one problem – it had been booked by an ice dancing troupe for a show due to start immediately afterwards.

“I wanted to do the King Arthur… show at Wembley,” Wakeman told Classic Rock. “And they said: ‘You can’t, there’s an ice rink installed.’ I said: ‘Sod it, I’ll do it on ice.’”

Funded by Wakeman himself, the resulting shows were either one of rock’s most unique spectacles or its grandest folly. As well as the English Rock Ensemble, the keyboard wizard was joined by an orchestra, a choir and a small army of more than 60 skaters playing various characters from the King Arthur story, from Arthur and his paramour Guinevere to a phalanx of knights.

“I wanted the concerts to be musical and entertaining,” Wakeman told Metal Talk. “I followed some great advice given to me by David Bowie, who told me to do what I wanted to do on stage, especially if I was using my own money. ‘Don’t let any promoter, agent or manager tell you,’ he said. ‘They don’t have the imagination…’ I’m forever indebted to David for that.”

The sold-out shows were ridiculously entertaining, but they were also hugely expensive to the point of wiping Wakeman out financially. He managed to tour the US and South America - albeit without the ice rink – but it wasn’t enough to reverse his parlous fortunes. He had only one option: rejoin Yes. By the end of 1976, he was back in the band he’d left two years earlier.

Today, The Myths and Legends of King Arthur And The Knights Of The Round Table stands as one of the high points of both prog’s Golden Age and Wakeman’s own career, even if its own legend has been overshadowed by those infamous, ultimately ruinous gigs.

But it was just as important for Wakeman on a personal level, a blast of symphonic defiance in the face of both medical advice and even death itself. Looking back on the Wembley gig, he recalled playing The Last Battle – the song he’d composed while convalescing in hospital and ignoring his doctor’s insistence that he hang up his cape.

“I vividly saw myself lying in bed at Wexham Park Hospital, absorbing the consultant’s unwanted advice that I should contemplate early retirement,” he later said. “It showed the piece had far more subconscious meaning than I’d realised when I wrote it. It was, in retrospect, as much about me as about events at Camelot.”

"For fook’s sake!” blurts the figure to our left in a passable northern English accent. His one good, crystal-blue eye roves frantically across the pipes and vents just out of reach through the bars of the cage we’re currently locked in. The other eye is milky white, with a vicious-looking scar crossing the socket. To the other side, a tattooed and dreadlocked entity with a face like the Devil’s scrotum is trying to decipher a clue left on a scroll by the dastardly puppeteer who has us trapped in this dismal steampunk dungeon.

We were informed on entering that we only had an hour to make it out or we’d join the Puppet Master’s show forever. A quarter of that allotted time has already ticked away and we’re still stuck in the part of the room we were first ushered into.

“Don’t worry, once your blood is removed and your veins filled with oil, it won’t hurt anymore,” giggles the disembodied voice of our unseen guide, who introduces himself as ‘Pinocchio’.

“For fook’s sake,” shouts the one-eyed figure again. “Now you’re just threatening us!” His name is Dr. Dead and you might hope that a self-proclaimed mad scientist would have the perfect cracked-yet-methodical mindset to guide us through the fiendish puzzles blocking our way to freedom.

“You’d think so wouldn’t you?” he grins, with a gleam in his eye. “But no, it turns out we’re just really bad at this.”

Thankfully, we haven’t fallen into an unlikely Saw-style scenario and we certainly hope that no one is actually going to replace our blood with oil if we fail to get out in time.

Instead, Metal Hammer is at Finest Escape, an escape room in Nuremberg, along with Dr. Dead and his undead minion, Tommy Kemp – vocalist and guitarist respectively in rising zombie-metal band Dominum. Neither have done an escape room before, but when we meet at the impressively atmospheric venue on an otherwise ordinary weekday morning, they’re more than up for the challenge.

“It’s always good to try something new,” smiles Tommy, or Jochen Windisch as he’s known to his flesh-and-blood parents. He’s not yet ensconced in his dead skin mask but does have swathes of black and white makeup covering his face and neck.

“He’ll wear that all the time,” shrugs Felix Heldt, the man behind the Dr. Dead persona and the mastermind behind Dominum. “The rest of us will scrub ourselves clean and he’ll be scurrying round a festival like a raccoon.”

Dominum may not be A-list famous outside their native Germany just yet, but that could well change with their just-released fourth album, Night Is Calling. It’s the kind of classic Euro-metal with a killer conceptual gimmick that has served the likes of Sabaton and Powerwolf so well. The transformation of Felix and Jochen into Dr. Dead and Tommy Kemp is a reasonably involved process but the pair whip through it in about 10 minutes.

“I know why there are no other zombie bands – it’s because it’s a complete nightmare,” the singer laughs. “To get the look, and to find a way that you can take it on tour and not look cheap. And be quick with it too. Like when you have to do social media stuff and you get asked ‘Can we do this thing real quick?’ And Tommy was like, ‘Sure, give me three hours so I can do the make-up.’ We had to speed it up.”

Once the pair are fully transfigured, Ralf, Finest Escape’s manager, nods in approval. “You could be scary actors in our escape rooms,” he says.

He’s a little worried about them overheating in their full horror regalia but the pair are used to performing in sweltering conditions.

“When we played [Belgian metal fest] Graspop we had masks that weren’t as tight as the ones we have now. It was so hot that sweat was just pooling in the chin,” nods Tommy.

“It’s not only the mask but the costumes and layers,” adds Dr. Dead. “And we’re all sweaters. Some people come offstage and you’re like, ‘Did you even play?’ We look like we just got in a washing machine. But you don’t realise that too much when you’re into the game. It’s just the eyes of the boys are getting redder and redder, because I can only see their eyes during the show.”

Back in the escape room we now have the additional worry that we’re locked in quite a small space with two self-confessed heavy sweaters.

Fortunately, we finally make it out of the cage when Dr. Dead hurls a missile into a target at the other side of the room with impressive accuracy.

“I never had you pegged as one-hit wonders,” cackles Pinocchio, as a pneumatic tube delivers a key with a jump-scare clatter.

Even while their plans for world domination were still being drawn up, Dominum’s last album, 2024’s The Dead Don’t Die, was a Top 10 hit in their homeland.

“We were very happy because having a Top 10 record as a band that had existed just two years back then, that’s a wild thing. We’re very grateful that people seem to like this crazy thing we do, so this is what drives us,” smiles Dr. Dead.

The mad scientist’s talkative if somewhat less madcap alter-ego Felix and his quiet compatriot Jochen have played together for years, but Top 10 albums and huge festival crowds were not previously on the cards.

“You’re just happy that you have a gig, and then you drive 1,200 kilometres and play in front of 30 people. That was our band, but we loved it,” Dr. Dead recalls as we enter the escape room proper.

The germ of Dominum came from Felix’s role as a producer. He’s worked with the likes of German power metal band Warkings and folk rockers Dartagnan, but it was when he set sail with Austrian pirate metallers Visions Of Atlantis that something clicked into place.

“You drive to the studio and you feel like a pirate and go ‘Yarrgh!’ all the time, and then you drive home and think about everything. I watched The Walking Dead and I was thinking, ‘OK, so there’s pirate bands, there’s werewolf bands, there’s a lot of Viking bands, why is there no zombie band?’”

Lots of reasons really, but at the same time none at all. Leeds thrash lunatics Send More Paramedics actually got there first, but the nascent Dominum had spotted a gap in the market that they sank their rotting gnashers into. With the zombified Patient Zero installed on bass and Victor Hiltop on drums, their infection started to spread.

Appearances at Graspop and the main stage at Wacken followed, as well as a couple of UK jaunts that resulted in Dr. Dead picking up his frequent ‘For fook’s sake’ expulsion. The zombie metal idea had legs as well as teeth, it seems. Their popularity continues to grow like an undead plague but there will always be those quick to dismiss them as nothing more than a gimmick.

“We committed to this zombie thing but I think a band can only be persistent and last longer if the backbone is good,” Dr. Dead says as he and Tommy work their way through the puzzles of the next two rooms.

We’ve been asked not to give too many of the escape room’s secrets away, but suffice to say there are secret panels and hidden devices and – naturally – a terrifying metallic doll.

“Please take me with you,” it wails, causing the good doctor to hastily thrust it at his reanimated companion.

“I hope that the quality of the music and art helps us to not get drowned by the ‘whatever-metal’ tag,” the Doctor continues. “Ghost don’t say that they’re ghoul metal or Pope metal, it’s just Ghost. The bands that are successful, it’s not really about the masks. It’s just a way to tell the lore and to entertain.”

As we pass the halfway mark the tension genuinely starts to grow. Metal Hammer is here primarily as an observer, but we’re also roped into searching the rooms and helping to decipher the odd clue.

“I can put my stick in but I can’t do anything with it,” Dr. Dead states at one point, as he kneels by a chair occupied by his bandmate. Before anything smutty can pass our lips,

Pinocchio gets there first. “It’s not only about putting it in, it’s also about pulling it out,” he giggles.

It’s the hint they need to unlock the final room and at last meet our sinister guide, Pinocchio, who turns out to be a two-foot-tall metallic figure of the puppet of the same name.

“It seems like the circus must be in town!” he shrieks as we enter.

He’s obviously done a bit of research, The Circus Is In Town being both the lead single and opening track on the aforementioned Night Is Calling. It’s a twisting, shouting Grand Guignol fanfare of a song and the perfect teaser for an album filled with theatrical excess.

“I think if you combine Ghost and Sabaton, that’s an idea of where it’s going, because it always has a dramatic component to it. It’s emotional but it also wants to be epic all the time,” says Dr. Death.

“When you see the masks you think this must be a brutal death metal band, but we’re not death metal guys. We like melodies and he likes Taylor Swift,” he adds, pointing to his guitarist.

Dominum’s most hardcore fans, the Doctor explains, are known as the Living Dead Squad and their ranks are growing all the time.

“When we play a headline show, the front row is all in make-up; it reminds me of The Rocky Horror Show. They bring us strange gifts sometimes. I’ve had a few Dr. Death voodoo puppets and I’m glad I have them so no one can stick a pin in. Tommy gets lots of mangoes,” he chuckles.

“I mentioned it on an Instagram Q&A and now everywhere I go I get mangoes.” Tommy elaborates. “It’s cool though, because they’re expensive.”

Now isn’t the time for fruit-based discussions. Time is ticking, and there’s still one last puzzle to solve. It involves Tommy setting a series of dials while Dr. Dead deciphers instructions via a vintage screen and set of steampunk goggles. The pair suddenly become increasingly frantic, speaking in panicked German. Eventually there’s a heavy clunk and the last door swings open. Freedom!

It’s a good job Dr. Dead and Tommy made it out of the escape room in the nick of time, given that Dominum are due to play their biggest UK headlining shows later this year.

“It will be good for the world because there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on with very crazy people in high positions,” Dr. Dead says. “This is where we come in, because once a zombie bites you, you’re infected. And you know what? We all taste the same.”

Night Is Calling is out now via Napalm. Dominum's UK tour begins on December 12.

Glenn Hughes had it all in the 1970s and then came very close to throwing everything away in the 1980s.

Plucked from livewire rockers Trapeze to join Deep Purple’s Mk III in 1973, bassist/vocalist Hughes and fellow new boy David Coverdale helped revitalise Purple after the departure of original singer Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover. Hughes made three brilliant albums with the band – 1974’s Burn and Stormbringer, plus 1975’s Come Taste The Band. But at the same time, he had fallen into serious drug addiction.

“When anyone has success, there will be people around offering them stuff – jewellery, watches, girls, drugs,” Hughes tells Classic Rock. “When I joined Purple I was given all kinds of drugs, pills, things like that. I’d flush them down the toilet or just leave them in my pocket and not do anything with them.

“After about six months in Purple, I started to go: ‘What is this stuff about, cocaine?’ One night, I found something in my pocket. I was alone in my room, and I sniffed some of it. I went: ‘Oh, this is fun. This is making me happy’. Slowly but surely I started becoming addicted. I thought: ‘I’m young, isn’t everybody snorting cocaine off of strippers’ bums?’”

After Purple’s split in 1976, Hughes’ addiction worsened. By the 1980s, he was in a bad way, strung out on cocaine and, later, crack. His lifestyle took precedence over music – he managed one album with guitarist Pat Thrall under the name Hughes/Thrall, collaborated with Irish guitarist Gary Moore on the latter’s 1985 album Run For Cover and briefly joined Black Sabbath for 1986’s Seventh Star.

“Music was getting in the way of me getting high,” Hughes tells Classic Rock. “Getting high was the main thing for me. I tried to stop but I couldn’t. I was in trouble.”

If things were bad for Hughes musically, personally they were disastrous – and potentially fatal. His drug intake was wreaking serious damage to his body, and he came close to dying after setting fire to his kitchen with a fryer.

By the end of the 1980s, the future looked bleak for this one-time superstar. But salvation was around the corner in an unlikely form.

Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty were a pair of maverick electronic musicians who had notched up a UK Number 1 hit with their novelty 1988 Doctor Who-themed single Doctorin’ The Tardis, released under the name The Timelords.

By 1991, the pair were operating under the handle The KLF, and had pivoted towards more serious forms of electronic music. They were looking for someone to sing on an updated version of a trance song they’d released a few years earlier titled What Time Is Love?.

The powerful new version, renamed America: What Time Is Love?, reinvented the original as a full-on techno-rock anthem featuring a sample of the riff from Motörhead’s Ace Of Spades. The result sounded like Satan’s own spin class. All they needed was someone with a screaming voice to match the song’s beefed up sound. Enter Glenn Hughes.

“We were originally supposed to be doing the song with Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses, but he never turned up to the session,” The KLF’s Bill Drummond tod Joel McIver, co-author of Hughes’ 2011 autobiography Deep Purple And Beyond: Scenes From The Life Of A Rock Star. “I can’t remember who the fuck suggested Glenn, but as soon as they did I said, ‘What, that guy who I saw fronting Trapeze in 1971? Great idea!’”

“We got a call from someone in the KLF’s camp - they were looking for me or Roger Daltrey to sing What Time Is Love?,” Hughes tells Classic Rock. “I went down to the studio to meet the two KLF guys, and within an hour I’d sung what you hear on the song.”

Drummond was impressed by Hughes’ professionalism. “When he came in I assumed he’d be jaded and I wondered if he’d take the piss, because we’d worked with people who’d given us all kinds of attitude – but as soon as he went into the vocal booth, he was absolutely and utterly stunning,” he told McIver. “He was so full of energy.”

Little did Drummond know that Hughes was still in the grip of his bad habits. “I don’t think they knew anything about my drug addiction in the studio,”’ the singer tells Classic Rock. “I never showed up high. But I figured: ‘Holy shit, this could be my pathway to a different career - something strange but wonderful. Maybe this is the opportunity for me to take a look at my addiction.’”

Irrespective of the state he was in, the finished song was the perfect collision between techno and rock, with Hughes giving it his all on the song’s chorus and offering up some ecstatic screams. It was accompanied by a lavish video, filmed at London’s Pinewood Studios, which found Hughes and the extended KLF collective on a Viking-style boat being lashed by rain and stormy waves.

“They asked me to be in the video,” recalls Hughes. “I wasn’t drinking or on drugs that day, which was probably a good thing cos it was really hard work. But I was in a bad way.”

“He was brilliant and not at all fragile, because the video shoot was an ordeal, with tons of cold water flying everywhere and everyone getting soaked,” The KLF’s Jimmy Cauty told Joel McIver. “You can’t be fragile in that situation.”

America: What Time Is Love? was released as a single in the UK in February 1992 and reached No.4. The singer was credited as ‘The Voice Of Rock’ – a sobriquet he’d embrace in subsequent years. It was the most successful thing Hughes had been in since the days of Deep Purple. But more importantly, recording the song convinced him that it was time to clean up.

“I very obviously knew that I had a problem,” Hughes tells Classic Rock. “People were so pissed off with me, but they were praying for me. I decided when I got home to see if I needed to go into the Betty Ford Centre.”

Hughes did indeed check into the Betty Ford Clinic in January 1992, though not before he suffered a heart attack on Christmas Day after one last crack binge. Nor did sobriety take straight away. Hughes says he had “four or five relapses” before kicking alcohol and drugs once and for all in 1997.

While the success of America: What Time Is Love? didn’t lead directly to Hughes getting clean, he credits it with setting him on the path to sobriety.

“Working with the guys in The KLF was an incredible opportunity for me to get noticed again after being out of the picture for so long,” he says. “It gave me confidence. I owe them a lot.”

Slade's former frontman Noddy Holder is a national treasure. Would anyone in Britain even remember the annual celebrations marking the birth of son of God, Jesus Christ, were it not for the Walsall Warbler bellowing "It's Chriiiiistmaaaas!" at us from mid-November onwards? Unlikely.

Beyond that, Neville John Holder MBE is a beloved actor, an author, a former quiz show host, a TV critic, an inspiration for a character in Bob The Builder and an all-round showbiz legend. Yes, he might have inadvertently contributed to the success of god-awful heavy Californian metal band Quiet Riot, but that can't be held against him in a court of law.

Less well known is the fact that Holder is a keen fan of indie/alternative rock. This came to light when Slade's redoubtable vocalist/guitarist was recruited by the now-defunct British music magazine Select to review a selection of single releases in their March 1996 issue.

Artists who faced Holder's scrutiny included Oasis, who had just released a cover of Slade's Cum On Feel The Noize as a B-side to future national anthem Don't Look Back In Anger, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lush, Rocket From The Crypt, The Flaming Lips, Nick Cave with PJ Harvey and more.

It was, perhaps, no surprise to read that Mr Holder was a fan of Oasis, hailing their Slade cover as "great" - adding "The best bit is when they start doing a piss-take of our accents" - but who would have imagined that the Black Country legend was a fully-paid-up member of the Smashing Pumpkins fan club at the time? Invited by writer Clark Collis to assess the merits of 1979, the chilled third single from the band's 1995 masterpiece Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Noddy revealed, "I've got this album."

"They just can't be pigeonholed," he enthused. "They've got their own little style going. It's off the wall. It's certainly not a major radio record. But you can hear this in 20 listenings' time and you'll hear something new."

Nolder also professed to be a fan of the Pumpkins' fellow US alt. rock big-hitters Red Hot Chili Peppers, then promoting their under-rated One Hot Minute album, featuring moonlighting Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. Critical opinion was decidedly lukewarm for the LA funksters at the time, and Noddy couldn't summon up a huge deal of enthusiasm for the Aeroplane single, admitting "I'm not mad on this song... it wanders about a bit."

Rocket From The Crypt's urgent Born In '69 single too failed to fire the Nodster's imagination ("I think they'll probably need a bit more time to develop") but Nick Cave/PJ Harvey murder ballad Henry Lee was more warmly received, Holder likening the song to Leonard Cohen, and stating, "It'll be good seeing the video."

Elsewhere, Holder was enchanted by the weirdness of The Flaming Lips' This Here Giraffe - "Whatever they're on, I want some!" - but reserved his highest praise, and Single Of The Month award, to Lush, for their Ladykillers single, which he claimed he'd still be singing along to "in a fortnight".

"It's got handclaps in the middle bit," he noted. "You can't beat handclaps."

Wise words Mr H, wise words.

Semi-retired Iron Maiden drummer Nicko McBrain wants to record with the band again, despite stepping down from their live lineup in December 2024.

The 74-year-old, who joined Maiden in 1982, retired from the UK heavy metal legends’ touring cycle at the last show of their 18-month-long Future Past run, after suffering a transient ischaemic attack (TIA, or mini-stroke) in January 2023 which continues to limit his movement.