Steven Wilson has revealed how he persuaded former Doctor Who star David Tennant to appear on his new album.

Tennant, who played the Tenth Doctor between 2005 and 2010, adds narration to the Porcupine Tree frontman’s ninth solo album, the folk horror-inspired Requiem For A Village.

“In my head, I wanted an Irish or Scottish voice for it,” Wilson tells Prog. “My first thought was that [Scottish poet and humourist] Ivor Cutler would be perfect for it, but then I realised he was dead, so that made it a bit tricky.

“I’d tried a few voiceover artists, but they sounded like they were reading a script,” he continues. “We needed someone with gravitas. I vaguely remembered seeing a photo a few years ago where David Tennant was wearing a Raven That Refused To Sing T-shirt. My manager contacted his agent and he came back straight away and said he’d love to do it.”

Tennant was away filming, so Wilson talked to him on the phone and sent him the script of the narration. “Literally within 24 hours, he’d recorded it and sent it all back to me. I mean, I think I’ve got a pretty good work ethic, but that’s something else.”

The narration for Requiem For A Village was written by former XTC frontman and semi-regular Wilson collaborator Andy Partridge, centres around the mysterious, eerie village at the heart of the album’s concept and the strange people and happenings that occur around it.

“It encapsulates everything – the nostalgia, the question of whether the village really exists, and does it really matter?” says Wilson. “It’s about immersing yourself in this world, and the feeling of something beautiful yet a little bit scary, a little bit weird.”

Requiem For A Village was partly inspired by ’70s folk horror kids TV show Children Of The Stones.

“It’s an absolute classic and it was fucking terrifying,” says Wilson of the show, which was filmed around Avebury, Wiltshire, famous for its trio of Neolithic stone circles. “The story revolves around a kid who goes to live in a village with his dad, who is an archaeologist there to study a stone circle. It turns out that all the people in the village have this weird relationship with this stone circle. Without wanting to spoil it too much, it transpires that this stone circle has some kind of direct connection to alien life.

“What appeals to me – and this comes back to the whole idea of the album – is that it’s a village in our country an hour away from here, but it exists in this little insular bubble of fucking weirdness. To me, something about that is the scariest thing ever: that places like this can exist without you really knowing.”

Requiem For A Village is released on November 6. Wilson plays the Royal Albert Hall in London on October 28 and 29.

Read the full interview with Wilson in the new issue of Prog, on sale now.

“A great guitar album makes me want to pick up my guitar, crank my amp and play," says Halestorm leader Lzzy Hale. "Not necessarily to learn a particular song; it’s more of an unquenchable desire to hear the break-up of the amp’s speakers, feel the strings press into my fingers and make my right hand bleed from the impact of chugging. A great guitar album fuels me with instant inspiration, leaving me with no choice but to grab an axe and write something."

What is your criteria for a great guitar album?

“A great guitar album has to give me a certain kind of feeling. It’s more of an emotional connection to the tones and the way the riff moves your body. The guitar playing doesn’t have to be complicated – take any Neil Young record, for example. Even the simplest solos and riffs can have balls – and inspire you to write.”

Do you sit down and try to learn riffs from guitar records?

“In addition to my top five guitar albums, some other records that never fail to inspire me are Alice Cooper’s Schools Out, Metallica’s ‘Black Album,’ Holy Diver by Dio, Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf and Mastodon’s Once Around the Sun.

Are there any guitar-oriented albums that you didn’t "get" at first, but they grew on you and went on to become favourites?

“One guitar record I didn’t ‘get’ at first was Jeff Buckley’s Grace, but it’s only because, as a singer myself, I was overly distracted by his amazing voice. At first, I considered it more of a vocal album. But as I dug in, I realised that the man was an absolute genius on guitar.”

Lzzy Hale's Epiphone Explorer is available now. Below, Lzzy Hale reveals her five essential guitar albums.

Black Sabbath – Heaven and Hell (1980)

“This album has never left my heart. Every time I listen to it, it moves me forward. These are the riffs that get stuck in your head and change your life.”

Cinderella – Night Songs (1986)

“Tom Keifer never gets mentioned in rock guitarist countdowns. I think he’s very underrated. There’s an art to writing a riff that complements a vocal melody. Tom is also an amazing slide player – he has that ‘heartbreak tone’ that literally stings your soul.”

Neil Young with Crazy Horse – Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969)

“You may not see this one on many guitar album lists either, but Neil Young is a huge influence in how I perform as a guitarist. There’s a real ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude in his approach to the guitar, along with a rawness that puts this picture in my mind of Neil just walking into a smoky bar at three A.M., plugging into whatever rig and just bringing the house down.”

Soundgarden – Badmotorfinger (1991)

“Another hugely underrated guitar album. Those riffs are present and ballsy, and they match Chris Cornell’s fervour on vocals. The Outshined riff is one of my all-time favourites.”

Judas Priest – Sin After Sin (1977)

“One of the band’s earlier records, Sin After Sin really displays the raw power of the famous Glenn Tipton-K.K. Downing guitar team. Dissident Aggressor is punishing, and Diamonds & Rust is timeless.”

The original version of this feature first appeared online in September 2018.

As his new solo album From The Dark proves, Tony Iommi remains the king of the riff. The Dark Lord laid won the blueprint for an entire genre with the immortal riff that opens Black Sabbath’s eponymous 1970 debut album, an he’s not stopped since.

When Metal Hammer conducted a poll in 2018 to find the greatest riff of all time, it was no surprise that he was behind the one that came out on top. To be fair, any number of Sabbath riffs could have stolen it – Iron Man, Sweet Leaf, Hole In The Sky, Paranoid, Black Sabbath itself… the list goes on.

But the actual winner? The monumental riff that powers Symptom Of The Universe, the classic track from Sabbath’s 1975 album Sabotage. We asked the man behind how he created this immortal noise.

Can you remember where you were when you came up with the riff for Symptom Of The Universe?

Tony Iommi: “Oh my god, it was a long time ago. I can’t remember, to be completely truthful. I imagine we would have probably been in rehearsal.”

Is that how you used to come up with riffs – in rehearsal?

“Generally, yeah. Sometimes I’ve come up with stuff at home and taped it just to remember it, but I don’t really work things out as such.”

You make it sound easy…

“Dare I say it, but yeah, I’ve not had much trouble coming up with riffs. Now I’ve said it, I’ll probably never come up with another one. But I’ve got hundreds of them from over the years on various CDs. Some of them go back to the original Sabbath, some from the Dio era, bits and bobs from when [Deep Purple’s] Ian Gillan or [former vocalist] Tony Martin were in the band. I don’t even know what’s on there. I keep threatening to sit down and listen to them all one of these days when I get the chance.”

Back when you were writing Symptom Of The Universe, which guitarists were you in competition with?

“Me. I was in competition with myself. I would always try to come up with more and more inventive ideas – different tunings, changing the amps, just fiddling about with the guitars really. I would constantly be trying to improve things and change things. I didn’t really listen to other people, just in case I started playing someone else’s riff by mistake.”

The second half of Symptom Of The Universe heads off into weird, prog-jazz territory. Was that you deliberately setting out to write an early prog metal song?

“No, that was just us jamming together. It was something I came up with and Geezer [Butler, bass] and Bill [Ward, drums] followed, and then Ozzy came in. But then a lot of Sabbath’s stuff went to places you didn’t think they would go. I remember when we had Ronnie Dio with us, I played him the track Die Young [which ended up on Sabbath’s Heaven And Hell album]. It went into this completely different tempo, and he went, ‘You can’t do that!’ I went, ‘Of course we can. It’s what we’ve always done.’”

What are your memories of making Sympton Of The Universe’s parent album, Sabotage?

“Oh, it was a nightmare. We had a court case with our ex-manager, Patrick Meehan, while we were in the middle of making the album. We’d get a writ and we’d end up having to go into bloody court in the morning, all dressed up, then try to get back to the studio afterwards to carry on working. It was hard to come up with things. You had to have two heads.”

Did that aggro feed into the album?

“Certainly with Geezer’s lyrics. He wrote one song called The Writ, so it influenced him, that’s for sure. I think the aggression definitely came out in the music when we played together. There is some really heavy stuff on that record.”

Is it true that The Writ was inspired by a lawyer unexpectedly turning up at the studio to serve you with legal papers?

“That’s exactly what happened. They used to turn up all the bloody time. We never knew they were coming. If we did, we’d have disappeared sharpish.”

Sabotage took nearly a year to record. Was there ever a point where you thought you might not make it to the end?

“No, I’ve never felt like that. We’ve always fought through whatever was there. Without the music, we’d have all gone bloody loony. I think it actually it brought us all together as a band. Whenever we went through problems, we’d just fight through it together.”

The Sabotage album cover. What’s going on there?

“Ha ha ha! A guy who worked for us who was an artist, he came up with a great idea – us reflected in a mirror, stuff like that. But when it got to the day, somebody said to Bill, ‘What are you gonna wear?’ And he was, like, ‘I dunno.’ So he turned to his wife and said, ‘Can I borrow your tights?’ So he put on this pair of his wife’s red tights. And I think he might have borrowed Ozzy’s underpants, too. It looked bloody ridiculous. It definitely didn’t come out like we wanted it to.”

When was the last time you came up with a riff and thought, ‘Ooh, that’s a bit tasty’?

“Well, I’ve got a few that I haven’t used yet that were good. There’s about four or five from the last Sabbath album [13] I that we didn’t use. I listened to a CD with them on recently. I thought, ‘Blimey, that’s good, why didn’t we use it?’”

We’ve talked about Symptom Of The Universe. But what’s your favourite Tony Iommi riff?

“Oh my god, that’s difficult. I like Into The Void. And I like some of the stuff we did with Dio – Heaven And Hell was a good riff, Neon Knights. There’s so many I like. I like pretty much all the stuff we’ve done.”

Apart from your own, what’s the greatest riff of all time?

“That’s even harder. There’s so many great riffs out there from the past, and up to date stuff. But you’ve got to have Deep Purple’s Smoke On The Water. And of course there are a lot of Zeppelin songs. Jimmy Page has some great riffs.”

Have you ever had a riff come into your head while you’ve been sitting on the toilet?

“Ha ha! Oh yeah. I have riffs that come in all the time at different times, different places. You never know when the magic’s going to strike.”

This interview originally appeared in Metal Hammer issue 311

Nicko McBrain has revealed that he dabbled with heroin in the late 1970s.

The former Iron Maiden drummer, who has just released his autobiography, Hello Boys And Girls!, tells Classic Rock that he used the drug, but that he was “lucky” to never become addicted.

“This was a period where I was introduced to the higher echelons of people in the music industry and in other walks of life, shall we say,” he says. “I never put it in my arm, I just chased the dragon, as we used to call it – put it on silver paper and fire it up, then puff it up through a straw.”

While Nicko doesn’t specify a time period when he used the drug, he confirms that he had kicked heroin by the time he joined Iron Maiden in late 1982.

“Here’s the thing: God blessed me with this gene where I could just turn that tap off,” he tells Classic Rock. “Same with smoking, same with drinking. Anyone who’s struggling with substance issues, go get help – there’s people out there to help you. It’s not admitting defeat.

“But I was lucky enough to have this gene, so when I stopped, I didn’t go cold turkey – I got a bit antsy, and I got the cold sweats and the shivers, but I was very fortunate not to get really deep into the rabbit hole. I’d already knocked that on the head prior to getting the offer to come on board with Maiden in 1982.”

McBrain replaced former Maiden drummer Clive Burr, who was fired following the tour for 1982’s The Number Of The Beast album. In Hello Boys And Girls!, Nicko reveals that he was initially approached by Maiden’s co-manager Rod Smallwood while Burr was still in the band and put on retainer as “back-up” – something the latter was furious about when he found out.

“About a week had gone by when I got a phone call from Clive,” recalls McBrain. “‘You fucking arsehole!’ he screamed. ‘You motherfucking cunt! You’ve had my gig!”

Nicko pacified Burr and suggested he clean up his act in order to remain in the band, which he temporarily did. But by the end of 1982, Burr was out of the band for good.

While McBrain praises his predecessor – who died in 2013 – as an “amazing drummer” and acknowledges his part in Maiden’s success, he recalls a tense moment during a drum clinic in the mid-80s, attended by Burr

“After doing a solo, which I thought was pretty good, I got up and asked if anyone had any questions, and someone shouted, ‘How big’s your willy?’” he writes. “I thought, ‘What kind of question is that?’, and although I didn’t see who asked it, I swear blind it was Clive. It was definitely his voice, and it wasn’t said in a light-hearted way; it had a hint of aggression about it, as if the person was pissed off at me.”

McBrain adds: “When I asked Clive if it was him many years later, he changed the subject.”

Nicko’s autobiography, Hello Boys And Girls!, is out now. Read the full interview with him in an upcoming issue of Classic Rock.

For Mastodon, 2025 should’ve been a celebratory year. The American metal heroes embarked on a tour of Europe and the States to mark their 25th anniversary, a schedule that included London’s Finsbury Park bonanza with Slayer and Anthrax, plus Black Sabbath’s grand send-off Back To The Beginning. But everything changed in late August, when they landed in Alaska for their final date: “When we got to baggage claim at the airport, to go to our hotel, we found out that Brent [Hinds, former Mastodon lead guitarist/vocalist] had died,” explains singer/ drummer Brann Dailor. “We were in shock. We really didn’t know what to do next.”

Hinds had quit Mastodon, in acrimonious circumstances, five months earlier. His death, at just 51, was the result of a motorcycle accident. The band’s gig at the Alaska State Fair, on 22 August, instead became something of a requiem. At the end of their set, Dailor addressed the crowd in sorrowful tones: “We lost somebody very special to us yesterday. Brent Hinds, one of the most creative, beautiful people that we’ve ever come across in this world, tragically left us… We loved him so, so very much.”

Returning home, Mastodon took stock of the in-progress tracks for their next album. Conceived a year earlier as a return to the mythological realms of their classic works like Blood Mountain and Emperor Of Sand, the songs had already taken on a more personal theme following the sudden death of Dailor’s mother, Michele, in February 2025. Hinds’s passing compounded the album’s new direction.

“I honestly thought, going into writing a couple of years ago, that we might actually be able to go back to singing about Pegasus and Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster,” Dailor says dryly. “But fate had other plans, as fate often does. Directly after I lost my mom, the whole turmoil with Brent leaving the band went down, then a few months later he passed. All that together was really a tough stretch.

"The fact that Brent passed without reconciling was a real gut punch. I had that kind of heavy weight of grief already draped over me, and I was having a hard time personally. What helped a lot was having Mastodon music to work on. It gave me a focus. So we went over to our practice space and got right into it.”

The resulting Marrow Deep, their ninth studio album, is as fierce as anything Mastodon have put their name to. Guitars burn with savage intensity, drums pound like hammering heartbeats, unusual textures simmer and flash, the alternating lead vocals of Dailor and bassist Troy Sanders are never less than utterly committed.

The band have processed grief and loss elsewhere on record – most notably on 2009 album Crack The Skye, which addressed the suicide of Dailor’s sister, and 2021’s Hushed And Grim, an extended homage to Nick John, Mastodon’s late manager and guiding force – but not quite like this.

“Hushed And Grim felt very much like its title,” Dailor says of Marrow Deep’s immediate predecessor. “It was a bit of a slog at the end of the day, an emotional one for us. And it’s an hour and a half, whereas this one has a lot of different flavours. We didn’t want to make it completely doom and gloom, because we’re still here and very much alive. It’s just that when it comes to writing music, Mastodon has become this eternal dumping ground for all of life’s hardest moments.”

Hinds’s replacement, Canadian guitarist Nick Johnston (initially brought in for Mastodon’s live dates in May 2025), is now a full-time member, locking in with rhythm king Bill Kelliher.

“Replacing Brent is a tough spot for anybody, and Nick’s such a tender soul,” notes Dailor. “But he’s taken everything in his stride. In the studio, he and João [Nogueira, the band’s new keyboard player] provided the crown moulding. Those guys made sure the transitions were as cool as they could be. They’re good at building pre-choruses and being like: ‘What about this crazy jazz chord?’ Nick co-wrote things like They’re Coming For You, but the next record will have a lot more of him in it.”

For the most part, though, Marrow Deep was written by Dailor, Kelliher and Sanders. Lead-off single Your Ghost Again – a raw manifestation of despair, helplessness and regret – sets the charged emotional tone of the album. While recording the song in the studio, Dailor kept seeing Hinds in the corner of his vision, holding his guitar. Or thinking he did.

“Your mind plays tricks on you,” he says. “You think you see somebody, then you look and remember they’re gone for real. It was the same with my mom; I keep seeing her. I was just singing about seeing ghosts.”

Dailor’s mum was a profound influence on his choice of vocation. A classically trained pianist, she fronted a local rock band, called Kaper, in the Rochester, New York suburb where Dailor grew up.

“She was the first person I saw singing on stage, and I was in awe of her,” he recalls. “They did covers of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Rush, Boston, Styx, Cheap Trick, you name it. They practised in our basement just about every night, so there were all sorts of cool dudes hanging at our house with handlebar moustaches and leather vests, and Hells Angels, just blastin’ tunes. It kind of looked like a casting call for Boogie Nights.

“She was a huge Soundgarden fan. When we played with them, she just couldn’t believe it, or that Kim [Thayil, Soundgarden guitarist] had done a solo on Hushed And Grim. She was always excited to hear that I was meeting Alice In Chains and all these big grunge people.”

The significance of Marrow Deep’s title mirrors the extent of Dailor’s relationships with both his mum and Hinds. Mastodon formed when he and Rochester pal Kelliher, with whom he’d played in noisecore bands Lethargy and Today Is The Day, moved to Atlanta in early 2000. They soon hooked up with Hinds and Sanders, bonding over a shared appreciation of Iron Maiden, Thin Lizzy and sludge metal avatars Melvins, among others. By the following year, they’d landed a deal with indie label Reptilian, who put out debut EP Slick Leg.

“My mom will always be with me, because the deepest relationship that I will ever have was with her and my dad,” says Dailor. “But Brent got really close. There’s twenty-five years of living with this guy. When you have this otherworldly bond, this really deep emotional place together through music, it’s an elevated relationship.

"But when we did the Ashes Of Leviathan tour [2024, marking the 20th anniversary of prog-metal breakthrough Leviathan], I could finally see that it had run its course with him. We needed some kind of change, because it was dragging everybody down. It became really hard to get Brent to commit to anything. He just wanted to go do his own thing, ride his motorcycle and be a free spirit.”

Officially, Hinds left by mutual consent. He claimed he was kicked out, and delivered some public parting shots – “I won’t miss being in a shit band with horrible humans” – in the aftermath.

“He was a man scorned,” says Dailor. “He said some hurtful things, but I know he didn’t mean it. I was always hopeful that he was going to call me at some point and be like: ‘Dude, I’m done being a ding-dong. Can I come back? I have a riff…’ We were a hundred per cent sure he would’ve done that.”

One of Marrow Deep’s key songs is Snakes For Dinner. Taking its title from a random move that Dailor’s hippie parents once undertook – catching a bus to Arizona after sticking a pin in a map, and having to eat rattlesnakes somewhere along the way – it was fashioned largely by Dailor and Kelliher.

“The lyrical sentiment of ‘When you left you took the moon and stars’ is a reflection of how you feel the day after someone extremely close to you passes,” the drummer explains.

A hard-paced, often melodic piece with a wild keyboard solo, Snakes For Dinner also features guest vocalist Josh Homme. “We’re pals,” says Dailor. “The day after Brent died, Josh called me in my hotel room in Alaska. He didn’t say a word about Brent. He talked about some delicious food that he’d eaten, and that he was upset with me that I never told him how good this particular dish was, that I’d been hiding it from him. He just wanted to maybe make me laugh and check in on me and make sure I was okay. I really appreciated it. So I had him on my mind when we were in the studio: ‘Hey man, I got a part for you…’”

Another old friend, Neil Fallon, returns to growl a spoken-word passage on The Three Fates, a three-part epic that feels like a clamorous psych-prog suite. The Clutch frontman first guested with Mastodon on 2004’s Leviathan opener Blood And Thunder. But perhaps the most telling outside contribution on Marrow Deep comes from a familiar source of inspiration: Black Sabbath. Geezer Butler plays a lengthy, reliably imposing bass intro to The Vanishing.

Fittingly, Dailor is wearing a Sabbath vest – black, of course – while talking to Classic Rock at the band’s hotel in Copenhagen, where they’re in the midst of a run of European festivals.

“There’s a place nearby that we always go to when we’re here, called War Pigs,” he tells us. “They specialise in Texas barbecue. This vest is the one I wore at Back To The Beginning last year. My mom got it for me. She passed before the concert itself, but she was so excited that we were doing it. She was crying when I told her.

“Mastodon has always been immersed in Sabbath, but around the Back To The Beginning concert, and even much prior to that, we were listening to them non-stop,” Dailor explains. “Watching Sabbath at that show, I was like: ‘Man, Geezer is crushing it, he’s so good. He needs to start a new band tomorrow!’ Mom was such a huge Sabbath fan. And Geezer, in particular, was one of her favourites. I didn’t even tell him any of that. I just asked: ‘Do you want to do this?’

“The Vanishing was very Planet Caravan, with the vocals being affected through the Leslie [rotating] speaker in a similar way,” he continues. “For me, the song is basically about going into the cosmos, into outer space, and seeing my mother and my sister as two constellations. And making sure that my mom’s constellation found my sister’s. That’s wishful thinking, but I thought it was a romantic and beautiful sentiment.”

As you may have surmised, there’s a lot to unpack on Marrow Deep. Mastodon have been through a lot in the past couple of years alone – further drama informs the powerful In The Ruins, about the destruction of Sanders’ house in a Florida hurricane – but making music together continues to act as both emotional release and creative communion.

“We love writing music together, and I’m still excited about what’s around the corner, the next riff to get stoked about,” affirms Dailor.

For now, though, Mastodon are readying themselves for the Poisonous Weapons tour of the US this autumn. Beyond that, says Dailor, “the goal is to have a big old European go-around that’s not festivals. And we’re currently kicking around the idea of bringing a special guest along to do some Brent songs. I think that would be cool.

"We can’t not play The Czar or The Last Baron or Colony Of Birchmen or Oblivion. All those songs that Brent blessed us with his beautiful voice. But going on stage feels good right now, playing Your Ghost Again and dedicating it to Brent, just kind of getting everything out in the open. I think we’re all feeling a lot better”.

Marrow Deep is out now via Loma Vista.

Slaughter To Prevail frontman Alex Terrible has shared how his attitude to masculinity has evolved, and says that he wants to inspire others to confront their weaknesses and fears.

Terrible, who lists bear-wrestling and bareknuckle fighting among his hobbies, has previously espoused ideas about masculinity which have attracted controversy: a 2023 video from the singer titled '4 Rules Of Real Man' drew complaints from the LGBTQIA+ community for statements such as "the real man eats woman pussy, he likes."

But in a new instagram post, Terrible declares, "FUCK ALL THIS MASCULINITY BULLSHIT!"

"Let’s talk about masculinity," the post begins. "When I was a kid, I absolutely loved action movies with guys who knew how to fight and looked intimidating. Muscles, fighting skills, physical strength. They inspired fear in others, but seemed to fear nothing themselves.

"That image became deeply programmed into my mind, and I told myself: I want to become just like them!

"So I started working on my body, pushing myself through challenges and overcoming obstacles. Because getting into great physical shape and developing real fighting skills requires character, discipline, and mental toughness. And all of that takes years to build.

"But eventually, I realized something.

"The entire masculinity industry wasn’t actually what I had been chasing from the beginning.

"Today, I look at so many guys who have incredible physiques, impressive fighting skills, perfect discipline, and everything else.

"But then I started thinking about fear.

"And that’s when I finally understood what had truly inspired me as a child when I watched those action movies.

"Those characters were fearless. Or rather, they weren’t fearless at all. They felt fear, but they overcame it.

And then I started noticing people who were physically fragile, yet possessed an absolutely unbreakable spirit.

"People who could look death straight in the eyes and say: 'Come on then, motherfucker. You think I’m going down without a fight?'

"And that’s when it hit me.

"FUCK ALL THIS MASCULINITY BULLSHIT!

"I WANT TO BE STRONG IN SPIRIT."

"I’m still going to train my body," Terrible points out. "I’m still going to practice martial arts and develop my fighting skills.

"But more importantly, I’m going to confront my own weaknesses and fears. That’s where my real battle begins.

"And I want to become someone who inspires others to do the same.”

Captioning his post, Terrible adds, "Nobody will ever witness the most important battle of your life. Because your greatest enemy exists only for you. He’s always inside your head.

"I’m still afraid of death. I’m still afraid of the dark, of the unknown. But goddamn it, I will look those fears straight in the eyes!

"And you know what? That’s more powerful than any physique, any fighting skills, fame, money, or even sex! 😬

"When you overcome your deepest, darkest fears — the ones that literally make you shit your pants — THAT is true pleasure!"

Slaughter To Prevail are set to round off their year with two shows in Mexico in December.

The band will play the Teatro Estudio Cavaret in Guadalajara on December 18, and the Velodromo Olimpico in Mexico City on December 20.

Thank god for the weekend! It's feeling like winter is rapidly approaching this week, but we're not quite at the end of year yet with plenty of brilliant new albums to sink our teeth into as we hit the penultimate week of October.

That in mind, here's the results of last week's vote! Blackgold brought glory to the nu metal revival with Killaz landing a top three position (and if you like that, check out the last two tracks this week!), while Aussie newcomers Nika landed at number two. But ultimately, the crown could only go to the original symphonic metal queen as Tarja teamed up with Apocalyptica for something truly epic in Tango.

We've got a diverse bag for you again this week with new singles from Floor Jansen and Delain, plus a surprise drop from Machine Head. There's also a healthy showing from emergent and underground bands, so don't forget to cast your vote in the poll below - and have an excellent weekend!

Floor Jansen - Everything Is Moving On

It probably would've been a bit on-the-nose for this to have come out with last week's shock announcement that Floor Jansen had left Nightwish, but Everything Is Moving On feels like a perfect summation of the confident way the singer is approaching the future. More a pounding, triumphant old school metal track than the usual symphonic grandeur, it's a great showcase of her powerful voice and shows how she's expanding her repertoire on upcoming solo album Hytress, due January 15.

Delain - We Are Fire

Talk about a rough month for symphonic metal fans. Diana Leah has announced her departure from Delain after 2023's Dark Waters introduced her as the new singer of the group. Rather than recruit a direct replacement, Delain have announced plans for a star-studded new album that will feature figures including Marko Hietala and Sharon Den Adel. First single We Are Fire sees bandleader Martijn Westerholt recruit Eluveitie's Fabienne Erni, Italian singer Paolo Ribaldini and Noa Gruman of Sabaton's Legendary Orchestra for a typically bombastic and grandiose song.

Evil Invaders - D.S.S. (Death Strikes Suddenly)

Get some thrash in you! Kicking off with a delightful Araya howl, Belgians Evil Invaders are leaning hard on 80s speed with new single D.S.S. (Death Strikes Suddenly). If you're reeling from the recent death of Cronos, this might tackle the evil itch nicely, new album Weaponized Chaos set for a February 19 release, with the band touring the UK with Heathen the following month.

Vindicta - Idol(l)s

It's been a year since the line-up of Dogma fractured, and a little under that since former members of the demonic nun group formed Vindicta. Now they've announced they're signed to Napalm Records and put out new single Idol(l)s, a track that adds a spikier edge to the music they were making in their previous incarnation, seemingly poking fun at the situation its members found themselves in.

Machine Head - Sutures

Robb Flynn's barely let the dust settle on the Unatoned era and is already teasing new music. Sutures is a surprise new single from Machine Head, and feels like an especially feral and vicious release from the group, its hardest edges only slightly blunted by some big, chest-beating melodic passages.

Zilqy - Misfit Toys

Zilqy continue to be one of Japan's most difficult to pin down metal groups. On new single Misfit Toys the band mix hyperactive beats and heavy breakdowns with joyous, typically Japanese melodic choruses to great effect. Taken from the band's debut Birth Of Riot - which came out earlier this month - it shows they're another bright new voice to emerge from the island nation.

The Yagas - Runaway

It's been almost exactly 18 months since The Yagas released their debut album Midnight Minuet, a gloriously dark alt. metal album that saw actress Vera Farmiga embrace her inner goth. Now the group are back with a new single in Runaway, going full 80s with heavy synth and beats that feel like they should've been threaded into the DNA of movies like Lost Boys or Near Dark.

Shooting Daggers - T.R.L.T.

A short, sharp blast of 80s style hardcore punk, London's Shooting Daggers don't really need to reinvent any wheels when they make music this viscerally satisfying. Belligerent in the very best way, it's a great demonstration of this band's infectious energy.

Defences - Death Of A Dream

Defences are going big on old school nu metal vibes on Death Of A Dream. Chunky, downtuned guitars that make you want to bound around a pit, little record scratches and even electronic effects on Cherry Duesbury's vocals, it feels like a single that easily could've come right as the new millennium hit, but also doesn't feel dated for the fact.

Dead Signal - Follow The Signal

Sticking in the realms of nu metal inspiration, Italy's Dead Signal are combining the genre with explosive metalcore to great effect. Sounding like a collision of debut-era Slipknot and Impossibility Of Reasion-era Chimaira, Follow The Signal is the band's debut single and has us excited to see where they go next.

In the summer of 2006, My Chemical Romance came to England to play Reading and Leeds festivals, and to tease their forthcoming third album, The Black Parade, with a special headline show at Hammersmith Palais in west London on August 22. That night the New Jersey emo quintet gave live debuts to two songs from their forthcoming record- I Don't Love You and Cancer - and showcased three further songs from the album, The End, Dead! and House Of Wolves. It was immediately clear all in attendance that the band's follow-up to 2004's Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge was going to be something special.

Later that week, Metal Hammer's Katie Parsons caught up with Gerard Way's band backstage at Reading festival to get the inside story on an album that would soon be recognised as their masterpiece

The backstage field at the Reading Festival is a hive of activity. The guest area is awash in drunken squeals and bloated, beered-up bodies. The occasional 'funny hat' lurches by, and the multitude of dancing ladies in the warm light have suntanned ankles clamped into bright floral rubber boots. It may only be mid-morning but the party is already well underway.

Take two steps to the right, however, past a stern-looking security guard, and the green trailer sheltering New Jersey superstars My Chemical Romance houses an entirely different scene.

"A friend of mine killed himself by standing in front of a train," someone whispers from the corner. "He was 15 years old."

Donned in black from tip to toe (barring his new blond locks), Gerard Way and his four accompanying musicians (guitarists Frank Iero and Ray Toro, bassist Mikey Way and drummer Bob Bryar) are slouched on a couch, sipping sticky cups of brown soya milk from the small selection of food provided for their pleasure. They'll be clambering onto the hulking main stage at Reading in 30 minutes' time. It's the biggest show they've ever played in the UK. Given the cheery excitement just metres away, and the potential exhilaration awaiting them up in front of the gathered thousands, the last thing you'd expect to be talking about is suicide. But darkness seems to overshadow My Chemical Romance wherever they go.

"We actually tried to stay away from death," says the permanently sullen singer. "We just couldn't do it."

Gerard and the band are chatting to Hammer about their upcoming new release The Black Parade – the highly anticipated follow-up to the group's 2004 release Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge and 2002's I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. Thrust into global stardom following a series of massive hit singles and the adoration of a globe-spanning fanbase, My Chemical Romance may see the The Black Parade becoming their biggest and most important album to date.

"This is the most theatrical record we have ever made," says Gerard quietly. "It really is the record of our dreams. Just like the other two, it's a concept album, but it's the tightest of all three. While the last record was an examination of immortality, this new one looks at mortality. Yes, we have written about death again, but in a much more mature way."

Why can't MCR avoid such morbid thoughts?

"Everybody is afraid of death. It's just that maybe we're a little more afraid of death than most people," explains Mikey. "Everyone is going to die. That's the one thing that absolutely everyone has in common. It's universal. Death is kind of like the unknown, and I think, as a band, and on this record, we are influenced by the unknown."

The album's concept tracks the experiences of a character called The Patient, a narrator who My Chemical Romance use to help weave their shadowy ideas, lyrics, melodies and musical visions.

"At the very beginning of the record, The Patient is dying tragically young in a hospital," explains Gerard. "Death then comes to him in the form of a parade, because his strongest memory of childhood is of his father taking him to a parade. From that point on in the record, he examines his life, and he meets other characters in the parade that talk about their lives, and by the end, he is someone that chooses to live, as opposed to die."

Sitting in the confines of the small trailer, the four other members nod in agreement.

"I think that one of our main goals in this band has always been to write songs from the heart," says Ray.

"For me, it's like a constant quest to write the perfect song,” notes Gerard. “My current favourite of our arsenal is the new song Cancer. I think it’s the most emotionally powerful song that we’ve ever written. It’s direct, it’s honest, it’s ugly, it’s beautiful, it’s the truth. We played it a few days ago and the response was immediate. People were so affected, it was like they weren’t able to speak for two minutes.”

The lyrics may be written by their enigmatic frontman, but the sentiment of the album directly reflects all of the band members’ urge to give a voice to their fans; a voice for those who might find themselves in a situation where they may be choosing between death and carrying on with life.

“It’s about making a difference,” says Gerard. “It’s about giving those kids a representative.”

It transpires that from the very beginning of their careers, the group have felt a responsibility to give a voice to those who dwell in the ‘dark side’ a little more than others.

“We were originally united as a group because we ourselves were obvious outsiders,” explains Gerard about the band’s dark beginnings. “We were pretty much invisible and insignificant. When nobody pays any attention to you, you realise how mortal you are. That’s why teenagers that are troubled or are seen as outcasts are drawn to death. You have a lot of time to examine that subject when you’re all alone.”

Gerard and his bandmates are now in the lucky position where they can turn their own ‘outcast’ experiences into guidance and relief for others.

“We were people that were able to rise above those feelings,” he explains, “and with our help, others will be able to rise above that too. That’s why we have such a strong relationship with our fans. We can understand.”

Were you shocked into taking action by those that didn’t survive?

“The suicide of my friend was something that really changed my life,” he agrees. “There was a really strange wake where there were all these kids from high school there, all of his classmates – kids. That was strange. That set me on the path of wanting to escape that kind of life in New Jersey, the feeling of being depressed and insignificant.”

Come summer 2006, the band are about as far removed from insignificance as it’s possible to imagine, and the main stage at Reading is about as big at it gets for any band. As for being depressed? It’s hard to accuse Frank, Gerard, Ray and Bob of laughing too much. But Gerard’s little brother Mikey seems slightly more fragile. Throughout the interview, his hands are visibly shaking. His conversation is slow and considered.

“I am not going to diagnose myself, but I probably have ADD. I do have ADD, ’cos I am constantly wandering,” says the bassist.

“Mikey is the eternal kid brother of the band,” says Gerard, smiling at his brother. “He has a lot of heart and is just a bit shy and awkward. We’re very protective of him.”

Mikey also notes that Gerard requires protection as well, pointing out that historical frontmen often faced tragic fates due to a lack of support, and warns that without adequate backing, Gerard would likely flee under an assumed name.

That certainly contradicts the view that MCR is just another name for ‘Gerard’s band’. Though he has taken on most of the answers to the questions we have posed the group, it was made quite clear to Metal Hammer that the singer does not do interviews alone.

“We don’t want the emphasis to just be on one person. Bands are much more exciting than individuals,” laughs Gerard. “That’s why you start a band! And if you always keep that in your head, it’s that kind of unity that makes you stronger. When you just have one individual, that’s when people get depressed, people off themselves, and then you have one person carrying this intense weight on them and they’re this huge celebrity. They don’t have enough strength on their own; they need others. That’s the point of a band, of this band – we need each other. I think everyone in this group wants to carry our responsibility together.”

There is no time that this belief is more apparent than when the five members of My Chemical Romance get up on stage. Sure, Gerard is the ‘frontman’, the spokesman, the voice for the masses, but without the intense musical backdrop of his friends, he could be mistaken for just another madman on a rant.

“There is a degree of leadership that needs to be there on stage,” says Gerard, “and although it is one voice, it’s all of our voices speaking together. The music speaks for itself. The chemistry we have together is the real voice.”

To think there was ever a time when Gerard and the band were outcasts is hard to believe. Up in front of the gathered thousands, they’re worshipped like gods.

Each carries the audience in the palm of their hands, through their individual appeals and characters. There are banners being waved, and every word is sung back at the band with full force. Far from being insignificant, they are now the most notorious young men to ever come out of Newark, New Jersey.

“It was never about notoriety, never about fame,” insists Gerard not long after MCR step off the stage, drenched in their own sweat and bathing in the adoration of their fans. “However, we do seek a certain glory and victory in all this. There’s something really amazing about being able to get up on a stage like this and do this kind of thing.”

And who is this victory over? Is it hitting back at the bullies of your past?

“It’s less about the bullies and more about the victory of giving people like us a voice,” Gerard smiles. “And anyway,” he adds, “the bully is usually the guy that stays in the town, lives in the town, fucks in the town, drinks in the town, dies in the town. Whereas,” he grins, spreading his arms wide across the Reading field, “it’s usually the kid whose wearing black in the corner that ends up doing something significant.”

This feature first ran in Metal Hammer in 2006.

Whenever she’s anxious or stressed, Katrine Stenbekk has the same dream. The Norwegian vocalist is paralysed as she feels her bedsheets being pulled away from her; she then floats out the window and hears the voices of female relatives both living and dead, urging her to join them somewhere she can’t see. “I’ve started to call out my own name in my sleep, to pull me back,” she says, “because I’m not ready to know where this dream is going [to take me].”

Her recurring vision was the inspiration for Descend The Stars, a standout moment on her folk-prog band Kalandra’s magnificent new third album, The Other Side. ‘As daylight sings its final song… the tide of sleep is calling me,’ Stenbekk unloads over classical swells from the track’s guest performers, chamber-poppers Árstíðir. ‘It’s whispering my name.’

“I feel like it’s a nightmare more than a dream,” she continues, talking to Hammer by video-call on a dreary October afternoon. “I tell myself ‘this doesn’t have to be a bad thing’ and then I’m off flying, but deep down, I am scared. I also have mimics that often show up between 4 and 6am: voices that say my name. You know it’s happening in your head, but sometimes you wonder, ‘Is this in my head? What if someone is calling me?’”

It’s no surprise, then, that Stenbekk walked into a band meeting in 2024 and said that whatever they make next should be centred around sleep and the subconscious. Two years later, The Other Side is their first conceptual work: single Let Me Be Open is about overcoming deeply latent fears, while the shamanic yet catchy Animal asks whether generative AI technologies are able to dream. But the album also expands upon the quartet’s blend of folk tradition and modern rock, which has made them one of the most promising newcomers in alternative music.

Although Kalandra started in 2011, their career didn’t truly kick off until eight years later, when they inked a deal with By Norse: the label co-founded by Einar Selvik of Nordic resurrectionists Wardruna. On their 2020 debut, The Line, Stenbekk howled like a priestess over tunes which packed the awe of ancient forest rituals into contemporary song structures.

Where 2024 successor A Frame Of Mind realised the band’s anthemic potential, The Other Side is blurrier: less immediate but ultimately more rewarding as it coalesces sounds from across the continents. Midpoint A Ship Has Left The Shore rises from Western singer/songwriter-style intimacy to a cleansing, choral chant.

“The genesis of the band was us being this folky thing, but none of us are folk musicians,” explains guitarist Jogeir Daae Mæland. “It’s us doing a pastiche of all these different genres where we kind of know what we’re doing.”

“There are influences of folk from the Nordic countries, but also from all over the world,” adds Stenbekk. “I have hints of Indian and Middle Eastern things that I do with my voice.”

The lineup seem like opposites: Stenbekk is the chatty, elfin dreamer, whereas Mæland, co-guitarist Florian Winter and drummer Oskar Johnsen Rydh (all also on today’s call) are stoic, sometimes deadpan. Rydh barely says a word. But what brought them together was a shared desire to push limits. The singer and guitarists met while studying at the Liverpool Institute For Performing Arts (LIPA), the university co-founded by local hero Paul McCartney.

“I remember the day I did the auditions,” says Winter. “I had never heard of LIPA and wasn’t particularly a fan of the Beatles, but going into that audition, I said, ‘This has been my dream forever! I’m such a Beatles fan!’ It was all BS.”

The trio only met McCartney once, at their graduation ceremony, where he gave out the diplomas. “Time stops in that moment,” Stenbekk recalls. “It literally takes five seconds: you go out, you hold the paper and you smile at the camera. He said, ‘Take the pin badge.’ ‘What?’ ‘Take the pin badge, love – in my hand. Now look at the camera!’ I just glided off the stage and was like, ‘Oh!’ My heart was racing a lot faster than I thought it would.”

“When you go to LIPA, you sign away all the rights you have to them taking pictures of you,” adds Winter. “If they take a photo of you at the university, they can use that in all of their promotional materials, forever. I saw this in Oslo: they were having tryouts, and there was a life-sized cardboard cutout of me outside the building, in the middle of the street.”

From there, Stenbekk jokes, much of Kalandra’s career progression has come down to “stalking” their idols. The singer sent By Norse’s Selvik demos and music videos for four years, then it was another two before his label actually reached out with an offer.

Similarly, she once outright told composer Bear McCreary (The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power, God Of War, Percy Jackson And The Olympians) at a festival that she thought she’d be perfect for one of his projects. She’s now lined up to sing on his soundtrack for AAA title God Of War Laufey next year.

“It’s just about telling people in your genre that you exist,” she explains. “None of us have musician parents: we can’t leap off of someone else’s career. We really had to start from scratch, so we can’t have any shame about this. I’m quite introverted, but I know for a fact that if I don’t do anything, nothing is going to happen. So I need to dare to be social.”

That self-determination is paying off. As well as being signed to By Norse and their frontwoman having God Of War Laufey on the horizon, the band composed music for strategy game Kingdom Two Crowns in 2022 and have toured extensively. Songs from The Line alone have been streamed more than 50 million times combined.

But, when Hammer asks about the members’ hopes for the future, more of this kind of thing isn’t what they talk about. They want to carry on doing what brought them together: smashing different cultures together, and smashing genre conventions over their knees. “There are a lot of things that we didn’t get to do on the last two albums: we never got to work with an orchestra,” Winter hints.

On a more personal level, Stenbekk wants to work on keeping the bad dreams at bay, to control how stress infects her subconscious. “It’s like a black tar that seeps into my soul,” she states, “and I don’t know how to relax. I still feel like I can’t get it out unless I allow myself to cry, or I go for a run. Maybe I should start boxing or punching something – I really feel like I should handle stress better.”

The Other Side is out on November 13 via By Norse. Kalandra tour Europe and the UK from February to March. Get tickets.

Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has spoken about his friendship with Marilyn Manson, and explained why he has stood behind Manson in the face of the on-going sexual assault lawsuits which the singer faces.

In 2021, more than a dozen woman accused Manson of sexual abuse/sexual assault, in the wake of allegations made by actress Evan Rachel Wood, who shared revelations of her “horrific”time with her former partner in the HBO documentary Phoenix Rising.

Manson made out-of-court settlements with Game Of Thrones actress Esmé Bianco, and another woman, known only as 'Jane Doe' who had accused him of rape. Another lawsuit filed by Ashley Morgan Smithline was withdrawn and recanted.

Manson is set to face a jury trial on November 15, 2027 to answer charges brought by his former personal assistant, Ashley Walters. Another case filed by actress Bianca Allaine Kyne is still pending. In a statement made to Rolling Stone in 2024, Kyne said, “For years, I lived under his shadow, paralyzed by fear. But that fear no longer controls me. It has been replaced by an unwavering pursuit of justice. I stand tall, unafraid. This is not just about my personal story. This is about exposing an industry that prioritizes profit over the safety of vulnerable young women.”

The LADA’s Sex Crimes Division investigated other claims made against Manson, but elected not to press charges, referencing issues with the statute of limitations.

Manson, real name Brian Warner, has denied all accusations against him.

In a new episode of the New York Times' podcast Popcast, Billy Corgan discusses his friendship with Manson, which has endured regardless of the allegations made against the singer, when asked "How do you make determinations of the degree to which they should be in your life and you should be in their lives?"

"That's a valid question," Corgan replies. "I think that ultimately, as a Christian person - how can I put it? - you have to stand by your friends. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have an opinion, and that doesn’t mean you’re not critical. In his case - and I’m not here to adjudicate it - but the DA looked at the case for five years. In some cases, I knew personal things behind the scenes that are not in the public sphere. I personally didn’t feel that he was guilty of the things he was being charged with, and ultimately, the fact that the DA didn’t pursue it.

"Basically, the person that I knew, and the way it all kind of went down, even though it was an elongated process, was commensurate with the person that I knew,"Corgan continues. "It all kind of lined up. But, I wasn’t there. I can’t be there for everything. But I guess it’s one of those things where I don’t, I don’t want the world to tell me who my friends are and who I should associate with. That’s politically, socially, and in Brian’s case, we have a relationship that goes back close to 30 years."

Corgan goes on to point out that Manson's wife Lindsay Usich has a twin sister [Ashley Usich-Iha] who is married to Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, adding,"there’s a deeper set of relationships there."

"I think anybody in that situation struggles with the accusations," he continues, "the seriousness of the accusations, but again, I also knew the inside baseball of the case. I knew certain people who are involved, and so you make those evaluations. At the end of the day, I feel I made the right determination, but if things had come out… Like, people would ask me privately, ‘Well, what happens if…’ and I’d say, If he’s guilty, or anybody in that situation is guilty, they should go to jail."

"I’m not saying I have any moral supremacy here," Corgan concludes. "I’m saying it’s a case-by-case basis. But I don’t like the idea of… this kind of witch mob thing bothers me."

In the wake of the allegations against Manson, the star was dropped by his management and record label. He has since been signed by Nuclear Blast, released two albums, toured with Five Finger Death Punch and more.

The singer is set to support Slipknot at Wembley Stadium in July 2027.

Watch the full Popcast podcast below.

John Carpenter is a true master of horror. From genre-defining classics like Halloween and The Thing, to thrillers like Assault On Precinct 13 and Escape From New York, all the way to the fantasy-comedy of Big Trouble In Little China, Carpenter has created some of cinema's most enduring movies.

Although he hasn't directed a movie since 2010's The Ward, that hasn't stopped him working. Since 1979's Halloween soundtrack, Carpenter has been releasing his own records and his latest, 2026's Cathedral ties directly to the graphic novel of the same name he created. Hammer caught up with Carpenter to talk about his influences and the songs that have inspired him.

“My scores have been influenced by rock’n’roll because I’m influenced by it. This newest one [the album Cathedral] is definitely towards heavy metal. The new graphic novel [it soundtracks] is based on a dream I had, which became a story. The story told us what the music was gonna be, and if you listen to the album when you read it, you’ll get the full experience.

I grew up in the 50s with science fiction and horror comic books and movies. Those things sparked my imagination and I’m still doing it, so I guess I was drawn to the darkness of someone like Blue Oyster Cult. (Don’t Fear) The Reaper is the scariest song ever written – Stephen King said that too. It’s basically, don’t fear suicide. What?! It’s an incredible song, an anthem for dark rock’n’roll. It’s the kind of thing you don’t want troubled young kids hearing, but it’s brilliant.

"I’ve always loved rock’n’roll; every time I hear The Beatles, it reminds me of being 16 or 17 years old. I especially like You Won’t See Me – it brings back memories of the past. The Beatles weren’t my first rock’n’roll band or anything – I remember Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show – but they were definitely the biggest. I remember The Big Bopper too, and Bill Haley And His Comets. I was born in the 40s, don’t forget! All ancient history by now. But The Beatles came along at the right time in my life and I love them.

“My dad played violin on I’m Hurtin’ by Roy Orbison. He was a session musician in Nashville; he played for many, many people. I actually saw Roy in a recording session one day and it was amazing. I can hear my father in the string part and I always think of him when I hear it. He was actually a classical musician, so he looked down on this [rock’n’roll] stuff, but it paid him very well. My dad was a very happy capitalist – and so am I!

“I loved The Supremes at their height, before they kind of went off. Stop! In The Name Of Love is great. I loved watching them and what else can I say? I saw the Four Tops and The Supremes because [TV personality and radio host] Dick Clark had his cavalcade of stars that travelled around and they went through Bowling Green [Kentucky]. It was the most fun of all time dancing to songs like It’s The Same Old Song. I wanted to sing like Levi Stubbs of the Tops, but I just don’t have a Black man’s voice – I have a silly white man’s voice!

“That said, some are great. Just listen to What A Fool Believes by THE DOOBIE BROTHERS, it’s unbelievable. Come on, man! I can’t believe he [singer Michael McDonald] gets that high with his voice.

“Speaking of harmonies, The Beach Boys’ California Girls is so sweet, nice and wonderful. The Beach Boys were great and I loved them, even after [singer and band co-founder] Brian Wilson left. I’m a loyal fan. Those songs were just inescapable; Barbara Ann, I Get Around… it’s all tremendous.

“I fell in love with Metallica thanks to my kids, and in particular the song Enter Sandman. We all loved it when it came out. That album – The Black Album – is just fantastic. And they are, right? But then they went and cut their hair, made Load and Reload… They were just this huge band, but I loved that [self-titled] album for introducing me to them. I’ve never actually seen them live. I’d totally direct a music video for Metallica if they asked, though.

“Procol Harum are one of my all-time favourite bands. This list has been pretty American, but they are most definitely British. I love the song Bringing Home The Bacon, and I love Gary Brooker’s voice… my god, was he talented. It’s too bad that we lost him [Gary passed away from cancer, aged 76, in February 2022].

“Derek & The Dominos’ Layla – come on, don’t pretend like you’ve not heard this a thousand times. He [Eric Clapton] is actually singing to George Harrison’s wife [Pattie Boyd, who divorced George in 1977 and married Eric in 1979]. I guess Eric fell in love with her, then all those years later married her, so he got with Layla in the end. It’s got one of the greatest guitar riffs of all time, there’s nothing better.

On a desert island, these songs are what I would listen to. If I was in outer space, these songs are what I’d want to listen to. But I love electronic music too, you know? I remember going to see Vangelis play and he’s got this set-up with all these pedals, jerry-rigged to create this incredible sound. And there was Tangerine Dream, too.

“Rock’n’roll’s kind of given way to rap these days, which I’m not really a fan of. But it’s still alive and still here – like me! Maybe a bit less transcendent and popular than it was, but it still speaks to people like it spoke to me all those years ago. 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.”

Maria Brink was bitten by the music bug at an early age. “My mama loved music,” she says, recalling her first gig when she was just five years old. “We’d be out on the lawn seats, and I got to see Stevie Nicks.”

Since then, she has become one of the most vivid and intriguing figures in our scene, not to mention one of its most distinctive voices. Since co-founding In This Moment in LA in 2005, she’s overseen their steady climb through modern metal’s ranks as they’ve shifted away from the melodic metalcore of their early days to a bigger, more polished blend of pop, goth and industrial. The band eventually scored a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance in 2021, while their live shows have become eye-popping, conceptual spectacles.

“I wanted to have these dark, gothic creature performers onstage with me,” she says. “The metal community doesn’t do that. I wanted to bring something unique.”

She’s also a survivor. From experiencing abuse and trauma in her childhood to moving to LA alone as a young mum “to be a rock star”, her road to the top has been anything but easy.

“My life taught me how to alchemise my pain into being a warrior,” she tells us, as we talk via Zoom ahead of the release of In This Moment’s ninth album, Witch. “I’m street smart, I’m savvy. I’m a fighter; you can’t pull one over me easy.”

Was there a moment in your life where you realised that you could sing?

“I was singing as a little girl. When I was seven years old, I lived in this cute little trailer park, and I would put on little productions with all the kids in our trailer park. We would invite all the parents, and we’d steal roses and flowers from people’s gardens and give each parent that showed up a little flower.”

What was your upbringing like?

“I grew up in the projects, motel rooms and trailers, we didn’t have a lot of money. My mom did wind up suffering from some bad addictions, and then my sister’s father was an abusive, bad man. It was a hard upbringing. Thank God I always had the gentle spirit and love from my mother, which kept me afloat through everything.”

How has that impacted you as a person?

“I wouldn’t change anything for the world. My mom was addicted to crack for a while, and I think it taught me to be afraid of drugs. Addiction runs really thick in my family. I might have wound up being an addict. I’ve only smoked weed. I’ve never tried any other drug ever. Sometimes I think when I’m an old lady, maybe I’ll try mushrooms to connect to the Earth and tap into the forest… even though I swear I feel that now without the mushrooms.”

Your dad left early in your life. How did that affect you?

“He was a good man with a good heart. He just wasn’t necessarily meant to be a father. As a child, it was hard on me, but in my teenage years it hit me hard. At the beginning of my musical career, I wrote about it a lot. He came into my life for a little while, and we got close when I was around 16, 17. But then he moved away to the Philippines. Even though it came with pain, I don’t regret my dad being my father, and we had a healing moment when he died a few years ago.

I FaceTimed with him; it was the first time I had seen my dad’s face in over 26 years. I was FaceTiming with him when he actually passed away, and even when he couldn’t speak to me, I was telling him that I loved him, that I forgive him, and that the memories I have of him are only beautiful. I’m really grateful that we had that ending.”

You grew up in Albany, New York and discovered heavy music on the local hardcore scene. What are your memories of that?

“My mom loved Black Sabbath, AC/DC and Iron Maiden, so I had my first influences with my mom, but I remember going to my first hardcore shows in a little club in upstate New York called QE2. Hatebreed would come up, and Earth Crisis, and I remember I felt at home. There was a sense of danger and of belonging in there. That’s the first time I realised I wanted to go into music. I was 15 or 16.”

You had your son, Davion, when you were 15. What were the challenges there?

“It was hard being a teenage mom. I left school and got my apartment, a little studio, [in New York] right away when I turned 16, and we lived together alone. But I don’t know what kind of path maybe I would have fallen into if it wasn’t for my son. My son gave me hope. He gave me purpose in life. I was a kid when I had him; I was just doing the best that I could, but love was always there, and was the number one thing that kept us afloat.”

Did you worry that dream of being a singer might not happen because of your new reality?

“I didn’t. I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; I’ve had it since I was a kid, but I didn’t get diagnosed until I was almost 30. I set my mind on something, and I’m gonna make it happen. I’m pretty tenacious in that way.”

You moved to LA aged 25. Was that scary?

“I was scared all the time. I didn’t know anybody; just me and my boy. There are millions of people in the City of Dreams trying to make their dreams come true, and you’re one little, baby soul, trying to stick out. We didn’t live in the best neighbourhoods, and we had people try to break into our houses. I worked in the bar scene, and I was barely able to pay the rent, take care of my son, and get babysitters. The whole thing was a rollercoaster. I have a lot of guilt for bringing my son to California and pulling him away from all his friends to pursue my dream. He had to sacrifice a lot for my career.”

What do you remember about meeting Chris [Howorth, lead guitarist] and co-founding In This Moment?

“On Sundays, all these musicians would go to Chris’s house and have jam sessions, and I got invited. Not one woman there. I’m the only woman. Everyone’s practising, and I was like, ‘Hey, can I, like, show you guys something?’ I was terrified. I did this talking thing that started going into this like scrappy, rappy, singing and then screaming really loud. But nobody’s playing any music. I’m just standing there like crazy person doing this, trying to show who I am.”

How hard was it to keep the balance between being in a band and being a parent?

“I had my own apartment for a long time in Cali, then I wound up moving in with Chris, and Davion had his own room there. It made finances a lot easier. [Davion’s] life consisted of living with a bunch of bandmembers and we practised right in the house. I didn’t officially start touring until he was almost a teenager, and then my mom helped me, because in the beginning, it wasn’t like he could just come with me. We were in a van, and he was still in school.

"One thing that I’ve always had in this band is gentlemen around me, respectable men. I was very protective over my son and had healthy boundaries, not just around my son, but for our fans. I was like, ‘There’s not going to be any Mötley Crüe moments in here where you guys are banging young girls in the back’, and we didn’t allow hardcore drugs around. Because of the way I grew up, I didn’t want my son around anything like that.”

At the start of your career, you performed at open mic nights at the famed rock star hangout Rainbow Bar & Grill on LA’s Sunset Strip. What are your memories of that?

“I mean, that was scary too. I barely knew how to play the keyboard, but I slowly started meeting people. We became friends with Dino [Cazares, guitarist] from Fear Factory, he saw a light in us. And Lemmy sat next to me, drinking a beer. I just said, ‘Hi’, I didn’t make it weird or anything. I always tried to keep my cool, and eventually started realising they’re just people just like us.”

With your fourth album, 2012’s Blood, the band started presenting yourselves more theatrically. What was behind that change?

“We really found ourselves on the Blood album. Almost all of our bandmembers quit, our managers dropped us, and Chris and I were like, ‘Is the band over?’ At that point, it was like we were born again, and there was going to be no rules. I told Chris I was going to get a wireless mic and that I wanted to get performers, and he was like, ‘This isn’t Britney Spears. What are you talking about?’ No one in the metal world had dancers and performers onstage with them, but when he saw the performing arts, and it was dark, and it was creepy, and it was this theatrical moment that wasn’t contrived or cheesy, he saw the vision.”

Did you have that vision all along but weren’t sure how to implement it, or did you not feel comfortable? What gave you the confidence to go with it at that moment?

“I had dreams, but we were at the beginning of our band, and it was a certain way and a certain thing. I don’t think In This Moment would have wound up being who we are if our band didn’t fall apart at that moment.”

What influenced your personal stage style at that time?

“Did you ever see The Cell [2000 sci-fi movie starring Jennifer Lopez]? The imagery was so amazing to me. I love that she was wearing posture collars, and I always loved Alexander McQueen and high fashion; structured, shiny and gothic. I always loved latex and spikes. I help create the wardrobes and choreography for the live show, and it keeps me feeling alive and excited to create.”

You did your first solo performance in 2020, at ShipRocked festival.What are your memories of that?

“I have so many bells and whistles around me; performers and lights, pyro and [smoke plumes stage effect] cryo, wardrobe and masks. So, it was very different and unique for me to sit there alone. When I just play my piano and do something very intimate and very quiet, I feel a real connection to something deeper than myself.”

The new ITM album is titled Witch. What does that word mean to you?

“My whole house looks like a jungle. Crystals and sage, and little spells, and there’s witch brooms hanging on the walls, but not in a creepy way. I truly believe in the power of manifesting your destiny. I came from nothing, and have alchemised my pain into things I’ve manifested in life. My spells are my music.

I was also told, at a young age, by a pretty renowned psychic in California that I was burned in my last life as a witch. If you look into my eyes, I have a ring of orange around my iris. It’s why I was born as a fire sign. I always felt like I was a witch.”

What are your hobbies outside the band?

“I like to do arts and crafts and create wreaths. I like painting and making my house feel like literally a giant shrine; it brings me joy to create. I have a piano in my room. I love good restaurants and good food.”

There are two sides to your art: energy, love, the universe, and darkness, blood and violence. How do the two coexist?

“I think most people have a balance inside them of darkness and light. I have suffered from a crazy life, abuse and trauma, and there’s darkness in there, that’s why I have this beautiful outlet, which is our band. I have that light in me because I expel and release the darkness through my music, through my art. I still have it in me; I still have bad anxiety, suffer really bad, but I can live with it and have learned how to put it into my music.”

It seems like you’ve lived your life fearlessly, but do you have any fears for the future?

“I’m an empath. If somebody I love hurts, I hurt. Or if I see animals in pain on social media or I see suffering, it consumes me. It’ll make me sick. So I have to disconnect myself from the world. I’m really strong and powerful, but I also have to protect my energy to be strong. I’ve shared my energy so much, with so many people around the world, my fears have become more about protecting my own energy, my own circle, my own little world.”

Are you happy with how big In This Moment are, or do you want more?

“We still would love to keep expanding our art, and we would love to keep growing, but we are also trying to embrace who we are in the space that we hold within this industry, and be proud of that. I think we’ve lost a lot of beautiful moments instead of embracing the beauty of where we are; we’re always striving to get to that next level. And personally, I am focused on finding peace within myself, trying to overcome mental stress and fears or pain. I would love to just be in a place where anxiety doesn’t have a grip on me, and I could just fucking float around, like Yoda, in a space of peace."

Witch is out now via Better Noise Music.

Prog has teamed up with Steven Wilson and Fiction Records to celebrate the upcoming release of Wilson's ninth studio album, Requiem For A Village, which is released on November 6.

Get a limited-edition dark green vinyl variant of Requiem For A Village, plus a 12" x 12" exclusive art print, plus a copy of the latest issue of Prog with Steven on the front cover, with our new and exclusive bundle.

There are only 100 of these bundles available. Don't miss out! Order your bundle here!

Steven talks about Requiem For A Village in the new issue of Prog. “It’s another step along the way in terms of trying to make music that exists outside of any notion of genre. I like approaching things like an innocent who doesn’t know the rules of what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do.”

“I was watching a lot of folk-horror movies at the time, which suggested this world of dark, pagan music, brass bands, Morris dancers, things like that. At the same time that was spinning around my head, I was experimenting with drum and bass loops and synthesisers. It all coalesced together.”

The new issue of Prog also has great new interviews with Peter Hammill, Justin Hayward, The Pineapple Thief, Pure Reason Revolution, The Tangent, King Crimson founding member Michael Giles, Eivør, Arthur Brown and more.

There are only 100 of these bundles available. Don't miss out! Order your bundle here.

British bluesman Robin Davey, known for his work with Beaux Gris Gris & The Apocalypse, The Hoax and Well Hung Heart, has launched a stunning attack on modern blues music.

Davey, the youngest ever inductee into the British Blues Hall of Fame, singles out blues superstar Joe Bonamassa for special attention in a social media post announcing the release of a new solo album, The Blues According To Gutbucket Slim.

"The album is my vision of what the blues can be," says Davey. "I grew up listening to Beck, I grew up listening to Rage Against The Machine. I also grew up listening to Lightnin' Hopkins, Stevie Ray Vaughan and BB King. I grew up listening to Guy Forsyth, who sings a song on this record.

"The blues today has been screwed up by Joe Bonamassa. His influence has permeated through the younger generations, and it hurts my ears. It is devoid of soul. It is all about maximising profits and maximising Joe's ego. I'm tired of the endless stream of white blues that dominates the Blues festival circuit. These people can't write songs; they have no creativity, and they all sound alike – their playing is so devoid of personality.

"There, I said it. This record will not be hugely successful. I don't know if anyone will hear it, but I'm putting it out so that it may help people think differently about what the blues can be."

"This album is not for the blues purists," he adds. "But that generation is gone, and we as a new generation have to think differently about it."

Davey describes the five-track, 15-minute The Blues According To Gutbucket Slim as sounding like a collaboration between Gorillaz and Jimi Hendrix.

Beaux Gris Gris & The Apocalypse, who support These Wicked Rivers on a run of UK dates in November and December (billed as Beaux Gris Gris & The Magic Three), will release a new album, The Age Of Women And Monsters, in January, before embarking on a UK headline tour. Full dates below.

Beaux Gris Gris & The Apocalypse tour dates

Nov 12: Metzingen Hirsch, Germany
Nov 13: Chur Streaming Hall, Switzerland
Nov 14: Dornach Wydekanteen, Switzerland
Nov 17: Eppstein Wunderbar Weite Welt, Germany
Nov 19: Berlin Brickhouse, Germany
Nov 20: Joldelund Gerd's Juke Joint, Germany
Nov 21: Tilburg Heyhoef-Backstage, Netherlands
Nov 22: Grolloo Café-Restaurant Hofsteenge, Netherlands
Nov 23: Verviers Spirit Of 66, Belgium
Nov 24: Venray Municipal Theater Venray, Netherlands
Nov 26: Leicester Academy, UK *
Nov 27: London The Garage, UK *
Nov 28: Norwich Arts Centre, UK *
Nov 29: Milton Keynes Crauford Arms, UK *
Dec 03: Birmingham O2 Institute, UK *
Dec 04: Bristol Thekla, UK *
Dec 05: Falmouth Cornish Bank, UK *
Dec 06: Portsmouth The Lens, UK *

Jan 28: Loughborough The Generator, UK
Jan 29: New Milton Forest Arts Centre, UK
Jan 30: Aldershot West End Centre, UK
Feb 03: Hull Adelphi, UK
Feb 04: Grimsby Yardbirds, UK
Feb 05: Manchester Deaf Institute, UK
Feb 06: Stourbridge Town Hall, UK
Feb 07: Leeds Farsley Old Woollen, UK
Feb 10: Edinburgh Voodoo Rooms, UK
Feb 11: Glasgow Rum Shack, UK
Feb 12: Newcastle Cluny 2, UK
Feb 13: Sheffield Yellow Arch, UK
Feb 14: Blackpool Waterloo, UK
Feb 16: Cambridge Junction, UK
Feb 17: Bristol Exchange, UK
Feb 18: Southampton The Brook, UK
Feb 19: Norwich Waterfront, UK
Feb 20: London 100 Club, UK

Nov 25: Dudenhofen Bürgerghaus, Germany (rescheduled date)

* with These Wicked Rivers, billed as Beaux Gris Gris & The Magic Three
Find Beaux Gris Gris & The Apocalypse tickets.

Genesis’ future was very far from guaranteed when co-founding guitarist Anthony Phillips decided to leave the band in 1971. After making the decision not to break up, Peter Gabriel, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks set about creating a new line-up. The arrival of Phil Collins made a big difference, then the recruitment of Steve Hackett secured their future as a musical force via third album, Nursery Cryme, as Prog explored in 2022.

It’s well documented in Genesis lore how devastated the rest of the group were when co-founder, guitarist Anthony ‘Ant’ Phillips left the group after the show at the Sussex [now Clair] Hall in Haywards Heath on July 18, 1970. Trespass, their second album, and the first for Charisma, had been recorded that June but wouldn’t be released until October.

After much contemplation and encouragement from tour manager Richard Macphail, Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford decided to continue, advertising not only for a guitarist but also a drummer – the watershed had provided an opportunity for their third percussionist, John Mayhew, to move on. After seeing their advert in Melody Maker, ex-Flaming Youth drummer Phil Collins auditioned; he arrived early at Gabriel’s parents’ farm in Chobham that August, with his guitarist friend Ronnie Caryl, and went for a swim in the pool while he overheard the other candidates play. By the time it was his turn, he was familiar with what he was asked to perform.

Caryl auditioned for the guitarist’s role. Collins was successful but Caryl, being too bluesy, was not. Gabriel later said: “I knew when Phil sat down on the kit, before he played a note, that this was a guy who really was in command of what he was doing, because he was so confident. It’s like watching a jockey sit on a horse.”

After a handful of summer shows and the impending release of Trespass, Genesis, including Collins, returned to the road at Chatham’s Medway Technical College on October 2, 1970. The group had rehearsed extensively at the Farnham Maltings near Rutherford’s parents’ home in Surrey. “We just couldn’t replace Ant,” Macphail says.

Banks notes: “The nature of the guitar is that it tends to attract people who like to be flamboyant, and out there making a lot of noise as the centre of attention. We were looking for exactly the opposite of that.”

“Gigs were in the book, so we went on as a four-piece,” Macphail continues. “Charisma’s Fred Munt suggested that we get a Hohner electric piano with a fuzzbox, and put that on top of the organ. That was the beginning of Tony’s multi-keyboard thing.”

New roadie Paul Davidson – lured away from university for a life on the road by Macphail – was there that night: “Phil needed quite a lot of attention because at that stage, he hadn’t got a drum board to set up on, so his kit was always moving around. Part of my job was making sure it didn’t move around too much by a putting couple of nails into the stage.”

“When Phil came in, he could do a tap dance on stage,” Charisma PR Glen Colson says. “He was made for showbiz. He still is.”

It was during this brief period as a four-piece that Banks, Collins and Rutherford truly gelled, establishing a musical telepathy between them that exists to this day. “We literally left Ant’s amp on stage right and took a long lead and plugged the electric piano into it,” Macphail recalls. “Tony would play Ant’s solos on the repertoire that was being played live at the time.”

Collins’ pal Caryl played guitar with them at a show in October, before Mick Barnard was drafted in and played at gigs from until January 1971. It was the band’s Friars Aylesbury champion David Stopps who’d suggested Barnard, whom he knew from local band The Farm. “He helped them out at that moment,” Stopps says. “When Peter asked me if I knew anybody, I thought of him.”

“Mick was much more of a member than Ronnie,” Macphail says. “He was quite quiet, a good player, no doubt about it.” Although Barnard was with them, the search for a permanent guitarist went on: “They didn’t just need an axeman – they needed someone who was more than that,” Macphail adds.

Gabriel was intrigued by an ad placed by Steve Hackett in Melody Maker on December 12, 1970: “Imaginative guitarist-writer seeks involvement with receptive musicians, determined to strive beyond existing stagnant music form.” Gabriel phoned Hackett and suggested he listen to Trespass and see the group live.

He went with his brother John to see Genesis with Barnard, at London’s Lyceum on December 28. “They seemed almost like a semi-acoustic band,“ Hackett remembers. “They started with Happy The Man – I thought I was supposed to be seeing a rock band. I realised there was as much acoustic music in this as there was rock. They were different from most bands in that way.”

As 1971 dawned, Banks and Gabriel went to Hackett’s flat in Pimlico. “They said they had a guitarist, but they wanted someone who not only played electric, but 12-string as well,” he says. “I was a huge fan of the 12-string. I played them a number of things in different styles. It was very interesting: Pete did all the talking; Tony didn’t say a word.”

Hackett was asked to join, and out went Mick Barnard. There was little doubt that the latter was a good player who’d assisted the group immeasurably. “In a way, looking back, they really were waiting for Steve,” Macphail states. “Steve had so many other irons in the fire because he was into unusual tunings, 12-string acoustic and all that stuff.”

Many were to wonder what happened to the missing Genesis player. “Mick was a local legend. He was and still is a brilliant blues player. He’s still playing today,” Stopps says.

Steve Hackett brought his intense musicianship with him as the band began work on third album Nursery Cryme. As Gabriel would later say, the guitarist was “the colouring agent – the dark contained personality that was struggling to get out. Yearning, looming build-up of compressed energy. Steve had a dollop of unfulfilled frustrations.”

The most appropriate way to describe Joanne Shaw Taylor’s career arc, from being discovered by Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart at 16 to topping the Billboard Blues Album chart in the US, would be with a phrase coined by BB King: she’s paid the cost to be the boss.

By the age of 25 she’d supported King, toured with Stewart’s DUP project, backed his former Eurythmics bandmate Annie Lennox, and could doubtless have landed a gig as a hired gun with an established artist. Instead, she’s done anything but play it safe, staying true to her love of the blues through her 10 previous solo albums and countless road miles, which have positioned her at the forefront of the genre in the past five years.

Refreshingly, she’s maintained her success by taking risks stylistically, bringing the soul and pop-rock influences that shaped her vocal style into her songwriting on Heavy Soul (2024), and Black & Gold (2025). While the gamble paid off with both fans and critics, a third album in as many years could be a risk too far if the pace outstrips the consistency. Thankfully, The Trouble With Love finds Shaw Taylor audibly pushing herself as both performer and writer to refine the genre-blending approach of recent years.

In the propulsive title track that opens the record, Shaw Taylor’s vocals and biting guitar licks impress (no mean feat after a cameo solo from Joe Bonamassa) with their commanding intensity. The stripped-down stomp of Hell Or High Water and the midnight-blue ballad This Is Who I Am showcase her concise, eloquent phrasing as a soloist, the latter also illustrating her growing power and control as a vocalist.

Tired Of Being Right deftly balances gospel, soul and country rock, with hints of The Band. On the pop-rock side of the street, What Good Is My Love boasts dazzling six-string trade-offs with Orianthi, while The Girl That You Used To Love lands a killer riff and insistent harmonised vocal melodies.

Despite its well-worn title, Bad Boy puts an inventive 21st-century twist on the blues, complete with a sublime lead break and emotive lyric. Never Gonna Please ’Em All wields a riff that AC/DC would be proud to come up with, You And Me (Rachel’s Song) injects old-school soul with layered guitar textures, before album closer Death Wish builds from melancholy atmospherics to a pounding crescendo, with a solo shot through with the kind of blues feel you just can’t fake.

Rock icons Deep Purple have released a video for the irresistibly groovy title track of this year's Splat! album, which was released in July.

Earlier this year, Purple frontman Ian Gillan told Classic Rock that 'Splat!' was a word he'd scribbled in a notebook years ago as a potential album title after thinking about the old joke in which a bug flies into a car’s windscreen and the last thing that goes through its mind is its arse.

“I thought of me hitting the car's windscreen, and through my skull flew King Arthur and the Roman Empire, and every other aspect of humanity that had existed," Gillan told us, in typically fanciful fashion. "All in the form of chess pieces. And then they pixelated, gravitated towards each other, and faffed off towards the next form of human energy, but without arms and legs and bodies.

“The whole point of it is we'd become disembodied and part of a collective. All of the experience of a quarter of a million years of humanity lumped together as a smouldering energy force. My vivid imagination, basically. I've no idea what the hell's going to happen."

Splat! (the song) is the fourth single to be released from Splat! (the album), following Guilt Trippin', Arrogant Boy and Diablo. Deep Purple are currently on tour in Europe and will arrive in the UK for a run of shows in November. The band will also play several South American and Mexican shows in the run-up to Christmas. Full dates below.

Deep Purple: Splat! tour dates

Oct 23: Antwerp Lotto Arena, Belgium
Oct 25: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Oct 26: Stockholm Avicii Arena, Sweden
Oct 28: Oslo Spektrum Arena, Norway
Oct 29: Gothenburg Scandinavium, Sweden
Oct 31: Leipzig QI Arena, Germany
Nov 01: Hamburg Sporthalle, Germany
Nov 03: Dortmund Westfalenhalle, Germany
Nov 04: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Nov 06: Frankfurt Festhalle, Germany
Nov 07: Nuremberg Arena, Germany
Nov 09: Amsterdam Ziggodome, Netherlands
Nov 10: Strasbourg Zenith, France
Nov 12: Bordeaux Arkéa Arena, France
Nov 13: Nantes Zenith, France
Nov 15: Lyon LDLC Arena, France
Nov 18: Newcastle Utilita Arena, UK
Nov 19: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Nov 21: Birmingham BP Pulse Arena, UK
Nov 22: Manchester AO Arena, UK
Nov 24: London Eventim Apollo, UK
Nov 25: London Royal Albert Hall, UK

Dec 05: Sao Paulo Suhai Hall, Brazil
Dec 08: Santiago Movistar Arena, Chile
Dec 10: Buenos Aires Movistar Arena, Argentina
Dec 13: Monterrey Arena, Mexico
Dec 16: Guadalajara Arena, Mexico
Dec 19: Mexico City Estadio Fray Nano, Mexico

Find Deep Purple tickets.

Apple TV's long-awaited documentary about Fleetwood Mac is finally ready to hit the small screen. Fleetwood Mac: The Chain, which was announced in November 2024, will premiere on Apple TV on January 29, 2027, and features contributions from Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, the late Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.

The release is timed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the band's best-selling Rumours album – which came out on February 4, 1977 – and is named after The Chain, the only song on the album to be credited to all five members.

The film is directed by Frank Marshall, who also worked on The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (2020), Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story (2022) and The Beach Boys (2024).

"I am fascinated by how this incredible story of enormous musical achievement came about,” said Marshall in 2024. "Fleetwood Mac somehow managed to merge their often chaotic and almost operatic personal lives into their own tale in real-time, which then became legend. This will be a film about the music and the people who created it."

The film tells the story of Fleetwood Mac from the point when Mick Fleetwood invited Lindsey Buckingham – and then Stevie Nicks – to join the band after being played Frozen Love from their Buckingham Nicks album at Sound City Studio in Los Angeles in late 1974.

"Lindsey’s style was so stunning and unique," Fleetwood told Rolling Stone. "It was what hit me first, and it hit me hard. That hour and a half spent in Sound City changed everything."

The dramatic story of the band's pre-Rumours years, which include the loss of guitarists Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer (the first to mental decline, the second to the cult organisation Children of God), the firing and subsequent destitution of guitarist Danny Kirwan, dwindling popularity, a break-up in 1973 and the strange story of the "Fake Fleetwood Mac", will have to wait for another day.

When Neal Morse left prog supergroup Transatlantic to pursue his religious callings, fans and band alike thought it was all over. But in 2009 he, The Flower Kings’ Roine Stolt, Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy and Marillion’s Pete Trewavas returned with third album The Whirlwind, to both surprise and acclaim. That year Morse and Stolt told Prog how it had come about.

When Neal Morse ditched Transatlantic in 2002 to go and create music that promulgated his Christian faith, fans of the supergroup and its members – Mike Portnoy, Roine Stolt and Peter Trewavas – believed it was the end of their story. But in 2007 the keyboardist began to have a change of heart.

“A couple of things happened,” he says. “I was having dinner with a friend who’s not a big fan of progressive rock, and for some reason he blurted out that I should do another prog epic with Transatlantic. It was strange, and it did get me thinking. Then I wrote a demo called The Whirlwind, and it sounded ‘Transatlantic-y’ to me. I prayed, and began thinking that maybe it was God’s will that this was the direction.”

Stolt remembers: “Neal sent out the Whirlwind demo and asked if we were interested in doing another Transatlantic album. The rest of us had been waiting for it to happen. As time had gone by I thought it wasn’t going to, so it was kind of a surprise. We all said yes immediately.”

Demos were exchanged, and once schedules had been balanced the band converged on Morse’s Nashville home studio in April. “We thought the best thing to do was get together and see what happened,” he says. “Some of the guys had flown considerable distances so I thought they’d need some rest – but we started work the very first night and got the whole album sketched out; all the major themes were in the works. It only took us four days to write it. We work really fast when the inspiration’s there, and we took certain parts straight from the demos we’d sent each other.”

“That was very quick for me,” Stolt reveals. “People ask what it’s like recording with the band. Well, you get into a room and the bits just seem to fall into place, like a miracle. We’re never short of ideas, which is the main thing.

“Mike is sometimes seen as a drummer boy, but in fact he’s an intellectual. He conducts the band. There are lots of great drummers out there but there aren’t many like him; he can look at the different pieces and arrange the ideas into a cohesive whole.”

Morse agrees: “Mike’s a take-charge guy. He’s very good at picking the best parts of other people’s demos and figuring out how to arrange it, like a really good producer would. And then, of course, his drumming is unbelievable.”

The band are collectively credited for all songwriting, and Morse has been disheartened by the tendency of reviewers to attribute much of the work to him. “People would be surprised by how much is written by Pete,” he counters. “The main theme in the overture is his, and the very first vocal is his melody, sung by Roine. Pete threw out a lot of the chord changes on Is It Really Happening? His bass playing’s amazing too – nice and loud in the mix. As for Roine, he’s so creative. He came in with A Man Can Feel and we played that just as it was on his demo.”

He continues: “Transatlantic is a collaboration. I think that’s what makes it different; otherwise it’d sound like a bunch of guys playing my or Roine or Pete’s music. Most of the time it’s exhilarating, with tons of ideas going round. Once in a while it’s challenging: if the whole band’s pulling in one direction and you don’t agree, you don’t have any choice. That happened a few times, but the good things far outweigh those moments.”

“A band is always a compromise,” Stolt notes, “but everyone felt they had a chance to get their voice heard. We’d all grown a bit; we were all more ready to give and take and not push our own ideas too much. We were really listening to each other, and that comes out in the music.”

It would be disingenuous to imply that Morse’s withdrawal from Transatlantic – and also his main gig with Spocks Beard – led to a rift between the players. But if fans were bewildered as to his motives, so were some of his colleagues. “I was puzzled,” says Stolt. “It just came out of the blue. To this day I’ve never understood why we couldn’t keep making music. Neal had been working really hard to push sales and get more people to the concerts, and once people were raving about us he just said, ‘I’d like to stop now.’”

He adds: “I very much respect it, though; if it isn’t right you shouldn’t be in a band. But I never saw anything evil in the music we were making. It’s not like we’re a Satanic black metal band! But I’ve never wanted to put him against the wall and ask why. We never spoke about it, and we haven’t mentioned it since. It was his decision to make.”

Morse explains: “I felt like it was time for Transatlantic again; that’s what was wanted. God was putting people and things in my path to point me in this direction. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”

It’s hard to extricate his faith from The Whirlwind’s lyrical themes of apocalypse, exodus, sacrifice and – in the rapturous closer Dancing With Eternal Glory – redemption. “The concept of is that you’re in a confused state,” he says. “It could apply to your personal life or to things happening in the world. God will sometimes put us in a state of confusion for His purposes, for reasons we don’t understand. It’s only when we step back later we can see how He used it. Sometimes we have to get a little off our own ground before we’ll seek Him.

“But we approached the concept in a very abstract way; there are many facets of it on the album. The fact that my lyrics and Pete and Roine’s ideas fitted with the concept was what I would call ‘providential.’”

Ever the agnostic foil, Stolt counters: “Some of the lyrics I’d had lying around for a year, but they coincidentally fitted with the concept. That’s the good thing about art – you can do whatever you want, and if you do it with conviction it makes sense. ‘I love you baby’ rock lyrics can only be seen one way; but with, say, Genesis’ Supper’s Ready, or some of the things John Lennon wrote when he was on LSD, they can be about anything.

“It triggers your imagination. It’s interesting stuff. It probably means different things for different people. The Whirlwind is open to interpretation, and that’s part of the excitement.”

On the weekend of August 18/19, 2001, Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chili Peppers co-headlined the UK's V festivals, playing to crowds of 50,000 music fans at Weston Park in Staffordshire, and Hylands Park in Chelmsford, Essex. Both bands were flying high on the success of the shows, but on the morning of August 20, Foo Fighters came crashing down to earth, when Dave Grohl was informed that drummer Taylor Hawkins had been taken to a London hospital following a drug overdose. The following day, a press statement declared that Hawkins had "overindulged", but was now in a stable condition.

Twenty-five years on, the specifics of the incident referred to within the band as "Taylor's little nap" still remain cloudy. In the 2011 Foo Fighters documentary Back and Forth, guitarist Chris Shiflett suggested that Hawkins had taken heroin - "Our soundman at the time was like, 'Taylor fucked up, he's going to die, he's fucking dead'" - while Hawkins himself blamed an addiction to painkillers, cutting off further queries by saying, "Just fucking painkillers, okay?" Further muddying the waters, Dave Grohl suggested that the drummer was in a coma for "10 or 12 days", while Hawkins insisted it was around 48 hours.

Whatever the truth of the matter, it was sufficiently grave to cause Grohl to briefly consider breaking up the band.

"That was the first time in my life that I ever considered quitting playing music,’ he told me in 2009, "because it had got to the point where I wondered if music just equalled death... I’m in it for the fucking music, but I don’t want to do it if everyone is just going to die all the time."

And yet, by the autumn of 2001, Foo Fighters were back in business, working on a new record, almost as if nothing had happened, as if the trauma of the episode could be managed for all concerned simply by the quartet immersing themselves in music once more.

In an attempt to erase and rewind this troubling chapter of their history, the group attempted to tap back into more innocent, idyllic times, specifically the good vibes of their recording sessions for 1999's There Is Nothing Left To Lose at Dave Grohl's home in Virginia. This time around, however, working with producer Adam Kasper and recording engineer Nick Raskulinecz, the quartet struggled to recapture the same degree of creativity. Though Grohl had no shortage of song ideas - at least 20 - constructing fully-formed songs proved taxing, and frustration set in. As the new year dawned, the fruitless Virginia sessions were wound down, and operations shifted back to Los Angeles, specifically to Conway Studios, a state-of-the-art facility on Melrose Avenue.

If Dave Grohl, or his management, imagined that the change of scenery, and the boost given by the LA-based musicians returning to home soil, would serve as a catalyst for inspiration, they were mistaken.

"Nothing was being accomplished," Grohl recalled when we discussed the matter six years later. "The songs lacked any sort of life, they were just weird carbon-copy versions of songs that they were meant to be. It’s hard to explain. And then someone would come in and record half a track and go, 'Okay, I gotta go see my acupuncturist, I’ll be back later'. Meanwhile we’re paying $4,000 a day for this room."

"Honestly what happened is that we started working too soon on the record," he reflected. "We just weren’t ready to do it. We started in on it again before we were ready, before Taylor was ready, before the songs were ready: we felt obligated, in a way. That’s kinda the difference between the first album and the fourth album. In a way they were both made for the same reason – the first album, unconsciously – but the fourth album was a conscious attempt at healing the band. And it didn’t work. It had the opposite effect.’

"We were almost forcing ourselves to make that record," Taylor Hawkins added. "And it just wasn’t right. I just wanted to stay busy... but looking back, I probably could have used three or four months to get my head together."

Relationships within the Foo Fighters camp were hardly improved by Dave Grohl's decision to help out his old friend Josh Homme by playing drums on sessions for the third Queens Of The Stone Age record. Not least because it made Grohl aware that the album he was making with his own band was very much a poor relation by comparison.

"At night I’d go rehearse in a closet with Queens and I’d be in the best band in the world," he admitted. "And then I’d come back to Foo Fighters studio and be totally dismayed by the apathy and lack of any sort of passion. So things started getting tense."

Things came to a head in the spring of 2022, when Foo Fighters invited representatives of the world's biggest music magazines to Conway Studios for advance listens to what they imagined would be their fourth album. While Kerrang! writer Ian Winwood was being given a preview of new songs, the long-simmering tensions in the studio exploded.

"I remember getting into a fight in the control room with the Kerrang! people outside,’ Grohl recalled. "It wasn’t even a fight, just people making little jabs and little comments here and there. And I said, Okay, do you want me to go and tell those guys that we’re going to break up right fucking now? Because I will. We can if you want.” And then the room was kinda silent."

"I remember getting a promotional schedule for that album, looking at it and thinking, Wait a minute, I don’t even like this music, how am I supposed to promote it? How can I tell anyone I’m proud of this when I’m just not? And to be honest, the last thing in the world the band wanted to do was [for us] to be in the same room as each other."

And so, having already spent around one million dollars on the making of the fourth Foo Fighters album, Dave Grohl took the bold executive decision to take what had been recorded to date and bin it, while he went off to join QOTSA on tour. As much as this put noses out of joint, his bandmates would come to recognise that the time. out saved their band.

"It took about four months to do those Million Dollar Demos, and that’s far too long for a rock record," Taylor Hawkins noted. "Unless you’re doing A Night at the Opera."

In May 2002, with their friendship repaired and heads clear, Dave Grohl and Hawkins would take another stab at the record back in Virginia, and put together an 11-track album in just 13 days. Almost everything the band had recorded in Los Angeles was rearranged, set aside for release as a B-side, or simply discarded, and the duo also wrote new songs - Low, Times Like These and Disenchanted Lullaby among them. Finally, they had a record they considered worthy of release.

Much later, after his band's fourth album, One By One, was voted Best Rock Album at the 2004 Grammy Awards, Grohl would confess that, in his opinion, it featured "only four good songs".

"We rushed into it and we rushed out of it,’ he admitted. ‘Too many of the songs on that record just weren’t good enough. It was just a question of getting it done and getting it out... it wasn’t our proudest moment",

By then, however, Foo Fighters were flying high once more, disaster averted.

Queens Of The Stone Age have announced an American tour in support of their forthcoming album, Perfecth.

The dates will follow on from the Los Angeles-based band's previously announced South America shows.

Beginning on May 1 at San Diego’s Viejas Arena, the tour takes in iconic venues such as Red Rocks in Denver and the KIA Forum in Inglewood, California. Pixies and Wheelchair Sports Camp will support on all dates.

Queens Of The Stone Age US Tour 2027

May 01: San Diego Viejas Arena, CA
May 02: Inglewood Kia Forum, CA
May 04: Oakland Oakland Arena, CA
May 05: Sacramento Golden 1 Center, CA
May 07: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
May 09: Portland Moda Center, OR
May 11: Salt Lake City Delta Center, UT
May 12: Morrison Red Rocks, CO
May 14: Saint Paul Grand Casino Arena, MN
May 15: Milwaukee American Family Insurance Amphitheater, WI
May 16: Rosemont Allstate Arena, IL
May 8: Indianapolis Gainbridge Fieldhouse Arena, IN
May 19: ColumbusNationwide Arena, OH
May 21: Pittsburgh Petersen Events Center
May 22: Detroit Little Caesars Arena
May 24: Boston TD Garden

Tickets for the tour go on sale to the general public on Thursday, October 29 at 10am local time.

More headline shows for 2027 will be announced in the coming weeks.

QOTSA will release their ninth album, Perfecth, on October 30 via Matador Records.

The album title apparently reflects frontman Josh Homme's belief that the word 'Perfect' doesn't exist. Which it blatantly does, as he knows full well. But rock stars gonna rock star, we guess.

"Every song sounds like it's from a different world," says Homme, in reference to the record. "And that's on purpose, because it's trying to stitch together all these emotions revolving around love, lust, foolishness, and the sort of wisdom that comes as a gift from all that."

The album tracklisting is:

1. It’s Only Love
2. Insignificant Other
3. Where The Goth Girls At?
4. Mono
5. From The Cliff
6. Sunday
7. Easy Street
8. Phantom Limb
9. Run Away From The Mob

Produced by Homme and Michael Shuman, Perfecth will be available on CD, standard black vinyl, on clear vinyl, and as a limited Deluxe Edition - a gatefold LP package which includes handwritten lyrics, stationary, ‘stamps’ housed inside a custom envelope as well as a bespoke piece of art temporarily placed in a custom pocket - exclusively on the QOTSA and Matador webstores.

Old friends and bandmates of Cliff Burton have looked back at the late Metallica bassist’s prodigious talent in conversation with Metal Hammer.

Talking exclusively in our latest issue, Mike Overton – the guitarist in Burton’s first professional band, Trauma – remembers the Castro Valley, California native as his “stage buddy”. However, he reveals that Burton’s chops caused some friction between them in the early days, given the bassist had studied classical music and music theory at Chabot College.

“We actually battled a little bit in the beginning because he was playing way too much stuff, and I was just confused,” he laughs. “Cliff was all over the place, but it fit. I really had to learn a little bit in those few months we were playing and practising.”

He also looks back on the time Trauma, who featured future Faith No More member Jim Martin, entered a local battle of the bands and baffled the judges.

“The looks on the judges’ faces when they came out playing were just, like, shock and awe,” Overton explains with a laugh. “Most of us were going, ‘Man, that stuff sounds great. It’s so progressive and out of the box.’ But the judges were looking for the next Journey.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Brian Slagel – the founder of Metal Blade Records, who released Metallica’s first song Hit The Lights in 1982 – recalls watching Burton play with Trauma at a Los Angeles concert.

“Within 30 seconds I realised that the band was OK but this bass player they had was just incredible,” he says. “You know, he was Cliff Burton. He was in the denim with the big, wavy hair and the bass and going crazy onstage. I spent the whole show staring at him pretty much.”

Burton’s virtuoso style and stage presence led to Metallica poaching him from Trauma barely a year after he joined the fledgling band. Despite losing such a gifted player, Overton says he wasn’t upset over Burton jumping ship.

“The other guys in Trauma were getting more into the lighter stuff, so I wasn’t upset,” he says. “In fact, the first show Metallica did with Cliff, he put me on the guest list, and I’m sitting there going, ‘Oh my gosh.’ I was blown away with the raw power. I missed my stage buddy but I think it’s clear he made the right decision.”

After joining Metallica and getting the rising thrashers to relocate from L.A. to San Francisco for a more fertile alternative music scene, Burton played on three of their albums: Kill ’Em All (1983), Ride The Lightning (1984) and Master Of Puppets (1986). His classically trained talents came across through the bass solos on such tracks as Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth) and For Whom The Bell Tolls, as well as the neoclassical songwriting on Puppets’ title track.

Burton died on September 27, 1986, after Metallica’s tour bus crashed and flipped onto its side on tour in Sweden. He was 24. A memorial still exists near the crash site outside the town of Ljungby and is regularly visited by fans. The band paid tribute on 1988 album …And Justice For All, including a line on the song To Live Is To Die which Burton had adapted from a Paul Gerhardt poem.

Metallica hired Jason Newsted in November 1986 and continued to tour and record, affirming themselves as the biggest band in heavy metal with 1991’s Diamond-selling Metallica. Newsted departed in 2001 and was replaced by current bassist Robert Trujillo. The band are currently hosting a residency at Las Vegas’ multimedia venue The Sphere and will take the stage again tonight (October 22).

Raed Hammer’s full celebration of Burton’s life and legacy in the new issue. As well as his early years, we explore his time in Metallica and the impact he made on future generations of musicians. Order your copy now and get it delivered directly to your door.

Sonic Temple Art+ Music festival has announced its full lineup for 2027's edition, and it's packing another absolute monster of a bill. One of the world's biggest rock and metal festivals, which will take place May 13-16 2027 at the Historic Crew Stadium in Columbus, Ohio, will be headlined by Blink-182, Falling In Reverse and Korn, joining fellow headliners Iron Maiden, who were announced on Friday (October 16).

The announcement of Iron Maiden headlining Sonic Temple in 2027 marked a surprise extra leg of the metal legends' Run For Your Lives world tour, which has been celebrating the band's 50th anniversary since it kicked off in Europe last year.

As well as those four blockbuster headliners, Sonic Temple will also feature over 100 bands across the rock and metal spectrum, including Turnstile, Alice In Chains, The Offspring, The Prodigy, Beartooth, Poppy, Knocked Loose, Primus, GWAR, Castle Rat, Helmet, Blood Incantation, Suicideboys and many, many more.

Those bands and dozens more join the likes of A Perfect Circle, Meshuggah, President, Clutch, Testament, Imminence, Crowbar and Showing Teeth, who had all been previously confirmed for the festival in recent weeks.

Tickets for Sonic Temple 2027 are on sale now from the official Sonic Temple website, with various ticket tiers, deals, discounts and bundles available. See the full lineup for Sonic Temple 2027 below.

Sonic Temple Art + Music Festival 2027 lineup

Iron Maiden
Blink-182
Korn
Falling in Reverse
$UICIDEBOY$
Faith No More
A Perfect Circle
Alice in Chains
Turnstile
The Offspring
A Day To Remember
The Prodigy
Knocked Loose
The All-American Rejects
Beartooth
Slash feat. Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators
Till Lindemann: The Voice of Rammstein
Jimmy Eat World
Dayseeker
Primus
Seether
Mastodon
Sleeping With Sirens
Circa Survive
The Pretty Reckless
Poppy
Hot Mulligan
Ministry
Meshuggah
Bullet For My Valentine
In This Moment
Highly Suspect
Hollywood Undead
President
Ghostemane
The Warning
Insane Clown Posse
Clutch
Underoath
LOATHE
Sleep Theory
Sullivan King
Chad Gray: Voice of Mudvayne & HELLYEAH
Skid Row
Testament
Badflower
HANABIE.
Waka Flocka Flame
Superheaven
Bowling For Soup
Imminence
3OH!3, DRAIN
Gym Class Heroes
Switchfoot
We The Kings
Relient k
Fleshwater
Saosin
Violent Vira
Kim Dracula
GWAR
Forever The Sickest Kids
PeelingFlesh
Castle Rat
Steel Panther
Of Mice & Men
Crown The Empire
Boundaries
Carpenter Brut
Crowbar
Helmet
Blood Incantation
Palisades
Jutes
Fit For An Autopsy
After The Burial
Diggy Graves
Soulfly
The Paradox
Hot Milk
Fear Factory
Dirty Honey
The Black Dahlia Murder
Invent Animate
Ugly Kid Joe
SLOMOSA
Spite
Emmure
Rain City Drive
Demon Hunter
Cute Is What We Aim For
Shadows Fall
Sponge
Monolord
Her Last Sight
10 Years
Lacuna Coil
156/Silence
Escape The Fate
I See Stars
Snot
Spineshank
Vana
Shadow of Intent
Showing Teeth
The Color Morale
Madball
House of Protection
Nevertel
South Arcade
Point North
Nailbomb
Bear McCreary
Midnight
The Ataris
Wheatus
Green Lung
sace6
The Barbarians of California
OTEP
Nita Strauss
Kami Kehoe
Big Ass Truck
Red
Thousand Below
CKY
Butcher Babies
If Not For Me
Unearth
Dry Kill Logic
Pain of Truth
Ho99o9
Dark Divine
Arankai
Allt
Sylosis
Impending Doom
Wolves At The Gate
Infected Rain
Secrets
Eyes Set To Kill
King 810
XCOMM
Sunborn
Silent Theory
Empty Shell Casing

The Offspring's guitarist Noodles has announced that he is to step back from touring with the band as he deals with a health matter.

The 63-year-old guitarist, real name Kevin Wasserman, shared his statement in social media post yesterday, October 21.

"It is with deep sadness that I have to announce that I need to step away from live performances for a while to deal with a sudden and fairly serious health issue," the post reads.

"The rest of the band has my back, is super supportive, and will keep rocking you all in my absence. I hope to be back on stage sooner rather than later. Until then, I will miss all of you with all of my heart.

“Thanks for keeping me in your thoughts," Noodles concluded. "I really appreciate it.”

The Offspring currently have four live shows lined up.

They're set to play The Wiltern in Los Angeles on October 24, SEMA fest in Las Vegas on November 6, the Corona Capital 2026 festival in Mexico City on November 21, and the iHeartRadioALTerEgo 2027 festival at the KIA Forum on Los Angeles on January 16.

It has not yet been announced who will deputise for Noodles in his absence.

The Californian punk quartet are currently touring 2024's Supercharged album.

"It's hard to think of another multi-platinum rock band who are as consistently under-rated as The Offspring," Louder wrote when the album was released. "Back when 'Music Television' actually held the attention of teenagers for hours and hours on end, heavy rotation of the videos for hit singles Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) and the admittedly pretty awful Original Prankster, helped foster an unfair impression of the Orange County quartet as a novelty act, and in 2024, The Offspring's aren't even afforded the misty-eyed nostalgia granted to their hugely inferior successors Blink-182 or Sum 41, nevermind the bewildering acclaim bestowed upon the likes of Neck Deep or Magnolia Park. And it's fair to say that, following on from 2021's inessential Let The Bad Times Roll, the world isn't awaiting a new Offspring album with the same anticipation as say, The Cure's upcoming Songs Of A Lost World.

"Regardless, Supercharged, produced by Bob Rock, who has worked with the band on every album from 2008's Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace onwards, is a triumph, and a late-career highlight."

From the very beginning, Queen knew they wanted their second album to be “big”. Both in musical ambition and thematic grandiosity, 1974's Queen II, as guitarist Brian May noted, enclosed a “whole world”. Though not strictly tied to a concept, it grew from a myriad of influences, from classical literature to chess imagery and Victorian fine art. However, it was frontman Freddie Mercury’s interest in the latter that delivered one of the album’s most outlandish masterpieces, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke.

The track – derived from the 1864 painting of the same name by English painter Richard Dadd – was Queen’s "biggest stereo experiment", mirroring the complexity of the original artwork as well as the sense of mania that found its way into the mind of its creator. Though masked by an entrenched whimsy, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke conceals a dark history, one involving mental illness, incarceration and murder.

Following a brief career in draughtsmanship, Dadd experienced a psychotic breakdown during an expedition through the Middle East in 1842. Undergoing a striking personality change while travelling up the River Nile, he believed himself to be under the direct guidance of the Egyptian god Osiris. Later, upon his journey home through Rome, he became incensed by the desire to kill Pope Gregory XVI, though he abandoned the mission due to the religious leader being “too well guarded".

Dadd’s increasingly violent urges soon turned fatal. At the time, the painter was under his family's care in Kent, following a diagnosis of unsound mind (by today's medical standards, his illness would be recognised as schizophrenia) which described an “aberration of the intellect” along with the suggestion of confinement within an asylum.

Uncomfortable with this idea, his father, chemist Robert Dadd, proposed a course of “quiet and retirement” at home. Unfortunately, in the summer of 1843, Dadd – later claiming to have been under the instruction of Osiris – murdered his father by stabbing him and slashing his throat, convinced that the man was possessed by demons.

Upon fleeing to France, Dadd additionally attacked a fellow traveller before being apprehended by French police. After almost a year’s detainment in the Clermont de L’Oise asylum at Fontainebleau, he was then extracted to England, where he was incarcerated in the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum of Bethlem Royal Hospital.

Dadd, who had begun creating fairy-inspired pieces long before his mental illness took hold, was encouraged to continue his work by the hospital’s head of staff, George Henry Haydon, who commissioned The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke. From 1855, Dadd worked on the piece until 1864, upon which time it remained – according to him – unfinished.

Meanwhile, Freddie Mercury’s love of art sparked during his formative years at Ealing Art College. In the book A Life In Lyrics, former partner Mary Austin recalls Mercury's “fascination” with The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke. “It began with a story he read in a Sunday supplement. He showed me the clipping and told me we had to go see it, as if it couldn’t wait another day.” Describing the work as small but “so dense”, she continued, “You could stare at it for ages and still miss half of it…it was like a puzzle”.

Measuring just 21 inches tall, it depicts a busy woodland scene centred by the “fairy-feller”, an axe-wielding man positioned to cut through a nut. Around him are winged fairies, Oberon and Titania (king and queen of the fairies in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream), peasants, military, a trumpet-playing crane fly, and even Dadd and his father themselves.

Many of the characters, lifted from English folklore and Shakespeare, are given purpose in the painting’s companion poem, Elimination of a Picture & Its Subject-Called the Feller's Master Stroke, and appear again in The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke's lyrics, which portray each scene: ‘The fairy folk have gathered round the new moon shine / To see the feller crack a nut at night's noon time’.

“That song was totally Freddie's thing”, said drummer Roger Taylor to Mojo in a 2004 interview. “Full of Olde English vocabulary – tatterdemalion, satyrs, pedagogues, ostlers and junketers. Some really astonishing stuff.”

According to Austin, Freddie was so “transfixed” by Dadd’s creation that he insisted on viewing it on a weekly basis: “We’d go to the Tate, stand in front of the painting, and then go home again.” In a 2014 conversation with Classic Rock, May described his bandmate as “obsessed”. “He used to take us on the bus to Pimlico to see it at the Tate Gallery”, he said. “If you look at [the painting], it’s so complex, with many layers, which is what Freddie was trying to turn into sound”.

On what attracted the singer to the work, Austin believed that he “resonated with the madness. He wasn’t afraid of it”. She explained, “Every visit, we’d find something new. It was folklore, it was fantasy, all these tiny figures layered on top of each other. It showed him how far you could push detail, how intricate you could make something.”

Bustling with energy, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke captures Queen at their most extravagant. Equally as ornate and maximalist as the painting, the track is stuffed full of sound, composed of frantic harpsichord, hopping drums, numerous vocal layers and overdubbed guitar parts.

“Freddie was really coming into his own”, said Taylor. “With this album he had this crazy plan for this vast number of vocal counterpoints - a six-part harmony there, another six-part harmony overlapping. He didn't seem remotely bothered by the fact that there were only four of us to sing all these parts.

“It was a massive amount of work. We really were consciously trying to break the boundaries of what people thought they could do in the recording studio.”

Due to its complexity, which, according to May in a 2019 Mojo interview, saw the band push “everything to its limit”, the track “could only have been a studio creation”, and was therefore only performed a few times during the Queen II album tour in 1974. The first live recording of the song appeared as late as 2014, when it was released on Live At The Rainbow ‘74.

Though The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke was rarely performed, Dadd’s creation found another way to the stage - through Freddie’s costumes. As per a 1975 Sotheby's listing, the frontman approached designer Wendy de Smet with a costume sketch inspired by a character within the artwork, together creating his white ‘Mercury Wing’ catsuit.

At this time of writing, the Royal Academy of Arts is displaying Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke in London as part of the first major museum exhibition dedicated to the artist in over 50 years.

However, it’s typically housed at the Tate Britain (formerly known as the Tate Gallery), the place where Freddie Mercury’s enchantment with the artwork originally began, inspiring not only one of Queen’s greatest albums, its formative extravagance a portent to classics such as Bohemian Rhapsody, but numerous other creators, including English comic writer Alan Moore, doom metal pioneers Candlemass and fantasy / science-fiction author Terry Pratchett.

The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke undoubtedly holds a complicated, sad legacy, but just like the Queen song born from it, it continues to unveil something new upon every encounter – a masterstroke of obsessive complexity and dedication.

The Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London runs until October 25, 2026. Read more about Queen and Freddie Mercury's last stand in Classic Rock's latest issue, out now.

There are two sides to every story, and Alice Cooper just happens to be on both of them. Born Vincent Damon Furnier on February 4, 1948, his creation of Alice Cooper – the larger-than-life villain inspired by 50s horror movies – helped to inject a bit of theatricality into rock’n’roll that has helped inspire everyone from Kiss to Mercyful Fate.

Cooper has shared parts of his story before – notably in 1976’s Me, Alice and 2007’s Golf Monster – but his latest book, Devil On My Shoulder, is a novel reappraisal of his life through the lens of both Furnier the man and Alice Cooper the character. Hammer caught up with the shock rock legend to talk about his new book and how he feels about his place in the pantheon of rock and metal greats.

What inspired you to do a book basically cross-examining yourself?

“I have to deal with both me and Alice! Who are two entirely different people, by the way. So I got to thinking, ‘Hey, that’d be a great idea for a book – the conflict between the two.’ They coexist, and get along quite well even though they’re opposites. I am just the dad, grandad, church-going guy who’s as normal as can be. Alice is just the opposite – he’s the villain of rock! I have to jump between those skins a lot.”

Rock’n’roll has always had an element of reinvention, but it seems there was always an element of Alice in you even when you were in school?

“Well, I was certainly the class clown. I went to a lot of different schools and I figured the only real way to get along was to be the funny kid you didn’t want to beat up. I learned how to exist like that and I was always the kid who wanted to go see horror movies, always more on the side of the villain than the good guy. But I could see the humour in those movies too, where the guy would come out of a cave and you could see the zipper on the back of his scary costume. I was way ahead of other kids my age when it came to understanding the absurdity of things. I created Alice to be my favourite rock star – he still is.”

We’re at a point where theatricality is coming back into rock and metal in a big way. Does it feel like we’ve come full circle?

“I grew up in Detroit with Motown and stuff. But I really loved Chuck Berry, because he would lead a song off with his guitar. He could tell a story in three minutes and make it syncopated, funny, tragic or whatever. To me, that was so clever. He was the architect for the Rolling Stones and The Beatles – he put the rock into rock’n’roll. So that was my biggest influence at the time, until I was about 15 and then it was the British invasion."

There’s a point in the book where you point out all the bands who’ve cited Alice as an influence. Has there ever been anyone who made you go “I’m not sure I see us in that.”

“Almost all of them. They’d say, ‘We really digested this album’, but it’d always end up being an album where I’d be like, ‘Really?’ The punks kind of liked albums like Zipper Catches Skin, or Special Forces – those really blackout albums I had. Whereas Metallica said they listened to Welcome To My Nightmare. The Sex Pistols said Killer was their favourite album… everybody had a different take.

I think what it was, is that we went so far against what you were supposed to do and still made hit records that could be played on the radio. Everybody could see that, from KISS to [David] Bowie. It was like, ‘Wow, you can be a character and still get hit records?’ That was what we brought to the table. Without Bob Ezrin we would’ve dissolved, I think. He was our George Martin – he took what was good about us and made it better.”

You mention being fascinated by horror movies from a young age – when metal came up and was quite explicitly influenced by that stuff, did it feel like a scene that immediately appealed to you?

“I looked at heavy metal as just being very hard rock – it was still guitar driven rock’n’roll. All it was, was now the frills had been taken out. I found a lot of your metal bands were actually prog bands. Listen to Iron Maiden – they’re metal, but they’re also prog. There’s a 10-minute song that goes through 28 changes, but they keep the attitude. The thing about metal is that it’s all about attitude. How do you want that band to come off? You want the anger and frustration to show, to spit at society. Spit at authority. It kind of got funny to me watching it for a while, because half of these people wanna be Vikings.

It got humorous, because I’m looking at some of these bands – death metal is still hard rock. It’s still guitar driven hard rock, with a different attitude. Then it got more theatrical. It was really just bands… not necessarily living that lifestyle, but doing what I was doing – playing characters up there. I think that’s healthy, I think that’s great. Being a Christian, people would say, ‘What about these death metal bands who are anti this or that?’ I’d go, ‘Hey, they’re yelling at God. I think he can take it.’”

What’s your favourite rumour you’ve heard about yourself?

“Oh my God, I’d hear a new one every day! There was no internet when we started, it was all word of mouth, so stuff like the chicken incident [in 1969 Alice threw a live chicken into an audience thinking it would fly away – the crowd instead tore it apart] started it all. We weren’t the band your parents wanted you to see. The funny thing was, there was nothing in the show that was bannable. It was just so different that nobody knew how to put it in a box.

We’d get to towns and the ASPCA would turn up like, ‘You cannot see a German Shepherd on fire in this show.’ I’d go, ‘What?! Are you kidding me? Who even thought of that?’ The absurdity of it got so humourous we just had to not deny anything and the notoriety would get bigger and bigger."

How mad did it get?

"The best thing that ever happened to us was when they tried to ban us in Britain – our next record [1989’s Trash] went right up the charts and we sold out Wembley. I’d send David Blunkett gifts – he couldn’t figure out why we were so happy!”

Devil On My Shoulder is out now via Ebury Spotlight. Alice Cooper is currently on tour in the UK, and tours North America later this month.

With Ozzy gone and Geezer and Bill all but retired, it falls to Tony Iommi to keep the flame of Black Sabbath burning. On this album, in tandem with Norwegian singer Jørn Lande, he does so in the style of the Ronnie James Dio-fronted lineup and the subsequent Heaven & Hell. Is it as good? Mostly, yes. More importantly, the unmistakable sound of That Guitar and the bludgeon of Those Riffs can only mean that the fire still blazes.

Lande is an impressive partner, co-writing all eight songs with Iommi – even if his lyrics are sometimes more metal-by-numbers than the much-loved existential musings of Terence Michael Joseph Butler. The vocals, though, are arresting and occasionally uncannily like David Coverdale’s, echoing Lande’s work in Whitesnake spin-off outfit The Snakes three decades ago. Behind the frontmen, the Brummie rhythm section of bassist Becky Baldwin (latterly of Mercyful Fate) and drummer Karl Brazil (James Blunt, Robbie Williams etc) are mighty.

There are occasional keyboards and orchestrations by Iommi’s trusted producer Mike Exeter (who has worked with the guitarist since the release of the DEP Sessions, engineered The Dio Years compilation and also has writing credits), but really, and with the greatest respect to all the other talent involved, all you need to know about From The Dark is that Tony Iommi plays guitar.

We hear him first on Over The Violent Sun, a hammer-to-the-anvil opener if ever there was one. Next, on Black Times, he slows things down, then on World Alone – the first single – he delivers a brutal boogie that is the closest this album gets to upbeat. Beyond The Dead goes back to the charnel house, conjuring images of evil fogs at a marvellously funereal tempo. Then comes Stormwatcher, which ups the pace nicely as it chugs through an impressive soundscape on a superior riff. Great solo, too.

Death Wake, featuring a lead break by Iommi’s old mate Brian May, boasts superbly syncopated riffage as it rises and falls. Next is Return Of The Arbalist, a suitably gothic paean to medieval siege weapons, which once again stomps on the ‘loud and fast’ pedal.

The Deluxe CD adds instrumentals Scent Of Dark and Deified (from Iommi’s fragrances side project), but the greatest treat here is designated album closer Legacy. Mixing a mournful bridge with Stargazer-like lyrics, an electric solo and, briefly, Spanish guitar, it’s absolute killer, gold-standard Iommi. All rejoice and draw ever closer to the flames.

In 2017 Dragonforce guitarist Herman Li told Prog how he discovered Dream Theater, and what becoming a member of their fan club had done for him.

“I was born in Hong Kong and the pop music there was just awful. I just wasn’t into it. Then I heard guitar solos for the first time and I thought, ‘Wow, this is really cool!’

I came to London around 1988, and it was around 91 or 92 that I first heard progressive rock. It was the grunge era – but I never got into that so I had to go and find my own music.

I used to live in Hammersmith; and I remember borrowing tapes and CDs from the local library. I got a bunch of Rush albums and then I discovered Dream Theater and Symphony X. I got into them because they had a more modern approach.

Although Michael Romeo from Symphony X was one of the inspirations behind my guitar playing, Dream Theater are my true prog heroes. I got into them on Images And Words – I thought all the songs on that album were amazing – but Scarred from [1994’s] Awake is my favourite track of theirs.

That was from my ‘learning to play guitar’ time so it meant a lot to me. I practised along to that song. It’s not extremely technical but the solo blows you away and it’s got a great melody.

I’ve seen them play every tour since Awake – that was the first prog gig I ever saw – and I thought The Astonishing tour was the best I’d ever seen them. Wow! I don’t know what people were complaining about online because I thought that album was amazing, and the whole show, the production – they nailed it.

They say you should never meet your heroes – but I’ve met Dream Theater loads of times now. We’ve played festivals together, I got John Petrucci to sign my guitar and I even interviewed him once for a magazine, which was fun!

I grew up being inspired by these guys and they’re genuinely nice. Prog is the thinking person’s music – maybe that’s why the musicians are so friendly.

Through Dream Theater’s fan club and online forums, I found out about a lot of other prog rock bands, like Shadow Gallery and Lemur Voice. More recently I discovered Circus Maximus and I thought their album Nine had some really good songs.”

Iron Maiden drummer and longtime Florida resident Nicko McBrain has become the latest in a long line of musicians to express his dismay at Donald Trump's US presidency.

In a new interview with the Daily Telegraph, McBrain slams Trump and United States Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and reveals he turned down the opportunity to play 18 holes with the President, a keen golfer.

"I was actually invited to go and play golf with him,” McBrain tells writer Ian Winwood. "A friend of mine who’s a massive Republican said, ‘Oh, do you want to come and play golf with us? With the president?’ And I said, ‘You fucking what?’… and I just said, no. No mate.

"I’m not politically inclined, although I must be because I have my thoughts about him. I’m not amused by the narcissism, and all this kerfuffle about the Epstein files and whatnot, and especially the debauched war that he's put on Iran."

"My last word on Trump and his bunch of cronies is, they should be put in jail,” adds McBrain, who says he lives "too fucking close" to the President's Mar-a-Lago estate.

Elsewhere in the interview, McBrain, who stepped away from touring with Iron Maiden after the final show of the Future Past tour in 2024 but remains a member of the band, talks about his career with The Irons and his issues with addiction, and reveals that his favourite band are British funk-pop group Level 42.

"Who knows, if I wasn’t drumming for Iron Maiden, whether I would have got in with Level 42?" says McBrain. "I would have pushed for that, certainly."

Nicko McBrain's autobiography Hello Boys And Girls! is published today (October 22) by Harper Collins.

Canadian duo Angine de Poitrine have announced a mammoth world tour for 2027.

The microtonal math-rockers, who exploded into public consciousness a mere eight months ago after their session on Seattle radio station KEXP went viral, will kick things off in Australia before heading across the Pacific to South America for shows in Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Colombia.

Dates in Canada, the US and Mexico will follow, before the globe-straddling, papier-mâché pair head to Europe for a run of shows that climaxes with two nights at London's Brixton Academy.

"Angine is preparing its bullock cart and announces a new ride for 2027!" proclaim the duo.

Presale signups for all new headline dates are available via Layla until October 25 at 10 am GMT. Registrants will receive a unique code the following day, which will give them access to the artist presale beginning October 27 at 10am (local). Other presales start on October 29 at the same time, and any remaining tickets will go on general sale on Friday, October 30.

Angine de Poitrine are currently on tour in Europe. All their shows for the rest of the year are sold out.

Angine de Poitrine: Vol II 2026 tour

Oct 22: Paris Élysée Montmartre, France
Oct 24: Lyon L'Épicerie Moderne, France
Oct 25: Antwerp Trix, Belgium
Oct 27: Berlin Astra, Germany
Oct 28: Hamburg Molotow, Germany
Oct 29: Heidelberg Metropolink, Germany
Oct 31: Amsterdam London Calling, Netherlands †
Nov 01: Groningen VERA, Netherlands

Nov 05: Toronto History, ON
Nov 06: Quebec City Impérial Bell , QC
Nov 14: Montreal Club Soda, QC
Nov 16: Brooklyn Brooklyn Steel, NY
Nov 17: Brooklyn Brooklyn Steel, NY
Nov 18: Brooklyn Brooklyn Steel, NY
Nov 19: Boston Roadrunner, MA
Nov 20: Philadelphia Franklin Music Hall, PA

Nov 22: Mexico City Corona Capital CDMX, Mexico †

Nov 25: Atlanta The Eastern, 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 Avenue, MN
Dec 02: Minneapolis First Avenue, MN
Dec 04: Los Angeles The Wiltern, CA
Dec 05: Los Angeles The Wiltern, CA
Dec 07: San Francisco The Castro Theatre, CA
Dec 08: Oakland Fox Theater, CA
Dec 10: Portland McMenamins Crystal Ballroom, OR
Dec 11: Portland McMenamins Crystal Ballroom, OR
Dec 12: Seattle Showbox SoDo, WA
Dec 13: Seattle Paramount Theatre, WA

Angine de Poitrine: Concerts de Musique 2027 tour

Mar 04: Melbourne Forum, Australia
Mar 06: Meredith Golden Plains, Australia †
Mar 07: Adelaide WOMADelaide, Australia †
Mar 09: Sydney Enmore Theatre, Australia
Mar 13: Buenos Aires Lollapalooza, Argentina †
Mar 14: Santiago Lollapalooza, Chile †
Mar 19: São Paulo Lollapalooza, Brasil †
Mar 21: Bogota Estéreo Picnic, Colombia †

Mar 28: Calgary Grey Eagle Event Centre, AB
Mar 29: Calgary Grey Eagle Event Centre, AB
Mar 31: Ottawa History Ottawa, ON
Apr 01: Ottawa History Ottawa, ON
Mar 06: Winnipeg Burton Cummings Theatre, MB
Mar 07: Winnipeg Burton Cummings Theatre, MB

May 02: Washington The Anthem, DC
May 03: Boston MGM Music Hall at Fenway, MA
May 05: Pittsburgh Stage AE, PA
May 06: Detroit Royal Oak Music Theatre, MI
May 07: Columbus KEMBA Live!, OH
May 08: Nashville The Truth, TN
May 10: Dallas The Bomb Factory, TX
May 11: Austin Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park, TX
May 15: Denver Mission Ballroom, ES

Jun 3-5: Barcelona Primavera Sound, Spain †
Jun 05: Paris We Love Green, France †
Jun 12: Neuchâtel Festi’neuch, Czech Republic †
Jun 14: Milan Magnolia Estivo, Italy
Jun 18-20: Scheessel Hurricane Festival, Germany †
Jun 18-20: Neuhausen Ob Eck Southside Festival, Germany †
Jun 24: Halifax The Piece Hall, UK
Jun 28: London O2 Academy Brixton, UK
Jun 29: London O2 Academy Brixton, UK

Jul 18: Toronto RBC Amphitheatre, ON
Jul 30: Chicoutimi Zone Portuaire, QC

Find Angine de Poitrine tickets.

Sharon Osbourne says that she didn't share doctors' warnings about the potentially fatal consequences of her husband Ozzy Osbourne undertaking his farewell show with the other members of Black Sabbath.

Last week, in an interview with Rolling Stone, Osbourne revealed that doctors in England had strongly advised Ozzy not to perform at the Back To The Beginning show scheduled to take place at Villa Park in Birmingham on on July 5, 2025.

"They advised us not to do the show," Ozzy's wife and manager admitted. "They said it would kill him. We were all together and Ozzy said, 'It’s not an option. It’s what I want.' He said, 'I know I’m dying. If I miss a few months of my life, I want to go this way. This is what I want.' It was his wishes and we went through with it."

Announced in early 2025, Back To The Beginning was put together as a final bow for both Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath, following Ozzy's retirement from touring in 2023 due to Parkinson’s disease and other health issues.

Staged a short distance from where the singer grew up in Aston, Birmingham, it featured a who's who of heavy metal - including Metallica, Slayer, Guns N' Roses, Mastodon, Tool, Anthrax, Lamb of God, Gojira and more - paying their respects to Ozzy and Black Sabbath, and generated money for local charities.

At a screening of the forthcoming Back To The Beginning documentary film in London last night, October 20, Sharon Osbourne revealed that the health professionals' warnings weren't shared with Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward ahead of the show, according to a report in Variety.

"The guys didn’t know how sick Ozzy was," she told former Kerrang! and MOJO magazine editor-in-chief Phil Alexander during a Q&A session. "I mean, even my kids - we never told my kids. So nobody knew how sick he was.”

"He was just praying that his lungs would work and that he could sing."

Osbourne also revealed that her husband was "flying high" after the success of the Back To The Beginning show.

"He was so happy," she said. "Until the day he passed, he was still on that high. He was so excited, so thankful to everyone. It was just joyous for us to see him that way, because we hadn’t seen him that way in years. He was laughing, telling jokes again. It was brilliant."

Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back To The Beginning will get a global cinema release on October 28.

Former Nightwish singer Floor Jansen appreciates her old symphonic metal band After Forever being able to make a brief comeback last year, but would stop short of describing it as a full reunion.

Talking exclusively to Metal Hammer recently, before her shock Nightwish exit was announced last week, the Dutch vocalist, who fronted After Forever from 1997 to 2009, fielded questions sent in by fans.

One user, posting via Facebook, asked how Jansen feels about After Forever reuniting for two shows in The Netherlands in 2025, with some original members and a different singer taking part.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s not an After Forever reunion,” Jansen answered. “It’s an After Forever cover band with original members. I’m part of that band and I’m not there. After Forever stopped many, many years ago. I now have a solo career and Nightwish.”

The singer then explained why she didn’t join the reactivated group: “Because I’m far over my head in work as it is. After Forever is in the past. I like that many people enjoy the music once again, so great, do it. But don’t call it a reunion without the actual original singer and songwriter.”

Founded by guitarists Mark Jansen (no relation) and Sander Gommans in North Brabant, Netherlands in 1995, After Forever started as a death metal act but switched to a more operatic sound after Floor joined. They made five albums together – their final, a 2007 self-titled effort, reaching number six on the Dutch charts – but broke up in 2009. Floor joined Nightwish as a touring singer in 2012, replacing Anette Olzon, then became a full-time member in 2013.

In 2018, Floor told FaceCulture that she thought After Forever ended before their time. “I was not too pleased with stopping,” she said. “I did not think it was a good idea. I think there was [more to do].”

While Floor toured and recorded with Nightwish, singing on three studio albums, guitarist Mark (who split from the lineup in 2002) formed symphonic metal outfit Epica, who’ve had seven albums chart in the Dutch top 10. After Forever returned and played two comeback shows in October 2025, with new singer Angel Wolf-Black replacing Floor.

Floor’s Nightwish departure was announced on October 15. The band said that the parting was a mutual decision and that they will continue working on their upcoming 11th album as planned, with studio time booked for 2027. It’s not yet clear who will replace Floor.

Meanwhile, Floor is focusing on her solo career and will release her second album, Hytress, on January 15. The singles Run and Bring Me Silence are out now. She has European and Central and South American tour dates booked for next year. See details and get tickets via her website.

"I've been dreaming up a storm lately. I've been dreaming up a storm lately, and the entire city is burning. Look, you can see the colours dancing around the flames like the inside of a mad jukebox. Horny angels stalk the streets, looking for a little damnation and wearing nothing but the red badge of love. Motorcycles reproduce in nocturnal alleys, groaning with greasy pleasure, and they've blown up the YWCA like a giant balloon and sent it out to sea, full of screaming, lovely, lonely girls.

"And if I fall asleep here tonight. You better give me some asbestos sheets, 'cause I've been sweating gasoline. My dreams are highly flammable, and there are parts of my body that just won't stop giving off sparks. Stop me before I dream again.

"Why must I be a teenager in love?"

With this wild fever dream intro to the seven-and-a-half minutes video for their debut single, the world was introduced in 1989 to gothic girl group Pandora's Box, a New York quartet featuring only three actual flesh-and-blood humans.

The band might be unfamiliar to you: the song, however, you'll know... just not this version of it. Or the epic story behind it all, encompassing an angry Meat Loaf, a disgraced nun, Wuthering Heights, English film-maker Ken Russell, one member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, and er, "an erotic motorcycle".

Strap in, it's a wild ride.

On his website, Jim Steinman described It's All Coming Back To Me Now, written "while under the influence of Wuthering Heights" as "my attempt to write the most passionate, romantic song I could ever write."

"I was trying to write a song about dead things coming to life," he revealed. "I was trying to write a song about being enslaved and obsessed by love, not just enchanted and happy with it. It was about the dark side of love and about the extraordinary ability to be resurrected by it once dead.

"It's about obsession, and that can be scary because you're not in control and you don't know where it's going to stop.

"It's like Heathcliff digging up Cathy's corpse and dancing with it in the cold moonlight. You can't get more extreme, operatic or passionate than that."

By the late '80s, Steinman had a reputation in the music industry: exactly what that reputation was depended on you asked. To some he was a visionary genius, to others an unhinged maniac. Steinman believed that anything worth doing was worth over-doing, that boundaries were for the weak, that truth could only be found in excess. Raised on classical music and '50s rock 'n' roll, he knowingly self-defined as 'Little Richard Wagner', a composite character who desired everything louder than everything else, long before the phrase became associated with Motorhead.

"I never really saw classical music and rock 'n' roll as different," he told Kerrang! magazine in 1989. "I still don't. I grew up liking extremes in music - big gothic textures. I never have much regard for more subtle stuff... I was attracted to William Blake, Hieronymus Bosch, I couldn't see the point in writing songs about ordinary, real-life stuff... I always wanted to sweep in, speaking in German, with a bat on my shoulder."

Bat Out Of Hell made Steinman a music business legend. Composed by Steinman, produced by Todd Rundgren, and sung by Meat Loaf, it has sold over 43 million copies worldwide, and vindicated and amplified Steinman's belief that everyone else was doing rock 'n' roll wrong. This, unsurprisingly, also made Steinman a lot of enemies within the music industry.

Even Meat Loaf, who first met Steinman in 1973, and loved him dearly - "We belonged heart and soul to each other" he told Rolling Stone in 2021 - sometimes found his friend exasperating. Not least when Steinman refused to let him record what he called his "erotic motorcycle" - It's All Coming Back To Me Now - insisting that he always envisaged it being performed by a woman. While Meat Loaf seethed on the sidelines, Steinman, seeking an '80s version of his favourite 1960s girl group The Shangri-Las, began to assemble an all-female band that could do justice to his magnum opus.

He didn't cast the net too wide when recruiting for Pandora's Box. Ellen Foley was Meat Loaf's girlfriend, who'd dazzled with her performance on Paradise by the Dashboard Light alongside her man on Bat Out Of Hell. Elaine Caswell was found singing in a New York bar, where Steinman was "blown away" by her voice and "the looks of an avenging angel." Gina Taylor was performing in NYC as Tina Turner in '60s musical Beehive. And Deliria Wilde - talked up in the media as a former nun thrown out of a convent for a "shocking" transgression, didn't actually exist, except in Steinman's imagination.

Together, with musical assistance from E Street Band keyboard player Roy Bittan, Pandora's Box recorded the 1989 concept album Original Sin, featuring the singles It's All Coming Back To Me Now, Good Girls Go to Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere), and Safe Sex (When It Comes 2 Loving U).

"I wanted this project as though Clockwork Orange was about girls," he explained to Kerrang! "I wanted to write an album that sums up the last 10 years. What I saw coming out of the AIDS epidemic, as with all plagues, was a plus side. This one is that it's restored sex as something dark and magical and terrible."

Steinman recruited English film director Ken Russell - Tommy, Women In Love, The Devils - to direct a video for It's All Coming Back To Me Now in London. It was not subtle. Reporting from the video shoot, music writer Sylvie Simmons noted, "There's leather and snakes and tombstones and cockrings with shrunken heads on, and a glorious, erotic ceremony on the fantasies of a girl near death from a motorcycle crash being ministered to by paramedics."

"My manager saw it and goes, 'It's a porno movie!'," Steinman admitted.

Despite all the hype, all the headlines, the saucy video, and Steinman's obvious songwriting talents, the single - and indeed the Original Sin album - was a total flop. But the song didn't die.

In the summer of 1996 it was resurrected by Steinman for Celine Dion, who released it as the third single from her 14th studio album, Falling Into You. The single reached number one in Canada, and number two in the US, and is fondly remembered as one of the Quebec singer's most powerful anthems.

Reflecting on the themes of the song on his website, Steinman wrote, "It says that, at any point in somebody's life, when they loved somebody strongly enough and that person returns, a certain touch, a certain physical gesture can turn them from being defiant and disgusted with this person to being subservient again. And it's not just a pleasurable feeling that comes back, it's the complete terror and loss of control that comes back. And I think that's ultimately a great weapon."

Broadway legend Andrew Lloyd Webber reportedly told Steinman that he believed the song was "the greatest love song ever written", and after hearing Dion's version he predicted, "This will be the record of the millennium."

Finally, in 2006, Meat Loaf recorded the song as a duet on Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose.

"I believe that the version that Marion Raven and myself did on this album is the definitive version," Meat Loaf regularly declared while promoting the record, but the record-buying public had already decided otherwise.

Former Killswitch Engage cohorts Howard Jones and Adam Dutkiewicz have reunited in new band Burn Eternal.

The US tandem announced today (Wednesday, October 21) that they have inked a deal with heavy metal label Metal Blade Records and will release their first song soon.

The news follows years of teases about the project and their as-yet-unannounced debut album, which was recorded in 2023 and 2024.

Singer Jones comments: “We couldn’t be more excited to announce Burn Eternal joining forces with Metal Blade for our debut album. The whole team has been amazing, and we can’t wait to get this music out. From an idea while having lunch in London to a completed album, this has been such a fun way to reconnect with my friend. Burn Eternal lives!”

Guitarist Dutkiewicz adds: “I am wicked excited to finally be able to share my project with Howard with all of you! It feels great to be hanging with an old friend and making more music with him. We’re just two goofballs just dicking around in the studio again. We are also excited to be putting it out with the Metal Blade family. Mostly because they truly feel like family, not a corporation. Good vibes abound!”

Dutkiewicz co-founded Killswitch Engage, one of the biggest bands in modern metalcore, in 1999, and Jones joined their lineup in 2002, replacing Jesse Leach. With Jones upfront, the band made a series of era-defining albums, including 2004’s The End Of Heartache and 2006’s As Daylight Dies. The singles My Curse, The End Of Heartache and Holy Diver (a cover of Dio’s 1983 anthem) were smash hits which enjoyed extensive MTV airplay.

Jones departed Killswitch in 2012 due to personal struggles and was replaced by his predecessor Leach. The exit was amicable, and the singer temporarily reunited with the band as a guest at select live shows in 2018, before handling co-lead vocals on 2019 single The Signal Fire.

Talk of Burn Eternal kicked off in 2023, when Jones revealed via social media that he and Dutkiewicz were in the studio together. “1st song down, 11 to go,” he wrote on Instagram. That December, the singer shared that vocal recording for he album was finished. It was confirmed in December 2024 that the album had been mixed.

Meanwhile, Killswitch continue to record and tour. They put out their latest album This Consequence last year and will start a run of shows in Australia and New Zealand at the end of the month. See dates and get tickets via their website.

After having moved on from The Teardrop Explodes, Julian Cope released his second solo album, Fried, in 1984. It was received with bewilderment and confusion by many, but in 2014 Prog argued that it should be seen as a rewarding – if flawed – prog-pop experiment.

After a whirlwind four years fronting psychedelic-loving post-punks The Teardrop Explodes, and a level of LSD ingestion that could only be described as heroic, Julian Cope was living in the Staffordshire village of Drayton Bassett, wide-eyed, paranoid and nurturing an obsession with accumulating toy cars. Rock music had gobbled up another young soul.

Or so it seemed – in fact, he was of a sterner disposition, and way more than the drooling eccentric and/or preening narcissist dismissed by the press. While his contemporaries fed their egos with stadium rock and philanthropy, Cope burrowed deep into the subjects that actually interested him. Those included mythology, paganism, krautrock, psychedelia.

He had looked into the abyss and seen Bono’s puckered face staring back at him, and now he was a man on a mission to show the world he meant business.

The world, however, took one look at the cover of Fried, beheld an emaciated Cope crawling through the dirt wearing nothing but a turtle shell – and needed some convincing. “Nothing I do is ironic,” Cope has since said. “Irony is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

It sold even fewer copies than World Shut Your Mouth, released six months earlier, and resulted him being dropped by his label. It’s a flawed work, but rich too, and a return visit today is highly rewarding.

Epic, anthropomorphic opener Reynard The Fox (categorically not the Fairport Convention song of the same name) is written from the perspective of a hunted animal: ‘Hey in the pouring rain/When the smell of terror brings a thousand eyes/The red men come again/They kill my children and they kill my wife.’

Featuring a nostalgic Doors-esque spoken-word mid-section about Cope’s beloved Warwickshire countryside, and a conclusion that alludes to the singer’s propensity for self-abuse, this is the music of mythical England at its bloodiest.

Meanwhile, the barbed Bill Drummond Says treads that finest of lines between jangly indie and prog-pop, and is inspired by former Teardrop Explodes manager Drummond’s own Julian Cope Is Dead.

With its neat, elegant arrangements, Holy Love is a joyous pop song – Scott Walker reborn as a lanky plank with saucer eyes – and the single Sunspots is a thoroughly uplifting piece of oompah-pop.

And that’s the thing about Fried : for all its obvious signs of embracing cult status, here Cope is a pop fan – albeit the type of skewed pop written by Syd Barrett, 13th Floor Elevators or Love.

With its feet deep in English soil, it’s music that’s plugged into an alternative national grid of stone circles and ley lines, political dissent, wanton hedonism, burned psyches and individuality.

Fried is punk in approach but prog in outlook; it’s earthy, timeless and slightly ludicrous – and all the better for it.

Jean-Michel Jarre has announced UK and European dates for his Oxygene & Beyond tour, celebrating 50 years of his landmark Oxygene album, plus music from a forthcoming new album to be released in spring 2027.

The tour will initially visit cities across Europe, including London’s O2 Arena and Manchester’s Co-op Live, with further concerts scheduled in Katowice, Łódź, Gdańsk, Cluj, Budapest, Berlin, Prague, Brussels and Barcelona, along with multiple nights in Amsterdam and Paris.

Oxygene & Beyond continues a landmark anniversary year for the album that helped bring electronic music to a global audience. A 50th-anniversary edition of Oxygene set for release via BMG on November 20, places a new 2026 stereo remaster alongside immersive Dolby Atmos and 5.1 mixes and bonus content.

"This tour is both a celebration of where it all began and an invitation to imagine what comes next," says the 78-year-old French composer/performer/producer. "The adventure continues."

Jean-Michel Jarre - Oxygene & Beyond tour 2027

Sep 21: Katowice Spodek Hall, POL
Sep 22: Lodz Atlas Arena, POL
Sep 24: Gdansk Ergo Arena, POL
Sep 27: Cluj BT Arena, ROM
Sep 29: Budapest MVM Dome, HUN

Oct 02: Berlin, Germany – Uber Arena, GER
Oct 03: Prague, Czechia – O2 Arena, CZE
Oct 06: Amsterdam Gashouder, HOL
Oct 07: Amsterdam Gashouder, HOL
Oct 08: Amsterdam Gashouder, HOL
Oct 11: Brussels Forest National, BEL
Oct 14: Paris La Seine Musicale, FRA
Oct 15: Paris. La Seine Musicale, FRA
Oct 16: Paris La Seine Musicale, FRA
Oct 19: London O2 Arena, UK
Oct 21: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Oct 24: BarcelonaPalau Sant Jordi, SPA

Further dates for 2028 will follow.

On November 5, Thames & Hudson will publish Machines by Jean-Michel Jarre: A History of Electronic Music, Jarre’s exploration of electronic music’s past, present and future.

Drawing on one of the world’s most significant private collections of electronic and electro-acoustic instruments, the book traces a century of sonic experimentation through analogue synthesis, the digital revolution, immersive multimedia and AI-assisted creation.

Jarre is currently working on a new album, details of which will be announced in due course.

Five months ago, we watched as Angine de Poitrine – microtonal sensations from Saguenay, Quebec’s fertile DIY rock scene via…I dunno, somewhere in space – sent a jam-packed Electric Ballroom into a state of feverish glee. Since then they’ve raked up millions more streams, made their US talk-show debut (The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon) and sold out increasingly massive spaces across the globe.

That London debut caught us by surprise, in the best way – a proper rock show and a thousand times more fun than we imagined such a fiendishly clever, angular duo could be. Do they pull off the same trick tonight? In a word: yes.

Support band/fellow Quebecois rockers Gros Mené kick things off with a pleasingly all-over-the-map melee of punk, psychedelic, blues, hardcore and alternative sensibilities. It all makes a weird, oomphy kind of sense. If All Them Witches came out of a garage in Detroit, instead of Nashville, they might have sounded like this.

Delighted cheers rise and spotty balloons fly over heads as the curtain rises to reveal our pyramid-saluting headliners – resplendent and slightly homemade-looking, like characters dreamt up by a primary school teacher (after a particularly hefty spliff). It’s an oddly wholesome backdrop for hard-stabbing opener Angor, its hypnotic math-rock, prog and ancient scales layered with dizzying dexterity.

Yor Zarad is their mad French-Canadian answer to Focus, intense but giddy, drummer Klek’s long nose flailing between beats, guitarist/bassist Khn stepping back and forth as if in a dance with his pedals. It’s like being suddenly thrust into a psychedelic, high-energy party at some kind of alien souk.

It’s pretty much the same setlist as the one we saw in May, but now with an expanded vocabulary of distorted “eryhjjhthturrrhgtuhh!” declarations between songs. You wonder if there’s a code in these garbled exchanges (two short “urrhgtdddttjtk!”s for “oh fuck my drumstick's stuck!”, or somesuch thing), either way it unites the happy roomful gathered here.

It *is* a less boisterous crowd compared to the frenzied mob at the Ballroom – as you’d expect from tonight’s wider demographic and capacious, high-ceilinged setting. Still, everyone’s quite ready to bob along in unison on command, ADP’s non-verbal offbeat panto showmanship transcending language and culture boundaries.

Crowd-surfers start to flow around Mata Zyklek, ADP’s virtuosic chops and eastern sensibilities reaching banger-grade rockability. Intense but full of silly fun, frenetic then fluid repeat patterns with nods to Arabic, Greek, Turkish, Indian and other old world musical traditions.

Ababa Hotel is a jazzier funk affair – the band going a bit Dave Brubeck on us for a moment – leading into a gloriously bizarre call n’ response “EEEE!” “ARGGGHH!”, proof that even 333-year-old otherworldly beings can do hammy old-school theatre.

Much loved fan favourite Fabienk sees the room descend into full-scale alien disco boogie. Everyone bounces and sings along with the guitar hook. We lose count of the spotty outfits, headgear and hairdos around us, as Sherpa stirs up a heady cloud of eastern hoodoo and tight, twisted oomph for an all-out rock climax.

You do wonder if this’ll all turn out to be some feverish cheese dream that we wake up from in, say, 2028 and go “Hey, remember when we were nuts for these weird instrumental dudes with absurd oversized heads? What the hell was that??” But even if that did happen – whether Angine’s reign ends tomorrow, or years from now – we'd look back on it as a brilliantly eccentric moment in music history.

That said, they have got two London nights booked for next summer, so it’s not over just yet.

When affordable synthesisers arrived just as punk ran out of its initial puff, the new machinery offered an alternative to picking up a guitar and learning three chords.

Thus, tens of thousands of converts plugged in a keyboard and learned three notes – which, of course, is all you need if you have something to say.

The Human League were there at the vanguard. Mainly hailing from post-industrial Sheffield, they always believed in the DIY ethic of punk, even if they expressed it through MIDI pop. And therein lay the prog, especially with the arrival of former Rezillos guitarist Jo Callis in time for 1981’s Dare.

The pop-culture-obsessed ex-art student had delivered a number of hit singles with an approach heavily powered by David Bowie and Mick Ronson; and so it would prove here. (Callis’s 21st-century band FingerHalo gave a convincing live adaptation of The Width Of A Circle, one of Bowie’s proggiest tracks.)

Dare will always be remembered for the smash hit Don’t You Want Me, so ubiquitous that it’s still earning co-writers Callis, singer Phil Oakey and keyboardist Adrian Wright royalities to this day. It’s irrefutably pop – until you listen to the chord structure leading to the chorus and in the chorus itself.

A technical expert will have to explain what’s going on, but it plays on the notion of straightforward construction by presenting alternative inversions of chords near the ones you think you’re hearing. Prog or what?

Don’t You Want Me is the last track on Dare because no one thought it would do anything. Earlier on, though, we have Seconds – and, at this point Callis, Oakey and Wright have transplanted themselves to the world of krautrock, complete with motorik beats, droning backing notes and minimalist leads.

Meanwhile Oakey delivers his lyrics – addressing how the world changed with the assassination of JFK in 1963 – with an almost wilful dismissal of verse-chorus structure.

Such dark, subversive alternative influences are all over what’s regarded as a genre-defining pop record. That’s partly down to producer Martin Rushent, whose proggy credentials by then included Gentle Giant, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Groundhogs, Curved Air and The Stranglers.

The you-can-do-it-too influence of Dare contributed to the Musicians’ Union’s attempt to ban synths in the mid-80s; meanwhile, Rushent helped invent the notion of the remix album, helming 1982’s Love And Dancing under the banner of The League Unlimited Orchestra. It contains a seven-minute version of Don’t You Want Me where you can really hear those weird chords in action.

Seconds remains a massively drawn-out, theatrical part of The Human League’s performances, offering audiences a shamelessly prog moment amid the electronic, not-quite- new-romance. It’s evidence that Dare is a secret prog album hidden in plain sight – which is pretty daring by any measure.

Texan singer-songwriter Ryan Hamilton has launched a GoFundMe to raise money for medical expenses after being diagnosed with Mantle Cell Lymphoma, a rare and often aggressive form of cancer.

"I never imagined I would be creating a GoFundMe to afford to fight for my life," says Hamilton. "But I also never imagined I'd be sitting in an ICU being told I had a rare form of cancer.

"I'm a dad, and more than anything else in this world, I want to be here to watch my daughter grow up. I have songs I haven't written yet. Shows I haven't played yet. Friends and family I love, and a whole lot of life I'm not finished living."

Hamilton says that he has health insurance and also qualifies for financial assistance, but the expenses involved in his treatment are "overwhelming."

"To put it into perspective, just one of the medications I have to take costs approximately $300 per pill," he says. "I have to take one every day for at least the next two years. That's roughly $219,000 for one medication alone. And right now, I'm taking eight different prescriptions.

"That doesn't include everything else that comes with cancer treatment: ongoing oncology care, chemotherapy and other treatments, testing, scans, hospital expenses, follow-up appointments, and the financial reality of trying to recover and work while undergoing treatment."

Hamilton is a former member of indie-folk/pop duo Smile Smile and power-pop act People On Vacation, formed with Bowling For Soup frontman Jaret Reddick. After his debut solo album Hell Of A Day gained traction in the UK, he formed Ryan Hamilton and The Traitors, who toured with The Wildhearts. And later, he released the charity single Fuck You Brain with Ginger Wildheart in order to raise awareness of mental health issues.

After signing to Stevie Van Zandt'sWicked Cool Records, Hamilton released two albums as Ryan Hamilton & The Harlequin Ghosts and toured with The Alarm. He stepped away from music in 2023, but was coaxed back into action by Van Zandt and released his latest album, Haunted By American Dreams, in July this year.

Ryan Hamliton's GoFundMe is seeking to raise $50,000.

American rock titans Aerosmith, who announced their return to live action earlier this month, have shared several photographs taken during rehearsals for the shows.

Alongside the images (below), which were shot by legendary rock photographer Ross Halfin and show drummer Joey Kramer resuming his place behind the drum kit, the band write, "The Bad Boys from Boston are back. Who's coming to the Hollywood Bowl next week?"

Aerosmith are scheduled to perform a pair of California, Dream On: Aerosmith & Friends shows at the Bowl on October 29 and November 1, with an impressive supporting cast in place.

Joining the band will be Guns N' Roses, Black Crowes, RUN DMC, Heart, Andrew Watt, Billy Idol, Chad Smith (RHCP), Duff McKagan (GN’R), Eric Church, Jerry Cantrell (Alice in Chains), Marcus King, Mike Inez (Alice In Chains), Nuno Bettencourt (Extreme), Pat Monahan (Train), Sammy Hagar, Slash (GN’R), Steve Stevens, Sully Erna (Godsmack), Tom Morello, Adam Wakeman, Audley Freed and Kenny Aronoff, with Don Was acting as musical director.

It is understood that the line-ups will vary by night, and that other guests will be announced.

Drummer Joey Kramer hasn't played with the band since their Deuces Are Wild residency in Las Vegas, Nevada, in early 2020, while Aerosmith themselves haven't performed live since abandoning their Peace Out...Farewell Tour in September 2023 after frontman Steven Tyler sustained a fractured larynx.

At the time of writing, tickets are still available for the October 29 show, ranging in price from $335 for standard tickets to $660 for Platinum seats. The November 1 performance is sold out, with resale tickets available.

Rock legends The Rolling Stones have released a new single. Who You Callin' Crazy, a breezy, upbeat affair powered by saxophonist Courtney Pine, comes from Foreign Tongues, Loose Lips, the upcoming expanded deluxe edition of their current album Foreign Tongues.

The deluxe set includes four previously unreleased recordings. In addition to Who You Callin' Crazy, there's Where There's A Will (featuring Steve Winwood on organ), Human Tide, and She Still Comes Around.

A fifth "new" song, Bad Luck Hideaway (a duet by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards featuring drums by the late Charlie Watts), first appeared as a bonus track on the iTunes edition of Foreign Tongues, and then as the B-side to the recent Stones single Mr Charm.

Who You Callin' Crazy was premiered by BBC Radio 2 DJ Vernon Kay, the lucky recipient of a voice note from Stones' singer Mick Jagger.

"Hi Vernon, it’s Mick here," said Jagger. "I’m excited for you to press play for the first time on Who You Calling Crazy on BBC Radio 2. It's The Rolling Stones’ new single, so I hope you like it. Bye!"

Foreign Tongues, the band's 25th British studio album, was released in July, and was produced by the in-demand Andrew Watt, who has also worked with Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop, Pearl Jam and Paul McCartney, swiftly developing a reputation as the go-to guy for bands wishing to recapture some of their youthful zest.

Foreign Tongues, Loose Lips will be released on November 27 as a standalone vinyl edition, a deluxe 2CD edition, and across digital formats. The standalone vinyl edition features all five Loose Lips recordings on LP, alongside a CD of the original Foreign Tongues album. The 2CD edition includes the original 14-track Foreign Tongues album on CD1 and the five Loose Lips recordings on CD2.

Nirvana's era-defining 1991 album Nevermind has overtaken AC/DC's classic Back In Black to become the sixth best-selling album of all time – and it's also outperformed Pink Floyd's epochal The Dark Side Of The Moon.

The new numbers come from data analysis company Chartmasters, who combine physical sales, digital downloads and streaming to calculate an "Equivalent Album Sales" (EAS) total, which also includes sales of singles and songs from those albums that have also appeared on compilations and greatest hits packages.

Chartmaster's listing shows that while Back In Black has sold more physical vinyl copies (37m as opposed to 30m), the other calculations (tracks included on other albums, physical singles, digital singles and streams) are enough to push Nevermind above Angus Young & Co. in the all-time chart.

Nevermind has an EAS of 66,832,000, while Back In Black's total isn't far behind at 66,831,000. Meanwhile, Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon, released 18 years before Nevermind, has an EAS of 63,623,000. Only two rock albums (Eagles' Hotel California and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours) appear higher in the overall chart than Nevermind. The full Top 10 is below.

Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain once claimed he'd taken guitar lessons for two days in eighth grade, so he could learn to play Back In Black's title track, although band manager Danny Goldberg later claimed that while Cobain liked AC/DC's music, he was never comfortable with their lyrics.

Meanwhile, in 1992, Classic Rock's Mark Blake asked late AC/DC leader Malcolm Young what he thought of Nirvana.

"Singer's a blond feller," responded Young. "Bit of a poser."

The Top 10 Best Selling Albums Of All Time (according to Chartmastrs)

1. Michael Jackson - Thriller (EAS 131,253,000)
2. Eagles - Hotel California (74,695,000)
3. Bee Gees & Various Artists - Saturday Night Fever OST (73,267,000)
4. Fleetwood Mac - Rumours (73,108,000)
5. Michael Jackson- Bad (70,196,000)
6. Nirvana - Nevermind (66,832,000)
7. AC/DC - Back in Black (66,831,000)
8. Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon (63,623,000)
9. The Beatles - Abbey Road (61,075,000)
10. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV (60,696,000)

See the Top 100.

Danish ensemble Heilung have announced their first live shows since going on hiatus after completing their 2025 tour in Sweden last August.

The 'Amplified History' collective, known for their euphoric live shows, which feature dozens of costumed musicians and dancers, will resume live work in March next year with a string of dates in Australia and New Zealand. The tour begins with two nights at the iconic Sydney Opera House, and ends with a show at the 13,000-capacity Spark Arena in Auckland. Full dates below.

Support at the shows apart from Sydney will come from the German-born, Texas-based folk-pop singer-songwriter Lilith Max.

A presale for Sydney tickets begins tomorrow (October 21) at noon local time, while the general sale kicks off on Friday at 9am. Tickets for the other shows go on sale on October 27 at 9am local time (presale), with the general sale starting two days later. Tickets are available from Destroy All Lines.

"It is with great honour that we can reveal the first performances after our long hiatus will commence Down Under," say the band. "Even more so because the first time we set our bare feet on stage again will be in the beautiful halls of the Sydney Opera House.

"Only a few Danish acts have managed to perform within these famous walls, and we are proud to become part of that legacy.

"From Sydney, we will once again travel across Australia and finish with one single performance in Aotearoa / New Zealand. Some of these places we have already visited before; others will be new to us. We are counting on better weather in Brisbane this time; those of you who were there will know what we mean!

"Once again, we will also have the honour of sharing the ritual and dance with First Nations people of these lands, meeting old and new friends and honouring the local spirits together."

Heilung originally announced they would be going on hiatus in November 2024, nine months before the end of their last tour, proclaiming, "Heilung retreats now. It will vanish from the stages, the roaring drums will be silent, and the ecstatic dance is over. It will go to sleep, rest for a time and return stronger than ever before."

The collective have also completed work on a new album, Sagas, which will be released on December 11 via Season of Mist. The first single from the album, Læknisgaldr, was released last week.

Heilung: 2027 Tour Dates

Mar 01: Sydney Opera House, Australia
Mar 02: Sydney Opera House, Australia
Mar 04: Melbourne Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Australia
Mar 06: Brisbane Riverstage, Australia
Mar 09: Adelaide AEC Theatre, Australia
Mar 12: Perth Red Hill Auditorium, Australia
Mar 16: Auckland Spark Arena, New Zealand

Find Heilung tickets.

Talking exclusively with Metal Hammer, Enslaved guitarist Ivar Bjørnson has looked back on the time he declined Type O Negative lynchpin Peter Steele’s invitation to support his thrash band Carnivore on tour.

The 48-year-old progressive black metal player was 17 when he met Steele during Enslaved’s first tour of the US in 1994. The person who booked Enslaved’s tour happened to be a friend of the revered goth metal singer/bassist, who died of sepsis aged 48 in 2010, and knew that Steele was a fan, to the point that he had a CD copy of Enslaved’s second album Frost on his tour bus.

“[Steele] was really nice, super friendly,” Bjørnson recalls. “Some weeks later came the offer: ‘If you want to hang out for another month after the tour, you can support Carnivore.’ I was like, ‘Umm, I think I need to go back to high school.’”

When asked if he regrets that decision, Bjørnson quickly says yes. He adds: “Then again, I was 17, so we were barely allowed to go on tour in the first place! And we’d already stayed two weeks longer than we were supposed to. We made up a story that we were staying with a friend in Dallas, but we actually spent two weeks touring Mexico. I didn’t tell my mum about it until I was 26.”

Bjørnson (real name Ivar Peersen) co-founded Enslaved with bassist/vocalist Grutle Kjellson (Kjetil Grutle) in 1991, when he was just 13 years old. The band were closely associated with the ‘inner circle’ of the Norwegian black metal scene, considering founding Mayhem guitarist Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth a mentor, but never joined because their lyrics focussed on Norse mythology rather than Satanism.

Bjørnson recalls another amusing anecdote from the ’94 US tour elsewhere in the interview, explaining that Enslaved’s van was so uncomfortable that he and Kjellson had to drink vodka to be able to sleep.

“Our van broke down while we were driving through the Bronx, so we were told to stay in the van at the garage,” he continues. “When we broke down, we were already quite far into our nightly ritual of getting dozy. At some point, it was like, ‘Where’s Grutle?’ He was running around, with no t-shirt, screaming, ‘I’m Santa Claus!’ Some of the other guys had to go get him.”

Enslaved are currently preparing to release their 17th album Mið, out on October 30 via their longtime home of Nuclear Blast. The band will tour Europe with Icelandic post-rockers Sólstafir in February. See dates and get tickets via their website.

Megadeth mainman Dave Mustaine has explained why his Grammy-winning thrash metal band didn’t play Black Sabbath’s star-studded farewell show, Back To The Beginning.

Talking exclusively to Metal Hammer, the singer/guitarist, 65, says that he and his bandmates didn’t know about the event – which had Metallica, Tool, Guns N’ Roses and dozens more on the bill – until after the lineup had been put together. They found out when news broke that one artist had been dropped for demanding payment, despite it being a non-profit charity gig.

“What we had heard was some scuttlebutt in one of the bands, and they never said who it was, they had asked for an exorbitant amount of money,” the Symphony Of Destruction songwriter tells us. “And I guess that was something that was in really bad form. I don’t know any more about it, but that was not us. We were over in Europe playing.”

Even though Megadeth weren’t involved in the all-day extravaganza at Birmingham’s Villa Park, which took place two weeks before Ozzy Osbourne’s death aged 76 in July 2025, Mustaine adds that he’d “do anything” for Sharon Osbourne, Ozzy’s widow and the event’s organiser.

“Being able to play a show for her and her husband and helping with the grieving process, I’m all about that, because they were there for me,” he explains. “When Sharon got sick the first time [getting diagnosed with colon cancer in 2002], I sent her a bunch of roses and said ‘get well soon’ because of her kindness.

“I never really thought that that would go any further than that, but as soon as I got sick [battling throat cancer in 2019], her and [Ozzy] were right there. They called me not long after the diagnosis had come out and I thought it was really commendable.”

Later in the interview, Mustaine is asked if Megadeth, who announced their impending retirement in August 2025, would host their own Back To The Beginning-style sendoff. While Mustaine would “love to do something like that”, he believes it’s sometimes “a little self-serving to do stuff like that”: “It’d have to be done with grace and style, like the Osbournes.”

He adds that he doesn’t “have a lot of guys that I’ve [kept up] with in the music business”: “They’re just afraid to come up and talk to me. I don’t know, it’s kinda lame. I feel like a self-ostracised loner, sometimes. I love the idea of what we’re doing: touring.”

Megadeth released their 17th and final album, a self-titled effort, in January. It was the first album of their 43-year career to top the US Billboard 200 charts. Their farewell tour started in the summer and will continue with a run of European and UK shows in the New Year, with Black Label Society and Testament supporting. See dates below and get tickets now.

Mustaine published In My Darkest Hour, a memoir about his cancer battle, via Da Capo last month. In an extract shared exclusively with Metal Hammer, the frontman recalled how his former Metallica bandmate James Hetfield rallied behind him following his June 2019 diagnosis.

"Hearing from him just as I was about to begin treatment, when I was at a pretty low point, meant a lot to me,” Mustaine wrote. “Fuck the drama. Be a human being. And don’t do it for clout or likes on social media. Pick up the damn phone and reach out. Privately. One to one. That’s what James did.”

Back To The Beginning raised an estimated combined total of £6–£7 million for the charities Birmingham Children’s Hospital, Acorns Children’s Hospice and Cure Parkinson’s. An abridged concert film, containing snippets of each of the sets performed that day, hits cinemas next week.

Megadeth 2027 European tour dates:

• Mar 09: Belfast The O2, UK
• Mar 11: London OVO Arena Wembley, UK
• Mar 12: Nottingham Motorpoint Arena, UK
• Mar 13: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
• Mar 15: Cardiff Utilita Arena, UK
• Mar 16: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
• Mar 18: Birmingham BP Pulse Live, UK
• Mar 19: Leeds First Direct Bank Arena, UK
• Mar 21: Paris Zenith, France
• Mar 23: Brussels Forest National, Belgium
• Mar 25: Dusseldorf Mitsubishi Electric Halle, Germany
• Mar 27: Copenhagen KB Hallen, Denmark
• Mar 28: Oslo Spektrum, Norway
• Mar 30: Hamburg Sporthalle, Germany
• Apr 01: Berlin Velodrom, Germany
• Apr 02: Krakow Tauron Arena, Poland
• Apr 04: Munich Zenith, Germany
• Apr 05: Bern Festhalle, Switzerland
• Apr 06: Milan Unipol Forum, Italy
• Apr 08: Lyon Halle Tony Garnier, France
• Apr 10: Barcelona Olimpic Arena, Spain
• Apr 12: madrid Movistar Arena, Spain
• Apr 13: Lisbon Sagres Camp Pequeno, Portugal

The prolific Ozric Tentacles continue to carve out their own sonic universe on 17th studio album Harmonic Mind, which evokes their free-spirited origins and takes in trippy 90s rave culture. Prog catches up with bandleader Ed Wynne to discuss hanging out in Donovan’s flat, the ever-changing collective and his plans to avoid the AI trap.

For progressive music fans of a certain vintage, Ozric Tentacles always seemed like the new kids on the block, bucking the trend in the late 80s by purveying instrumental, intricate, driving, guitar-based fare. So it’s rather surprising to realise it’s 40 years since they permeated our consciousness – firstly as hidden champions of the free-festival movement, subverting record company norms by self-releasing a succession of brightly coloured cassettes; then unlikely pioneers of neo-psychedelia’s resurrection, capturing a crossover audience with their ravey vibe.

We’re now almost 17 studio albums in, give or take the vast number of off-the-record releases, authorised or otherwise, in the Ozrics’ “floativerse.” The current line-up’s youthful energy captures something of band’s critical and commercial peak circa the early-90s Erpland era. Guitarist and band leader Ed Wynne acknowledges that the prevailing vibe extends to latest release Harmonic Mind.

“Each album does sort of tread on the shoulders of the one before,” he says as he gears up for an autumn tour with The Orb, “but there’s a hark back to some of the earlier stuff, more of a band feel – there are camaraderies between bandmembers enjoying the progression and development of the tracks.”

Harmonic Mind is, perhaps, a gentler vibe than other recent releases. “I don’t know what that comes from. Maybe because I am!” he says. “I do have it in mind to make an outrageously heavy tune very soon!”

All members of the current live line-up contributed to the studio work, most notably Wynne’s son and right-hand man Silas Neptune, whose implacable countenance behind a bank of keyboards and dials belies a dexterity that’s only occasionally unleashed. In Wynne’s words, “He takes care of a lot of the synthesisers, and making sure everybody can hear each other.” Neptune’s musical partner, Saskia Maxwell, contributes fulsome flute; Wynne contrasts her with former Ozrics flautist ‘Jumping’ John Egan.

“She’s more accurate than John! It was fun with John, but I recorded everything he played because it was never going to repeat. With Saskia I give her a scale and she’ll go away for a day and practise; there’s more control.” Maxwell also lends a mysterious dancing presence onstage: “She brings a female element, which hasn’t always been the case with this band.”

The line-up is completed by drummer Pat Garvey and bassist Corey Wallace – “a real joy onstage; he’s got this feeling about him.” Wynne himself works through his usual melange of guitar styles: funky rhythmic licks, bell-like harmonics, and full-blown eyeballs-out soloing, as well as acknowledging “an acoustic resurgence,” with the title track incorporating “more than one guitar superimposed over another, sculpting, erasing and editing.”

For a family as musical as the Wynnes, there was little formal training as Ed grew up; instead, innate talent prevailed. “My mum got me trying to have piano lessons, but the guy took her aside and said, ‘I’m very sorry but this is the only totally unmusical person I ever tried to teach. It’s not going to work!’ I started off just playing piano and then my brother had a guitar and I thought, ‘I must have a go on that.’ I thought that little grid on the chord-book must mean the frets and fingers. I worked a few chords out and started really enjoying it.”

He can’t recall his transition to playing solos, but that blistering work remains his calling card. He lists Hendrix, Zappa, Hillage, Santana and Holdsworth as key influences. Just as important growing up, though, was the innate atmosphere around him. “My father was a sculptor – an artist – and there was an aura about the house we grew up in,” he explains. David Wynne’s most recognisable works included Girl With A Dolphin (1973), a statue that stands near London’s Tower Bridge; and an interlocking hands design for the 50p that marked the United Kingdom joining what was then the EEC that same year.

Wynne recalls: “A few famous musical people used to hang around the place, which was very inspiring and made me think, ‘This is a good way to be.’ I was given the freedom to not get some boring job. I was very blessed.” Home was an apartment in Wimbledon, London, in the same block as psychedelic singer-songwriter Donovan. “I’d get back from school and think, ‘Which door should I go in? I’ll go in Don’s door today!’ There they all were with their instruments, smoking dope, with weird lights, telling their jokes and odd people doing strange things. It was absolutely fascinating!”

Woking in his attic, Wynne became a prolific composer and performer from the early 1980s onwards. “I had my four-track recorder where I spent all day, every day, just recording stuff. It was brilliant. I couldn’t stop. I thought, ‘Well, why stop? What if I can’t stop?’ I just got into recording as a permanent way of life, really.”

Wynne became equally adept at guitar, bass, various keyboards and production techniques, but also took on board a rolling collective of people, some of whom, like brother Roly, ended up in the Ozrics and its precursor, Bolshem People. “The house was between the local pub and the railway station. People used to pop in on the way back from the pub – which was either good or bad! We used to set up and just crank it out. My dad would stomp on the door and say, ‘It’s too loud. I’m trying to work here!’ He was fairly nearby in the house trying to make his sculptures.”

Tapes were altruistically sent out to anyone interested in them, starting a dispersed archive of unofficial material, which has continued to this day. “It was experimental stuff,” says Wynne. “There’s a load of bootlegs out there which I’m not that proud of, but it’s fun for people to see where it comes from.”

That was also the starting point for the band’s six coveted brightly coloured cassettes, including the wonderfully-titled Tantric Obstacles, which were sold at gigs and via mail order for the few in the know. “Roughly once a year we were like, ‘Oh, look, we’ve got enough for another tape!’ As those evolved, it became more like doing an album.”

The culmination was 1988’s masterful, ethnically diverse Sliding Gliding Worlds, which was subject to additional influences “Prior to that I went for a three-month jaunt to Thailand – I just got fed up with the whole Western thing and said, ‘Sorry, guys. I’m getting a ticket. See you in a few months!’ I had an acoustic guitar and got to the point where I felt very, very content. I came home and literally camped out in the studio. Nobody saw me for about a month, and I had Sliding Gliding Worlds at the end of that.”

Prog wonders if self-releasing the cassettes was an anti-system statement in itself? “It was more about the fact that it was too strange for most labels!” he replies. “And it was really fun. We used to literally spend all week copying tapes and getting photocopies, cutting out covers, folding and putting them in there and having a box of them at the gigs, selling them for £2.50.”

By that time he’d developed an affinity with the free festival movement. “I left school and ended up going to Stonehenge Free Festival and playing at campfires – all kinds of random fun free stuff.” The band were a main attraction at the famously anarchic Treworgey Tree Fayre in Cornwall in 1989, not long after they’d released their first official album, the pristine Pungent Effulgent. Their ramshackle, jammed performance on Wango Riley’s Stage (an open-sided lorry) very much represented a messy alter ego.

“It was hard for people to get paid at that festival,” he recalls. “There was a farmhouse on the edge of the site and we managed to get past the gatekeeper. Suddenly we were in this normal house, full of hippies. We made a cup of tea and one of our lot went upstairs to get the dosh for the gig. He found this room where the floor was completely covered in pound coins, with this guy desperately trying to pull it all together!”

The classic line-up featured Wynne’s sadly missed brother Roly. “He was a pure bass player,” he remembers. “I didn’t have to explain the frame or the mode or the scale or the style – he’d just grab the bass and play the perfect line.”

Alongside the brothers in the late 80s were Egan, the flautist and visual centrepiece; plus Joie Hinton and Merv Pepler, soon to succumb to their ravey sides with Eat Static. High points were Jurassic Shift, which reached No.11 in the UK charts in 1993, and high billing at Reading and Glastonbury Festivals the same year.

Both the Ozrics and The Orb found themselves in the vanguard of a new movement in that era, 80s, which bridged genres and generations: The Orb via samples of Steve Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Musick and Pink Floyd; the Ozrics with ravey wig-out tracks such as The Throbbe, Sploosh! and Pyramidion – which still feature in today’s live sets. Their audiences cross-pollinated at the time, but as they prepare to tour together, is that still the case? Wynne thinks so.

“The bands are very, very different to listen to. But there’s a match with the feeling that comes across: the almost goofy, funny kind of spacey thing that people enjoy. I admire the fact that The Orb aren’t too serious about things. I find it a bit crazy when people do take themselves too seriously.

“It’s something to do with – sorry to say this – prog people. When someone says ‘prog’ to me, it makes me think of complicated music and people with furrowed brows trying to play it as well as they can. It’s probably my biased opinion, but to me ‘prog’ means ‘progressive,’ which means moving forward. In one way we’re progressive because we’re trying to push out the edges of what’s been done before.

“At the moment I’m basically trying to second-guess AI. I don’t want AI to be able to copy what I do. I’ll have to make it a bit stranger, perhaps!”

Harmonic Mind is on sale now.

Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has looked back on recording for his heavy metal side-project Probot with Motörhead legend Lemmy Kilmister.

The Ace Of Spades singer/bassist was one on a long list of guest stars on Grohl’s 2004 album, which also featured late Venom leader Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant, Soulfly/ex-Sepultura singer/guitarist Max Cavalera and Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil, among many others.

Lemmy contributed his voice and thunderous low end to the single Shake Your Blood. In the new issue of Metal Hammer, Grohl looks back on recording the track, revealing that Kilmister showed up to the Los Angeles sessions at 10:30am and asked, “Who wants to drink?”

Grohl continues: “In the sink were two dirty pint glasses. He washes them out with his hand. He pours about three-fourths whiskey in each and tops it off with a little Coke. And then he stirs it with his finger. He hands it to me and I’m like, ‘Here we go.’”

The singer/guitarist adds that he was impressed by Kilmister’s commitment to Probot, as he had two sets of lyrics for what would become Shake My Blood, the unused draft being called The Blind Could See. After recording that day, the debauchery continued.

“[Kilmister] says, ‘Who wants to do some drugs?’” Grohl recalls. “It was me and [producer] Nick Raskulinecz, and we’re like, ‘No, we’re cool, man.’ He pulls this little packet of speed out of his rolled-up sleeve. And I’m like, ‘I’m gonna watch Lemmy snort rails off the Neve desk? This is nuts!’ And he just takes a pinch out of it and eats it and swigs it back and he goes, ‘Who wants to go look at some tits?’”

Shake Your Blood was released as Probot’s second single in December 2003, ahead of the album dropping in February 2004. During a 2004 Rolling Stone interview, Kilmister revealed that he wrote the song’s lyrics in 10 minutes. The album proved a moderate commercial success, charting at number 68 on the Billboard 200 and 24 on the UK Albums chart.

Kilmister passed away on December 28, 2015: four days after his 70th birthday and two after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Grohl attended Lemmy’s funeral, which was live-streamed via Motörhead’s website, and delivered an emotional eulogy. The Foos man remembered him as “the one true rock’n’roller who bridged my love of AC/DC and [Black] Sabbath and [Led] Zeppelin with my love of GBH and the Ramones and Black Flag”.

The new Hammer contains the full interview with Grohl, who talks with Scott Ian, Charlie Benante and Frank Bello of New York thrash metal veterans Anthrax. Order your copy now and get it delivered directly to your door.

Metallica have uploaded pro-shot footage of their performance of Devil’s Dance at the Sphere.

The Diamond-selling heavy metal titans played the deep cut from their 1997 album Reload for the first time since 2008 during the second show of their ongoing Life Burns Faster residency at the Las Vegas venue on October 3.

It continued what has become a trend of the band performing rare songs at the Sphere. At their first Sphere show on October 1, they dusted off 1988’s …And Justice For All for the first time since 2014. The October 3 show also featured the first performance of 1996’s The Outlaw Torn for the first time since 2019. Watch the Devil’s Dance footage below.

Metallica announced their Life Goes Faster residency in February, and the run of shows is set to continue until March. The performances feature stunning video effects generated by Industrial Light and Magic, along with UK/US animation team Treatment Studios.

Their performances of …And Justice For All and 1984 instrumental The Call Of Ktulu have been uploaded to YouTube as well, the Call Of Ktulu clip having amassed more than a million views in five days.

The Sphere residency is proving a major commercial success, with all of the announced dates having sold out, but it’s not been trouble-free for the 10-time Grammy winners. At the October 10 date, singer/guitarist James Hetfield made a statement against “entertainers” influencing audiences with “their bullshit”.

Although Hetfield did not name names, his comment came shortly after Macklemore was kicked off of an Ed Sheeran stadium tour for saying “free Palestine” onstage. Among those irked by Hetfield’s words is former Pink Floyd singer/bassist Roger Waters, who went on a scathing rant against the metal musician on a podcast last week.

“He’s just showing that he’s a complete prick,” Waters said on The Katie Halper Show. “He’s got an IQ of about three, and why we’re talking about him, I don’t even know, because he’s a nobody. He may have a few hundred million dollars or whatever, but he’s a prick.”

Metallica are the first metal band to host a residency at the Sphere, but it’s unlikely they’ll be the last. Tool drummer Danny Carey said in February that his progressive metal stars are eyeing up possible shows at the Vegas venue in 2027.

What began as an impromptu phone call in 2017 snowballed into a punk prog supergroup featuring Stewart Copeland of The Police fame, King Crimson and Zappa guitarist Adrian Belew and Level 42’s Mark King. Together Gizmodrome became a very happy and well-timed accident – and as Copeland told Prog that year, they also became “a hell of a lot of band.”

“Is it prog?” ponders Stewart Copeland, who is tall, gangly and adept at a comedy French accent. “Recently the French were telling us: ‘It’s progressive, but the songs are short. We are confused. We think maybe it is punk prog!’ I’d say we’re prog because there are way too many fucking drum fills all over the place. And we’re prog because Adrian’s guitar-playing is insane and should not be allowed on a pop record. And then Mr King fires up and this is a whole new world – all the other bass players, like Stanley Clarke, will soil their pants when they hear this. Oh my God, that’s a hell of a lot of band. Then again, maybe it’s punk because of the energy – and because, frankly, it’s our intention to burn down the city and eat all the children.”

Lock up your preconceptions: Gizmodrome are here. Something of an all-star musical supergroup – “That’s better than being called a shit group,” offers Mark King – they combine the fantasy line-up talents of Copeland on drums, King on bass and Adrian Belew on guitar, with Italian keyboardist Vittorio Cosma (a long-time Copeland collaborator) smoothing it all together. Stentorian vocals and peculiar lyrics are chiefly provided by Copeland in a manner he describes as “Tom Waits meets Barry White with a little hair of Lee Marvin,” while King and Belew chime in with sweeter voices.

The outfit’s phenomenal pedigree coalesces in vibrant, imaginative and unexpected ways. As they eagerly confirm, there was a natural chemistry, and what’s emerged from the lab – a studio in Milan – is a fizzing fusion of prog, jazz, pop, funk, reggae and, er, fusion.

That chemistry is clear as Copeland, King and Belew, evidently enjoying each other’s company, banter boisterously in a London hotel. Their enthusiasm, humour and sparky interplay perfectly match their eponymous album’s eclectic effervescence. So how did this crackling collaboration, this dream ticket of dexterity, come about? Although the three constantly interrupt each other with quips and teases, they’re equally fast to eulogise each other’s talents. King kicks off the tale.

“Last July, I get a text from Stew, saying, ‘Hey Marco – already with the Italian thing – do you wanna come join a band in Italy?’ Straight away I said yes. Seven days later we’re in the studio. As a bass player, the chance to play with Stewart is just fantastic. He’s got to be in every drummer Top 5. And I started out as a drummer, so the drums are very important to me. Then you see Adrian weave his magic, making things happen. It’s just been an absolute joy. And so easy to do – it’s not as if everyone had to find their place, to settle in… we just played, and it sounded so good that after 10 days most of the songs were in the can. Stew had most of these songs ready, but they weren’t much like they are now. We did another session in April. There’s a real sound to this band, it’s happening.”

Belew concurs. While he did add a few parts later, “90 per cent of it is us three in the studio, being able to get excited, to talk about it. Very rarely does putting people in the room together result in the synergy that this automatically had. It was palpable. By the end of the second day I was thinking, ‘Damn, what a great band this is!’ And then I’d think: ‘Oh… is it a band? Or is it a project?’ But every day we’d get up, go to the little piazza, have breakfast and talk about everything in the world. Then we’d go to the studio, play, have a little tequila at five and get straight back into it until a long late-night meal at some Italian restaurant. You do that for a couple of days, you get to know each other. The jokes and stories start to flow. You become invested in the whole thing. And you realise: this is a band! We should go and play this for the world.”

“That,” says Copeland in his best Doctor Evil voice, “was my secret plan all along. Adrian thought he was coming in to play a few solos on ‘Stewart’s project’ – but by day three it’s his project. I mean, otherwise I can’t afford these guys!”

Thus bonded, they plan to tour early next year (with Level 42’s Pete Biggin on drums to free up Copeland), hoping the response to the album will be as good as all the early signs indicate.

Copeland and King technically toured together back in 1981, when Level 42 supported The Police across Europe. King reckons it was a “fantastic education for a young dude to stand side-stage and watch how these guys, who were becoming one of the biggest bands in the world, were doing it.” He’d never met Belew before Gizmodrome, “so that in itself, if nothing else, has been brilliant.” The pair express excitement at how their voices sat together instantly. And Copeland and Belew knew each other “just marginally, by reputation.”

Butting in over their relentless rapport, Prog asks if, as primary songwriter, Copeland had to adopt the headmaster role. “Ah, no – one important part of the process was we dispensed with the notion of ‘sanctity of the composer.’ Of course, when you write a song, you imagine it’s perfection; it’s goddam Stairway To Heaven, y’know? But with these guys, it’s gonna get better. Whatever chords or riffs I had, they’d chew on it for five minutes then for the next 25 they’d fuck it up, with my blessing and encouragement. For example, Belew comes in on something that seemed a perfectly good song and – fuck me – we’re into a whole new cosmos! Again, that was my secret trick, my plan. I wanted them to realise it was our album, not mine. That’s the way you get things happening.

“You get stuff out of Belew that Trent Reznor’s not gonna get; you get the real shit, coming out of his imagination. Once set free, it gets freer and freer and wilder and crazier. But this got way better than I even imagined: you can hear the excitement of real inspiration. By the way, that’s an old Police trick. Next time you hear a Police record, consider that the drummer and guitarist had never heard that song until 20 minutes before recording it. It’s a useful technique…”

King interjects, “We’d be shouting out, ‘Section change!’ And, ‘I don’t know this part yet!’ At times it was like The Troggs Tapes on acid.”

“It struck me that for the first time in a long time, this material was custom-made for what I like to do,” Belew says. “I bring a lifetime of experience in, and everything I’ve learned since I heard Purple Haze when I was a kid, anything you want, I can throw it in there. And if you don’t like that, fine, I got another idea. If Stewart’s singing about an alien radio station, cool, I’ll play an alien radio station sound…”

Alien radio stations are just one element of Copeland’s curious, declamatory, serio-comic lyrics, which remind one of his erstwhile punk alter ego Klark Kent. Here be zombies in the mall, horny politicians and “strange things” happening. A recurring theme is that of letting off steam, escaping, going off the rails.

“At home, I’m a suburban dad, driving my kids to school,” the drummer says. “But when I’m out in the world, sitting at a lonely train station, riding a cab across a strange foreign city – that’s when your mind goes into really weird reveries. That’s where this shit comes from. Y’know, ‘the pain of the life that I have lived.’” (Imagine, if you can, Copeland putting on a Steven Toast voice for that last part.)

He goes on to discuss how mistakes are made while “looking for Babylon” – but of course what happens on the road stays on the road. Quoting his own lyrics, he says, “Back home you got a solid life/That don’t mean a thing out here…” The sense of rootless disorientation in his songs is, however, leavened with madcap humour. Which forces the question: what is the fascination with horses? The lyrics make frequent allusions to our equine friends. The trio crack up, pointing at each other and declaring, “Oh, that was him!”

Finally, King shrugs, “Oh, Stew is just fucking obsessed with horses.”

Eventually Copeland moves us on. “Some things are autobiographical. I’m an old bastard coming down from my ivory tower for a fling, or at least the guy in some of the songs is. Maybe a little dinged and dented, but just give me a Cadillac and I’ll stay all night. We seem to visit many strange cities in these songs. ‘Ah, my life is a strange city,’” he all but winks.

Pressing them on whether their previous rich bodies of work inform or colour this music leads to King professing his lifelong love of jazz fusion and Belew getting mildly defensive on the subject of his King Crimson past. “Of course when you’ve partially shared 30 years with a band of that name, some of that’s in there, but I’ve been out of that orbit for many years now. I’ve branched out solo and with my own band, so… I don’t think in those terms any more.”

Copeland clarifies that his own performance style delivery is influenced by the opera he spent three years writing. “It’s storytelling – you act the note as well.”

“He’s in character,” adds Belew. “And he’s going for it. Playfully.”

“Playful?” mock-protests Copeland. “I already told you: my intention is to burn down the city and eat all the children. It’s Darth Vader, but in a good mood. Hey, the original motivation was fun in the sun in Italy. The mission was la dolce vita. Then when these serious players came in we tried to hold onto that nihilistic feeling… and we just went ape-crazy.”

Scott Holiday is a child of the desert. A beach dweller these days, the Rival Sons guitarist grew up in sight of California’s Mariana mountain range, on the edge of the Mojave riverbed. Summers were spent exploring, taking psychedelics and absorbing otherworldly surroundings. It left clear marks on his musical vocabulary, captured now in his kaleidoscopic debut (under the solo guise of HOL1D4Y) Topology. It’s trippy but hooky. Think Pink Floyd via The Beatles at their weirdest, wrapped in a cinematic package and punctuated by the distinct, suave yet gnarly guitar tones crafted in his day job.

"My stepdad had these massive outdoor speakers, and we would listen to [Pink Floyd’s] Echoes while the full Moon came up over the mountains, the stars out," he says. "So when I think of desert music, I think of Pink Floyd and cosmic music. Topology fits into that world."

The first music I remember hearing

Some of the first music I took in was on TV shows. The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine I remember pretty deeply – very psychedelic cartoon, comical and light and far-out. And stuff from Sesame Street like the Pinball Number Count song – you’d be hard-pressed to find a funkier song than that.

The first song I performed live

One of the first things I learned and performed in front of junior high kids was Rush’s Fly By Night. I think we were playing this song maybe without a singer, so I was covering multiple jobs. Around the same time, I got up with my cousin, who’s a great singer, and we did [Extreme’s] More Than Words at my uncle’s wedding – we nailed that one.

The guitar hero

Jeff Beck. There’s something elusive and visceral and raw and creative and beautiful about Jeff. Also Dave Gilmour, Django Reinhardt, and then you get into the jazz world and it’s Grant Green, Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell. Of course, Hendrix and Page. I like modern players too, like Nels Klein, Jonny Greenwood, and Ruban Nielsen from Unknown Mortal Orchestra – nobody ever talks about him.

The singer

If you were gonna force me, I would probably say Aretha Franklin is the ultimate voice, and David Bowie the ultimate character-singer voice.

The songwriter

I could get into the Leiber & Stollers, but as a writer, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, George, John and Paul, and their individual works. Joni Mitchell, Prince…

The greatest album of all time

The first that popped into my head is The Dark Side Of The Moon, and in that world I also think of [Hendrix’s] Axis: Bold As Love, Led Zeppelin IV. But in hip hop you might pick A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders, or in the jazz world John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, or Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis. And Bob Marley’s Babylon By Bus .

The best cover version

Donny Hathaway’s cover of John Lennon’s Jealous Guy, his 1972 live version. Generally I feel originals are better, but you’d have to be so Lennon-biased to hear those two and go: “The Lennon version’s better.” Donnie’s just feels more realised to the meaning of the song.

The best record I've made

Probably Topology, because it’s the only one that is mine [laughs]. With Rival Sons, Great Western Valkyrie sticks with me for some weird reason, and I think Feral Roots is the other one – we had a certain groove, and a way we were writing that felt really succinct on those two records.

The best live band

Queens Of The Stone Age. We did a summer with them and they’re hard to beat. Those guys pack a punch. Also Nine Inch Nails.

The most underrated band

Spoon, from Austin, Texas. I love that band. I feel like they’ve never made anything bad. When I’m making Rival Sons records or my own, just in the ethic and the quality control, I think of a band like Spoon. They are a benchmark in my head. Gimme Fiction is great, but they have no bad records – even their B-side demos.

My Saturday night party song

If I’m on the bus and we’re gonna rev it up, and I’ve got all the crew dudes, I have the ‘Roadie Friday’ playlist. The first song that jumps into my head is Van Halen’s Dance The Night Away. And the first five or six Van Halen records, just put them on random – you’re gonna start partying when you hear these songs.

The song that makes mr cry

Keith Richards, Hate It When You Leave. There’s something raw with Keith that I just feel like it speaks to me. Keith sings a love song in a way that I feel connected to. Also my partner in Rival Sons [Jay Buchanan]. He wrote a song called Feel Better, that’s deep. And I love Deep Swimming on his new record.

The song I want played at my funeral

I would want the people I love the most to play things to feel great, and feel love and feel joy. Like The Bar Kays’ Holy Ghost, which is one of the funkiest songs ever put to tape, and with the message of ‘dance and live until we can’t dance and live any longer’.

Topology is out now via Sacred Tongue/Thirty Tigers.