Henry Yates

Leaving the bedroom for the rehearsal room exposed my flaws and smashed my confidence. But if you can stick with it, you’ll have the best laugh of your life and supercharge your playing

Demo’d in ’74, when their compositional skills wrote checks their chops couldn’t cash, Squeeze shelved Trixies for 52 years. Now, Tilbrook says he’s proud to pull this lost album from the time machine

A powerful, lyrical bluesman, the founding Jethro Tull and Blodwyn Pig guitarist always played music his way – even when it hurt his career

Joanne Shaw Taylor was just a young kid when she met B.B. King. Now she is paying tribute to the King of the Blues on Joe Bonamassa’s all-star album

B.B. King would have celebrated his 100th birthday in September last year. But when Joe Bonamassa discovered that the centenary was going almost unnoticed, he swung into action

The Final Countdown is one of rock's evergreen anthems, but Norum admits he thought it was “dreadful” at first

A slide master with a voice like life, the English bluesman hated the spotlight – and deserves notice beyond his perennial Christmas hit

The Ten Years After bassist survived Hamburg’s Star-Club, sparked the blues boom, achieved immortality at Woodstock – and is still going strong at 82. “Music,” he says, “it’s a drug…”

With a refreshed lineup, a new EP, and a boxset documenting the band's storied career, The Wedding Present founder/frontman Gedge and new guitarist Wood tell us why they're not afraid to bleed for their art – but they're not superglueing the wounds together

The departed soul man was the Stax band’s MVP, writing and driving the R&B classics that ruled the ’60s

Boss's Matt Knight gives us the lowdown on the XS-1 and XS-100 Poly Shifter series, the pitch-shifting pedals that put the DigiTech Whammy on notice

DarWin guitarist Greg Howe and bassist Mohini Dey, plus the supergroup’s mysterious namesake, tell us about new album, Distorted Mirror, and how it is reinventing the concept album

Algerian desert rockers’ new release, Essam, fuses electronica with fuzzbox vibes, political flashpoints and ancient poetry. Call it desert blues if you like – but they don’t

The not-so-gentle art of relic’ing has enjoyed a renaissance since its maligned roots in the mid-’90s. We asked scene godfather and Gibson Custom Shop guru Tom Murphy how the tide turned

The amount of money changing hands for artist-owned guitars at auction is eye-watering. Amelia Walker of Christie's London explains what sells and who's buying – and whether it will last

The fabled upright acoustic bassist leaves us with a thousand tales of misadventure and an extraordinary body of music that weaves through the rock ’n’ roll era

Grave illness and a broken heart have tested Stephen Dale Petit – but the bluesman tells us that completing his Clapton-bolstered masterpiece, Be The Love, is all that matters