Last night (September 14), the polka-dotted duo Angine de Poitrine made their US TV debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon – and used the occasion to debut a new song, Zugzegk.

Brandishing their new Godin double-neck guitar/bass, Khn started the song with a robotic voice that has since become synonymous with the Dada-ist band, before launching into the microtonal, looped frenzy we’ve come to expect from them. It’s noodly, it’s upbeat, but somehow, still catchy – and just over four minutes long.

The Québécois duo – guitarist/bassist Khn and drummer Klek – are undoubtedly one of this year’s breakout acts. After their session on Seattle radio station KEXP went viral, the band – complete with oversized papier-mâché masks, oversized noses, and polka dot costumes – racked up millions of streams and graced the lineup of a multitude of major festivals.

Speaking about their sudden rise to the top, guitarist Khn recently told Guitar World, “It would be presumptuous to think that it’s only about the music. Because while we make an honest effort to create fun and original tunes, there’s also an endless flow of amazing music being put out every day by people whose virtuosity knocks me out of my chair.

“Has the success of any rock band ever been only about the music? The music needs to be catchy, but it’s also about how people relate to it. Angine confusingly celebrating while also satirizing some of rock ’n’ roll’s clichés – all in good fun – might be what a lot of people needed.”

The microtonal mavericks are currently on a sold-out North American tour, which kicked off on September 9 at Le Poisson Rouge in New York.

Mid-gig string breaks are the stuff of nightmares for guitarists. Angine de Poitrine, though, recently turned tragedy into triumph by jamming their way out of trouble.

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock since February, the microtonal mavericks have been 2026’s breakout act, with a double-neck guitar – now crafted by Godin – at the heart of their act.

But when a string broke on the six-string half of the instrument, the band made the best of a bad situation. Instead of carting the guitar off-stage for a tech to restring in private while they played on with their second double-neck, they kept things front-facing.

Godin actually made two custom models for guitarist Khn, so it was certainly possible. But that wouldn’t be as fun as jamming while the tech simultaneously restring the guitar in front of the crowd, would it?

The duo were playing at Le Poisson Rouge, New York, on September 9 when Khn’s high e string broke. Cue their tech, wearing a head torch and moving with a swift but calm efficiency, to enter the stage and attempt a restring while Khn played some pleasingly squelchy riffs atop Klek’s drum beats.

It was a fiddly job, one that could have put an end to the jam, but Khn and his tech pulled it off.

There’s a huge roar as the restring is complete, especially with how smoothly it’s done. At no point is the jam interrupted by the sound of a string slowly rising to pitch. Hats off, sir.

The band recently spoke to Guitar World, offering fascinating insight into their meteoric rise and self-described “freak show.” The story of Khn’s madcap guitar teacher is a big highlight and shows how the band's alien music came to be.

They’ve come a long way since sawing frets onto an S-type knockoff, and then in turn Frankenstein-ing it with a bass guitar. Rush guitarist and prog rock titan Alex Lifeson is the latest to heap praise on a band that no one predicted would have made 2026 their year.

Mastodon have broken their silence after it was announced the band is being sued by the estate of the late Brent Hinds.

“Sadly, a private business dispute with the estate of our dear departed friend Brent Hinds was made public,” the band’s statement read. “We strongly deny allegations of ill intent on our part and intend to vigorously defend what we believe is a meritless lawsuit.

“We don’t intend to speak publicly on this going forward, as we feel this wouldn’t honor Brent’s memory or the legacy of his musical gifts.”

Last week, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that original Mastodon members Troy Sanders, Bill Kelliher and Brann Dailor are defendants in a filing that was lodged by the estate of their former guitarist.

The lawsuit lists a number of complaints, including the unauthorized use of Hinds’ image, and that the buyout of Hinds’ interest in merchandise was never finalized before his death.

As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, the estate alleges that Mastodon “selected and placed a recognizable image of Brent on the album cover of [new record]Marrow Deep and disseminated that cover to advertise, market, distribute, and sell physical albums, digital downloads and streams, merchandise, and related goods or services”.

Hinds’ estate also alleges that claims were made by the band about Hinds’ substance abuse, and that private information was made public after the guitarist’s death. Hinds, who left the band in March last year, died in August 2025 following a fatal motorcycle accident.

Mastodon’s response comes amid a further personnel shake-up. It has been confirmed the band had recruited Baroness frontman John Baizley to join their touring lineup.

Kelliher and co played an intimate warm-up gig over the weekend ahead of their upcoming Poisonous Weapons tour. Baizley was brought out to help close the set, but Mastodon confirmed his involvement would continue long term.

"We had a blast at the Earl last night!” Mastodon wrote on Instagram. “A great pre-tour warm up before we break out the lasers and LED screens.

“Our good pal, John Baizley from Baroness joined us, we had so much fun, we’ve invited him join us on stage during The Poisonous Weapons Tour to play a special set of Mastodon songs we haven’t played in a long time! We’re really excited to bring this special set on the tour. It’s going to epic! Who’s ready to party?”

With their 12th studio album, Cursum Perficio, arriving next week, thrash metal titans Anthrax are showing no signs of slowing down.

Their Jackson V-touting guitarist, Scott Ian, has often served as the band’s figurehead since their inception in 1981. But some of their best ideas come from behind him, and the man responsible is finally getting the recognition he deserves.

Drummer Charlie Benante, who is currently part of the Zakk Wylde-fueled Pantera reunion, has been driving a lot of the band’s material behind the scenes. For decades, he’s written a huge portion of their material on guitar. For many, that side of their operations has been a complete mystery.

“It’s so weird that 40-something years later I’m starting to get recognized for it,” Benante says in the new issue of Guitar World. “I don’t want to say it was a dirty little secret. Insiders knew, but on the outside, I wasn’t really allowed to talk about it in the interviews.”

“Scott had nothing to do with that,” he adds, “but some of the other guys felt discredited that the drummer was writing all the songs. The problem with that is I don’t think it ever dawned on them the effect that it had on me – that I could never speak about it or talk about it.”

It became an understandable sticking point for the sticksman. So he sought solace from an LA new wave band.

“It was frustrating because Scott and I always did the bulk of the writing and the bulk of the work,” he continues. “I watch the Go-Go’s documentary [2020’s The Go-Go’s] at least once a year because I relate to it so much. At one point, the band wants the two primary songwriters to give up the credit and divide it evenly within the band, and when they’re talking about it, I go, ‘That’s exactly how I feel.’”

Over the years, he’s learned to put his frustrations aside – or at least vent them towards his TV screen once a year, before dusting himself off and going again. Whether he gets his flowers or not doesn’t dilute his commitment to the cause.

“My attitude is still all about Anthrax,” he reassures us. “If I have to take a backseat for it, I’m doing it for the betterment of the band itself. I’m just happy that after all this time, the creativity still comes.

In a studio report with Guitar World in 2014, Ian explained how “great riff writer” Benante’s role has been fundamental to the band’s success, while also explaining his key role in turning demos into bangers.

The riff-writing drummer’s full interview features in the new issue of Guitar World, which can be ordered from Magazines Direct.

President have been a breakout success story in British metal over the last year or so. The anonymous masked metallers were announced for Download Festival 2025 without releasing a second of music, and have gone from strength to strength with an EP and an album released since.

Now, they’ve got the backing of Manson Guitar Works. The firm, acquired by Muse maverick Matt Bellamy in 2019, has added their two guitarists, Heist and Protest, to its artist roster.

Protest was the first to come aboard. He’s been wielding an extended-scale five-string MV-bass for a little while. Heist, meanwhile, has just taken delivery of a Baritone seven-string Verona Modern model, completing the set. A close inspection reveals Fishman humbuckers on the Verona, as well as an EverTune bridge. Both players also get custom logo inlays at the 12th fret.

Notably, these seem to be custom-made guitars, given that neither is listed on the Manson website. By Guitar World’s count, Heist’s new weapon might just be the firm’s first-ever seven-string baritone. It follows Matt Bellamy going full Meshuggah with an eight-string Oryx model, which has been supercharging their back-to-their-best new album, The Wow! Signal.

What Bellamy’s new beast and these two President models signal is a real statement of intent from Manson to integrate itself into the extended-range modern metal scene.

It’s a burgeoning market, so it’s a smart move from Manson, and one that might yet yield some very interesting production runs.

“We’re incredibly proud to be involved with both Heist and Protest from President,” Manson says. “Their debut album Blood Of Your Empire has been on repeat here since its release on Friday. Any of you lucky enough to be seeing their sold-out US rallies, let us know what you think of these beasts!”

Manson has been pushing the boat out in 2026, with Bellamy’s main guitar – a James Bond-like, gizmo-loaded electric guitar – getting three reissues in February.

Its “radical” Supermassive Black Fuzz has also gotten high praise from Guitar World.

A previously unheard gem from the Van Halen archive is to be released as part of the limited-edition version of Alex Van Halen’s new book on the band.

The song, Glitter, was demoed in 1974, just a year after the band changed its name to Van Halen. But getting your hands on a copy will be a real battle. The book, Van Halen, is an official chronicle of the band and is limited to just 1,500 signed and numbered copies.

Still, it’s big news for Van Halen fans, coming just shy of two years after the release of Unfinished, the final song Eddie and Alex Van Halen wrote together before the guitar legend’s 2020 passing.

Glitter features original bassist Mark Stone, who left the group later that year. He features alongside the Van Halen brothers and David Lee Roth.

The track will be served up as a 7” picture disc vinyl, featuring artwork inspired by the band’s 1984 tour design. It also stands to be the earliest Van Halen track ever to see the light of day.

The B-side is a specially selected spoken-word recording from Alex Van Halen, born from conversations he had with the book publisher, Genesis.

“Van Halen opens the Van Halen family archive for the first time,” Genesis says. “The band’s story is told through an extraordinary collection of correspondence, tour memorabilia, album artwork, press material, musical equipment, unpublished photographs and much more.”

The 312-page tome traces the band’s Dutch origins, their arrival on US soil, and the glitz, glamor, and chaos that followed.

You can pre-order the book from Genesis for $475/£345.

In May, fast-rising UK heavy metal band Tailgunner – mentored by ex-Judas Priest veteran K.K. Downing – faced unspecified allegations that led guitarist Rhea Thompson to leave the band and bassist Thomas Hewson to step back temporarily.

At the time, the band said they were “made aware of recent allegations made against him,” with Thompson saying that “due to moral and ethical concerns, I am no longer playing for Tailgunner”.

Now, it has been revealed that Hewson was accused of sexual abuse and repeated abusive behavior towards Jara Solís, a guitarist who was also the band’s photographer. Both Hewson and Solís have released lengthy public statements about the alleged abuse.

According to Solís’ account, their initial contact began in March 2025. A short while later, she joined Tailgunner’s tour as their photographer, where the first alleged incident of sexual abuse took place, alongside “shouting, intimidation, and increasingly aggressive behaviour,” according to her statement.

She claims further incidents took place over the next couple of months. In early 2026, she joined Tailgunner as a stand-in guitarist for a two-month tour, a period she describes as overwhelming and during which she “would spend hours crying every day” and “increasingly suffered from panic attacks”.

Solís subsequently confided in others before sending the band a detailed statement, and alleges that the only band member who ultimately supported her was dismissed.

The guitarist claims she filed a police report in her native Spain. On May 14, 2026, the case was archived because Spanish authorities do not have jurisdiction over events that occurred in the UK.

She subsequently filed a formal statement with the British police but decided not to pursue legal proceedings further due to the financial and emotional repercussions involved.

Hewson denies the accusations and has now publicly shared what he describes as “the complete chronology” of their relationship.

The 36-page statement details key points in their relationship, in which he insists that while their professional and personal involvement developed mutually, he did not use his position in Tailgunner to obtain sexual access to Solís.

Hewson says that his hiatus was a period during which the information supplied to the band was assessed, although he does not specify who reviewed the details. Furthermore, he claims that he has never been “contacted, questioned or interviewed by police in Spain or the UK,” and has never “previously faced an allegation of sexual abuse”.

“It transforms a disputed account of one relationship into a public assertion that I represent an ongoing danger to women generally,” he writes.

“I fully reject that. Tailgunner has worked professionally with numerous women throughout its existence, including women who continue to work with the band today. Those people are aware of the allegations and do not accept Jara’s characterisation.”

Hewson is back on tour with Tailgunner. Meanwhile, Solís made her statement public last week and is actively performing with her band Hunger.

Tailgunner’s and Solís’ full statements are available via their social media accounts.

This feature was originally published in the January 1995 issue of Guitar World.

The successful implementation of a revolution requires two things: thinkers and thugs. Individually, these groups are powerless. But put them together and you've got a mighty fighting machine: the thinkers set the agenda and the thugs put in the boot.

Luckily, the primordial New York punk scene was blessed with its share of both species. So, odd as it might seem, the first “punk” gig was a poetry reading. In February of 1971, Patti Smith gave her debut reading in Manhattan, with Lenny Kaye backing her on guitar. From this one-off art happening, the Patti Smith Group eventually developed into a full-fledged rock band.

Meanwhile, Smith’s friend Tom Miller was also exploring the connection between rock and poetry. He changed his named to Tom Verlaine, in honor of the French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, and went on to start Television. He’d played in a band with Richard Meyers, who later became Richard Hell, frontman for the Voidoids.

Television, the Voidoids and the Patti Smith Group were prominent among the bands that in 1973 regularly played a new bar on Manhattan's Bowery, CBGB’s. Before that, amazingly enough, there had been no place in New York City for original, unsigned rock bands to play. They even barely had CBGB’s, which was originally intended as a venue for different kinds of music – the club’s initials stand for Country, Bluegrass and Blues.

As Television guitarist Richard Lloyd recalls, the venue had to be persuaded to present rock bands: “Mainly, [club owner] Hilly Kristal was afraid that the Hell’s Angels [whose headquarters are still nearby] might come down to the club.”

Reportedly, Kristal relented when it was discovered that the bar’s cash intake was much higher on nights when rock bands played than on country, bluegrass or blues nights. “We brought people into the club who actually spent money at the bar,” Lloyd says with a laugh.

If Television, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and Talking Heads represent the more cerebral side of what was going on at CBGB’s, the “thug” element made a strong showing too. The Dead Boys and Dictators would come in time, but first and foremost there were the Ramones: the rock band as cartoon gang.

They were four guys from Queens in matching black leather motorcycle jackets and nearly matching bowl haircuts. The little one on the right would yell “one-two-three-four” and the jackets would commence pounding out amazingly short, fast, loud, and tight rock songs with lyrical hooks like “now I wanna sniff some glue” and “beat on the brat with a baseball bat.”

“When we started off, we thought we were a bubblegum band,” Johnny Ramone explains. “The Bay City Rollers were out at the time and we thought, ‘All right, this is our competition.’ But we were a little too warped to be like that.

“We heard Saturday Night by the Bay City Rollers, and we went and wrote Blitzkrieg Bop because we wanted a chant in one of our songs. But we didn’t know we were doing something that was warped; we were singing about stuff that it was natural for us to sing about – sniffing glue and things like that.

“We didn’t think anything was unusual about it. We weren’t trying to be unusual. That’s what happened later on – bands would try to write about sick things. That’s the difference between us and them.”

Ramone bought his first guitar in 1974. It was a Mosrite Ventures II – the same model he uses to this day. The MC5’s Fred “Sonic” Smith had played a Mosrite, but Ramone says he got his mainly because he confused a salesman at Manny’s Music in New York by asking the price of just about every cheap used guitar in the place.

The second time he asked about the Mosrite, the clerk quoted a price that was $20 cheaper than the first time. So for the princely sum of $50 bucks a punk rock legend was born.

“Right when I started with the Ramones is when I bought a guitar and learned how to play,” says Johnny. “So I didn’t have any influences insofar as learning how to play. The first song I learned to play was a Ramones song.”

This touches upon what is perhaps the most important point about punk: ideas came first, technique second. A cartoon of the time showed three crudely drawn chord diagrams, representing A, E, and G chords. “This is a chord,” was written next to the first diagram. Then, “This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.”

In the early ’70s, technique had become a bully. Lots of very creative people were scared away from rock because they couldn’t play 32nd note triplets as fast as the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Punk brought them.

“All those bands at CBGB’s were there because there was no place else for them to go,” says Smith’s colleague Lenny Kaye. “Tom Verlaine always describes it as, ‘Each of them was a little idea.’”

Luckily the electric guitar served those llittle ideas very well. “I think what we were trying to do was bring it back to more of a rhythmic thing,” Kaye explains.

“Even though my favorites were Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck, I probably took more influence from someone like Pete Townshend, where you were dealing with really hard rhythms – being able to move the music like that.”

In its own way, Johnny Ramone’s relentless down-picking was every bit as revolutionary as Charlie Christian’s horn-like solo lines had been in the ’30s. Christian’s demonstration of the guitar’s potential as a single-note melody instrument was a critical juncture in the instrument's history.

In the ’70s, punk artists’ reassertion of the guitar’s rhythmic power was, in its own way, equally significant. Rhythm is what has always made rock the powerful, primal, tribal, sexual force that it is.

Interestingly – like many developments of similarly cosmic import – Ramone’s speed-machine down-picking initially grew out of purely practical considerations: “When I first started playing, it was a way of keeping time, and a way of being able to count out the parts: ‘One, two, three, four... next chord!’”

The Ramones have never ceased to value simplicity. Then, as now, Johnny recorded with his Mosrite plugged straight into two Marshall heads feeding two 4x12 Marshall cabinets. The band have kept their songcraft basic and powerful too. At first this also was a matter of necessity.

“We knew we had to play competently and tight,” says Johnny, “because audiences were used to seeing a certain level of competence from the established major bands. We knew we couldn’t try to play something we weren’t capable of playing. We stuck to simpler things, so that it would sound like we were playing well.

“I had noticed something like that when I saw Slade play live. They were limited in what they could play, but the songs were great and they sounded so good. You could really see that, within their capabilities, they could do what they did very well.”

When the Ramones first played CBGBs in August 1974, there still was no official name to describe what they were doing. The ranks of similar bands were swelling rapidly and would soon include Tuff Darts, Blondie, the Mumps, Mink DeVille and the Speedies.

A word for the phenomenon finally crystallized in December 1975, when John Holstrom and Legs McNeil published the first issue of Punk magazine, one of the very earliest zines.

“Punk” ultimately came to mean not only a type of music, but a lifestyle which valued the pillars of “lowbrow” culture – junk food, sitcoms, cheesy little garage bands. What is today – in an era of swap meets and Nick at Nite – absolutely mainstream was new, exciting and “outside” in 1975.

Without such a receptive environment, the Ramones might have been forced to learn to play guitar solos and ended up sounding like Foghat. Then again, if not for the Ramones, the knotty poetry and tortured, stark guitar-based probings of artists like Television, Smith and Hell would probably never have made it out of lower Manhattan. A revolution requires both thinkers and thugs.

It was to prove as true in London as it had been in New York. By the time the Ramones went to England in 1976, they were the best shock troopers any revolution ever had. Something about their speed, economy, and tunefulness – not to mention their prickly blend of humor and menace – hit a large, hyper-sensitive cultural nerve. To a certain type of mid ’70s rock fan, punk was absolutely irresistible.

For Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, coming back as Rush – and playing some of the trickiest songs in the prog-rock legends’ playbook – meant getting back up to speed. Musically and physically. That proved to be a mammoth task in itself.

“It’s a tough show,” Lee says in a recent Rolling Stone interview. “Each night has its own difficulties. But we’re all professionals and that’s why you do all the work. My day and my off days are not fun. I sleep late because now I’m on a late schedule. I have to see my physio person.

“Coming back at this age, your fear is that you can’t do it anymore, and you’re going to be a compromised version of yourself. And I don’t want that.”

Lee goes on to reveal that that was one of the main reasons why Neil Peart retired – specifically, because “he refused to show anything but his very best in public”.

He continues, “And that’s why, according to my daughter, I didn’t smile for a year and a half before appearing onstage. My daughter came up to me and she was so happy. She said, ‘You look so happy up there. I haven’t seen you smile like that in a year and a half.’ I’m like, ‘Really? Am I really a grump?’”

As for the most challenging song on their setlist, the duo is quick to point out that most of their worries centred on A Farewell to Kings, which they included for the first time since 1979.

It’s the first track from their fifth studio album, which bears the same name. “It’s a weird song,” describes Lee. “It sounds like a walk in the park with a minstrel, but it’s not.”

The inclusion of what the two deem to be the “hardest song” of them all points to their determination, even at their age, to “be better than we’ve ever been not just be as good as we were,” as Lifeson insists, “and challenge ourselves with songs that we haven’t played in a long time.

“All of them were challenging after 11 years, anyways. But to bring back A Farewell to Kings, that took a lot of work.”

In related news, Alex Lifeson separately discussed the struggles he faced leading up to the Rush reunion.

South Bay L.A.’s Joyce Manor have built a reputation for crafting short, spirited blasts of emo-punk, but there’s something different about their latest LP, I Used to Go to This Bar. And producer Brett Gurewitz has as much to do with it as the band themselves, according to frontman Barry Johnson.

For the first time, they didn’t double-track the rhythm guitars, and they also eighty-sixed the high-gain amps. But instead of trashing the band’s energetic sound, the simplified production leveled up their performances and the guitar interplay between Johnson and co-guitarist Chase Knobbe.

“The perceived increased fidelity is just more intentional guitar sounds,” Johnson says, while Knobbe adds that Bad Religion guitarist and Epitaph label head Gurewitz didn’t labor much over guitar sounds – he simply knew what’d work.

Most of the tones on the album came from a ’50s Les Paul Junior through a vintage Fender Deluxe Reverb and a Mesa Boogie cab, with an occasional assist from a Vox AC30 and a Gibson ES-330.

“We’d get it to where the amp was on the edge of breaking up,” he says. “It sounded too clean to me, honestly, but when I heard it with everything else, it was amazing.”

That straightforward approach serves the songs well. The chord inversions on All My Friends Are So Depressed, which gave them their first Billboard hit seven albums in, wouldn’t work as well behind a wall of gain.

Even barn-burner I Know Where Mark Chen Lives benefits from the restraint as Johnson and Knobbe build the tension before detonating a powder keg on the chorus.

“The parts on this record are written very specifically,” Knobbe says. “We’ve gotten pretty obsessed with making the guitar parts kind of weave, where we’re not really playing the same parts. It’s all the same melodic information, but you find ways to sort of fuck up the rhythm a little bit so it locks in.”

The band also employed a “trick” they learned from producer Rob Schnapf, who produced 2016’s Cody.

“He’s like, ‘When you do everything four times, the listener begins to expect what you did previously. On the second verse, do something slightly different.’ It keeps the song interesting in a way, and it’s just a bit more sophisticated.”

• I Used to Go to This Bar is out now via Epitaph
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Oceansize took their name from a Jane’s Addiction song. Like Jane’s Addiction, they inspired other bands to greatness. They also imploded spectacularly.

“Either people wanted to fire other people or they were threatening to quit,” says frontman Mike Vennart. “It became a matter of, ‘If you fire him, I'll stay.’ With me in the middle of it going, ‘What the fuck do I do?’”

Prog was a dirty word when five working-class art college students from Manchester formed the band in 1998. Now, it seems like the only term broad enough to capture their mercurial output.

They had three very different guitarists, each with a boatload of pedals, playing on top of some of the most ambitious time signatures this side of Meshuggah.

Their songs regularly stretched to eight minutes, bolting the ugliest grunge riffs to the most achingly beautiful post-rock crescendos, delivered with NWOBHM-raised guitar chops. It was hugely ambitious and sonically explosive, but hard to even comprehend on a first listen.

Yet 15 years on from the band’s demise in 2011, Oceansize now makes more sense than ever. Mainstream success may have eluded them, but their influence has quietly seeped into the DNA of some of the biggest progressive guitar artists on the planet. Heck, they inspired the biggest progressive guitar artist on the planet.

“Sleep Token were very complimentary,” says Vennart, who supported the masked arena-metallers in 2024 with extreme metal side-project Empire State Bastard. “Obviously I didn't know who the fuck they were because no-one knows what they look like. But they knew who I was.”

If there’s any trace of Oceansize in Sleep Token’s broad-church metal it’s in their ‘anything goes as long as it fits the mood’ ethos – a sentiment that can be traced back to cult English odd-rockers Cardiacs and Mike Patton-fronted weirdos Mr. Bungle. They all saw genres as walls to be smashed rather than rules to be obeyed.

“[Frontman] Vessel really respects the artistry of Oceansize, the songcraft,” says producer Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood, who worked with Sleep Token on 2025’s Even in Arcadia. He describes Oceansize as one of the “most underrated, best bands ever.” For his money, Only Twin, a brooding, polyrhythmic head-fuck of a seven-minute epic from 2007’s Frames, is a candidate for “best song ever written”.

When he shared it with his frequent collaborator – and former bandmate – Misha Mansoor, a lightbulb went off. The Periphery guitarist became so enamored with 2007 album Frames that he began using Oceansize as a kind of shorthand when writing with the rest of the band.

“We’ll refer to certain parts as ‘the Oceansize part,’” he says, citing sections of the band’s 16-minute monster Reptile as a “direct Oceansize ripoff.” “They understand what that means and what I’m going for. It’s a vibe thing. Oceansize are very good at setting a vibe and living in it.”

Origin story

The Oceansize vibe was apparent from the very first time its five members – Vennart, Steve Durose (guitar), Richard ‘Gambler’ Ingram (guitar/keys), Mark Heron (drums) and Jon Ellis (bass) – got in a room. You can thank their sixth, chemical member for that.

“We took mushrooms on the first-ever rehearsal,” Vennart says. “Every practice we ever did, we had a four-track machine running the whole time because we were smoking so much weed back then, we would never have remembered anything that we’d written.”

The group’s three guitarists quickly settled into their roles: Vennart was the oddball riffsmith, pulling from Soundgarden and Pavement. Gambler was the “absolute fucking noise fiend” who wanted Danelectro’s signal-obliterating Fab Tone on at all times. Steve Durose was “basically Slash” but with a penchant for “astral twinkly guitar that sounds like a beautiful constellation.”

“I was always proud of the fact that we were never playing exactly the same thing,” says Vennart. “It was always a 3D image; a sort of mosaic effect.”

Vennart and Durose could shred. But they hid their abilities – and their influences – from the world, under strict orders from drummer Heron.

There were rules. Don’t reference metal bands (unless it’s Meshuggah). Don’t mention any guitarists who you liked as a teenager. And definitely don’t play any classic rock riffs (Vennart says an argument after Durose played a Guns N’ Roses riff at soundcheck “lasted all the way from Manchester to Paris”).

It was a constant barrage of shifting musical sands, and the band’s too-cool outward presentation took its toll internally. But it was all for the good of the music (and the ego).

“Whatever pain and suffering and fucking psychological battery we all endured, the tunes worked out for the best,” Vennart says. “We put ourselves through absolute hell making those records because we all thought we knew better than everybody else in the band, but we also knew that we were better than everybody else in the music industry.”

When debut album Effloresce dropped in 2003, it was hailed as a bright new dawn for British rock music. It’s a remarkably confident debut, spanning battering ram riffs (Catalyst) and sweeping guitar orchestras (Women Who Love Men Who Love Drugs). Its tonal language left a major mark on prog guitar hero Yvette Young, who named her band Covet’s debut album after it.

“I was hanging out with a bunch of people who really liked prog,” she recalls. “They were introducing me to Tool, Porcupine Tree and then Oceansize. Some of it didn’t resonate with me, admittedly, but Oceansize did. I love the odd-time feel. The tones are great.

“The epic layering of stuff, and the way that it builds dynamically… I think about things like that sonically now in my own music with Covet.”

There was no great plan when it came to painting Oceansize’s sonic landscape. Vennart used a heavily modified Squier Strat with a DiMarzio Tone Zone humbucker in the bridge. Durose opted for standard-issue Les Pauls, while Gambler played an SG that he made himself. Amps were Marshall and Laney. But pedals were where the band really indulged. Sometimes with frightening results.

“It was the dawn of that period where everybody realized that they needed to fucking bring out their effects,” Vennart says.

“You'd bring out your Big Muff and you bring out your Rat, you bring out a huge delay and a phaser. I had this DOD phaser that would take your guitar sound and make it at least 10 times louder than it had previously been. Using it was actually fucking terrifying. I thought, ‘This thing is going to break my amp. It's going to fucking blow it up.’”

Drop in the ocean

Oceansize were always on the verge of blowing up. But that combustion is what gave rise to so much brilliant, indescribable music.

2005’s second effort, the sprawling Everyone into Position, was the closest the band came to success. Songs appeared in commercials for UK mobile network Orange and an episode of The OC.

But the rock climate was changing. It was the era of the great indie renaissance, and Oceansize weren’t exactly a natural pairing on bills with Arctic Monkeys and the Strokes.

“We wanted to be the band that you would go and see at Glastonbury, take a bunch of drugs, and become evangelical about to your friends,” says Vennart. “Unfortunately, the zeitgeist changed and that kind of band was not really welcome anymore at Glastonbury or Reading.”

It spoke to a wider issue: Oceansize were difficult to pigeonhole. The shortest song on their next album, 2007’s Frames, is six and a half minutes. Every song occupies its own knotty sonic universe, bolstered by new bass player, Steven Hodson, recruited from local noise-rockers Kong. To this day it’s not an easy listen, but it remains the band’s high-water mark.

For critics, this eclecticism was their greatest strength, but without the backing of the mainstream music machine, it left them struggling to find the success of their peers, such as former labelmates Biffy Clyro, whose shorter, more accessible songs were seeing them finally break out of the UK’s ‘toilet circuit’ venues.

“Music like this can be very challenging,” says Mansoor. “It's dense, long albums and they're not quick payoffs. You have to be in the right mood and you certainly need time. You can’t just pop on a song and get the payoff in three minutes. I can say from personal experience that tends to make more devoted fans because you're more invested.”

Oceansize certainly have their fair share of evangelical fans. You don’t just like Oceansize. They become an obsession. They get under your skin. They alter your musical DNA. But part of the reason why their influence is hard to decipher is that Oceansize’s sound is so expansive, it’s indescribable.

“I don't quite know what to call it,” says Mansoor. “It's very British-sounding to me, but very adventurous; proggy, but not try-hard prog. It's really hard to describe, but it’s beautiful.”

Everyone I spoke to for this feature loves Oceansize, but none of them have ever learned to play any of their songs. That’s unusual. It speaks to the collaborative, flowing quality of their music. Oceansize was never three guitarists. It was a collective.

“A lot of modern progressive metal feels very... mathematical. This doesn't feel like that,” Getgood says. “I think in part it comes about because they were writing a lot of that stuff when they were stoned and jamming. So much of songwriting now happens in an isolated environment, and people bring their ideas to the rehearsal room. It's hard to create those cohesive statements in the same way.”

Cut down to size

For all the plaudits and the small but dedicated following, eventually something had to give. In 2010, as Oceansize released their final album, Self Preserved While the Bodies Float Up, Vennart joined his friends in Biffy Clyro, now playing arenas, as a second guitar player. It made the problems in his own ranks painfully clear.

“I just realized what a sorry state our affairs were in,” he says. “There was an inherent belief in each other with Biffy Clyro. With Oceansize there was no trust. You couldn't trust people to not get fucked-up before a show.

“When you’re out in the middle of Poland playing a gig and somebody in the band is not able to play because they’re too fucked up, you start questioning what you’re doing with your life.”

For Vennart, the split felt like a bereavement. It took him the best part of five years to stop feeling angry.

In the decade and a half since, he’s released a run of well-received solo records, worked with Slayer’s Dave Lombardo, and toured the world many times over with Biffy.

The offers for an Oceansize reunion only grow each year. But don’t hold your breath.

“I’d actually quite like to do it because I need to let go of these negative feelings,” he says. “I think everybody in the band needs closure and to be able to look back on the band with an open mind and an open heart and realize that what we did was fucking good.

“Unfortunately, the things that blew the band apart are still very, very, very prevalent, and they are very real, and it all comes down to mental health. That’s the end of it.”

Oceansize may be destined to remain a cult band. But their determination and vision inspired a host of guitar artists determined to escape pigeonholing of their own. And with genre boundaries well and truly demolished by the music streaming wrecking ball, they found their audience. Maybe Oceansize still could.

“You can have a brilliant idea, brilliant music, but it’s not the right place or right time, or you don’t have the right people backing you,” Young says. “But when you make art, it’s there forever.

“Oceansize fans are devoted. If Oceansize were to suddenly release new music 10 years from now, everyone would be like, ‘Holy shit!’ No-one would forget them.”

• The 15th Anniversary vinyl edition of Self Preserved While the Bodies Float Up is out now via Kscope.

Orianthi-fronted power trio The Power of 3, featuring acclaimed drummer Cindy Blackman Santana and bassist Rhonda Smith, have announced their self-titled debut album and debut double single, War in the Streets and Treat Me Like a Lady.

The album, out on December 11 via She2Music, was produced by legendary Jimi Hendrix and Davie Bowie collaborator Eddie Kramer and features a special guest appearance by Carlos Santana.

Recorded entirely in analog, the record promises to capture “the raw chemistry of three world-class musicians whose collective careers have included collaborations with Michael Jackson, Prince, Jeff Beck, Alice Cooper, Beyoncé, Lenny Kravitz, Santana, and Pharoah Sanders.”

The Power of 3’s origin story harks back to a suggestion by Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis, who encouraged Orianthi to assemble a power trio inspired by Hendrix collective Band of Gypsys.

Orianthi reached out to Blackman Santana, known for her work with Lenny Kravitz and Carlos Santana. The two went on to recruit Smith, who held down the low-end for Prince, Jeff Beck, and Beyoncé.

Speaking about the new ensemble, Orianthi says, “I know people all over the world want to see us, and we can't wait. It'll be so much fun to get out there. Playing together with Cindy and Rhonda, this is like a powerhouse. It's not just me... this is a real band.”

In a recent interview with Guitar World, the guitarist also spoke about working with a producer who has a fair few legends under his belt, including Jimi Hendrix.

“He definitely has brought out something that other producers haven’t with his energy alone,” she said.

“Eddie focuses on getting the right microphone placement and works his magic... It’s very old-school and interesting. I love watching Eddie in the studio when he’s panning and doing wild shit. We did a 25-minute jam, which will be on the record, and he had to mix that. He was sweating afterward!”

She continued, “Because I’m such a huge Hendrix fan, I respect him so much. He suggests things like, ‘Why don’t you try this amplifier, this setting, this pedal, or this guitar?’ I’ll try whatever he calls for, you know? My heart is open. Being in the studio with Eddie Kramer and Kevin is an honor.”

The trio has already made its live debut, having played at Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium twice, most recently before the Raiders-Cowboys game last November.

Orianthi confirms that they’re now preparing to bring the project to audiences worldwide.

The Power of 3 is out December 11 via She2Music and available to preorder/presave now.

Soundgarden have announced their live return, recruiting Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready and The Pretty Reckless’ Taylor Momsen for a one-off performance next month.

McCready and Momsen both previously joined Soundgarden onstage last year for the band’s star-studded Hall Of Fame induction ceremony.

Now, they are set to reunite with the grunge legends to perform the halftime show at the Seattle Seahawks’ NFC West season opener at Liumen Field against the New England Patriots – a rematch of Super Bowl LX.

The band have performed only a handful of times since guitarist/vocalist Chris Cornell died in 2017. Recently, it was confirmed one last Soundgarden album is on the way. It’s set to feature material they began writing before Cornell’s death.

The show on September 10 will be their fifth since Cornell’s death. A performance at the I Am the Highway: A Tribute to Chris Cornell show in 2019 was followed by appearances at the Taylor Hawkins tribute show, a charity show with Duff McKagan in 2024, and the Hall Of Fame showing last November.

The double-hire sees Cornell’s duties split between two musicians, notably reuniting the lineup that delivered an impassioned Rusty Cage at the Hall Of Fame.

News of the show has excited most of the fanbase, with many pointing to that Rusty Cage performance as proof.

Meanwhile, Kim Thayil has recently been talking about Soundgarden’s legacy and Chris Cornell’s unfinished tapes, describing it as “emotionally draining” but “exciting”.

The groundbreaking 1970s ABC sitcom What’s Happening!! followed the adventures of three Black teenagers – Raj, Dwayne and Rerun – as they navigated school life, adolescence and romantic pursuits in Watts, Los Angeles.

One of the series’ more memorable storylines unfolded in a 1978 two-part episode, Doobie or Not Doobie, in which the Doobie Brothers returned to Jefferson High School (portrayed as Patrick Simmons’ alma mater) to perform a concert – only to discover that Rerun has been coerced into illegally taping the gig.

Simmons recalls being “all in” for doing the show. “I was a fan,” he says. “I watched the show and loved it, so I wanted to do it immediately.” Trouble was, nobody else in the band was interestred. “They weren’t familiar with the show, so they were nervous about doing it.”

He remembers then-bassist Tiran Porter as being especially dubious (pun intended). “He thought the whole thing might be a little cliché,” the guitarist says. “For me, it wasn’t even a question that we should do it. I thought the writing and acting was great, and the show was hilarious.”

Beyond his affection for the series, Simmons saw the potential of the band’s appearance on the series as a great opportunity for them to spread their music to a wider audience.

“I was a devotee of R&B and soul, and by virtue of having Mike [McDonald] in the band at the time, we were leaning more in that direction, though we hadn’t yet crossed into a real appreciation from Black audiences,” he says.

“There were more people of color showing up to our gigs, but we were still seen as this white rock ’n’ roll band. Doing the show was positive on so many levels, certainly for ourselves, but also for the country in terms of bringing people together. Our fans could tune in and see us in this wonderful presentation with an acclaimed acting troupe.”

How did you eventually sell the band on doing it?

I sold Mike on it. He was like, “I don’t know. I’m not sure.” I told him I thought we could reach other audiences and what a great show it was. He hadn’t seen it yet. Finally, I told him to watch it – “It’ll tell you all you need to know.” I think that worked with him, and it worked with [drummer] Keith [Knudsen].

When the band was approached to do the show, was the bootlegging plot already written into the script?

The script was basically an outline at that point. They were still writing it as we stepped into the studio to work on it, which I think is kind of the way it is with television anyway. Within an hour of us being there, they said, “We think this is going to be so good that we’d like to make it a two-parter.” And we went, “Yeah, of course.”

It was a pretty big deal when Rerun’s tape recorder drops out of his raincoat and hits the floor, and everything stops.

Then it was like, “Tune in next week.”

At the time, was it a big concern among bands that fans were sneaking tape recorders into concerts?

People were always doing that. We didn’t really care. I mean, we’d rather they didn’t because the recordings sounded like shit. The Dead’s fans were doing it every night. We would hear this stuff, and it would bug us. It bugged us more if somebody recorded us and then tried to sell it.

Of course, there’s the famous line that has entered the lexicon – “Which Doobie you be?” Had you heard that before the show?

No, that was one of the lines somebody wrote. There’s another one, where [Raj’s bratty sister, Dee] asks Tiran, “What are you, a half-brother?” [Laughs]

After the shows aired, did the rest of the band come around and feel good about doing it?

I think everybody felt good about it in the end. It was a good experience. The people on the show were so nice to us, and we became friends. We were always doing benefits in those days, and we got some of the people to come and do shows. They’d come and speak and help raise money for the United Way. There were so many rewards to doing the show.

It’s a shining moment in TV history.

It is. People will forget everything else about us except that we were on that show.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

No discussion of Mastodon can ignore the sense of renewal running through the band’s latest release, Marrow Deep. Following the departure and tragic passing of longtime guitarist Brent Hinds, and with Nick Johnston stepping into the role, the Atlanta metal titans found themselves entering unfamiliar territory.

Hinds’ departure in early 2025 represented the biggest personnel change in Mastodon’s history. After 25 years together, the remaining members faced a decision that would ultimately shape the band’s next chapter.

“We knew the change had to happen,” says bassist Troy Sanders. “But we had absolutely no idea what the future looked like.

“We were prepared to do whatever it took. If that meant auditioning 500 people or spending months looking for the right person, then that’s what we were going to do. Finding the right fit was that important.”

Instead, the search barely had a chance to begin. Nick Johnston was the first person the band invited to Atlanta – not to audition, but simply to hang out.

“Our drummer Brann had met Nick years ago and always thought he was a great guy and an incredible player. So before we even talked about music, we just asked him to come and hang for a couple of days.

“At this point in our career, being a good human being is every bit as important as being a great musician. We wanted to know whether we’d actually enjoy spending time together.”

As fate would have it, the timing couldn’t have been more surreal.

“The day Nick arrived was the morning Brann’s mother passed away. Nick knocked on the door after flying into Atlanta, and we had to tell him straight away, ‘Hey… really nice to meet you, but Brann’s mom died this morning.’

“Nick immediately said, ‘I’ll turn around. I’ve got a friend nearby. I don’t need to be here.’ But we told him, ‘No, come in. Stay with us.’ Looking back, I think that told us everything we needed to know about his character.”

“When we finally got around to playing together, he walked in and said, ‘I know about 20 of your songs. Which ones do you want to play?’ We were like… ‘Wait, what?’ He’d already done all the homework because he’d been a fan for years.

“Nick said, ‘I’m not here to fill Brent’s shoes. I want to help write the future of Mastodon.’ That was exactly what we wanted to hear. At that point it was basically, ‘You’re in.’”

The band immediately hit the road, first touring North America with Coheed and Cambria before tackling a full European festival run. Another summer of overseas shows followed.

“Those have honestly been the three best tours of our career. The camaraderie, the energy, the appreciation – we all feel renewed. It doesn’t happen very often that something this significant changes, and somehow everything just clicks.”

That renewed confidence carried directly into the recording sessions for the new album. Rather than treating Johnston as a hired hand, he was encouraged to become a genuine creative partner.

“If we’d hit a section where something wasn’t working, Nick would jump in with ideas straight away. He wasn’t trying to dominate anything. He just genuinely wanted to make the songs better.

“He’d throw ideas into the room whenever he had them, but he’s equally happy if somebody says, ‘Actually, I think we should try something else.’ There’s no ego attached to it.”

For Sanders, adding another songwriter has subtly shifted the band’s musical vocabulary without sacrificing its identity.

“It naturally evolves the sound because another creative voice is involved, but it still sounds completely authentic. It never felt forced.”

Despite being one of modern metal’s most acclaimed outfits, Sanders insists Mastodon’s greatest strength remains its willingness to challenge one another.

“If somebody tells me I’m overplaying something, my response is usually, ‘Okay… what would make it better?’ I’m never precious about it.

“There are times where someone might say, ‘That vocal isn’t quite there,’ or, ‘That bass part could probably be simpler.’ You’ve got to be willing to hear that.

“If everybody’s trying to protect their own territory, you spend more time arguing than making music. We’re way beyond that.”

As anticipation builds around the new record, Sanders has deliberately stopped measuring success by sales figures or chart positions. Instead, he sees two distinct milestones.

“The first success is simply finishing the album and putting it out into the world. We’ve been living with some of these riffs for nearly two years. We finished recording almost a year ago, and now it’s finally being released.

“Of course we hope people love it. But we never expect anybody to love it. We’ve never written records to win over old fans, attract younger fans or chase a different audience. We write albums that satisfy the five of us first.

“If we’re hugging each other at the end of the process because we genuinely love what we’ve created, then hopefully enough people will connect with it, too. But that can’t be the reason you make it.”

His second measure of success is far simpler.

“It’s spending the next few years travelling the world and playing these songs live. When you walk onstage every night and feel that connection with thousands of people… that’s when you remember you’ve got the coolest job on Earth.”

Angine de Poitrine are arguably the breakout band of 2026. Since their otherworldly KEXP session went viral, guitarist Khn de Poitrine and drummer Klek de Poitrine have set the guitar world into a microtonal-guitar-meets-prog-rock frenzy.

The mavericks have now gained the support of fellow Canadians and prog legends Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee, who have recently spoken about the Québécois phenomenon.

“Well, I think they're fantastic,” Lee told Chile’s Radio Futuro in a recent interview. “I love the fact that they've gone viral, because they're so unusual, peculiar, idiosyncratic.

“It's a sound that no-one's heard before. They've taken Primus and a bit of Rush and all the complexities and sort of boiled it down to a two-piece band using an incredible array of technology.”

Lee went as far as to say that Angine de Poitrine’s repertoire is the “most entertaining and exhilarating bits of music that I've heard for a long, long time.

“And I think most people that hear them find it somehow infectious, and I don't mean that like it's poisonous. I mean good infectious.”

Lifeson also chipped in, calling their arrangements and songwriting “hypnotic.

“You know, using the looping pedals to create a bassline, and then guitar lines over it, and keep building on it,” he pointed out.

“And above all, they're just great players. They really play their instruments so well, and that whole microtonal approach just makes it sound so exotic, and just mesmerizing.”

“And the drummer has a bigger nose than me, so I love it,” Lee quipped.

Other recent Angine de Poitrine disciples include Animals as Leaders’ Tosin Abasi, who recently had the privilege of wielding Khn’s microtonal double-neck guitar/bass, as documented by Willow Smith.

The two guitarists recently attended an Angine de Poitrine gig, and Abasi couldn’t help but lay his hands on what’s already proving to be quite the legendary guitar.

As for the rest of us, well, it seems like a signature may or may not be in the works – at least according to CEO Simon Godin.

“I’m speaking with their team,” he told Guitar World. “It’s not a yes or a no. Everything went very big, very fast, and now this is the instrument they’ve dreamed of.

“Maybe this is why, for now, they want to keep it unique. If we do make a signature version, it won’t be a big production. It will be more of a collectible item that you hang on your wall.”

Frank Beard, ZZ Top drummer for 56 years, has died at 77.

The band’s representative, Bob Merlis, confirmed that Beard died while in hospice care at his ranch in Richmond, Texas, with his family by his side.

“Today, Elwood [Francis, ZZ Top bassist] and I lost a great friend and collaborator, and the world lost one of the most naturally innovative drummers and a great and true son of Texas,” guitarist Billy Gibbons wrote on social media. “His signature backbeat was key to keeping ZZ on top.”

The band cancelled yesterday’s (August 18) show in Salt Lake City and today’s show (August 19) in Colorado Springs.

The band’s current tour resumes this weekend in Austin, Texas. A representative confirmed to Variety that Gibbons and Francis will continue performing under the ZZ Top moniker with a fill-in drummer.

As Gibbons told the publication, “The band of which he was part for six decades is going to keep on keeping on as he had wished.”

Gibbons and co had recently cancelled their scheduled performance at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles due to “insurmountable obstacles” – later revealed to be Beard's health issues. Last year, the drummer also “temporarily” stepped away from touring due to unspecified health problems.

Although he wasn’t technically a founding member, Beard is widely regarded as ZZ Top’s definitive drummer.

He replaced original drummer Dan Mitchell shortly after ZZ Top released their first single, Salt Lick, and its B-side, Miller’s Farm, in 1969. While much of the band’s appeal lies in its hooks and riffs, Beard’s mastery of the Texas shuffle meant he was very much the band’s anchor.

Beard was also instrumental in recruiting the late Dusty Hill – the band’s late bassist, who was part of its fabric for over 50 years. The two had previously played together in local Dallas bands before finding fame with ZZ Top.

“Dusty and I knew each other’s tricks,” Beard said in a 2008 interview with Guitar World.

“So automatically his audition sounded four times better than the other bass players we were auditioning. I really wanted Dusty in the band.

“So when the other bass players were up there, I made sure it was plenty lame. When Dusty got up there, we knew all these little punches and kicks we could do together at certain points. And it was like, ‘Wow! Oh man!’”

Robert Jon & the Wreck hail from Orange County, California, but sound like they just rolled out of Georgia or Florida circa ’82. The band, which proudly wears its Allmans and Skynyrd influences on its sleeve, features a charismatic frontman, surging Hammond organ, multi-part vocal harmonies and plenty of hot licks and biting slide guitar by Henry James.

Their most recent album, Heartbreaks & Last Goodbyes, was produced by Dave Cobb, who has worked with Marcus King, Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile and John Prine.

James says Cobb helped the band structure the material and gave them sonic ideas, including playing them classic Seventies albums by Free and the Faces. That was music to the ears of James, who calls himself “the ’70s rock nerd, the guy that knows what year this album was recorded and who played on it.”

“Our influences are all over the place, which I think is actually a strength since we all influence each other and play one another our favorite albums, which are completely different,” he says.

“I’m very well versed in my influences and my players, specifically from that generation. 90 percent of what I listen to is ’60s and ’70s rock, as well as R&B, jazz, funk and country from that time.”

James is a true-blue guitar guy who grew up reading Guitar World, so you know he’s got taste! For more proof, his favorite players include Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Ritchie Blackmore, Eddie Van Halen and Steve Howe.

“I’m a guitar guy who obsesses about pedals and pickups and amps,” James says. “But I also know that all my favorite players were focused on the music first, and that’s what we all try to do.”

For all that wide range of influences, the Wreck are distinctly a California band, and James says that he thinks it can be heard in their music in a variety of ways.

“I think there’s a subtle slickness to what we do,” he says. “We love session guys and have respect for Toto and the Wrecking Crew and these musicians who laid down tracks on so many great L.A. records. That’s in our DNA, as is the California country thing from the Flying Burrito Brothers to the Eagles.

“Some of the guys are big fans of the Bakersfield country sound and, I’m a Van Halen fan, too. They exemplify California hard rock.”

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are another influence on the band, right down to the structure of their name. They are, says James, very much a band, not a backing group.

“It’s very democratic. We make decisions as a group,” he says. “That takes a lot of the load off any one person and we try to lean into everybody’s different strengths, which helps the sum be greater than the parts.”

• Heartbreaks and Last Goodbyes is out now via Journeyman Records.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Back in 2005, Brian May and Roger Taylor embarked on their first full Queen world tour since the death of their enigmatic frontman, Freddie Mercury.

Not only did it find May and Taylor performing under the Queen moniker for the first time since 1986, it also saw them joining forces with a new lead vocalist.

Bad Company’s Paul Rodgers was given the unenviable task of filling Mercury’s shoes, but he stepped up to the plate. Queen + Paul Rodgers, as the project was officially called, was a huge success, lasting for two world tours, several high-profile shows and a studio album over the course of four years.

And, as May explained in the May 2005 issue of Guitar World, the lineup had rather surprising origins: a celebration event for the Fender Stratocaster.

For Fender’s 50th Anniversary Strat Pack concert, May and Rodgers joined the bill to play a cover of Free’s All Right Now. May knew they were on to something.

“We were both so knocked out by the sheer chemistry between us on stage,” May remembered. “Afterward, we were talking together when someone – I guess it was me – said, ‘Well, you know, maybe we should do more of this sometime.’”

Taylor remembered May’s excitement over the prospect of getting the band back together with Rodgers at the helm.

“After the Fender gig, Brian got on the phone to me and said, ‘You really have to look at what we just did,’” Taylor recalled. “He sent over a videotape and I could see what he was talking about. I wondered why we hadn’t thought of doing this before.”

To test the waters, May and Taylor teamed up with Rodgers to play at Queen’s induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame. The trio was easily convinced. The Return of the Champions World Tour was swiftly announced. A studio album, Queen’s first post-Mercury, was made.

“Paul does amazingly well, I think,” May said of the collaboration at the time. “The first time I heard him sing We Will Rock You, I knew we had something valid and new here. Paul brings things out of that song I never even knew existed before!”

Despite skeptics surrounding the project, Queen + Paul Rodgers got the Queen machine up and running again. Mercury’s presence was undeniably irreplaceable, but it gave May and co. the chance to honor his legacy by taking the band’s music back on the road. And it can all be traced back to that Stratocaster event.

Things eventually fizzled out in 2009 after Rodgers reunited with Bad Company for a summer tour. It was an amicable split; no one thought it would be a permanent arrangement.

“We did two world tours and a couple of live recordings, and...made a studio album… which was pretty historic,” Rodgers told Billboard (via NME). “They hadn't really gone in the studio with anybody and recorded something like that for a very long time. So it was quite an achievement, I think.”

On the flipside, Queen hasn’t been the only rock institution that Rodgers joined – or at least came close to joining – in his time. Earlier this year, it was reported that Rodgers was approached to front the new Van Halen album.

“Frank who?”

Kylie Gaspard is describing her inbox flooding with DMs from her friends about a guy named Frank sharing Beginner, a song by her alt-rock band, Cashier.

“They were like, ‘Frank Ocean!’,” laughs Gaspard, vocalist of the Lafayette, Louisiana-based band. “He listened halfway through, took a picture and posted it. I think it’s in a Rolls Royce. Really crazy, super surreal, and really awesome. He's everything.”

“He’s one of the best artists of the past 15 years, for sure,” says Cashier lead guitarist Jo Perillo.

A mega star like Frank Ocean discovering and sharing one of Cashier’s songs validated their DIY philosophy.

“It made me feel like we could pop off doing it ourselves,” Gaspard says. “It’s definitely reaffirming,” Perillo agrees.

Cashier weren’t always the alternative rock, shoegaze-leaning band that caught the ear of big-time celebrities. Before Covid, they were a textural indie rock band that Perillo says sounded like Alex G. Then the Big Muff showed up.

“I feel like that's like the sound of Cashier,” Perillo says. “We both have a Big Muff and a Rat. Basically, the Rat is, like, the normal sound. I have my Big Muff after and Kylie has hers before it, but just for the heavier parts. My always-on is the Fuck Overdrive by this pedal company called Smallsound/Bigsound that doesn't exist anymore.”

The other key piece of gear that helped push the band toward their heavy sound is a Squier J. Mascis Jazzmaster. Borrowed from a friend, Perillo’s Jazzmaster became Cashier’s version of Metallica’s EMG pickups or Kurt Cobain’s Small Clone.

“I've been borrowing it for seven years very graciously from a friend,” Perillo says with a laugh. “She just told me, ‘Oh, you can keep using it.’ It's a great guitar. I feel like it enabled Cashier to come into its own because I didn't really have a very rock-sounding guitar.”

It’s these things combined that have helped the band achieve the sound that they have on The Weight, their debut on the Philadelphia-based label Julia’s War Recordings. The EP is a departure from their shoegaze-influenced singles.

“Shoegaze is such an umbrella term now,” Gaspard says. “On The Weight, we’re more obviously alt-rock. The songs don't have much meat to them.”

So what’s next for the band?

“Hopefully the EP and our singles can feed everyone enough [for now,]” Gaspard says. “Contractually, next year there will be an LP. It’s definitely being worked on. I have the pressure of a deadline, so I can get it done.”

• The Weight is out now via Julia's War.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Consider Liam and Noel Gallagher, the wily Mancunians who conquered the world captaining the mega-ship that was Oasis. The former was the ultimate frontman – the lightning rod and mouthpiece with endless swagger and an inimitable voice. The latter (though he certainly wasn’t soft-spoken when a journalist’s microphone was around) was the studio craftsman, shaping the band’s enormous sound, and penning those steamroller riffs and choruses that’ve gone ‘round the world a million times over.

The Gallagher brothers happen to be an extreme example of that most vital of Rock Band relationships – that of the singer and guitarist. But they also embody the stereotype – the creative chemistry that yields sublime results (he didn’t co-write it, but what would Wonderwall be without Liam’s sneer?) and the intrapersonal tension (Liam going full Jack Nicholson in The Shining with one of Noel’s ES-335s).

To me, the brothers Oasis are one of rock’s defining singer/guitarist partnerships, but, who do you rate as the best singer/guitarist duo (or trio) of them all?

To get into the fine print, yes, the singer in question can also play guitar in the studio and onstage with the band (even if it causes some tension). They also don’t have to have ever thrown shit at each other, or even taken endless passive-aggressive shots at one another in the press!

Let us know your choice in the comments below.

Jethro Tull’s first album, 1968’s This Was, featured guitarist Mick Abrahams and leaned in a decidedly bluesy direction. That approach didn’t work out for the British soon-to-be-prog rockers, and neither did Abrahams, leading to a short spell during which some guy named Tony Iommi took up six-string duties in Tull before bandleader Ian Anderson found his long-time running mate in Martin Barre.

Barre’s first album with Tull, 1969’s Stand Up, was a harbinger of things to come, meaning less blues, more flute from Anderson and undertones of prog. But there was heaviness, too; the record featured riffs that stood up to anything Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore or Jimmy Page were doing.

“We’d recorded Stand Up, and that was a new direction for Ian because Tull was a blues band,” Barre says. “And then suddenly we were this other animal you couldn’t put a title to.”

Barre did his best to put a title to said animal by kicking the riffs-meet-prog into overdrive for Tull’s third record, 1970’s Benefit, showing that he, too, was on the precipice of guitar-god greatness. Of course, Barre didn’t know that at the time – and doesn’t necessarily see it that way today.

“I just played,” he says. “We didn’t really investigate tone and sounds. We just got in there, and the sound of Jethro Tull was there, needing to be examined.”

Examine it they did. Songs like With You There to Help Me, To Cry You a Song and Teacher showcased Barre’s open-minded approach as well as Anderson’s status as a guitar maestro.

“I guess it was what was going to become prog,” Barre says. “The birth of prog sounds stressful, but it was exciting. We didn’t know if people were going to like it. Jethro Tull was a blues band, and they were like, ‘What’s happened to you?’ But slowly, we won them over. We had what people would call a ‘blank canvas’ because nobody knew what to expect. It was a relief in many ways.”

The relief didn’t last long, as Benefit was disregarded upon its release in April 1970. Rolling Stone even called the album “lame and dumb.” But as time has gone on, Tull did more and more of that winning people over that Barre talks about, and in retrospect, time has been kind to Benefit.

By the time Benefit came out, Tull were moving away from blues and toward prog, but the album also has a ton of heavy riffs.

At that point in time we’d been touring, and we’d met bands like Led Zeppelin and all these great bands. We knew Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck and Cream; they were bands we loved and listened to, so we were going to be influenced by them. That’s what everybody was doing.

When I play, I think, “There’s a riff that hasn’t been invented, and it’s probably not difficult.” I love the power of a great riff. There are classic riffs that were immortalized by Hendrix, Beck and Jimmy Page, but I love the concept that music can be so simple but so important because the riffs are so dynamic. I guess everybody fed off everybody else.

The general understanding of Tull’s music is that Ian played the acoustic guitar parts and you the electric, but that wasn’t entirely the case on Benefit. Ian is a better player than he’s credited.

Yeah, he is. He was a guitar player before Tull, and he told me he started listening to Clapton, Beck and Hendrix and realized he was never going to be as good as them, so he turned to the flute, but he is a great guitar player.

It’s a very focused area of play, but what he does – because I’ve learned his acoustic parts – is really good. They’re fun to learn, demanding and very, very precise.

Do you remember recording With You There to Help Me, which has a distinctive guitar flare and features you and Ian?

We both played electric. Ian played a rhythm track, and then I put all the riffs, bits and pieces. It was all live in the studio, so the whole band played that track live to record it.

Were there many overdubs on Benefit?

No, it was nearly all live. Maybe we used some overdubs, and I don’t know if [we had] an eight- or 16-track, but there weren’t many, so you didn’t have the luxury of doing 20 takes and then taking the best bit from each one.

Even when you overdubbed a solo, it was a live solo from beginning to end. You couldn’t drop in and repair it, so we mainly recorded it live in the studio.

To Cry You a Song has an incredible harmonized guitar riff. Was that you and Ian together?

Yeah, that’s me and Ian again. It was fun. It was inspired by Blind Faith’s Had to Cry Today. It’s a similar feel and riff, and we just had a lot of fun with it. I think it shows in the recording. You can tell it was something that was really easy and positive to put together.

What guitars were you using while recording Benefit?

Well, it wasn’t good stuff! Benefit was done on a Les Paul that I bought, and I’m ashamed to say that it was a fake. [Laughs] I didn’t know it then, and I loved it. I just wanted a Gibson Les Paul because when I was at college and starting in bands, it was the Holy Grail.

Just to see one was like, “Oh, my God,” you know? You wouldn’t even need to touch it; it was this… thing. You couldn’t have it, and you couldn’t find them, so you couldn’t play them, but they had this mystique about them, which, I guess, they still do. Not in my mind, but they still do.

Where did you get the Les Paul copy from?

Stand Up was done on a Les Paul Special, a really beat-up thing I bought from a shop in London. But then, I bought this [fake] Les Paul from a dealer in America, and that was the one guitar; it’s all I used for the whole record. Nobody had two guitars in those days; you couldn’t afford it! But yeah, it wasn’t a great guitar. [Laughs]

You used Hiwatt amps in the studio.

The Hiwatt amps weren’t particularly good, either. [Laughs] They didn’t drive easily; they weren’t really rock amps. Marshall began doing that well and [were available] at the time, but we all used Hiwatt, so that side of it was against everything, with the formula of a fake guitar and Hiwatt amps that weren’t very good and didn’t inspire.

I didn’t really know anything about amps or guitars at the time, so you just made the best of what you were given. And I had a sort of treble boost pedal to get a bit of sustain at the Hiwatt.

How do you feel about Benefit now?

We were really happy with it. Going back to the way Stand Up was received, we knew we were going to make a good album. Whether it sold tens or hundreds of millions of copies, that was never the formula.

We were just so confident, enthusiastic and positive about making more music in that direction. That’s what rock bands did. They just went in their own direction. It was great fun to make. If it had failed and sold nothing, I still would have been happy with it.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

When Chicago-based indie rockers Friko were writing and recording their first album, 2024’s Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here, it wasn’t hard to keep the sound lo-fi. Singer Niko Kapetan was the band’s lone guitarist, so there wasn’t much that could be done to stretch out the sound.

“That’s what we stuck with, because it was honest for that time,” Kapetan says. “But on this one, we could kind of expand on ideas and go to some places that we wouldn’t have been able to go with the first record.”

This time around, Kapetan was joined in guitar duties by newcomer Korgan Robb. Having a second player to bounce off allowed the band to expand its sonic palette. The result is a fuller, more complex sound that really highlights the band’s biggest strength – its ability to create dynamics that ebb and flow.

While there are moments of quiet-to-loud, Something Worth Waiting For truly shines when the shifts aren’t sudden, but rather build slowly, until a song that started with simple strummed clean chords has built to an all-out fuzzy freakout.

The key to getting the huge tones that define the album turned out to be keeping it small. Alongside their Fender Deluxe and Princeton amps, the duo depended on tiny lunchbox amps to get their outsized sounds. Kapetan and Robb pushed those small amps with some rare pedals from New York-based musical gear wizard Jay Andersen, particularly a pedal designed to emulate the warm, fuzzy tones of a Tascam preamp.

“It’s just a white box pedal with, like, Sharpie on it, and it is the crown jewel of my little ’board, definitely,” Kapetan says.

“If it sounds like we’re really loud, I bet we both have it on,” Robb adds. “Once I got one of those pedals, it was just like, ‘That’s the sound.’ It feels like your amp is about to explode.”

Adding to the explosive sound was Robb’s Red Panda Tensor, a bizarre pedal that allows users to mimic tape loops, with the added bonus of reversing or modulating them, or even just randomizing them for extra chaos.

“I love using loops,” Robb says. “I have a looper as well that I loop in real time, but I don’t loop things to be in time. I loop drones or stuff like that.”

While modern boutique pedals played an integral part in getting Friko’s sound, they went with the classics when it came to guitars. Both guitarists have Jazzmasters in their arsenals, though Kapetan’s is unique; it was pieced together with his dad.

“That’s just my go-to. It’s consistent – and a really good sound.”

• Something Worth Waiting For is out now via Ato.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

With their expansive microtonal music and colorful stage get-up, Angine de Poitrine have been one of 2026’s most surprising success stories.

The band’s rapid rise has been one of the biggest talking points of the music world as a whole. Even they aren’t quite sure how they have managed to hit such heights. Guitarist Khn has some theories, though.

The microtonal sensations first blew up when their KEXP performance went viral. At the time of writing, it has over 18 million views. Since then, they’ve gone from strength to strength, bagging a new custom-made Godin double-neck and packing out venues around the globe. Khn, meanwhile, has been heralded as a generational guitar hero.

Speaking candidly in an exclusive interview with Guitar World, the polka-dot-clad guitarist isn’t entirely sure how to define their success. But he knows it goes beyond their riffs alone.

“It would be presumptuous to think that it’s only about the music,” he nods. “Because, while we make an honest effort to create fun and original tunes, there’s also an endless flow of amazing music being put out every day by people whose virtuosity knocks me out of my chair. Has the success of any rock band ever been only about the music?”

It’s a powerful question. A look to other breakout modern acts – Sleep Token’s Even In Arcadia was a record-smashing success, and Ghost continues to climb the rock n’ roll food chain – shows that aesthetic and lore also play a part. Fan mania is multifaceted, and escapism is vital.

“The music needs to be catchy, but it’s also about how people relate to it,” Khn posits. “Angine confusingly celebrating while also satirizing some of rock ‘n’ roll’s clichés – all in good fun – might be what a lot of people needed.”

What originally appeared to be a fake Russian version of the band has captured the hysteria surrounding the duo. Recently, Angine de Poitrine played the Montreux Jazz Festival in front of around 100,000 people.

“In times where communication technologies bring a constant smell of fear and conflict, Angine invites everyone to knee-bend dance to weird, wonky rock ‘n’ roll, putting forward no specific message about human affairs,” Khn smiles.

“Ultimately we’re saying, ‘You have the right to let your brain snap out of it for an hour – have a hot dog and go crazy.’

Yet, for all their admirers, the microtonal maniacs (in the best sense) are proving divisive all the same – Devin Townsend’s recent comments certainly sparked debate. Guitar World’s Henry Yates has also explored why the band splits listeners.

The band stars in the new issue of Guitar World (out August 10), which can be ordered from Magazines Direct.

Nikki Sixx has admitted that Mötley Crüe have embraced the use of backing tracks during their shows, but promises they still play all their own instruments live.

The glam metal veterans have faced numerous allegations of using tapes during their gigs in the past. In the most serious instance, former guitarist Mick Mars once accused them of miming on stage.

Responding to a fan’s question on X, though, bass player Nikki Sixx has now admitted that, yes, they do use backing tracks. But they play their own parts live. And they’re comfortable with that.

“Since we saw Queen using some to help during the song Bohemian Rhapsody live, we understood that we could bring in elements that we could not do live,” he writes.

These are extra instrumental layers, such as orchestrations and saxophones, rather than guitars, he says. Their ballad Home Sweet Home and the upbeat Rattlesnake Shake are examples of songs that have those extra sprinkles.

“We sync them up with what we are playing, and we do play 100% live,” Sixx continues. “It’s better for the fans, and we enjoy being able to do what we did in the studio live. It’s a win-win for us.”

As MusicRadar reports, Crüe have come under scrutiny before. A 2022 performance seemed to suggest that Tommy Lee wasn’t playing his drum parts. Fans had noted discrepancies between his movements and what came out of the PA.

Backing tracks with live performances are a sensitive subject, and many bands have been accused of ‘faking’ their shows before now.

It’s often a delicate balancing act for artists to tread. Fans don’t want to buy expensive tickets to see musicians miming, but there are instances where those extra tracks are accepted.

Wolfgang Van Halen may have called bands who heavily rely on extra tracks “lame as hell,” but John Petrucci offered a more forgiving take. He says backing tracks are fine, so long as the guitarist on stage is playing their ass off.

Then, of course, there’s the whole other world of ‘fake guitar playing’ in the online sphere. It’s generated some fascinating conversations with our readers as to where the line is drawn. Similar debates could be sparked around live performances.

This feature was originally published in the January 1995 issue of Guitar World.

Punk lore has it that British punk began on the 4th of July, 1976, when the Ramones played the Roundhouse in London. They shared the bill with the Flamin’ Groovies; the Stranglers were the opening act.

The following night Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy played another London rock club, Dingwalls. It’s been said, only half in jest, that everyone who went on to be in a major London punk band was at one of those two shows. Steve Jones certainly has fond memories of the shows: “The Ramones were rocking. It was great!”

“We met all these kids there afterwards,” Johnny Ramone recalls, “and they said, ‘Oh, we’re starting our band this week. We just formed, but we haven’t rehearsed yet. We were waiting to see you guys.’ And it was the Damned and the Clash.

“We thought it was cool that all these kids were forming bands. I think one of the Damned said, ‘You want to go back to the Sex Pistols’ loft? They’ll play for you.’ We said, ‘Oh no, we can’t do that. We don’t wanna.’ We thought kids would be asking us this everywhere we went. We didn’t know they were gonna be famous or anything. We just thought they all looked cool. They looked like little kids to us.”

There was also a dark side to this leather-jacketed children’s crusade. The London bands, recalls Johnny, “all hated each other. Like, the Damned hated the Sex Pistols, and they all hated the Clash. They all hated each other, like little tiny gangs.”

It was the second night, at Dingwalls, says Johnny Ramone, that he first encountered Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten. “He comes up to me and says, ‘You know, I think Patti Smith sucks.’ I go, ‘I don't give a shit. I don’t like her either.’ And he goes, ‘Oh you don’t?’

“He was trying at first to be, you know, like, nasty. And when he heard what I had to say, he was all friendly. I guess he wanted to get a reaction out of me with that stuff about Patti Smith or something. Like I cared.”

Actually, British punk rock had begun to develop long before the Ramones arrived in 1976. In the early ‘70s, a growing pub rock scene had resulted in a “back to basics” vibe in British music.

In 1974 Malcolm McLaren had taken on the management of the Faces copy band that the kleptomaniac Steve Jones had formed with his friend, drummer Paul Cook. Together with Vivienne Westwood, McLaren ran the Sex shop on London's fashionable King's Road, selling bondage gear and underground designer wear.

McLaren had also had a brief stint managing the New York Dolls at the end of their career. He returned to London with a white Gibson Les Paul that had belonged to the Dolls’ Syl Sylvain. In what retrospectively seems a heavily symbolic gesture, the instrument was passed on to Steve Jones. Originally the group’s singer, Jones was to become the definitive punk guitar stylist.

By 1975, the name and original lineup of the Sex Pistols had fallen into place. Musically, Cook and Jones didn’t have too much in common with the two new Pistols. Singer Johnny Rotten had wide-ranging tastes – everything from reggae to Captain Beefheart to experimental ‘70s German groups like Can.

Bassist Glen Matlock was an avid pop fan. His love for the Beatles was to prove a constant source of conflict with the others. As his main guitar influences, Jones lists Ron Wood, James Williamson, Johnny Thunders, and Free’s Paul Kossoff.

The pub rock scene had given rise to acts like the Stranglers, Eddie And The Hot Rods and the 101ers – whose singer, Joe Strummer, would eventually go on to lead the Clash. These acts would later become more associated with punk; but Jones maintains that the Sex Pistols’ sound and approach developed independently of any outside groups or punk “agenda.”

“I just thought of the Sex Pistols as a rock band. When we started, we didn't say, ‘Okay, we're gonna call ourselves “punk” and it’s gonna sound like this…’ I just couldn't play very well and John couldn’t sing. And that’s the sound it created – purely by accident, I guess.”

“I’d only been playing for like three or four months before we did our first show. All I could do was just play a barre chord and move it up and down the fretboard. One chord, you know. It wasn’t until about a year later, until we did Never Mind The Bollocks, that I loosened up a bit.”

Judging from the incredibly powerful guitar work on Bollocks, Jones developed very quickly. So quickly that it was widely rumored that guitar veteran Chris Spedding actually played on some or – depending on who’s telling the story – all of the tracks. But if that’s true, then Jones learned to imitate Spedding’s work awfully well later on.

Jones has his own explanation of how his bruising, rhythmically precise chordal style developed so quickly: “It's ‘cause I was doing a lot of speed at the time. I would just practice for hours and hours, literally over and over again. I’d practice to records and all of that – wake up, take me little Black Beauty and just play for 12 hours.”

The interplay between Jones and Cook is another factor in the Sex Pistols’ tremendous power. Together they took the Ramones’ muted, down-picked eighth-note feel and somehow made it sound 10 times larger. “I think it came from masturbating too much,” Jones suggests.

Jones and Cook never really seemed to need a bass player. When the two of them played together – whether in the Sex Pistols or, later on, in the Professionals – they instantly got that sound. And, like the Patti Smith Group, the Sex Pistols were without a bassist at certain critical formative stages in the band’s career. Musical differences with Glen Matlock led to his expulsion just as sessions for Never Mind The Bollocks were getting under way.

“He was into the Beatles too much,” Jones says. “He kept trying to teach me these weird, funny chords and it just didn’t sound good. He kept saying, ‘Play a B7,’ And I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.”

Matlock’s replacement was Rotten’s friend, John Ritchie, who took on the name Sid Vicious. Selected mainly for his look and his compatibility with Lydon, Vicious couldn’t actually play the bass when he joined. As a result, for most of Never Mind The Bollocks, says Jones, “whenever we put tracks down, it was just me and Paul. We didn’t have a bassist playing with us; it was just guitar and drums.

“Except for Anarchy In The U.K. – Glen Matlock was still around for that one, and he played bass with us at the same time we put down guitar and drums. But on the rest of the songs, it was just me and Paul, and I would put the bass on afterwards.

“Sid wasn’t around and he couldn’t play anyway. He was in the hospital or always fucked up. Which was a godsend, really, because he kept wanting to play on the record, and we were trying to think of ways to get him out of the studio. He was just making a fucking mess. And then he got hepatitis and had to go into the hospital for a few weeks. So it was a perfect opportunity for me to play the bass. God bless him.”

Yet another reason why the Bollocks tracks are so tight and have such devastating economy of arrangement is that they were heavily demoed. Each of the songs was recorded numerous times in various studios. As the Pistols and McLaren led the British media on a mad chase, getting booted off major record labels more quickly than they’d been signed, there was ample time to polish the tracks.

But Jones bristles at the suggestion that he overindulged in guitar overdubs on the final version of the album. (Rotten used the phrase “21 tracks of guitar” to describe the venture.) “Lies!” Jones cries. “What the fuck does he know, anyway?

“I mean, there are guitar overdubs on there – like on Anarchy In The U.K., there’s mainly two guitars doing the rhythm with some kind of flange or phase on them. And then there’s one playing chords here and there; not throughout the whole song, but coming in at certain places. There’s one doing a feedback thing near the end, and another doing power chords at the end. I would say there were about six guitars on there. A far cry from 21!”

Most people assume that Jones got his wall of guitar sound by plugging his Les Paul into one or more Marshalls. But he’s keen to set the record straight on that point as well. “All I was using was one Fender Twin Reverb, which I stole off Bob Marley at the Hammersmith Odeon.

“It was an older one with a silver front. I put Gauss speakers in, which took away the real trebly Fender sound and gave it a lot of midrange. It was a nice, warm sound, but it had a lot of distortion on it. I just had it turned up to 10 the whole time.”

Jones complains that latterday guitarists are clueless when it comes to playing punk. “A lot of people just don’t know; they get it completely wrong. They say, ‘Okay, we’re going to do a Sex Pistols song.’ And they play it three times faster than the actual song was.

“But that’s where the power is – when it’s slowed down, when it’s paced. Everyone thinks punk has got to be fast and stupid. They get it all wrong.”

The artists and crazies within McLaren’s social circle created a bold new visual style around the Pistols and punk itself, including a style of album graphics that’s now routinely taught in university art history courses.

McLaren made the Pistols the center of a media circus that was much like a performance art piece in its own right. But the whole thing wouldn’t have meant doodley-squat if the Pistols hadn’t been an absolutely great rock ’n’ roll band.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Angine de Poitrine remain the buzz band of the year. It’s essentially now a legal requirement for guitarists to have a strong opinion on them. If only there was a way to choose a side without three days of doom-scrolling. Wait, there is... It’s Fret Buzz!

Catch me up. Who are these clowns?

Is your Wi-Fi down or something? Angine de Poitrine are a Québécois experimental rock duo and viral phenomenon. They’re everywhere. Selling out tours. Drawing record crowds at the Montreal Jazz Festival. Wigging out on Later With Jools Holland. Opening for Jack White. Poor old Rick Beato has begged people to stop emailing about them. He can’t keep on top of his inbox.

What kind of music do they play?

A sort of stabby, scronky math-rock, using loop pedals and microtonal guitars. It’s pretty good. But the music is arguably just a footnote in their overnight fame.

Do you think their polka-dot costumes and papier-mâché masks might have something to do with it?

It seems likely. If you’ve ever thought, “I quite like rock ‘n’ roll but wish it had a soupçon of street-theatre whimsy”, this is the act for you. The lineup features a guitarist (Khn) with a proboscis you could use to artificially inseminate livestock. And a drummer (Klek) who looks like the bastard child of a dalmatian and the Pulp Fiction gimp.

Slipknot and Ghost wear masks too. But I don’t hear you taking the piss out of them…

That’s because we’re scared they’ll send us a dead crow in the mail. I mean, what are these guys going to do – perform a strongly expressed mime?

Where did Angine de Poitrine come from, anyway?

The official PR line is that they’re 333-year-old time-traveling aliens. And they’re not a band, by the way, they’re a “mantra-rock Dada Pythago-Cubist orchestra”.

That sounds a little pretentious.

Yes it does.

It sounds to me like they’re getting on your nerves.

Well, like I said, the music is really interesting. But the backlash has already started. Devin Townsend recently pondered: “Would they have that same attention if they weren’t wearing big clown noses?”

Well, would AC/DC get the same attention if Angus Young wore jeans and a T-shirt?

Yes! We think so. Wouldn’t they? We’ve never actually thought about that before.

So Devin has spent his entire career dressing soberly, in a bid to draw precisely no notice to himself, has he?

Er, not really. There were the white top hats. And now you mention it, I think he dressed up as a superhero in the PowerNerd video.

I mean, are polka dots inherently annoying?

They don’t have to be. Buddy Guy and Randy Rhoads’ guitars were riddled with the pox and we still love those guys. That reminds us: Khn might even have a signature Godin microtonal double-neck in the works.

What are microtones anyway?

Oh, you Westerners! Microtones are the in-between notes you pass through when you’re tuning to standard pitch. Angine de Poitrine are far too arty to be constrained by your fusty 12-semitone system.

So these guys could discover, I dunno, H sharp?

Er, sure... If Cruella de Vil doesn’t flay them for their spotted skin first.

• Correction July 30, 2026: This article was updated to remove a line that incorrectly stated “poitrine” was French for ‘boobs’, as opposed to meaning ‘chest’ in this context.

The Ozzy Osbourne-Randy Rhoads dynamic duo is the stuff of legends. After Ozzy was ejected from Black Sabbath, his quest to launch a solo career brought together British veterans Bob Daisley, Rainbow’s ex-bassist, and former Uriah Heep drummer, Lee Kerslake.

At the same time, a certain Randy Rhoads, from LA's Quiet Riot, was tired of the internal turmoil within his band, and their seemingly never-ending chase for a US record deal. In October ’79, after he heard that the former Sabbath frontman was auditioning guitar players, he somehow found himself in the Ozzy circus.

“Even though I was fucked up on cocaine and booze, I remember when I first met Randy Rhoads,” Osbourne told Guitar World in 2002.

“I was staying at a hotel called Le Parc on West Knoll off Santa Monica Boulevard [in West Hollywood]. I used to live like an animal then. And Dana Strum from Slaughter says to me, ‘I’ve got this fucking amazing guitar player for you.’

“And I go, ‘Yeah, sure.’ ’Cause at the time, everybody was a fucking Hendrix clone. So it was one in the morning, and I was fucking smashed. Off the wall. And this little guy comes in. He looked like a fucking doll. But even in my stupor, I realized he was great as soon as he started playing the guitar.”

Osbourne fondly recalled working with Rhoads on Goodbye to Romance – the 1980 ballad influenced by the chord progressions of Baroque composer Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

As this song demonstrates, Rhoads drew heavily on his rigorous classical training, favoring European classical modes over pentatonic scales while placing a premium on virtuosity.

“I was a drunken, drugged-out, fucked-up slob,” Ozzy continued. “But Randy was patient with me.”

“Randy said, ‘Maybe if you tried it in this key…’ He worked with me. He had the patience because he was a guitar teacher. And he gave me a lot of confidence. He wouldn’t intimidate me. Because, believe it or not, I’m quite easily intimidated.”

As for the rest of the album, Ozzy confirmed that “it was a writing team,” with Rhoads crafting the riffs, Bob Daisley writing the lyrics, and the Prince of Darkness coming up with vocal melodies. Through their collaboration, the triumvirate created a timeless record that marked a move away from Sabbath’s heavy metal sound.

Another nod to classical music comes by way of Dee, included in the Blizzard album tracklist – an homage to Rhoads’ mother.

“Randy absolutely adored his mother,” Ozzy said. “And one day Randy came to me and said, ‘Do you mind if I do this classical guitar piece for my mum?’ And I said, ‘Fuck, what yer askin’ me for? Go ahead.’”

The band’s hard work paid off, with singles Crazy Train and Mr. Crowley hitting both the US and UK charts. Most importantly, it solidified Ozzy as a bona fide solo act who could stand on his own – with a little help from Rhoads.

Glam rock and Hollywood go hand in hand. Named after the celebrity drinking club founded by Alice Cooper in the ’70s, the Hollywood Vampires are as extravagant as supergroups get.

Not only does it include bona fide rock legends Cooper, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, and Cooper/Crossbone Skully bassist Tommy Henriksen, but movie star Johnny Depp is a core member of the lineup. Even his bandmates get starstruck from time to time.

“People are shocked that we are so good, and I can see why. It’s sorta glam, and you’ve got the movie star in there,” Cooper tells Classic Rock.

“Johnny has always wanted to be in a band, and now, finally, he’s in one,” adds Perry. He’s, of course, referring to Depp’s highly documented road to becoming a rockstar.

From picking up the guitar at 12 to dropping out of high school to pursue music, moving to LA with his then-band, and chasing a record deal, Depp’s goal was always to become a serious working musician – before he fell into acting.

“After the second or third song people get over the shock of seeing Johnny Depp up there with a guitar. And it’s legit. The band really plays. And you know what? He’s a great player.”

Cooper recalls that he had never met the actor until filming Dark Shadows, Tim Burton’s Gothic fantasy film in which the veteran rock star made a cameo.

“I was telling Johnny about the drinking club with John Lennon, Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson,” he continues.

“During the shooting, I played the 100 Club on Oxford Street and invited Johnny along. He got up with us and nailed every song. I said it would be fun to be a bar band again and play all the songs of my dead drunk friends.”

Perry was the last one to join. “I was staying at Johnny’s house working on a solo record,” he says. The Aerosmith guitarist was immediately recruited.

“We have so much fun playing together. I always think of the Vampires as the best unknown garage band in the world.”

“And certainly the most expensive one,” quips Cooper.

The supergroup would go on to debut at the iconic Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, over two nights in September 2015. Fast forward to 2026, and the band is still going strong, with a UK and European tour kicking off on August 12 at London’s O2 Arena.

Asked about the challenge of juggling everyone's packed schedules, Perry hints at the balancing act: “I can tell you that some people in his [Depp’s] camp are not happy he’s taking a couple of months out to play music.

“But when it’s time for Johnny to play guitar, he knows it’s time.”

George Orwell’s novel 1984 envisioned a dystopian future where totalitarian governments ruled the world, and the average person’s attempts to enjoy even the slightest personal pleasure were patrolled and punished by the Thought Police in service of Big Brother.

However, when mankind finally reached that symbolic year, the prevailing atmosphere was more of a hedonistic non-stop party than a period of peril. We have the power of the mighty Van Halen to thank for much of that.

Considered by many – including Eddie Van Halen himself – as the band’s masterpiece, 1984 was one of Van Halen’s best-selling albums and one of the best-selling rock albums of the entire ’80s.

It has earned RIAA Diamond certification for surpassing 10 million units sold – a feat the band only matched with their 1978 debut album, with the two perfectly bookending the beginning and end of Van Halen’s classic era with David Lee Roth fronting the band.

Clocking in at a lean 33 minutes and 22 seconds, 1984 was, as the saying goes, all killer and no filler. Even the best-selling album of all-time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, can’t make that boast (does anyone even remember Baby Be Mine and The Lady in My Life?). 1984 produced an impressive string of four hit singles, with Jump delivering Van Halen’s only Number 1 charting hit single in the band’s entire career.

Panama and I’ll Wait both peaked at Number 13, and Hot for Teacher came in at a not-too-shabby Number 56. Even the album’s “deep” tracks – Top Jimmy, Drop Dead Legs, Girl Gone Bad and House of Pain – were scorchers too hot for the Top 40, but found a welcoming home on more adventurous FM station playlists.

The only outlier is the album’s title track, but Ed’s solo synth performance perfectly set the mood as a brief overture that boldly introduced Van Halen’s brave new world.

Future Control

With 40 years of hindsight, it’s tempting to look back and conclude that the phenomenal popularity of 1984 was primarily due to it being the perfect album released at the perfect time.

However, its success also benefited significantly from several years of extremely hard work leading up to its release, along with a series of high-profile events that brought Van Halen prominently into the public’s awareness.

During the early ’80s, Van Halen had become one of the world’s biggest touring acts. The band sold out every single one of its 83 shows in the United States and Canada on its 1982 Hide Your Sheep tour, and in early 1983 they made their first ever appearances in South America during a month-long leg that introduced the band to thousands of rabid fans.

A few months later, Van Halen staked a claim as the biggest band in the world when they headlined “Heavy Metal Day” on May 29, 1983, at the US Festival, performing in front of an estimated audience of 375,000 – Van Halen’s largest audience ever. Their fee for the US Festival gig was $1.5 million, setting a new world record at the time.

Van Halen was also experiencing a significant upward trajectory in record sales. 1984’s predecessor, Diver Down, was a commercial success thanks in large part to the hit status of the 1982 single (Oh) Pretty Woman, which peaked at Number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

The only previous time that Van Halen cracked the Top 20 was when Dance the Night Away reached Number 15, and that was all the way back in 1979. From their debut effort onward, each album that Van Halen released charted higher than its predecessor, with Diver Down peaking at Number 3 compared to Fair Warning’s top position at Number 5.

Van Halen’s tour, album and single statistics were notable, but what truly catapulted the band into the public limelight was Ed’s increasing celebrity status, even though the guitarist never sought the spotlight and was never comfortable with being called a rock star.

His marriage to popular television actress Valerie Bertinelli led to appearances on mainstream prime time shows like Entertainment Tonight, making the Van Halen name a household word. Ed’s charming, down-to-earth demeanor won over many new fans who would have been shocked by the raucous atmosphere at a typical Van Halen concert, let alone the band’s backstage antics.

But perhaps the biggest turning point that made Ed a bona fide celebrity was his guest appearance on Michael Jackson’s 1982 album Thriller, on Beat It. Jackson wanted to record a rock song, and he knew that getting the world’s most popular guitarist to play a solo would introduce and endear the singer to an entirely new audience.

What Ed didn’t realize at the time was that his performance on Thriller would similarly cause Jackson’s fans to notice Van Halen. Beat It went on to top the charts worldwide, and those 33 seconds of shredding guitar bliss became an immortal symbol of the most enduring cultural crossover of pop, R&B and rock.

Eddie didn’t want his name to appear on Thriller’s credits, mainly to keep the session a secret from his bandmates, but there was no mistaking who performed that solo.

Despite his request to remain incognito, record company and musician’s union agreements led to his name appearing four times in the liner notes, and his wife Valerie and engineer Donn Landee, who had recorded every Van Halen to date, also were thanked for good measure.

It didn’t matter anyways as David Lee Roth immediately knew it was Ed the first time he heard Beat It blaring from a car stereo in a 7-Eleven parking lot.

Brave New World

Edward Van Halen’s creative inspiration increasingly grew during the early ’80s as he broadened his horizons into new musical styles and techniques and explored instruments beyond the guitar.

While he was initially pleased with Van Halen’s fifth album, Diver Down, he wasn’t happy with the rapid-fire approach to the sessions, which were completed in a mad rush over a period of 12 days.

On the band’s previous album, Fair Warning, Ed had finally become comfortable with spending considerably more time recording and crafting multiple guitar tracks in the studio while also experimenting with a broader palette of guitar tones. He felt that the slam-bang live performance blueprint used on Diver Down was a regression to the band’s first three albums, and the outcome left him creatively unsatisfied.

“I was always butting heads with (producer) Ted Templeman about what makes a good record,” Van Halen said in 2014. “Diver Down was a turning point for me because half of it was cover tunes. When we made Fair Warning I spent a lot more time with [engineer] Donn Landee working on my sound. I became much more involved in the recording process.

“To me, Fair Warning was more true to what I am and what I believe Van Halen is. We’re a hard rock band, and we were an album band. I like odd things. I was not a pop guy, even though I have a good sense of how to write a pop song. When we started work on 1984 I wanted to ram it up Ted’s poop chute and show him that we could make a great record without any cover tunes and do it our way.”

In order to be able to do things his way, Ed took dominant control of the creative reins by building a professional multitrack studio at home in 1982. Initially, the plan was to build a studio for recording demos, but as work progressed the guitarist realized that, with Landee working by his side, he could record Van Halen’s next album there.

“I did not set out to build a full-blown studio,” Ed admitted. “I just wanted a better place to put my music together so I could show it to the guys. I never imagined that it would turn into what it did until we started building it. Slowly it turned into a lot more than I originally envisioned.

“Everybody else was even more surprised than I was, especially Ted. They thought I was just building a little demo room. Then Donn said, ‘No man! We’re going to make records up here!’ Donn and I had grown really close and had a common vision. Everybody was afraid that Donn and I were taking control. Well… yes! That’s exactly what we did, and the results proved that we weren’t idiots.”

Ed’s new home studio, named “5150” after the California law code for taking a mentally disordered person into custody when that person is considered a danger to others, was completed by the end of 1982.

In a recent interview with Greg Renoff for Tape Op magazine, Landee recalls that the first recording session took place on January 2, 1983, with Ed on synthesizer and his brother Alex Van Halen on drums.

Although Ed said in his 2014 Guitar World interview that he didn’t want to record cover tunes, ironically the very first song ever recorded at 5150 was a cover of Wilson Pickett’s In the Midnight Hour.

It’s very likely that this was a calculated move on Ed’s part to appease David Lee Roth and Templeman, perhaps hoping to convince them that the studio was indeed up to the task after they worked there and heard the results. The fact that the song was never released and is still locked up in 5150’s vaults suggests that Ed may have never actually wanted to record it in the first place.

However, Ed boldly revealed his hand with his next move. Over the previous few years, the guitarist had worked on a synth-dominated song that would later be named Jump after Roth wrote the lyrics, and with the studio up and running he recorded an instrumental demo of the tune, performed on an Oberheim OB-Xa synthesizer with accompaniment from Al on drums and Michael Anthony on bass.

“When I first played Jump for the guys nobody wanted to have anything to do with it,” Ed said. “Dave said that I was a guitar hero and I shouldn’t be playing keyboards. But when Ted heard the demo and said it was a stone-cold hit, everyone started to like it more. Ted only cared about Jump. He really didn’t care much about the rest of the record and just wanted that one hit.”

The band worked diligently recording new material for most of 1983, with the exception of the month of May, which they spent preparing for their appearance at the US Festival. Ed particularly reveled in having “unchained” freedom to experiment whenever and for as long as he pleased.

This included some explorations he wouldn’t have tried at a regular studio, like when he backed up his 1970 Lamborghini Miura S near 5150’s doors and miked its mighty roar. Initially intended for use during the chorus of Jump, the Lamborghini’s forceful growl eventually found its immortal home on the bridge of Panama.

Necessary tools for the party

In addition to equipping 5150 with a solid selection of classic studio gear that included a Universal Audio console purchased from United Western Studios, 3M M56 16-track tape machine and various items of high-end outboard gear such as Eventide Harmonizers, Teletronix LA-2A and UREI 1176 limiters, Lexicon Prime Time digital delay and EMT140ST plate reverb, Ed also added a wide variety of new instruments to his creative arsenal.

Ed had become enamored with the Oberheim OB-Xa polyphonic synthesizer and its updated version the OB-8, and they played a major role in three of the album’s songs.

Keyboards had actually prominently appeared on all three of Van Halen’s previous albums – a Wurlitzer electric piano on And the Cradle Will Rock… (Women and Children First), an Electro-Harmonix Mini-Synthesizer on Saturday Afternoon in the Park and One Foot Out the Door (Fair Warning) and a Mini Moog on Dancing in the Street (Diver Down) – but they were distorted and usually employed as ersatz guitars. With 1984, Jump and I’ll Wait, there was no mistaking that Ed was playing synths.

However, Ed was still a guitarist at heart and to his core, and he made many new additions to his guitar collection. The most notable newcomer was a rare vintage 1958 Gibson Flying V that Ed bought from Dan Martin of Missouri’s St. Charles Guitar Exchange – the first of many vintage guitars Ed would buy from the dealer over the years.

The V was Van Halen’s primary guitar on the album, used to record Hot For Teacher, Girl Gone Bad, the main riff of Drop Dead Legs and, as recently discovered, quite possibly for Jump [researcher Allan Garber has uncovered a behind-the-bridge pick scrape in the isolated guitar track, corresponding sonically with the V’s tailpiece configuration].

The guitarist had also acquired a few of Steve Ripley’s stereo guitars, featuring hexaphonic pickups (essentially each string had its own individual pickup) and panning controls for each string.

Ed put the Ripley to good use on Top Jimmy, using an open D7 tuning (DADACD, low to high) and playing harmonics that bounced across the stereo soundscape. This is probably the song called Ripley on a Warner Bros. memo that Ted Templeman wrote on August 23, 1983.

Ed later recycled the title for another song he wrote for The Wild Life soundtrack since it also used the Ripley guitar. That song later became Blood and Fire on Van Halen’s 2012 A Different Kind of Truth album.

Photos taken at 5150 during this period show a Veilette-Citron Shark baritone guitar, but apparently any songs where he might have used it didn’t make the final cut on the album. That Warner Bros. memo lists a song called Baritone Slide – very likely an unreleased or unfinished track featuring this instrument.

Ed had given conflicting reports over the years about the use of his original Frankenstein guitar or his Kramer 5150 to record the album. He had officially publicly retired the Frankenstein starting with the tour in support of 1984, but it’s plausible that he used it for one last hurrah.

However, Ed also had a habit of immediately putting new guitars to use once they orbited into his universe. As the 5150 became his favorite main guitar on albums recorded for the remainder of the ’80s, he may have played it on 1984. But one confirmed constant throughout all of Van Halen’s first six albums was the use of his 1968 Marshall Super Lead 100-watt head with its voltage reduced via a Variac.

“I had my old faithful Marshall head and bare wooden 4x12 cabinet facing off into a corner,” he recalled. “Al was in the other corner, and we set up some baffles to have isolation between my guitar and the drums. Because the space was so limited, Alex had to use a Simmons kit except for the snare.”

Ed employed effects much more sparingly than he had on previous Van Halen albums. Most notably, he used a pair of Eventide H910 or H949 Harmonizers that were slightly detuned and individually panned left and right to provide a stereo spread and subtle chorus effect on many guitar tracks.

Panama made good use of rhythmic delay, and the studio’s EMT plate reverb was employed tastefully on that song as well as Girl Gone Bad and House of Pain. However Ed’s usual MXR flanger and phaser pedals are absent.

Ministry of Truth

The finished product exceeded all expectations and then some. 1984 was a document of a band at its prime, where years of relentless touring had made their sound tight and their improvisational communication almost psychic.

Ed’s songwriting talents had expanded and grown, with his knack for pop hooks balanced by ambitious excursions inspired by progressive rock and fusion jazz.

Perhaps the most surprising element of 1984 is the fact that the first note of guitar is heard after more than two minutes have passed. This was partly the result of Templeman’s late comment that he wished the album had a song called 1984.

Landee realized that he had about 45 minutes of Ed improvising solo on the Oberheim that could be edited down to an instrumental intro, and voila! He had his wish. The 1984 synth instrumental made the perfect dramatic statement and lead in to Jump.

Jump was pure pop perfection that fit right in with the synth-crazy mid-’80s, but Ed’s dynamic guitar solo was the secret weapon behind its success, giving Van Halen a competitive crossover advantage with a hard rock audience that would never be caught dead listening to groups like the Human League, Depeche Mode or Soft Cell.

Panama may be the ultimate classic Van Halen tune, with Roth’s raunchy “fast car and faster girl” lyrics perfectly capturing the So Cal party vibe that made the band so irresistible from day one. It’s also one of two songs on 1984 that were inspired by AC/DC, which was not a bad move considering how Back in Black had already become the best-selling hard rock album of all-time.

The infectious, bouncy energy of Top Jimmy made it a strong contender for a fifth single or at least a hell of a B-side. However, it was probably held back by the difficulty of switching from open D7 tuning to standard for the solo’s delirious whammy bar workout, which prevented Van Halen from ever performing the song live.

Drop Dead Legs similarly should have been a hit, partly thanks to its relentless pile-driving Michael Anthony/Alex Van Halen rhythm section groove.

“That was inspired by Black in Black,” Ed admitted. “I was grooving to that beat, although Drop Dead Legs is slower. Whatever I listen to somehow is filtered through me and comes out differently. It’s almost a jazz version of Back in Black – I put a lot more notes in there.” It was never played live until the final 2015 tour.

Jump and its supporting music video may have made Van Halen seem harmless and cuddly, but Hot for Teacher was the opposite, exposing the band as the bad boy party animals they really were.

Alex Van Halen’s galloping Simmons drum intro sounds like a nitro-fueled dragster revving up before he switches to a Billy Cobham-meets-Buddy Rich swing that pushes Ed’s hot-rodded tapping into overdrive.

Roth’s schoolboy-in-heat lyrics are given extra punch and verve by Anthony’s high-pitched harmonies, while Ed keeps things loose and raunchy with ZZ Top-inspired bluesy finger-plucked riffs.

I’ll Wait was the album’s other synth-driven hit, with the yin of Ed’s sophisticated keyboard chords and a chorus with smooth yacht-rock lyrics penned by the Doobie Brothers’ Michael McDonald counterbalanced by the yang of Roth’s semi-goofball rants about “heartbreak in overdrive” and “such good photography!”

The guitar solo similarly provides a contrast between Ed’s melodic phrasing and fusion-esque flourishes with explosive vibrato bar noise.

When the album’s final sequence was being prepared in late 1983, no-one had any inkling that the band’s classic era with David Lee Roth would soon come to a close, yet the final two songs on 1984 delivered about as perfect a send-off as any fan could ask for.

Girl Gone Bad is simply epic and the closest thing to a progressive rock song that the band ever recorded. Ed delivered a tour-de-force performance with dynamic shifts in emotion from elegiac tapped harmonics to dark, drama-filled riffs. This was Van Halen’s equivalent to Led Zeppelin’s Achilles Last Stand with the added bonus of a truly blazing Van Halen solo heavily inspired by Allan Holdsworth.

Dating back to Van Halen’s early club days (demos were recorded in 1976 with Gene Simmons and in early 1977 for Warner Bros.), House of Pain was the only song not completely written fresh for the album, although the only element that remained from the early versions was the song’s main riff.

“I guess nobody really liked it the way that it originally was,” Ed said. “The intro and verses are completely different, and the fast part in the middle for the solo and the groove at the end are almost like entirely new songs.”

House of Pain showed that Van Halen had grown and evolved considerably over the preceding seven to eight years without losing any of their hunger, intensity and power.

Gin-scented tears

All good things must come to an end. They were too good to last. Always leave the people wanting more. These may be overused clichés, but it’s difficult to think of better ways to describe the aftermath of the 1984 album, its ambitious supporting tour and the eventual breakup of Van Halen’s classic David Lee Roth lineup.

Did success spoil Van Halen? Yes, and no. Eddie Van Halen’s ever-growing musical ambitions and desire to pursue different sonic paths collided with David Lee Roth’s incessant adoration of the spotlight and aspirations to pursue a career as a movie star.

With two diametrically opposed forces in conflict, the tensions inevitably sucked all the air out of the room until no one could comfortably breathe. Trying to outdo 1984’s success would have been an unfathomable challenge for any band, so it sadly made sense for Van Halen to end that chapter at the top of their game.

Van Halen fans both new and old maybe didn’t get exactly what they wanted, but instead they got what they needed. The Van Halen brothers and Anthony joined forces with Sammy Hagar and his growing legion of fans to take the band in a different and arguably more progressive direction it couldn’t have tried with Roth.

5150 didn’t reach the staggering commercial sales heights of 1984, but it became Van Halen’s third all-time best-selling album with 6x Platinum certification. It was also the first Van Halen album to finally reach the #1 spot on the charts. [1984 likely also would have achieved that feat, but it had the disadvantage of going head-to-head with the best-selling album of all-time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which was in the beginning of several extended periods where it completely dominated the charts for several months.]

Meanwhile, Roth put together one of rock’s greatest supergroups, recruiting the extraordinary talents of guitarist Steve Vai, bassist Billy Sheehan and drummer Gregg Bissonette to keep the rip-roaring party going full blast.

Roth’s first full-length album Eat ‘Em and Smile was nowhere near as commercially successful as the albums he recorded with Van Halen, but with Vai and Sheehan’s instrumental pyrotechnics and Roth’s inimitable character it kept the white-hot flame burning very brightly for classic Van Halen fans.

The split resulted in a Dave vs. Sammy argument as incessant as it is meaningless. For some fans, the change truly was the best of both worlds, but it didn’t last. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. Van Halen had won the victory over itself.

Kiss have announced that their upcoming Kiss Kruise: Land-locked in Vegas, taking place between November 13 and 15 at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, will feature a historic Ace Frehley All-Star Tribute.

The one-night-only celebration will see Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Tommy Thayer, and Eric Singer come together with special guests to honor the memory and legacy of the late Frehley, their founding lead guitarist.

These guitarists and artists – whose names have not been announced yet – were personally handpicked by the band and will be supported by the Ace Frehley Band. Furthermore, each current member of Kiss has personally selected and will individually perform a song from the Spaceman’s vast repertoire as part of the tribute.

“Another year of the Kiss Kruise experience and the best one yet is on the way. Everything we’ve learned at sea and on land over the past years is going into making this the ultimate weekend with us,” comments Stanley.

“We can’t wait to be back together with the Kiss Army and Navy from around the world for more killer performances, incredible artists, events, and exclusive experiences you won’t find anywhere else.”

In addition to the Ace Frehley All-Star Tribute, fans can expect two unmasked Kiss sets – one acoustic and one electric – and ’80s nostalgia galore, with performances from the likes of Bruce Kulick, Slaughter, and Night Ranger.

Frehley had previously joined his former bandmates during the Kiss Kruises, most notably in 2018, when he performed four songs with the band – 2000 Man, New York Groove, Nothin' to Lose, and Rock and Roll All Nite, with Kulick also on guitar.

Following his death on October 16 last year, Kiss also paid tribute to their late guitarist during an “unmasked” show at last year’s Kiss Kruise. It also happened to be their first live performance in nearly two years, following the final show of their 2023 farewell tour.

For more information about this year’s Kiss Kruise, head to its official website.

Mastodon will release their next album, Marrow Deep, on August 28, and have dropped a new single, Snakes for Dinner, which features Josh Homme.

Marrow Deep is the band’s ninth album, and first without former guitarist Brent Hinds, who left the group in March last year, and was killed in a motorcycle accident last August.

It will also be the first with new guitarist Nick Johnston and keyboardist João Nogueira, who has been added as an official member of the band. It makes for a new-look Mastodon.

The band has already released Your Ghost Again, which saw them face Hinds’ loss head-on, and last week released a short film that celebrated his life and legacy.

Homme, who previously featured on Colony of Birchmen, returns to the fore with some harmonized vocals, while Bill Kelliher and Johnston's riffs propel the track forward. Some fierce fretboard runs nod to the band’s Leviathan and Blood Mountain eras.

Marrow Deep is inspired by the Three Fates of Greek mythology. Life, loss, and destiny are three interconnected themes throughout, as the band prepares to release yet another album dominated by grieving.

Emperor of Sand found Bill Kelliher writing by his dying mother’s bedside, while its follow-up, Hushed & Grim, was underscored by the death of their manager, Nick John.

The album was recorded at West End Sound in Atlanta with Patrik Berger, who has worked with Lana Del Rey, and Kurt Ballou (High On Fire, Converge). The album is said to feature “a staggering roster of guests”, which will be revealed in due course.

Having wrapped summer dates with Loathe, Mastodon will embark on the Poisonous Weapons Tour, which starts in Orlando on September 16 and concludes on October 24 at Sick New World Dallas.

Marrow Deep is available to pre-order now.

This feature was originally published in the June 2016 issue of Guitar World.

By the fall of 1985, David Lee Roth had seemingly put the breakup of Van Halen in his rearview mirror.

Hoping to capitalize on his MTV-driven video stardom, Diamond Dave now set his sights on the big screen.

Along with his creative partner and manager Pete Angelus and writer Jerry Perzigian, Roth wrote a screenplay entitled Crazy from the Heat. Angelus and Roth then sold it to CBS Theatrical Films, secured a 10 million dollar budget, and camped out on the CBS movie lot in Burbank to do pre-production for the musical comedy. Angelus recalls, “I was going to direct it and Dave was going to star in it.” If all went according to plan, Crazy would hit theaters in the summer of 1986.

But in early November, just days before they would begin shooting, the phone rang in their studio offices. It was Roth’s attorneys calling to deliver some terrible news. CBS, facing serious financial woes, had shuttered its film division, leaving Angelus and Roth without a means to make their movie.

Angelus says, “When we put the phone down, I remember we were both kind of speechless for a moment. We’d spent the better part of a year preparing for that film. We’d done the casting. We’d done the location scouting. We’d been working with the set designers and the wardrobe people. We were fully into it and fully prepared.” At that moment, it appeared all their work had been for naught.

This setback seemed tailor-made to trigger a crisis of confidence for Roth. He’d trumpeted his movie plans in the press throughout the summer past, previewing a bikini-packed plot that would see rock star Roth squaring off against his greedy manager while on an island vacation.

He’d minimize the challenges inherent in filmmaking, declaring on the David Brenner Live show that both starring in and making a film was the “next logical step” after his success with video. “It’s the same thing… except our movies have been three minutes and twenty-eight seconds. So now it’s time to just bump it up to 90 minutes.” But now it seemed unlikely that his movie would ever arrive in theaters.

Meanwhile, Roth’s former bandmates in Van Halen had seemingly suffered no ill effects from his summer 1985 departure. They had a new blond-maned, leather-lunged lead singer, Sammy Hagar, and had begun work on the follow-up to their multi-platinum smash, 1984.

Roth also had to live with the fact that Eddie Van Halen, who’d told Roth in the spring of 1985 that he had no interest in scoring Crazy because the guitarist expected the film would “probably stink,” seemed to have made the right decision after Roth’s deal disappeared.

But as the months that followed would demonstrate, Roth was nothing if not resilient.

In the summer of 1986, the rock superstar would re-emerge with a hot new band comprised of virtuoso guitarist Steve Vai, bassist extraordinaire Billy Sheehan, and monster drummer Gregg Bissonette. He’d release a million-selling new album, Eat ’Em and Smile, and two new MTV-hit videos, Yankee Rose and Goin’ Crazy, all built upon the creative foundation he’d laid down for the aborted Crazy from the Heat. He’d follow that up with a barnstorming six-month tour of North America.

Despite stepping out from Van Halen, the massively popular act that had been the vehicle for his stardom, and the unexpected loss of his hard-won movie deal, Roth proved that he could weather adversity and still come out on top, smiling from ear to ear.

In early June 1985, nimble-fingered bassist Billy Sheehan, then a member of the heavy metal band Talas, got an unexpected phone call at his Buffalo home. “It’s from David Lee Roth’s office. He wants me to be in his movie. Can I come out to L.A. right away and talk to him?” Sheehan immediately said yes, passing the word to Roth’s representative that the timing for this meeting was ideal, since the upcoming Talas and Yngwie Malmsteen tour would commence at the Hollywood Palladium on June 7.

Sheehan, who’d gotten to know Roth back in 1980 when Talas had toured with Van Halen, made plans to arrive in L.A. a couple of days early. But prior to leaving home, Sheehan rang up a friend. He says, “I called Ed Van Halen to see if he wanted to come down to the Palladium show. At the time, I didn’t know anything about Van Halen breaking up. Ed said he was busy and couldn’t come, but said, ‘Have a good show!’” Before Sheehan got off the phone, he mentioned that he’d recently received a call from Roth.

“Wait. What! Why’d he call you?”

“Oh, he wants to have a meeting with me at his house.”

“Really? You’re kidding! You’ve got to call me back as soon as you have the meeting, because I think he’s going to pull an Ozzy Osbourne on us.”

In other words, Van Halen’s guitarist suspected that Roth’s next move was to become a solo artist, much like Ozzy had done in 1979 after leaving Black Sabbath.

Sheehan says that he now realized that he’d stumbled onto a minefield of inter-band politics. “I thought, ‘Jeez, now I’m in the middle of something,’ but I went ahead with the meeting with Dave.”

A few days later, Roth detailed his movie plans and laid out his vision for his new group to Sheehan. “We had the talk,” Sheehan recalls, “and decided to start the band. He said, ‘It will be you and me. We’ll find a guitar player and a drummer.’”

Sheehan agreed to join forces with Roth as soon as his two-month tour with Talas ended, but after the singer swore him to secrecy, Sheehan realized he couldn’t return an important call. “So now my head’s about to explode, and I said to myself, ‘Well, I better not call Ed back.’ I felt terrible, because I was friends with Ed.”

As it turned out, Eddie wouldn’t need an update from Sheehan. Around the same time, he and Roth had a climactic meeting of their own at Roth’s place, with the longtime musical partners deciding that it was time for them to go their separate ways.

“When I shook Edward’s hand goodbye,” Roth explained later, “we hugged each other and cried and said, ‘Hey, it’s musical differences and career differences, like all bands.’”

For his part, Roth left that meeting with the impression that their parting was mutual and amicable. But once the star guitarist bitterly denounced Roth for leaving the band to become a movie star in the August 15, 1985, edition of Rolling Stone, an occurrence that Angelus says shocked both him and Roth, the rock world knew that Van Halen had broken up.

Roth shook off this unpleasant episode by searching for a guitar player to pair with Sheehan. After consulting with Ted Templeman, who’d be producing the forthcoming soundtrack album for Crazy from the Heat, Roth offered the gig to Billy Idol axman Steve Stevens. But Stevens told Roth that because of his musical commitments to Idol, he couldn’t work with Diamond Dave sooner than the following summer, a schedule that was unworkable in light of Roth’s movie timetable.

Roth then circled back to Sheehan and Templeman for advice. Sheehan recalls that after Stevens passed, “I mentioned Steve Vai to Dave, and I may have mentioned him to Ted as well.”

Templeman, who’d gotten turned onto Vai’s astounding playing some time earlier, remembers endorsing the former Zappa and current Alcatrazz guitarist for Roth’s new band during an impromptu listening session.

“Dave had a beat-up, noisy cassette of Steve Vai, and we listened together in some garage with the tape player on the fender of a car. I said to Dave, ‘Yes, that’s the guy.’”

Roth then placed a call to the guitarist. Vai said at the time, “I pick up the phone and hear, ‘Hey man, this is David Lee Roth. How ya doin’, Steve? I’m making a movie and I’m looking for some music.’” Vai, who’d just finished working on the soundtrack for the blues-themed movie Crossroads, agreed to get together with Roth and Sheehan once he finished a short summer tour with Alcatrazz.

By August, Vai, along with his drummer Chris Frazier, would appear at the Roth mansion to jam with Sheehan and Roth. Sheehan recalls, “Steve came down to Dave’s basement, and he brought his drummer with him. Chris had worked with Steve on a couple of records.”

Once they plugged in and tuned up, the first signs of the remarkable musical chemistry that made the original Roth band so powerful made themselves manifest, according to Vai. “The moment we started jamming,” he told journalist John Stix, “it sounded great.”

By the end of that day, Vai had the gig, which made perfect sense to Sheehan, and not just because of his remarkable fretwork. “I love Steve Stevens, but Steve Vai had that Zappa-esque, tongue-in-cheek, comedic, entertainment vibe that was really important for the Eat ’Em and Smile band, because we’d be involved in a lot of comedy in our live show.”

Over the next few weeks, Sheehan and Roth, with Frazier on drums, worked up approximately 15 song ideas. In late September, however, Roth abruptly decided to audition other drummers rather than giving Frazier the gig. Sheehan comments, “Chris is an awesome drummer, but for whatever reason, Dave wanted to get somebody else.”

After placing want ads in the local trade papers, Vai and Sheehan set up shop at Hollywood’s S.I.R. Studios. Even though the listings didn’t mention David Lee Roth, word traveled fast in the Hollywood rock community that a coveted spot in Roth’s band was up for grabs. On the morning of the audition, scores of drummers flocked to S.I.R.

One of them was Detroit native Gregg Bissonette. The drummer, who’d gotten an invite call from Vai thanks to a referral from former Kiss guitarist Vinnie Vincent, had a résumé that at first glance seemed ill-suited for a hard rock outfit like the David Lee Roth Band. After graduating with a degree in music from North Texas State, he’d been the drummer for The Merv Griffin Show, soft-rocker Gino Vannelli, and jazz legend Maynard Ferguson. Still, he’d grown up a big rock fan.

Bissonette was thrilled about the opportunity, but when he arrived, his heart sank. “I just remember this huge line, just down the block.”

As he waited, he questioned friends who emerged from the audition room. Bissonette recalls, “I asked Matt Sorum, who later played with the Cult and Guns N’ Roses, and he said, ‘Oh they wanted me to play double bass, but I don’t really play much double bass.’ I did know Hot for Teacher really well, because I was a huge Van Halen fan. So I’m in line, and now I’m getting my feet warmed up, thinking, ‘Here we go – it’s double bass!’”

Soon it was Bissonette’s turn. “So I walk in the room, and it’s Steve and Billy and this funky old drum set. I sat right down and they said, ‘Hey, could you play a solo for us?’” After Bissonette finished, Vai showed him a guitar part that would later be enshrined on Roth’s 1988 album, Skyscraper.

“This piece would end up being Hot Dog and a Shake. Steve wanted me to hit these breaks with him and Billy, and during all that, he would solo. So as Steve was talking I reached into my backpack and took out a Sharpie. I’d brought my own snare, so I started writing out these figures on my snare head. Steve goes, ‘Woah! So you can read and write music? This is amazing!’”

The next day, Bissonette’s phone rang. It was Vai, who told him, “Hey, you’re a great guy and we love the way you play. We’re all going to meet at Dave’s place today, and we’re going to have you play for Dave.”

As Bissonette explained to Modern Drummer, this jam session couldn’t have gone better. “I went in the next day, met Dave, and we played… It was just like magic.” Soon after, he’d audition for Templeman, who, like Roth, came away impressed by Bissonette’s big-band experience and killer chops.

But before Roth told Bissonette he had the gig, he attended to some pressing film-related business.

On October 27, the Fabulous Picasso Brothers, as Angelus and Roth had dubbed their creative partnership, held an old-time cattle call audition at the Hollywood Palace in order to cast new talent for Crazy. With Sheehan, Vai, and Bissonette looking on, Roth marveled at the droves of the wildly attired actors and scantily dressed actresses, telling the Los Angeles Times, “This is a hell of a way to spend a Sunday, isn’t it?”

Bissonette, who like Vai and Sheehan, had never experienced this kind of rock pandemonium, says, “There were just lines of girls in bikinis.”

Bissonette’s week only would get better.

On a night that underscored just how high Diamond Dave’s star had risen in 1985, Roth informed Bissonette that he’d gotten the gig on the same night the singer would be appearing live on national TV. “It was Halloween,” the drummer recalls, “and Dave said, ‘I’m going to be on The Tonight Show tonight!’ Joan Rivers was the guest host, and we all went down to the set. It was like a dream when they told me.”

Bissonette now went to work with the others as they rehearsed and worked up new material. During these sessions, the three sequestered themselves in Roth’s basement while Roth and Angelus worked upstairs on pre-production for Crazy from the Heat. Vai says, “Once we’d all gotten into the basement and started jamming, writing, and playing, it was a very open, free, creative environment.”

Sheehan stresses that much of this creativity flowed from the fact that he and Vai shared many of the same musical influences. He says, “Steve and I were into a lot of the same bands, like early Bowie and Hendrix. When we came up with musical ideas we’d say, ‘That’s kind of a Hendrix-y thing’ or ‘That’s kind of a Bowie-thing.’ The ZZ Top shuffle and the ZZ Top feel were a big part of the influence too.”

Roth, listening through the floor, would regularly join them to review the new material. Sheehan says, “Dave would come downstairs and tell us what he liked, and what he didn’t like. We threw away what he disliked, and then he’d say, ‘Okay, now come up with a chorus.’ We eventually came up with all of these pieces of music.”

Roth also helped inspire Vai and Sheehan’s manic and sophisticated solo parts. As Sheehan explained in Guitar World, when he’d ask Roth, “Hey, Dave, is this bass part too busy?” Roth would shoot back, “No, do it twice as fast and Steve, you double it.” Likewise, Vai told Guitar Player that when he’d ask Roth if he was “overplaying,” Roth would reply, “No, keep going.”

Along with original material, the band considered a number of cover songs for their upcoming release.

Sheehan recalls, “I was in the Kim Mitchell band briefly. He’d sent me a demo with four songs. Kids in Action was one of them, and I just loved it. I played it for Dave and he really dug it. He also dug a Rory Gallagher song I played for him. It was from one of his mindblowing Rockpalast concert performances. I think it was called Secret Agent.”

Roth had plenty of song suggestions too, one of them being Speak of the Devil by the early Seventies Texas power-trio Stray Dog. “He played it for us,” Sheehan says, “and we all said, ‘It’s perfect.’”

At the same time, Roth and Angelus worked to prepare everyone for filming. Vai, who recalls the zany plot included parts for all of the band members, says, “We had a lot of fun preparing for the movie. We got together with [choreographer] Toni Basil and started working out choreography for the songs. It was going to be really great.”

Sheehan says that Roth and Angelus even arranged for a private showing of a cult film that had inspired them as they worked on Crazy. Sheehan continues, “We went to a screening of a 1940s movie called Hellzapoppin’. It’s just a wild, amazing movie, with a bunch of skits and vignettes and craziness. That was one of the templates Dave and Pete were using.”

Sheehan likewise remembers that as filming drew closer, the tunes they wrote soon made their way into the script. “I know songs like Goin’ Crazy were going to be integrated into the movie somehow. I remember reading the dialogue in the movie, and there were a lot of scenes with the band.” These musical scenes included a concert performance of Shy Boy and a nightclub scene that featured Roth crooning his way through Sinatra’s That’s Life.

All of this planning and scheming, however, came to a standstill on that fateful November day when CBS pulled the plug.

Angelus says that after the initial shock dissipated, they began discussing their options, asking each other: Apart from litigation against CBS for breach of contract, what’s our next step? Sheehan recalls telling Roth that day, “‘The hell with it. We’ve got a band. We’ve got songs. Let’s go out and tour!’ Not that he already didn’t think that, and not that he needed any encouragement from me, but I just remember thinking, ‘I’m ready to play.’”

Roth would get clarity about the next moves to make once he, like Sheehan, considered the full breadth of the creative endeavors they all had underway.

“The movie was just one part of a whole program,” he explained to Creem. “Obviously, when the movie fell out, we just continued with the rest of the program.” Angelus observes that what Roth termed “the program” had included “a coordinated release of the film, the [soundtrack] record, and, of course, the tour to accompany it.”

With his film in limbo, Roth and Templeman held pre-production meetings for what would now be a stand-alone rock record rather than a soundtrack album. They decided that the forthcoming Eat ’Em and Smile would include covers and originals, ones that represented a middle ground between the pop flavored, big-band sound of Roth’s Crazy from the Heat EP and the guitar-oriented pop metal showcased on his albums with Van Halen.

As Diamond Dave would later say, even though he’d put together a band capable of playing the most technically sophisticated heavy metal, he didn’t want fans of California Girls wondering “what happened to the brass on this record? Where’s the saxophone? Where’s the shoobee-doobee-doo-bop?”

In late November, just days after the movie was put on hold, the four musicians entered Berkeley’s Fantasy Studios with Templeman and engineer Jeff Hendrickson.

Hendrickson, who’d already worked with Templeman on Hagar’s V.O.A., Aerosmith’s Mirrors, and Roth’s Crazy EP, recalls that the producer had a particular way he liked to begin recording sessions. “Ted and I usually tracked everything in the first couple of days, so the band could just get a feel for things. Sometimes we would keep those as our master takes because they’d turn out so well.”

Templeman believed that this cut-live approach helped musicians avoid the dreaded red light fright and allowed him to determine which songs would ultimately work best on the album.

“We got a lot of keepers that way,” Hendrickson observes, “because when the band members don’t feel like they are on the spot, they play like they do when they’re out on the road, and so you get a lot better feel. But then again, sometimes you’d hear that a certain track would need a lot of work, or even that a track isn’t going to work at all.”

Templeman and Roth then listened back. They’d initially settle on 11 tracks for the album. These included six Vai/Roth compositions and five covers, including the Sheehan-penned headbanger Shy Boy, which dated from his Talas days.

While Roth was well accustomed to Templeman’s ways of working, it took a bit of getting used to for Vai, who had a very different mindset when it came to studio work.

“At times I didn’t know if I liked [Ted’s approach],” he explained to Guitar Player. “But then I realized, boy, it’s really fun. Get in there and do it. We kept about 50 percent of what Dave sang on the basic tracks. I’m used to sitting in the studio and tweaking and playing and punching and tweaking some more and EQ’ing and punching again. With this, it’s get in there and kill the guy with the ball.”

Templeman’s method, as it had done for him and Roth during their Van Halen days, paid dividends at Fantasy. The four musicians produced high-energy, minimal-overdub takes of Roth classics like Tobacco Road, Goin’ Crazy, and even the frenetic Shy Boy.

In the weeks that followed, the band would reconvene in New York to track at the hottest studio in America, the Power Station. Roth, in particular, loved working there because he felt inspired by Manhattan’s energetic street vibe.

“The Power Station is in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, which is more dangerous than New Guinea,” he proclaimed to a reporter. “When you’re there for more than a month recording, you’re bound to soak up a lot of the anxiety from the surrounding streets, and that comes out on the album.”

One track that generated some New York anxiety for Vai was the languid Ladies Nite in Buffalo.

Vai recalled that his original demo “had tons of keyboards and all sorts of guitar overdubs.” But when Templeman had asked the band to first run through Buffalo, Vai gamely collapsed all of his guitar parts into one so they could cut the song live, fully intending to replace this basic track and overdub multiple guitar lines in the coming days.

Templeman, however, had a different take. When he played the track back for everyone, he thought the guitarist had pretty much nailed the song on his first pass. Vai, in turn, thought Templeman had lost his mind. As Vai told Guitar Player, “Of course, being an artist, I hemmed and hawed: ‘I want to do it again.’”

Hendrickson recalls, “Vai kept fighting us because he felt his rough track was terrible. He was so meticulous. But he’d played this basic track that just blew everybody away. We couldn’t believe he wanted to change it.”

Ultimately, Vai says, Templeman and the others got him to see that his guitar part “was beautiful the way it was.”

Despite Templeman’s aversion to overdubbing, a persistent Vai did convince the producer to let him add additional guitar parts to the album. For example, he says, “I remember we were doing Elephant Gun and I said I wanted to double the guitar part. Because the part is all over the place, Ted goes, ‘What do you mean, double it?’

“I can double every single little thing, perfectly.”

After first saying no, Templeman did give the go-ahead. Vai started to double the part, but before he finished, he broke a string. Templeman said, “Well, probably we should just leave it with the one guitar.” Soon after, the producer departed the studio for the day.

Vai immediately went to work. He says, “I finished it. And when Ted heard it the next day, he liked it, so that’s why it made the record.”

Vai also layered some of his patented guitar eccentricity on what would be the album’s first single, Yankee Rose.

As he explained to Guitar Player, “The half-time section in the middle had this nice little arpeggioed chordal thing that was kind of open and bare. So I said, ‘Let me try putting a solo on it. Let me try something weird.’ I hooked up a couple of delays set to some long delay… and they rolled the tape.”

Roth also had some ideas for the guitar parts for Yankee Rose. While Vai overdubbed, Roth got him focused on constructing an outro solo that might be visually arresting for MTV audiences. Roth coached Vai, saying, “Here in the video I want you to do something where you can take the guitar and ram it between your legs.” Vai then came up with the whipsawing whammy bar licks for the song’s conclusion.

Despite Roth’s MTV-driven mindset, the New York sessions also produced a song seemingly more suited for the Thirties than the Eighties.

I’m Easy, a spirited big-band song originally recorded by Australian singer Billy Field, came into Roth’s orbit thanks to Templeman, who thought it fit perfectly with Roth’s “Gigolo” persona. Bissonette recalls that, weeks earlier, when the producer had played it for the band during pre-production, he said, “Gregg, this is going to be right up your alley, because you’re used to kicking five trumpets, five trombones, five saxes.”

At this point, Bissonette got to draw on his musical connections from his Maynard Ferguson days as Templeman worked to recruit session players for the track. He recalls, “Ted said, ‘Hey Gregg, you seem to know everybody. So can you help us put together a killer big band in New York?’ I said, ‘Man, I sure can.’” On the day of the New York session, Ted pulled Bissonette aside to thank him, saying, “Wow, you got all the A-list guys.”

Vai also played a vital role in making the horn parts on I’m Easy sound great. He explained, “I wrote the score and directed the horn section. You should have seen it. I had snakeskin pants on, my hair was flipped out, and I was sitting in this director’s chair with a baton in one hand and a big score in another. Twelve of New York’s best studio blowers were there, and I’m going, ‘Okay, now, can you make this a little more staccato over here?’”

Bissonette says everyone was amazed as they watched the Berklee-trained Vai, nominally a guitarist, do this work for the track. “He just sat down with pen and manuscript paper and wrote out the big band arrangements. The session guys then played along with our track and overdubbed. It was phenomenal.”

As the final overdubbing sessions wrapped up in the spring, Templeman and Roth looked to trim their song list down to 10 songs from the 11 they’d completed.

Ultimately, Kids in Action didn’t make the cut, to the dismay of both songwriter Kim Mitchell and ace session keyboardist Jeff Bova, who’d added synths to the track while the band worked at the Power Station. Bova observes, “I know they were toying with keeping either Kids in Action or Tobacco Road. I remember when the album came out being a bit disappointed because I did a lot of cool keyboard stuff on Kids.” To this day, the track remains unreleased.

With the album in the can, the Fabulous Picasso Brothers turned to scripting and filming promo videos for two of Eat ’Em and Smile’s forthcoming singles: Yankee Rose and Goin’ Crazy! Determined to make good use of their months of effort on Crazy, Roth and Angelus scripted two mini-movies as preludes to the band performance footage that would be the centerpieces of the videos.

Along with casting many of the performers who’d been slated to appear in the movie, they also drew upon their months of work on wardrobes and makeup. As Sheehan explains, “Most of the clothes we had in the Eat ’Em and Smile videos, and the fat suit that Dave wore in Goin’ Crazy, those were all meant for the movie, initially.”

Bissonette adds, “Goin’ Crazy and Yankee Rose were a big part of the proposed look of that movie. Even though Crazy didn’t happen, the videos sure did, and they were amazing. To this day, nobody makes videos like that.”

In June, Roth unleashed an all-out promotional campaign. He talked about his new band, album, and upcoming tour to the press with enthusiasm, telling a reporter, “If you love Van Halen, if you like rock and rolling, you’re going to be blown away. We’ve got all kinds of new tricks to show you.”

He was much less sanguine, however, when it came to the current incarnation of his former band. Responding to the salvos fired at him over the prior months by Hagar and company, Roth stated, “Whenever you have a big ugly divorce, there’s hurt feelings. On the other hand, Sammy’s only angry because he knows I’m better than he is.”

On July 7, Eat ’Em and Smile finally dropped. Driven by the success of Yankee Rose at radio and on MTV, the album would peak at Number 4 on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart. In the weeks that followed, Warner Bros. Records would also release the Van Halen–esque Goin’ Crazy, and the Sinatra standard That’s Life as singles, pushing sales of the LP over one million copies by the fall.

The Eat ’Em and Smile tour, which began in August, likewise did big business, from the first date onward. Vai, who’d never played arenas before, says that in fact the tour’s sold-out opening night provided him with one of the most vivid memories of his career.

“It was just amazing to be on that tour, but being on the stage that first night was a shock. You realize you’re now a rock star performer. There are 20,000 people out there, and you’ve got to deliver. At one point, Dave did this thing where he just stops and puts the mic out to the crowd. The screaming went on for like 10 minutes. It was so loud that Billy and I were looking at each other because we were scared. It was louder than our amps. I just thought, ‘What’s happened? Because this is wild.’”

Every night the four musicians, along with tour keyboardist Brett Tuggle, would blast through a setlist packed with new Roth favorites and classic Van Halen tunes, interspersed by flashy solo segments by Bissonette, Vai, and Sheehan. But as Sheehan explained to Guitar World, the solo performances of the two guitar players became more engaging as the tour progressed, thanks to the input of Angelus and Roth.

“We needed to come up with something to entertain everyone. At the start of the tour, I did my solo the same way I always did it, and Steve did his own solo, too. Although the musicians in the crowd may have loved it, I’m sure a lot of the other people were yawning… So Pete Angelus suggested that we do a guitar duel – and it’s a riot.”

Sheehan says with a smile that Roth’s advice was to “make it like a contest, like a tractor pull. That was the phrase he used. So Steve would come out there and start playing, I’d come up behind him and stop him and push him out of the way and play a while, then he’d push me out of the way. Then we’d push each other, and chase each other around until we’d get to the end when we’d have this big grand finale.”

Over the course of the next six months, Sheehan, Vai, and the rest of the band would play over 100 dates, entertaining arena audiences all across the continent.

Today, members of the group are both nostalgic about and proud of their accomplishments during these years. Sheehan, who’d leave the group in early 1988, says, “My experience with Eat ’Em and Smile and Dave was just amazing and incredible. On tour, places were packed, there were gorgeous girls, and everybody was at the top of their game.”

Vai adds, “Our timing couldn’t have been more perfect, and all the elements came together. You could put on the biggest stage show, and you could wear anything you wanted, and boy did we ever. But what was most exciting to me is the rawness, intensity, and attitude of the music.”

Bissonette remarks that since “the David Lee Roth band was my first big rock gig,” these years will always have a special place in his heart. “Dave,” the drummer says, gave “me my platinum musical passport, good over the world. It’s been the coolest.”

Today, both fans and band members are hopeful for a reunion of the classic Eat ’Em lineup. This is especially true after the Hollywood fire marshal blocked Roth, Vai, Sheehan, Bissonette, and Tuggle from performing at an oversold Lucky Strike Live on November 25, 2015, in what would have been their first performance together in decades.

Vai says ruefully, “The Lucky Strike thing was almost like rock star interruptus. People say the fire marshal stopped us minutes before we went on, but it was seconds. I was standing behind the curtain with a hot guitar in my hands and I was ready to start. I did everything I could to get us to play, but we just couldn’t. Afterward I thought we’ve got to do something together, because there’s just too much cool energy here.”

While everyone’s schedules are packed, there’s a shared desire among the principals that they should all reconvene at some point soon, assuming Roth will light the fuse again.

Sheehan observes, “It’s all up to Dave. This is his game. If he wants to do it, I’m so into it. Ideally, it would be great to record a song or two and then go out and do a bunch of shows: Europe, USA, maybe South America, Japan. It would be great, to get everybody together again, to do it all again, just for the hell of it.”

Vai says, “I think that would be really nice to honor the legacy of the Eat ’Em and Smile album and band. There doesn’t have to be any big commitment. It would just be about getting out there and bringing it home, the way we used to do it, while we still have the juice, which we do.”

Last November, Roth appeared to leave the door open to a reunion, suggesting to fans on his way out of Lucky Strike Live that one day the group might have to book the Hollywood Palladium and give it another go.

Nearly one year after Brent Hinds’ tragic death, Mastodon members are opening up about their complicated 25-year-relationship with the former lead guitarist – and the brain injury that nearly spelled the end of the band.

In an infamous accident that happened right after the 2007 MTV Video Awards, Hinds was involved in an altercation that resulted in a significant head injury that, for years, was rumored to have involved System of a Down bassist Shavo Odadjian – one that multiple sources have since dispelled.

“He, I guess, was kind of running around this casino and ended up just pissing off the wrong person,” says Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor.

“In his very drunken states, he would be a habitual line stepper. He crossed the line with somebody, from what I was told. This person said, ‘Don't do that to me,’ and he did it and got punched, and I think he fell over and hit his head, and I think that was what did the most damage.

“It was really, really, really scary, and we thought we might lose him then.”

“Yeah, we thought the band was over,” adds co-guitarist Bill Kelliher. “He's crossed the line; he's gone too far. He was really fucked up for a long time.” Hinds’ fellow band members even thought that the brain damage was going to be “irreversible” and “substantial.”

However, it also seemed like his recovery served as an intense period of inspiration for Hinds, who, according to Kelliher, was “playing acoustic guitar a lot” and had written an impressive number of songs.

“[We were thinking], man, maybe this is a good thing. Then, Crack the Skye happened, and it was like, wow – he came [up] with all these songs and riffs and ideas, and it was like this rebirth.”

“Every riff and song and composition that he brought in at that time, I was in absolute awe of it,” continues bassist Troy Sanders.

“It was next-level Brent; it was peak Brent, and if someone like Brent was really excited about something, it was on. All three of us, we [were] glued to him. That led to this magical, spiritual-like moment that became Crack the Skye.”

Released in 2009, Mastodon’s fourth studio album became one of their highest-selling albums to date – and marked a significant sonic shift for the band that many consider their masterwork.

“It was a very exciting time, looking back on it,” reflects Kelliher.

“It was a big jump for our band to go from Blood Mountain to Crack the Skye. I remember all of us saying we want to make a classic album that you can pull off the shelf in 20 years from now, 30 years from now, and go, ‘This record stands the test of time.’”

Mastodon recently released Your Ghost Again, their first song without Hinds. The track introduces new guitarist Nick Johnston, and serves as a taster of the band's album, slated for release later this year.

The group's The Poisonous Weapons Tour kicks off on September 16 in Orlando, Florida.

1980 saw the release of more classic metal albums than perhaps any other year in music. From AC/DC’s Back in Black to Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz, Judas Priest’s British Steel to Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell, the new decade was ushered in with landmark albums from some of the genre’s biggest names. Add to this list the self-titled debut from five lads from East London who called themselves Iron Maiden.

Though initially lumped in with the then-burgeoning New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement (which included bands like Motörhead, Def Leppard, Saxon and Angel Witch, all of whom also released albums that year), Maiden over the course of the decade rose to become one of the biggest and most successful acts in heavy metal, a position they still hold today, 30 years later. Along the way, the band’s sound influenced generations of newer metal acts, from legends like Metallica to contemporary headliners like Avenged Sevenfold.

In 1980, however, Maiden were little more than a struggling young outfit themselves. Formed by bassist and songwriter Steve Harris five years earlier, the band burned through a slew of members before lead guitarist Dave Murray and singer Paul Di’Anno came onboard in the late ’70s, solidifying Maiden’s core early lineup.

It was then that the band’s sound – metal riffs and rhythms played with punky speed and aggression, and tempered by twin-guitar harmonies and progressive twists and turns – came into focus.

“I think if anyone wants to understand Maiden’s early thing, in particular the harmony guitars, all they have to do is listen to [British rock band] Wishbone Ash’s Argus album,” Harris says.

“Thin Lizzy too, but not as much. And then we wanted to have a bit of a prog thing thrown in as well, because I was really into bands like Genesis and Jethro Tull. So you combine all that with the heavy riffs and the speed, and you’ve got it.”

By 1978, Iron Maiden had built a solid following around London as a result of their energetic shows (which already included an appearance from an embryonic version of their fiendish mascot, Eddie).

A four-song demo recorded at the end of that year, and later released as The Soundhouse Tapes, attracted a manager, Rod Smallwood, who subsequently landed the band a deal with EMI.

And so, in early 1980, Maiden – which in addition to Harris, Di’Anno and Murray also included co-guitarist Dennis Stratton and drummer Clive Burr – entered London’s Kingsway Studios to record their debut album.

“We had done The Soundhouse Tapes, but this was a whole new thing,” Murray recalls. “Just the whole experience. You had the amps and the cabinets in there and your headphones on, and it was like, This is it: the big time.”

Adds Harris, “We did the whole thing in 13 days, which was fine. We knew the stuff backwards and forwards because we had been doing it onstage for three or four years before that. So there was no problem there.”

According to the bassist, however, there was a problem with their producer, Will Malone.

“We were all young and naïve and we didn’t know about producers and what they do– or don’t do, really,” he says. “And [Malone] was just a waste of time. He didn’t do anything. He just sat there with his feet up reading Country Life. So in the end we just bypassed him and dealt straight with the engineer.”

Harris reports that his main instrument for the sessions was a ’70s-era Fender Precision Bass, which he still uses to this day.

“Back then it was matte black, but I’ve changed the color over the years,” he says. “And I was likely playing through a Hiwatt amp. I was just trying to get as much top end and presence out of my sound as possible.”

In fact, throughout much of the album, Harris’ propulsive and melodic bass lines are pushed far up front in the mix, a sonic trait that has since become one of the band’s calling cards. On Iron Maiden, however, this was somewhat unintentional.

“The truth is that the guitars were mixed too low,” Harris says. “I think the lead sounds are fine, but the rhythms weren’t beefy enough. They sound a bit weedy, really. And I suppose because of that my bass popped out even more than it should have. And from a selfish point of view, yeah, that’s nice, but if you’re considering the overall band sound, it’s not so good.”

For his part, Murray reports that he used his trusty black 1957-era Fender Strat on the recording. The guitar, which had previously belonged to Free’s Paul Kossoff, became Murray’s primary studio and live instrument for much of the ’80s, and it is also the basis for his current Signature Series Stratocaster. “

As for amps,” he says, “I was going into Marshall 100 watts. And in between I had an MXR Phase 90, an MXR Distortion+ and a wah pedal.”

Murray recalls that co-guitarist Stratton primarily played a Les Paul. “So there was a good balance between us, with the Fender and the Gibson,” he says. “And as far as our parts, we’d sit down and work out harmony bits and stuff.

“Dennis was quite good. I used to go see him play in bands back in East London and I thought he was stand-out. So it was nice that we got to play together for a bit. And I think there are some great moments on the album.”

Indeed, Iron Maiden is an incredibly strong effort from start to finish. The album features some of the band’s most beloved and enduring songs, including the rampaging opener, Prowler, the hooky Running Free, the epic Phantom of the Opera and the pummeling, twin-guitar-laced Iron Maiden.

As for his personal favorite, Harris doesn’t hesitate: “Phantom of the Opera,” he says. “I felt that was probably the first song I’d written that was a bit more proggy. It had a lot of time changes in it and different movements and moods. It was indicative of where I wanted to take things with the band.

“And looking back on it now, I can see it was really a pivotal point in the direction of our music. I’ve always felt you shouldn’t have to do verse/chorus and that’s it; you should be able to do whatever the hell you want. And that song really proved it.

“But the album is actually rather strong all around. In a way you could argue that it’s a best-of of the first four years of the band. So it’s all gonna stand up, track-wise.”

Preceded by the release of the Running Free single, Iron Maiden, replete with cover art that presented a somewhat punked-up rendering of Eddie, was issued in the U.K. on April 14, 1980. (The U.S. version, which hit shelves in August of that year, tacked on the previously single-only release Sanctuary.)

In what was a surprise to all involved, the album shot straight into the British charts at Number Four. “We thought we’d do reasonably well, because we had a hardcore following up and down the U.K. from playing the clubs for years,” Murray says. “But the fact that it debuted so high was unbelievable for a new band.”

In support of the album, Iron Maiden spent the rest of the year on the road in the U.K., and even opened for Kiss on a string of dates throughout England. By the time the band regrouped at the end of 1980 to begin work on its second album, Killers, Stratton had been sacked.

Harris says, “Everyone always uses the term ‘musical differences’ when you’re changing a band member. But with Dennis that was the case. He was a good player, but his influences and the things that he liked and the way he saw things was totally different to where we were heading. We were hoping it wouldn’t be, but it was.”

In his place Maiden recruited Adrian Smith, a childhood friend of Murray’s who had been fronting his own band, Urchin (an outfit which, at one time, included Murray in its ranks). One album later, the band would trade Di’Anno for Bruce “The Air-Raid Siren” Dickinson and begin its ascent to the top of the metal heap in earnest.

And yet, many of the songs from Iron Maiden’s quickly recorded debut continue to be fan favorites, as well as staples of the band’s live show. “Iron Maiden is always in there,” Murray says. “And on this most recent tour we closed every night with Running Free. So it shows you these songs have really stood the test of time.”

As for why he believes this to be the case? “The album just captured something,” Murray says.

“Listening to it now, 30 years later, it’s still quite interesting. It’s very raw sounding, and for the most part quite uptempo – the songs are almost frantically fast paced. But that was our frame of mind at the time. We were very excitable back then.” He laughs. “Though I suppose we still are.”

• Originally published in Guitar World, December 2010

In June 1980, Led Zeppelin embarked on a 14-date tour of Europe. Beginning on June 17, in Dortmund, Germany, the tour would also wrap up in Germany, with a July 7 show at Eissporthalle an der Jafféstraße in Berlin.

Tragically, that Berlin show would prove to be the band's last ever performance with drummer John Bonham, who passed away on September 25, 1980, after a day of heavy drinking. He was just 32 years old.

Though Bonham's health was already in decline throughout the summer trek (he collapsed three songs into the band's June 27, 1980 show in Nuremberg, Germany, forcing the band to cancel the rest of the show), you can't hear any evidence of it in the soundboard recording – posted below – of the band's July 7 gig.

Throughout the 14-song set – which included a number of tunes (In the Evening, Hot Dog and All My Love) from the band's 1979 In Through the Out Door album, alongside classics like Black Dog, Kashmir, Whole Lotta Love, and Stairway to Heaven – Bonham was in typically thunderous form. Like the rest of the band, Bonham was all too eager to show audiences that – even after a decade-plus at rock's pinnacle – the mighty Zepp still had plenty of gas in the tank.

Though their commercial standing had never been higher at the dawn of the ‘80s, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Bonham were jittery about the band's place in rock at the time.

The band's August 4 and 11, 1979 mega-shows in Knebworth, England – designed to be a triumphant live return to their home country after an absence of four years – were polarizing. Many fans felt that the gaudy production of the concerts – which were attended by hundreds of thousands of people in total – distracted from the music itself, which was more than a little ragged at times.

Of course, by this time, punk and especially new wave had gone from buzzy sub-genres to the kings of the hill, rendering the long-form, blues-based music of Zeppelin and their late-‘60s/early ‘70s contemporaries largely out of fashion.

With that in mind, the quartet viewed their summer 1980 gigs as a reset. No big light show, no lasers, no white smoke – not even any lengthy stand-alone solos or flamboyant outfits.

Even the venues on the tour were significantly downsized, the small Western and Central European arenas the band tore through on it being a far cry from the masses at Knebworth and the enormous arena and stadium American crowds the band had entertained on their last tour, all the way back in 1977.

The success of the 1980 European tour gave the band a jolt of momentum, and persuaded them to book a North American tour for the fall of 1980, with a similarly scaled-down approach.

It was during rehearsals for that tour – which was scheduled to begin on October 17 – that Bonham passed away.

We'll obviously never quite know how Led Zeppelin would have evolved from 1980 forward had Bonham lived, but the soundboard recording from their last show with him certainly suggests that they had plenty of musical fire left.

Last year, the AI-generated band The Velvet Sundown went viral, with the “band” racking up millions of streams in mere months.

Their three albums, Floating On Echoes, Dust And Silence, and Paper Sun Rebellion – complete with AI-generated album covers – sounded so uncannily real that they left music fans scratching their heads and questioning whether they were fully AI-generated.

According to an investigation by The Guardian, it’s still unclear what music The Velvet Sundown’s albums were trained on.

Furthermore, when an alleged spokesperson for the band, operating under the pseudonym Andrew Frelon, spoke to Rolling Stone, claiming that the music was created using the AI tool Suno, a Velvet Sundown X account clarified that, “We understand the intrigue our project inspires – and we’re not here to dispel mystery.

“But we are here to correct the record….The Velvet Sundown is a multidisciplinary artistic project blending music, analog aesthetics, and speculative storytelling. While we embrace ambiguity as part of our narrative design, we ask that reporting on us be based on verifiable sources – not fabricated accounts or synthetic media.”

Now, a real, human band is attempting to fight back against AI-generated music by forming a Velvet Sundown tribute band – aptly named Bootleg Velvet Sundown.

“I formed a tribute band of the most famous AI group of all, Velvet Sundown,” says Simon Balch, the progenitor of this project.

“Instead of giving any money to the Velvet Sundown, I’m giving all the profits to real musicians, whose work AI [has] stolen in the first place. This is humans versus machines, and today, the humans are rising.”

So what’s Balch’s master plan? “First up, we're re-recording some of their tracks in studios [featuring “real musicians” Leo Walrus, Enzo Allen, Milo Garland and Luke McQueen],” he details. “I want to be the first tribute band to get more streams than the original band.

“I've not heard a whisper from The Velvet Sundown themselves, but if you are listening, here's a message to you: I'm not giving you a penny,” he insists.

“All the profits that we make will be going to real musicians. Am I a musical Robin Hood?... But in this case, my arrows are tribute bands, and my target, AI music.”

And while we’re all waiting to see what Balch and co.'s next step is, you can follow the “real” tribute band’s exploits on Bootleg Velvet Sundown’s official Instagram.

In more recent news, influential players, including Sophie Burrell and Sophie Lloyd, have spoken about how their work is being manipulated by bad actors who are using AI to defraud guitar fans.

American punk band Alkaline Trio has been forced to cancel their UK tour at the last minute as guitarist/vocalist Matt Skiba fights a medical condition that has left him unable to walk.

Former blink-182 guitarist Skiba says his condition has left him unable to “walk, talk, play, or sing” properly, forcing the cancellation of five UK shows and a headline appearance at the 2000 Trees festival.

The band has not revealed the specifics of Skiba’s condition, but the tour has been canceled after the band arrived in the UK. They have now returned to the States for treatment.

“We are immensely sorry, but we must cancel our dates in England… due to medical issues Matt has been suffering from that have worsened,” the band’s statement reads.

“He’s gonna be okay, but needs to be treated stateside as soon as possible. We will be back healthier and stronger.”

The reluctant but necessary cancellation, announced on the day of their first show in Birmingham, has been met with an outpouring of love from their fans. That prompted Skiba to address the issue directly via a video posted to Instagram.

“Thank you for all the love and support,” he says. “It means the world to me. You guys deserve a better show than I can throw right now. I've got numbness in my feet, numbness in my hands, and as you can tell, I’m losing my voice. I can’t really talk, walk, play, or sing.

“I’m gonna go home and get looked at. I love all of you so much, and we’ll be back ASAP to make these shows up to you.”

Shows in Birmingham, London, Newcastle, Leeds, and Manchester are affected and are expected to be rearranged in due course. Beloved UK alt-rockers, Don Broco, will take their place at the Gloucestershire, UK, gathering, which was meant to conclude their tour.

Guitar World wishes Skiba a speedy recovery.

While Eddie Van Halen was Van Halen's linchpin and chief songwriter, the Sammy Hagar era saw the Red Rocker prove himself as a songwriter in his own right.

Coming into the band, Hagar had something of an upper hand: the Van Halen brothers were already fans of the material he had recorded with Montrose in the mid-’70s, while his solo career was already on the rise.

Therefore, it was no surprise that Hagar brought his own ideas to the fore – even if Alex Van Halen wasn’t so keen at times. Eagles Fly, which ended up on Hagar’s 1987 solo record, I Never Said Goodbye, was one such track.

“When I sing Eagles Fly, it's about being born,” Hagar tells Total Rock when asked to pick the song he enjoys singing the most from his vast repertoire.

“And once again, I had a vision. It wasn't a dream. I was wide awake, and I had a feeling in a special place. I was in a special place.”

He continues, “I showed him [Alex Van Halen] that song, and Eddie's going, ‘Wow, wow, wow.’ And Alex goes, ‘Yeah, yeah. It sounds like John Denver; it's cool.’”

Hagar explains that, at the time, Alex “wasn’t about me writing songs for Van Halen,” preferring that Eddie handle the musical composition while assigning Hagar “the lyrics and the vocals.”

However, the drummer soon did a 180 when he heard it as a fully-fledged track on Hagar’s ninth solo album – and his first solo effort since becoming Van Halen’s front man. Eddie not only stepped in as the album’s co-producer – alongside Hagar himself and David Thoener – but also laid down the low end and a quintessentially Eddie guitar solo.

“When it came out, and we finished my solo record, Alex heard it, and he goes, ‘Hey, why the fuck didn't we put that on a Van Halen record!’” Hagar says.

“I went, ‘Well, Al, if you don't remember, I can remember you said it sounded like John Denver,’ because I was playing it on acoustic guitar!”

In more recent Van Halen-related news, Joe Satriani recently recalled being approached by David Lee Roth for a Van Halen cover band – when Eddie was still alive.

For their most recent respective releases, The Rolling Stones and Beatles bassist Paul McCartney shared a producer – i.e., producer to the stars, Andrew Watt. Not only that, though, Macca is reportedly the one laying down the low end on an upcoming Stones track, titled Covered in You, from their upcoming album (out July 10), Foreign Tongues.

“You could be a bit blasé and go, ‘Yeah, OK, so what?’ But for me, it wasn’t – it went the other way,” McCartney told NME.

“It was like, ‘Wow, there’s Mick [Jagger]! Ooh, there’s Keith [Richards]! Woah, there’s Ronnie [Wood]!’ It was exciting. It was really good. A great thing is all I had to do was play bass and not make mistakes, so it was good.”

As for Jagger, the Stones' iconic frontman revealed that the new tune required more of a “funk bass part.”

“Obviously, I’ve known Paul for ages. He’s not a stranger, but he’s never played bass with us before,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s a different thing, you know?

“I said to Andy [Watt, producer], ‘Is he gonna be into this? Because it’s a punk tune and I want overdriven bass. It’s gonna be simple, no mucking about.’ And Paul did exactly what was needed in, like, 10 minutes.”

Now, McCartney did also play bass on Bite My Head Off, from the Stones' 2023 album, Hackney Diamonds (some Foreign Tongues tracks date back to those sessions), but these instances didn't mark the first time the two collaborated.

The Macca-Lennon powerhouse wrote the Stones’ second single, I Wanna Be Your Man, back in 1963, while the late Brian Jones also contributed to the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. Jagger, meanwhile, contributed backing vocals to Baby, You’re a Rich Man.

Another instance where the two bands collided was when members of the Beatles and the Stones did a legendary one-off performance together as part of the TV spectacular, the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, where Lennon and Richards played the Beatles’ Yer Blues in the temporary supergroup the Dirty Mac – alongside Eric Clapton and Mitch Mitchell.

In more recent news, Paul McCartney recently challenged fans to work out the mystery guitar chord that inspired his new album – and, here at Guitar World, we figured it out.

Whether they’re being praised as torch-carrying titans or derided as classic-rock cosplayers, Canadian duo Crown Lands are often cited as the modern-day Rush.

But Kevin Comeau – their guitarist, bassist, keyboardist and now primary producer-engineer – isn’t concerned about the endless comparisons, which continue with the release of their third LP, the conceptual sci-fi epic Apocalypse.

But they’re expecting that chatter; after all, the reference point was consciously baked into the band’s DNA back in 2015, when he met his long-lost brother in prog, drummer-singer Cody Bowles.

“When we started the band, we joked to ourselves, ‘What if the White Stripes covered Rush?’” Comeau tells Guitar World. “We just kept leaning more into the Rush than the White Stripes as time went on. I still think, sonically, Rush’s Moving Pictures is as perfect a record as you can get. As a producer, I’m always chasing the clarity of something like Power Windows.”

In fact, connecting these virtuosic Canadian bands feels like the ultimate accolade. “We’re not worried about people comparing us to Rush,” he says. “I don’t think you can get more complimentary than a comparison to Rush. I love seeing the discourse online – ‘I don’t like them. They sound too much like Rush.’ Or ‘I don’t like them. They don’t sound enough like them.’

“I’ve always loved Rush’s [philosophy of thinking] – ‘We want to be the world’s smallest symphony orchestra.’ Trying to do that with two people is like trying to one-up our heroes – or one-down our heroes.”

Apocalypse is their most grandiose adventure into this symphonic realm, building on the proggy template – and interstellar good-and-evil storyline – they established with 2023’s Fearless.

The album balances spacey balladry (Through the Looking Glass) with heavy, punchy rockers (Blackstar), all building to the 19-minute climax of the title track, which also pulls inspiration from the Allman Brothers Band and the bonkers 1974 Yes piece The Gates of Delirium.

Their long-form centerpiece, with its textural shifts and cinematic key/tempo changes, offers plenty of space for Comeau on guitar – from crunching power chords to jittery arpeggios to bluesy leads that sound beamed in from The Wall.

That fluidity and constant surprise keeps the piece engaging, much like Echoes or Supper’s Ready. “When you have a record about going through a black hole and fighting your arch villain through time and space,” he says, “the music ends up writing itself. You end up pushing all the crazy polyrhythms even further.”

But the monster runtime wasn’t the ultimate goal, even if Comeau gets a nerdy thrill out of seeing the track tick past the 19-minute mark.

“You’re chasing length a lot of the time in prog,” Comeau says. “I’m always chasing the 20-minute opus. When we sent the final mix to Ted Jensen, it was 19 minutes and 1 second. Mastering engineers will often lop off any dead space, and the master came back at 18:58.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever had to send a revision – ‘It sounds great, but can you restore the four seconds of silence at the very end so that it stays past 19 minutes?’ It’s so stupid, but that’s progressive rock, baby!”

Even if all of these tunes had been short, Comeau would’ve had his hands full on Apocalypse; along with playing guitar and producing the bulk of the material, he also continued to handle all of the bass, synths and bass pedals. To put it in Rush terms: part Alex Lifeson, part Geddy Lee.

To pull off that crazy feat on stage as a two-piece, especially with their songs growing more complex, Crown Lands would either need to scale back dramatically or get super creative.

They’ve chosen the latter route, with Comeau often playing a double-neck guitar/bass custom-built by luthier Brock Stoyko. (There was also a major assist from Lee’s bass tech, John “Skully” McIntosh, who helped him wire it. And to land on a suitably “ergonomic” design, Comeau went to Lee’s home and took measurements of the Rush legend’s own double-necks.)

Comeau’s admiration clearly extends well beyond “casual fan.” In 2021, Crown Lands joined Lifeson on stage during the annual Andy Kim Christmas Show in Toronto, joining for an all-star Led Zeppelin medley.

“In rehearsals, I’m playing every Rush riff I know, like The Necromancer, and Alex is just laughing,” Comeau says.

“He was so cool. He said, ‘I don’t want to play my double-neck for this song – it’s too long and heavy.’ I said, ‘I’ll do it!’ He lent me his white Gibson EDS-1275 for Stairway, so I’m doing the 12-string part while he’s doing the solo. I’m like, ‘Holy shit, this is life-affirming.’”

Later, Comeau helped Lifeson catalog and tune his guitars for a charity auction, and he wound up being Lee’s keyboard tech ahead of 2022 Taylor Hawkins tribute show.

Prog is in Crown Lands’ blood, and their Rush worship is pure. “When I found Cody, it was like, ‘It’s perfect!’ We’re so deep into this niche; I don’t know where we’d be if we didn’t have each other to fill in [our] musical holes. I see that in Rush.

“They’re such singular musicians that, if they were in any other context, it wouldn’t work. The way they were able to last for 40 years, how they’ve stayed friends when the meat grinder of the industry destroys friendships, is so special.”

• Apocalypse is out now via Inside Out.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

It was backstage in Australia, of all places, that D12 got serious. “We was on Snoop Dogg’s I Wanna Thank Me tour in 2023,” remembers the Michigan hip-hop collective’s co-founder Kuniva.

“We was kicking it in his dressing room and he said, ‘Yo, did y’all hear that crowd out there when y’all came out? Man, y’all need to keep this going. The world needs D12. If they askin’ for it, you gotta give it to them. And they're screamin’ for it. Don’t stop now!’”

From the fateful day in 1996 when late Detroit rapper Proof assembled Motor City’s greatest street-poets under the banner of D12 – followed by their explosion on 2001’s Devil’s Night, with a peak-fame Eminem at the helm – the band’s legend was cast in stone.

But they only released one more full album – 2004’s D12 World – before Proof’s fatal shooting in 2006 and Eminem’s hiatus slowed their studio activity to a trickle. On 2018’s Stepping Stone, the ice-blond rapper went so far as to declare: “The moment that Proof died, so did the group. D12 is over.”

You could have fooled us. With Kuniva first to join today’s Zoom call, the faces start popping up like mushrooms. Here’s Swifty McVay: the friendly, thoughtful OG who’s mostly happy just to sit in. There’s Jeff and Jake Bass: the father-and-son studio team who produced and played guitar and bass on long-awaited third album D12 Forever.

The banter begins. “You're looking like Hugh Hefner over there, Jeff, with the robe and little fucking pipe and shit!” Kuniva tells his freshly showered collaborator as he exhales a flume of smoke.

“Minus the women,” drawls Jeff in response.

That industrial-strength chemistry shouldn’t surprise. Long-standing D12 fans know that Bass Snr’s association goes right back to the mid ’90s. One fateful morning at 3am, the story goes, Eminem and the D12 crew turned up to his studio on 8 Mile Road (the address should sound familiar) and put their sound in the hands of Jeff and his brother Mark, collectively billed as the Bass Brothers.

From that moment, right up until Eminem’s 2010 album Recovery, Jeff was a studio fixture (and fixer), sporadically producing and co-writing, while playing guitar, bass and keys for both groups.

“I remember when I first met them,” he reflects. “They were young and nobody knew anything about anything. But after Em blew up, he brought his boys in, and we continued working with them. It’s been a lot of years.”

The pick of the back catalog is probably Jeff’s brittle, pulsing, angry-hornet guitar intro to Eminem’s inescapable 2002 8 Mile soundtrack hit, Lose Yourself. “I never talked about that song with any of the guitar magazines,” he says, “because everybody thought it was just a sample.

“Y’know, Tone Lōc, back in the day, had used Eddie Van Halen’s Jamie’s Cryin’ on Wild Thing – but that was a sample. When I began to play the guitar parts live on these records, it gave hip-hop a different sound. D12 came along right after that, and they were using guitars in their work, too. And that’s the Detroit sound. You mix a little bit of everything together.”

Jake Bass was not yet a teenager when those classic albums went down –but already the kid had his antennae up. “I was 11 when they did Devil’s Night, and I was nerding out, studying what my dad did on that first record in real time,” he reflects. “I watched which guitars he chose, which Line 6 POD settings he used on the session for These Drugs. That kidney bean was the best!”

“You never know what your child's watching you do,” chuckles his old man. “Thank God that Jake picked up on all that kind of shit, as opposed to the drugs and the alcohol that I used to be fucking around with. He chose the right substance!”

For D12 Forever, Bass Jr took charge not just of production at Michigan’s FBT Studios, but the bulk of the album’s guitar and bass parts. “I went with that old-school Run-DMC/Beastie Boys vibe, but I did it all real and original and live on my PRS 40th anniversary McCarty SC56,” he tells us of the fiery rhythm work on recent single Tear It Down.

“I just wanted something with constant motion, because it was so high-energy. Something they could just go crazy on as far as rapping. If you break that guitar part down, you’ll see there’s seven or eight harmonies going on to give it that fullness.”

Another guitar standout is Tenderism, Jake’s snakecharmer lick coiling around a guesting Method Man’s bullet-belt vocals. “I wanted a hybrid of what would happen if D12 was mixed with Van Halen, mixed with the Ohio Players. And for the bass parts I used the exact same P-Bass my dad used on Devil's Night.”

“I bother Jake at all times of the day and night!” laughs Kuniva. “I call him up with ideas and he’s like, ‘Okay, I'll do it soon as I put the kids to bed!’ He’s always on deck for whatever you need. That's just a dope thing when you have someone who’s that in tune with your sound.

“Shit that I can't explain with words, Jake knows what I mean. He can play damn-near anything. Y’know, he comes in with a flute sometimes, or a mandolin.”

Those jawbreaker tracks couldn’t be further from the vibe of What If?, where Jeff steps up with a sunbeam outro solo beneath Melanie Rutherford’s vocal. “This album is Jake's baby,” nods the veteran.

“But I was honored they asked me to play the guitar on that track. I used a 335. I was always a Strat guy back in the ’90s, on Eminem and D12’s early stuff. Now I tend to gravitate more towards a fuller-bodied guitar.”

“What Jeff played on What If? just pulls at my soul,” reflects Kuniva. “I get choked up when I hear it.”

But the most poignant cut of all is saved for last – with Forever airing unheard posthumous vocals from the band’s fallen leader. “All the things that Proof happened to say on that recording were just so appropriate in such a beautiful, eerie way,” says Jake.

“It’s like, ‘It’s not over; it's not the end – it’s not gonna stop.’ I wanted the guitar to reflect that. There’s no chorus in that song; it’s just a constant motion.”

Along with Snoop’s pep talk, remembers Kuniva, Forever threw down the gauntlet, convincing D12 to raise their game, push this third studio album over the line and commit to their future.

“That song is so powerful, y’know? And I speak for all of us – when we heard the Proof verse, it was like, ‘Man, there’s something crazy in the air here that we have to match.’ It just means a lot to still connect with someone who was such a force in in your life.

“We came into this game not caring what other people thought about us. We’ve defied so many odds, survived so much, endured so much. So we’re really making a statement on that song – ‘Yo, no matter what happens, D12 is always gonna be here. We’re never going away. We’re gonna live forever!’”

• D12 Forever is out now.

When Slipknot released their self-titled debut on Roadrunner Records, precisely on June 29, 1999, singer Corey Taylor, percussionists Shawn “Clown” Crahan and Chris Fehn, drummer Joey Jordison, bassist Paul Gray, turntablist Sid Wilson, sampler/keyboardist Craig Jones, guitarist Mick Thomson, and original guitarist Josh Brainard altered not only the sound but also the very image of heavy metal as it entered the new millennium.

And while breakthrough single Wait and Bleed was pivotal in introducing Slipknot to the masses and opening the floodgates to nu metal, as Thomson said in a 2014 Guitar World interview, it wasn’t quite the musical trajectory the band wanted to follow for the rest of their career.

“For a long time, I resisted anything that had melodic choruses. I was very anti anything like that,” he said.

“I mean, I thought it was great how Wait and Bleed ended up on the radio. It’s a great song. But when we were having success with that on our first record and the label says, ‘Yeah, we need five more Wait and Bleeds, I was like, ‘Go fuck yourself!’”

Thomson went on to clarify why he had that immediate reaction – despite the single’s international success. “‘You want five songs that can be radio singles? Well, we’re really not that band. You sell our records, and we’ll make them, okay?’”

The guitarist even pointed out that the radio edit was significantly different than the album version – the label’s attempt at making Wait and Bleed more “commercial” and palatable for the mainstream.

“The more melodic sing-songy part of the chorus, which is on the radio edit, was different on the album,” he asserted.

“It was a background vocal, made lower, that Corey barked over. But then the fuckin’ label gets a hold of it, and they want a radio single, so they ended up having it remixed so the brutal vocal drops and the melodic vocal is now on top. But that’s not what you get when you see us live.”

As Thomson very aptly described the band’s core ethos – especially at the time – in a 2024 interview, “People didn’t fucking know what to think or do with us early on. But our thing always was, ‘Fuck your labels – just listen to the shit. Do you like it?’ You don’t have to categorize it and this and that. Just ask yourself, ‘Is it cool?’”

Elsewhere in the 25th anniversary retrospective, Thomson revealed why all of his solos were cut from the final record, and gave Guitar World a peek into the chaotic and intense recording sessions that made Slipknot such an iconic album.

Gear damaged during flights is an unfortunate reality for touring bands. However, gear damaged during pre-flight checks, well, that’s another story altogether.

According to the Boston-based blues band GA-20 – comprised of guitarist Matthew Stubbs, lead vocalist/guitarist Cody Nilsen, and drummer Josh Kiggans – one of their high-end guitar cases got damaged thanks to a particularly enthusiastic TSA agent at San Luis Obispo County Regional Airport in California.

“Big shout out to this fine TSA @tsaamerica agent at San Luis Obispo airport who insisted that taking everything out of my @monocreators guitar case and swabbing it wasn’t enough,” the band writes on social media, accompanied by an actual video of the ordeal.

“He then spent 20 minutes ripping out all of the padding/stuffing from the case and of course he was unable to put it back together. To top it off we all have TSA Pre check & this agent refused to run the case through xray until he ripped all the padding out of the case. The gig bag is trash now. ($380 case) Good news they gave me a business card and said if I have a complaint feel free to email.”

Safe to say, a multitude of musicians pitched in with similar experiences. Guthrie Trapp noted, “This is f*cking insanity!! Worst ‘case’ of this I’ve ever seen,” while singer/songwriter Bones Owens commented, “I had two guitars destroyed by baggage handlers on a flight earlier this year.. different situation, with a similar disrespect for musicians’ livelihood while traveling by air.

“There seems to be a lack of common sense, a lack of consequences, and mostly a lack of care. Sorry to see this happen to your gear, but thanks for sharing it here. It’s the best thing we can do to spread awareness and hopefully illicit [sic] some change.”

As for TSA itself, its policy states that, “Musical instruments must undergo screening when transported as carry-on or in checked baggage. Musical instruments transported as carry-on require a physical inspection at the security checkpoint. Inform the TSA officer if your instrument requires special care and handling. You may pack brass instruments in your checked or carry-on baggage.”

In more recent news, a clip posted to TikTok – with more than four million views – has sparked outrage after footage of a baggage handler carelessly throwing guitars on the ground went viral.

Angine de Poitrine have been on everyone’s lips since that polka-dot and microtone-heavy live session dropped on Seattleite radio station KEXP’s official YouTube channel. Since then, the Canadian duo’s lives have changed completely, as they’ve brought their unique brand of “mantra-rock Dada Pythago-Cubist” orchestral sounds to, well, the masses.

One of the most distinctive calling cards is guitarist Khn’s microtonal double-neck guitar/bass, built by luthier Raphaël Le Breton. Eastwood even created its own version in the form of the limited-edition Microtonal Doubleneck 4/6 Electric Guitar/Bass, which allegedly came together after Le Breton approached the company about creating a tribute to the original model.

Now, it seems like Khn himself is wielding a new version of the polka-dotted double-neck that led to Angine de Poitrine’s fame. During some of their latest shows, eagle-eyed fans noticed another version – this time by renowned (Canadian through-and-through) brand Godin Guitars.

According to reports by Guitar Bomb, the band’s viral success and subsequent world tours meant that Khn needed a solid backup. However, Le Breton was tied up with other work, so Quebec’s own Godin Guitars came through and built a custom double-neck for the guitarist.

Specs for the new-and-improved backup build include custom fretwork, with the upper neck featuring a standard 6-string electric guitar configuration, and a lower neck that functions as your typical 4-string bass.

Both fretboards are subsequently fretted to split the traditional 12-tone octave into 24 quarter tones, making them microtonal-ready.

Another key feature of this new build is its weight. Godin crafted this model to maximize ergonomics, chambering, and weight distribution – reducing the load on Khn.

Other tweaks include relocating the two dedicated output jacks to the bottom edge, with the guitar and bass necks split into separate signals routed to a Roland Jazz Chorus JC-120 and a Hartke HA2500 amp stack, respectively.

The band’s polka-dot aesthetic is further enhanced with matching black-and-white graphics. Finally, the original build’s “69” dice knobs have been swapped for custom “3” dice controls.

Judging by the response on Reddit, it’s safe to say that Angine de Poitrine fans and math-rock aficionados have gone crazy over this guitar – all begging the question: could the band be teasing an official signature model?

In more recent news, GuitarWorld.com’s editor-in-chief recently witnessed the dynamic duo live – and hailed Khn as the greatest polka-dot guitar hero since Randy Rhoads and Buddy Guy.

You never really know when you’re going to get your break. Dead Pioneers’ early single, Bad Indian, created a momentum they hadn’t anticipated. Things only accelerated when they mailed a copy of their music to Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament.

“I was 38 when we went on tour with them,” says guitarist Josh Rivera. “A long time ago I’d kind of given up on the dream of something like that happening. Pearl Jam asking us to come out and play was kind of the ultimate confirmation that maybe we were doing something right.”

That validation can be heard all over their forthcoming album Wagon Burner – while the Dead Pioneers’ politically charged identity remains intact, the record dramatically expands their sonic palette, pushing their sound and identity far beyond straightforward hardcore punk into something heavier, more atmospheric, and surprisingly dynamic.

“We got heavier and dirtier on this record than we ever have before,” Rivera says. “But we also cleaned it up and explored a lot more atmosphere.”

That evolution largely came from the chemistry of the band as a whole; their collaborative approach became central to the record’s identity.

Unlike many punk bands where guitar roles stay rigidly separated, guitarists Rivera and Abe Brennan approached Wagon Burner as a communal creative process where riffs constantly evolved in the room.

“This is the most collaborative band I’ve ever played in,” Brennan says. “Someone brings in a riff, and pretty soon everybody’s adding to it. Suddenly, you’ve got this Frankenstein song – but it works. I’ve always believed punk should evolve. If you’re just recreating the same thing over and over again, eventually it stops feeling honest.”

That attitude pushed the band to explore unfamiliar territory. Songs like Nazi Teeth lean into massive octane-drenched riffs and near-metallic aggression, while tracks like Never Alone incorporate cleaner layers, chorus textures, and the sort of melodic space that was only hinted at in prior releases.

“We explored using all sorts of pedals on this record,” Rivera says. “I probably brought 20 or 30 into the studio. There were always a dozen different things at my feet.”

Sessions took place at The Blasting Room studio in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he had the luxury of recording close to home instead of flying into sessions with limited gear. That freedom allowed him to constantly swap gear and textures. “On the last record I was mostly using whatever the studio had. This time, if I wanted a different guitar or a weird pedal for one section, I could just go grab it.”

They relied extensively on the EarthQuaker Devices Gary Overdrive, while also using the Chase Bliss Generation Loss Mk. II for degraded chorus textures and warped ambience. “Anytime I needed something a little warbly or weird, I was reaching for the Generation Loss,” Rivera says.

He leaned heavily on his Ryan “Fluff” Bruce signature Music Man StingRay alongside several PRS guitars. Meanwhile, Brennan tracked much of the record using his Gibson SG. “I love the way the SG reacts,” he says. “Anything weird or chaotic just feels right on that guitar.”

Brennan’s pedal choices played a huge role in the record’s heavier moments as well. He frequently used the EHX POG throughout the hard-charging Nazi Teeth, helping create some of the thickest guitar tones the band have recorded thus far.

“Once Abe kicked on the POG for some of those single-note riffs, everything just got massive,” Rivera says. “It stopped sounding like a normal punk guitar and started sounding almost mechanical and overwhelming – in the best way possible.”

Even fuzz tones carried deeper meaning. Dead Pioneers have repeatedly pointed to Indigenous-owned pedal company NativeAudio as a defining part of their sound, particularly the Frybread Fuzz and War Party pedals.

Their willingness to experiment mirrors their larger mission: originally born from singer/songwriter Gregg Deal’s spoken word performance project The Punk Pan-Indian Romantic Comedy, the band have always approached punk through a political lens rooted in Indigenous liberation, class consciousness, and anti-capitalism.

“You can’t talk about Indigenous rights without talking about capitalism and the way it’s affected our communities,” Deal explains. “You cannot talk about Indigenous liberation without talking about class war.”

That urgency drives the emotional core of Wagon Burner. Deal adds: “If Never Alone is saying music can bring people together, the rest of the record is explaining why you need that community in the first place.

“We have more in common with each other than we do with any billionaire dickhead. That’s the whole point. We’re trying to bring people along with us.”

• Wagon Burner is releaed on June 26, and it’s available for pre-order now.

For every wildly successful Metallica, there are countless metal bands that never grabbed the brass ring. In the ‘80s, extreme metal was breaking through, and there was a plethora of great bands to choose from.

While most never reached the heights of the Big Four, many of them are still slugging it out, and they’ve stuck around long enough for new generations of fans to discover them.

When the New Wave of British Heavy Metal hit in 1979, it encompassed a wide variety of bands – from Iron Maiden to Def Leppard. Raven and Venom were both three-piece outfits from Newcastle, England.

Raven’s sound was more upbeat than the Satanic darkness of Venom – and Raven singer/bassist John Gallagher jokingly described the other band’s sound as “Motörhead, on the wrong speed, in a cement mixer!”

Both bands were on the indie label Neat Records, whose owner, Dave Wood, told Gallagher that a guy with the biggest independent record store on the East Coast wanted to work with Raven. “America was a huge thing,” Gallagher recalls. “I never knew anyone who’d been there.”

The guy was the late Jonny Zazula, who signed Metallica and Anthrax to his Megaforce label, and added Raven too. “Jonny Z changed our lives,” Gallagher confirms.

“He was the next really seismic event for us. He was a larger-than-life character – one man against the world, definitely a David against Goliath. He was like a preacher, coming down from the mountain with the metal gospel and spreading it around the world.”

Metallica and Raven went on tour together. KJ Doughton, who ran Metallica’s first fan club, recalls: “Raven’s debut album, Rock Until You Drop, was the first NWOBHM album I’d ever purchased.” The band were featured on a lot of compilation albums, “and they were often the best band featured.” He went to three shows on the tour and argues: “Raven rivaled Metallica as a live band.”

Exodus came out of the legendary Bay Area thrash scene as San Francisco became a crucial area for the development of thrash metal. While it may seem odd that such violent, aggressive music could come from an area so mellow, it was a place where movements – beat poets, hippies, bikers, or the gay community – thrived.

Thrash was even new territory for the musicians who played it. Guitarist Rick Hunolt joined Exodus in 1984, not long before they recorded Bonded By Blood. He’d grown up with Zeppelin, Bad Company, and Thin Lizzy, and Exodus was the first time he’d heard thrash.

“It was all so new back then; no one was doing it,” he says. “I thought, ‘Dude, this shit is crazy – this music is insane!’” Of course, Bonded By Blood is widely considered one of the great classics of the genre. Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian said of it: “Best debut album of the Big 5? I think so.”

In the beginning, most artists didn’t think of success. “Nobody had any idea it was gonna be this huge,” says Hunolt. “It wasn’t about money for a very long time.”

Jeff Becerra, lead singer of Possessed, says: “We felt like we were part of a movement, like a revolution.” But he recalls that bands had to be unique. “If you came out as an Exodus clone band, that shit would not fly. Copying a band was instant suicide. You had to be original or you didn’t get a place in line.”

One of the most underrated bands on the SF scene was Blind Illusion, who had a trippy hippie vibe and weren’t afraid to bring new elements into their music. “Anything good we’d hear, we’d put it into the music,” says singer/guitarist Mark Biderman. “The diversity in the scene was really good. You had to stick to your guns and be what you were.”

Les Claypool was their original bassist. He first joined in 1978 as he was learning to play. “By ’80-81, he was already amazing,” Biderman says. “He was a natural, doing some really great stuff.”

When Possessed wrote the song Death Metal, Becerra says they wanted it to be, “an anthem to brand it. We wanted people to say, ‘Oh, that death metal band!’ That would make us musically different in the Bay Area underground and elsewhere.”

Still, it took time for people to catch on to what Possessed were doing – especially the deep, guttural vocals which are now common place in extreme metal. “I wanted the signing to match the music,” Becerra says.

Many thrash bands had to make do with whatever gear they could afford. While some had metal tools of the trade like BC Rich and Jackson guitars, James Hetfield famously had a cheapo Flying V copy as his main instrument for years.

Exodus’ Gary Holt had to record Bonded By Blood with a borrowed Hiwatt amp when his Marshall went down. He used a distortion pedal with the gain all the way off, and the rest of the knobs on full, turning it into a booster. That was also the key to Ian’s rhythm sound with Anthrax. (Randy Rhoads did it too.)

For Dark Angel’s Darkness Descends – one of the most brutal thrash albums ever recorded – Eric Meyer and the late Jim Durkin used the same stock 50-watt Marshall, and Meyer used a delay pedal to add more gain to his tone. In the case of Holy Terror’s massively underrated Mind Wars, the brutal tone was crafted by playing around with an EQ pedal until they got the right level of crunch.

Metallica entered the top 30 with Master Of Puppets in 1986, and went on tour opening for Ozzy Osbourne. The future of metal was pointing to them, and suddenly a very uncommercial genre looked like it had more potential than many had thought.

“When Metallica, Anthrax, Slayer, and Megadeth all got big, that’s where we all went, ‘So you’re sayin’ there’s a chance?’” recalls Forbidden guitarist Craig Locicero. “Very few of us made it through the keyhole – there wasn’t a lot of room in there.”

That year marked the peak of thrash, with the arrival of Metallica’s Master, Megadeth’s Peace Sells, and Slayer’s Reign in Blood. The latter is often considered the big daddy of the genre, while Dark Angel’s Darkness would become a big influence on death metal and grindcore.

But a second wave followed in 1987 as Testament, Death Angel, and Sacred Reich stormed out of the gate with excellent debut albums. Anthrax released their masterpiece, Among the Living, while the scene started to go deranged via Death’s Scream Bloody Gore and Napalm Death’s Scum.

Sacred Reich, who took a nod from the punk scene, were one of many thrash bands with a social conscience. Vocalist/bassist Phil Rind says: “I always felt that the lyrics were the nail and the music was the hammer. If you have the opportunity to say something, you should.

“Every band has to figure out who they are, what they want to talk about. I felt if we could help turn somebody on to something, open their minds a little bit and show them how things are, there was a benefit to that.”

While Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer all did well on major labels, others weren’t so lucky. Bands tended to fall into the same traps. Some faltered because the label had no idea what to do with them. Some suffered when the A&R executive who’d signed them moved on or got fired. Many succumbed to label pressure to be more commercial, and alienated their hardcore fanbase.

“There was a lot of interference and push to be more commercial,” says Gallagher of Raven’s nightmare experience. “We went along for the ride – and got left in the middle of nowhere. It took a long, long time to rebuild the damage done by Atlantic, and by ourselves.”

By the end of the decade thrash was preparing to jump the shark, as many fans turned to much heavier music. “The thrash movement, which used to be dangerous, became safe,” Forbidden’s Locicero says. “Thrash lost it edge, but bands like Sepultura, Pantera and Death had a new edge.”

When the hair bands went down in the ‘90s, a lot of heavier outfits nearly went down with them. But metal came back the following decade, arguably bigger than ever. And for the bands that deserved another chance, a new generation of fans were ready to discover them.

Gallagher says Raven aren’t bitter about not being bigger: “There’s nothing to complain about being a cult band. We have a following where we can tour and play live pretty much anywhere. For a couple of kids from Newcastle it’s pretty amazing.”

Doughton argues: “Raven are still in the fight – kicking ass for over 40 years without the creature comforts afforded bigger bands. They’re more deserving of respect than any other band alive, in my opinion.”

“If I wanted to get big, I’d tone down Possessed’s music,” Becerra says. “I’m happy with my cult status. When people were pushing us to get bigger, I didn’t play the game as much as I should have. But I still just want to play my music the way I want to.”

Rind comments: “It’s funny to see parents bringing their kids to our shows and turning them on to Sacred Reich. I appreciate that people still show up. Metal comes from the underground and it never goes away – it just goes back underground and percolates. It always comes back. And the fans are loyal; they’re the best.

“The fans thought we should have been bigger, but I always thought, ‘We’re exactly where we’re supposed to be.’ The fact that we got as far as we did is beyond my comprehension. We’re very fortunate.”

So, guys, anything new? Here at Guitar World, we believe in hitting artists with the hard questions first.

“Not much at all,” Geddy Lee deadpans. The bassist is speaking via Zoom from his home studio, a wall of basses behind him. “I’ve just been playing a lot of cards with Al, trying to win some money off him.”

“He always does,” says Alex Lifeson, joining in on Zoom from his own home music sanctuary. “He’s vicious at Go Fish.”

While we’re on the subject of games, suffice to say that nobody – including, for the longest time, Lee and Lifeson – had “Rush going on tour in 2026” on their bingo cards, and it wasn’t until the spring of last year when the idea started to look like a distinct possibility. Even after the two had finally come to a decision that yes, this was going to be a thing, they kept word from leaking out for months.

“Nobody knew,” Lee says emphatically. “I didn’t even tell my kids.”

“In this day and age, it’s so difficult to keep a secret,” Lifeson says. “We did our best to keep it quiet, and we were pretty successful, I think.”

The announcement was made almost casually, during a private event for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, last October, when, responding to an intentionally placed “fan” question asking if the band would ever tour again, Lee answered, “I kind of think we should tour next year.”

Initially, the tour, dubbed Fifty Something, was a relatively short run of seven major cities, but following near-instantaneous sell-outs, more cities were added, and then more, and as it now stands, the tour will encompass North America, South America and Europe, 86 concerts in all, and won’t wrap until April 2027 in Helsinki, Finland.

“It was very surprising,” Lifeson says of the reaction from fans.

“We knew there were fans that wanted us to come back,” Lee says. “We’d get messages from fans all the time and they want to see Al and me playing together again in whatever form we had chosen. We’re very fortunate we have such a loyal fan base, but I don’t think Al or I or anyone associated with us expected the overwhelming response to the very first announcement. It’s very nice, very gratifying.”

Lee admits to feelings of frustration following the conclusion of Rush’s last tour, R40, in 2015. In his view, the band was playing at peak form, and both he and Lifeson wanted to keep going. Drummer Neil Peart, however, had other ideas about how he wanted to live the rest of his life. “He was so happy being a full-time dad,” Lee says, “and his body just said to him, ‘That’s enough as a touring musician. I can’t do it anymore.’”

Over the next few months, Lee and Lifeson accepted Peart’s decision. “That’s life – no hard feelings.” Lee says. “The man certainly earned a break from the madding crowd.”

Following Peart’s tragic death in 2020 from glioblastoma, Lee and Lifeson gradually occupied themselves with various activities. Lee, who already published his first book, Geddy Lee’s Big Beautiful Book of Bass in 2018, cranked out two more: 2023’s My Effin’ Life: From Holocaust Roots to Rock and Roll Stardom and 72 Stories: From the Baseball Collection of Geddy Lee. “Writing my first book was very gratifying,” he says. “It taught me that instead of banging out notes, I can bang out words. It sent me down a different path.”

Lifeson posted a couple of solo instrumental tracks, Kabul Blues and Spy House, on his website before forming an alt-rock band called Envy of None with bassist Andy Curran, guitarist Alfio Annibalini and lead singer Maiah Wynne. The group issued a self-titled debut in 2022 and a follow-up, 2025’s Stygian Wavz, but played no live shows. “I really didn’t have any interest in going back on the road,” Lifeson says. “I felt like I was really done with that.”

The former bandmates reunited on stage a few times in 2022, first with Primus to celebrate South Park’s 25th anniversary (the show’s co-creator, Matt Stone, played drums on Closer to the Heart), and they performed mini-sets of Rush classics at a pair of tribute concerts for the late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, during which they were backed by a number of drummers: Dave Grohl, Tool’s Danny Carey, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith and former David Bowie sticksman Omar Hakim.

“The Taylor Hawkins tribute shows were pivotal for a lot of reasons,” Lee says. “Obviously, we got a chance to pay tribute to Taylor, but also we got a chance in our own way to pay tribute to Neil, which was long overdue. To play our songs again with some other brilliant musicians, it showed us that our music is still alive.”

Riding high from those shows, the two briefly considered taking things a step further and playing together in an official capacity. “But it didn’t work out,” Lee says. “No sense dwelling on it, just move on with your life.”

For Lifeson, that meant tending to his health. Stomach surgery to correct a hiatal hernia resulted in gastroparesis, a chronic condition in which the muscles in the stomach don’t move food as they should for it to be digested.

The guitarist visited a wellness clinic in Austria and learned to manage the condition through strict lifestyle changes (alcohol, smoking, gluten, lactose and junk food are out). Once he was back home, he would get together with Lee, just like always, and soon they began jamming. Then they began jamming on Rush songs, just two old friends having a blast.

Only it wasn’t that simple. This wasn’t just two old friends having a blast. It was something more than that… but what? Could they really tour once again as Rush? Should they? Warming up to the idea took some time, especially for Lifeson, who had previously stated that Rush’s touring days were over. And the biggest question of all was, if they did play live again, who would sit in that drum seat? As Lee says, “How do you ask someone to replace a guy who’s irreplaceable?”

Through his bass tech, John “Scully” McIntosh, Lee was tipped off about Anika Nilles, a German composer, producer and music educator, and as it turns out, a virtuoso drummer (her resume includes a 2022 tour with Jeff Beck). As Lee recalls, “We did a Zoom call together and said, ‘Look, we’re thinking of going on the road, and obviously we need a drummer. Would you be interested in playing some Rush songs with us?’

That’s really all we asked. She was totally game for it and said, ‘That sounds great.’ So she hopped on a plane and played with us for a week, and it was on the last day Alex and I looked at each other and went, ‘Wow, I think we have a drummer… Now what the fuck do we do?’”

When was it exactly when you two started playing Rush songs together again?

Geddy Lee: I would say it was in late 2024. I had just finished my third book, and I was sitting down here looking at all these bass guitars, and they were making me feel very, very guilty. So I started getting my fingers back in shape – and they were really out of shape.

I came down every day and played, and I was having dinner with Al one night and I told him, “Yeah, I’m getting my fingers back in shape. I’ve been writing a bit of lyrics and stuff. Maybe we should jam.” We always saw each other anyway every couple of weeks for dinner or drinks or something.

Al came over and we just started jamming and having fun the way we always do after we drink too much coffee. [Laughs] We’re having a laugh. Then Al, I think, or one of us suggested, “Let’s play a Rush song for fun and see if we can remember it without doing any homework.” Of course, we could only remember parts of them. That’s kind of how it started.

Aside from Rush songs, what else were you jamming?

Lee: We were just jamming, making shit up. That’s what jamming is.

When two guys from Rush get together to play Rush songs, what do they play?

Alex Lifeson: There are only like a thousand songs to choose from. We tried to get the easiest ones –

Lee: There are no easiest ones. [Laughs]

Was it just the two of you playing on your own, or did you have any sort of rhythm loop for accompaniment?

Lee: It was just the two of us. Sometimes we’d pull up the song and play along with it just to see – “What the fuck does that sound like?” That would help you remember all the things you forgot. I think Al remembers Freewill being the first song we tried.

Lifeson: Sure it was, yeah.

Lee: Which for a bass player is not a walk in the park. That was interesting to see my fingers tell me to fuck off. But it was fun. We ended up really laughing. And when we walked away from that goofy session, not only had we put some interesting jams down on tape, which I don’t know what’ll ever happen with them or they’ll remain in the bin, but we walked away with this smile. Playing our songs was so much fun.

The next time we got together to jam, we started challenging each other – “Can you remember this one?” Then we would flail through it. After enough of that, we started getting this sheepish grin at the end of our sessions. It was like, “What are we doing here? Are we doing something? Are we quietly tricking each other into going back on the road?” But that was still a ways away before we could agree to that.

What was that moment like when one of you finally said it out loud? Who was the first to say it?

Lee: I don’t know how that went. In the past, it was usually me who would say, “Hey, Al, do you want to do some shows? Do you want to think about this?” But I was a bit sheepish to do that because we’ve already been down that road and it didn’t work out after the tribute shows for Taylor.

We went down that road a little bit, but Al wasn’t into it for a lot of reasons. I don’t know who… I think we both just kind of gravitated to looking at each other saying, “This is kind of fun.”

Lifeson: I remember Ged saying, “We should get together. You should come over, have a coffee. There’s some stuff we need to talk about.” I went over and we did exactly that. We kind of talked about, “Why don’t we just play one of these days? Just play some stuff, maybe work on some stuff or whatever.”

That’s what led to that. I think Ged knew I was not really enthusiastic about even considering going back on the road, doing a tour, especially something that’s turned into this size of a tour. I think he was cautious and just wanted to have… I mean, we’ve been playing together for 60 years, and he just wanted to play together. That’s what we did the first day, and we were laughing and smiling and really enjoying it.

Like he said, we were jamming. We were playing bluesy stuff and whatever, and that led to playing a Rush song or two. That eventually led to playing maybe more Rush songs, and then the ball started rolling and it started to grow on its own, and it seemed to have a life of its own and an energy of its own. Everything started falling into place and moving toward ultimately getting together and doing this tour.

I needed convincing, for sure. Once I felt better – I got my health in order at the beginning of 2025, and that was one big hurdle for me. I was not feeling well enough health-wise to go back onto the road or to commit to doing anything with that sort of thing in mind.

But as the time went by and I felt good, and we started playing more and other ideas came up, it seemed natural that we would follow through with this and really start playing together.

It’s one thing to do one song, but it’s a whole other thing to do 40 songs. And I’ll tell you, it’s hard. It’s hard, hard, hard, but it’s really exciting, and it feels really good when the songs start coming together, and the fingers start going to the right places and it all comes back to you. Muscle memory is a mysterious thing, but it’s beautiful.

That must have been a strange and incredible process. As you said, you needed convincing…

Lifeson: It was gradual. When we started really sounding good together again, like more recently, when I could see a faint light at the end of the tunnel, it almost turned a switch on for me. I went from having self-doubt and not being really positively sure that I really wanted to do it… but I’d made the commitment. It was at that moment that I realized that, yes, this is going to be a good thing. It’s going to be a good thing for me personally and for us.

No doubt you were also considering your health and wondering, “Physically, should I do this?”

Lifeson: Well, I just concentrated on my digestive system. [Laughs] That was the main problem I was dealing with. I’ve had arthritis for years, and I’m pretty successful in dealing with that, but it was the digestive issues that were the real problem.

Millions and millions and millions of people go through that sort of thing. I managed to find a good way to mitigate some of the worst parts of it, and I just feel so much better about my energy and everything in my life, really.

Would it be right to assume that numerous drummers have approached you two over the years?

Lee: Well, yes. I mean, people who are close to us – good friends that are successful drummers – would never infer something like that because they have too much respect, not only for Neil and for the situation… They were grieving as well, so they wouldn’t be so selfish as to say something inappropriate like that.

There were many other drummers who reached out to me in the aftermath of Neil’s passing that were pushing themselves, and that was most distasteful to me. It was completely inappropriate timing.

Of course, we have some great pals who are amazing drummers in their own right, and they’re in very successful bands. We didn’t really know where to begin to look when it was time to choose a drummer. We started with Anika because she had been recommended to me, and I had done some research on her. I loved her vibe and her diverse style, and I had her in mind in case I was going to do some kind of project.

We didn’t have a list. We never, ever accumulated a list of drummers. When Al and I finally said, “Okay, I guess we’re getting serious. Who’s going to sit in that impossible seat?” How do you ask someone to replace a guy who’s irreplaceable?

It’s daunting. We started with the name that was already on my mind. We called her up, she came, and we hit it off. Once we were sure… She brought a lot to the table, but more than her chops, more than her guts and her willingness to sit in that hot seat, she brought an intelligence and a story. I love her story.

This is someone who grew up in Germany in a family of musicians. Her dad was a drummer. She’s played drums her entire life. She doesn’t even remember the first time she picked up sticks. It’s who she is. I thought, “Wouldn’t that be nice to bring someone so fresh in our midst to inspire Al and me?”

She’s a bit younger than us, and she likes to remind us of that. Every time we tell a story about a gig in 1971, she goes, “Wow, I wasn’t even born yet.” I’m just a big fan of hers, and I think Al has become a big fan of hers.

Part of this little journey we’re on now is about rooting for her. I really want her to succeed in this moment because she’s taking all the heat. The fans love her right now, but they’re going to scrutinize her, and she’s up for it. I just love that about her.

Did you give Anika a big list of Rush songs to prepare for when she came to play with you?

Lee: We just picked a few classic Rush songs. I said, “Learn these as best you can and let’s see what happens.” It was very casual, very relaxed, and it wasn’t an audition. We said to her, “We’re not auditioning drummers, but your playing really interests us. So just come and let’s see what happens.”

Lifeson: I didn’t know what the expectations were. I probably thought, “She’s very good. She seems to have a good grasp of the songs technically.” But there was something that was just not quite there. It wasn’t really until the last day that suddenly she sort of blossomed and understood better what we were kind of looking for or going after. And then after that, it’s just been better progressively through the whole year of rehearsals we’ve been doing.

Lee: On the fifth day, this is what happened: we’d gone four days and Al and I hadn’t even talked about her. We only had her for a few days, so we wanted to work through all these songs and see her reactions. See her gut feel, learn a little bit about it. We didn’t know her. She was a complete stranger, really.

She was a bit intimidated when she first arrived, of course, because she’d heard of the band, but she wasn’t a Rush fan. She didn’t know the songs intimately.

Of course, she knew songs like Tom Sawyer, and she knew of our reputation, and of course, there’s no drummer on the planet that doesn’t know who Neil Peart is and doesn’t revere that name. It was a tall order for her, but we were so busy working through these songs that we hadn’t chatted.

On the last day I said, “Al, can you pop into my house? We have to talk about what’s going on here.” [Laughs] He came over and I said, “What do you think?” And he said, “I don’t know. What do you think?” I said, “I don’t know. What the fuck are we doing?” [Laughs] We talked about her pros and cons. There was a sliver of doubt. Her technique was incredible, her facility…

Playing the fills was the last problem she would’ve had. She nailed the fills. That’s not the thing. There’s a lot more to playing a Rush song than the fills. It’s the feel. It’s the nuances. Our music is idiosyncratic, and that just takes time.

We’ve played Rush songs with maybe five or six different drummers over the last few years. Every time you sit and play a Rush song with a drummer, I don’t care who they are, there’s an adjustment. There’s a little translation that Alex and I have to do with the drummer about this little part or that little part. That’s normal. But we just weren’t sure because this was all new to us. So we went to that last day with an open mind, but a little doubt.

And song after song we played with her, she just killed it. I mean, she understood all those little things that Alex and I had been telling her all that week, and she processed it and delivered. That’s when we looked at each other in the studio and went, “Yep, we have a real problem, because now we have a drummer and we’re going to make a commitment.”

For Anika, it wasn’t just about recreating the records. It was about bringing her own perspective to the music.

Lee: I don’t know if Al feels the same way, but I think she’s very respectful of whose parts she’s playing. She understands that air drummers for the last 45 years have been out there mimicking some of those parts. She wants to do that justice. At the same time, she’s a completely original and independent creative force, but she’s sublimating a bit of that for the sake of a tribute to Neil.

At the same time, the more she knows the songs, the more confidence she has with the songs. There are moments where she’s now able to put her own special sauce on this song or that song. We’ll start looking for moments to let her stretch out. We already have a couple in the set where I look at her and go, “Anika, this is free time. You go wherever you want to go, and I’ll be there. We’ll meet you there.”

I look at it like this: There have been phases to this adventure. Phase one was her understanding Neil’s role in Rush. Phase two is like, we’ve learned all the songs, now let’s have some fun with them. Now we’re massaging the arrangements and seeing how they can go.

At the same time, we’re not out there to turn it into a new thing. We’re there to represent our songs with our hearts and with our best playing fingers forward. And we want fans to celebrate that music with us. The mandate isn’t to change everything. The mandate is to be respectful of the arrangements of the song at the same time elevate from the norm.

You’ve hired Loren Gold as a touring keyboardist, so it’s something of a new presentation.

Lee: That’s correct. That’s what we wanted. When people come in and look at the stage setup, it’s not a trio. It’s not Rush 2.0. It’s a new time and we’ve got a different vibe, but the music is treated respectfully.

Alex, are there any new guitars you’ll bring out on the road?

Lifeson: Yeah, a few. Kirk Hammett gave me one of his Greenies. I’ve been having fun with that. It’s a pretty raunchy Les Paul, for sure. The Gibson Custom Shop did such an amazing job on it. The relic’ing is just spectacular. It sounds really, really great. There’s a couple of other Les Pauls. [He gestures to an Explorer on the wall]

Oh, and I just got this from Gibson. This is a guitar that Cesar [Gueikian], CEO of the company, made with some of the craftsmen there. He sent that along for me to check out, so I’ve been fiddling around with that. It’s so different for me in terms of its shape and style. I’ve got to get used to it.

My original ES-355 has gone to someone else, but I have one of the reissues that I’ll have on the road. I’m still sort of building that arsenal. I think I had 23 guitars on the last tour. I’ll probably have 15 or 16, something like that. I don’t know how many Ged’s going to take out this time around. Ged, I think you had probably 25 basses on the last tour.

Lee: Last tour, I had 27 vintage bases that I played. I don’t know if I’ll get through 27 this time, but it’s a slightly shorter show and I’ve fallen in love with my beautiful ’62 Jazz Bass. I’m going to play that on quite a few songs, but I’m also planning to bring some unusual things out. I’ve got a couple of classic Rickies that I’ll bring out. I’ve got some Hofners and T-birds that I’ve fallen in love with. I’m going to have, I don’t know, maybe 10 to 15 instruments I’ll try to work into the set.

At the end of those five days you did with Anika, if things didn’t work out, for whatever reason, would that have been the end of this experiment, or would you have regrouped and tried something else?

Lifeson: Who knows? I mean, it’s impossible to say.

Lee: My gut tells me we would have regrouped and looked elsewhere, but I’m very happy we didn’t have to do that. We’re really lucky. And also with Loren Gold, our keyboardist – I met him in 2014 when I did a charity show with the guys from the Who in London for their 50th anniversary, ironically.

We kind of hit it off. Again, he was one of those names that just stuck in the back of my mind. And when we talked about adding a keyboard player, his was the first name that came to mind. We’re very fortunate that the two people who were top of our minds both have worked out really, really well. That’s a little bit of a blessing from above, I think. Someone’s looking after us there.

Of course, as you said, Neil is irreplaceable, and he’s beloved by the band’s fans. That said, people seem to be very excited to see Anika play with you guys.

Lee: We’re very gratified with how well she’s been welcomed by the Rush family, so to speak. They haven’t even heard her play one note with us yet, and there’s already this kind of outpouring of love for her, and they’ve shown her tremendous kindness, which I know is inspiring for her. It’s been very gratifying to see the response.

She must be a real inspiration to female drummers around the world.

Lee: Yeah. I think that’s a great part of her story. I love that part of her story. I’ve gotten mail from young girls, older women saying, “Right on, man. Thank you.”

And now she’s part of your story.

Lee: Totally. But let’s be clear: we did not hire Anika Nilles because she’s a woman. We hired her because she’s an incredible drummer, and not just an incredible drummer – an intelligent, hardworking, responsible… I couldn’t even get her drunk last night! [Laughs] I tried.

She’s a unique individual. In many ways, she reminds me of the big goof who sat on the throne before her. She’s a total professional, a work-first person. The fact that she’s female and she’s doing that for women musicians around the world, that’s a bonus. It’s not the reason she’s in that seat.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

When Kurt Cobain set out to create what would eventually become Bleach, he was still living in Aberdeen, Washington, and working as a janitor.

His guitar playing, coupled with his introspective songwriting, was attracting attention, however – especially when a nascent Nirvana, comprising Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic, and drummer Chad Channing, turned Shocking Blue’s Love Buzz into their live showcase track.

A dozen letters to labels later, Sub Pop head honchos Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman decided to take a chance on a very desperate Cobain, who accepted a less-than-ideal deal that saw the band absorb all the recording costs.

Recorded in four sessions in late December 1988 that spanned roughly 20 hours, Bleach is pure rawness. It cost the band – or, rather, Jason Everman, a musician, soldier, early Nirvana fan, and briefly the band’s second guitarist – $606.17, which he fronted.

“We literally tracked it all in three days,” producer Jack Endino told Cobain biographer Charles R. Cross in an interview published in Guitar World in June 2005.

Their rehearsals carried a similar DIY spirit, as the band honed Bleach in an Aberdeen hair salon owned by Novoselic’s mother, which could only be used after hours.

“The place closed at eight, so we’d start rehearsing then and playing until eight in the morning, when it opened again,” recalled Channing.

Perhaps one of the most underrated elements of Bleach-era Nirvana is Novoselic, who not only served as a reliable friend for Cobain but also stood out as a noteworthy bassist who perfectly complemented the rising face of grunge’s angular guitar playing.

When Cobain brought forward the riff for School, Novoselic told him, “That is the most ‘Seattle’ fucking riff I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Despite the band not living in Seattle, the city’s sludge metal scene of the ’80s and early ’90s, spearheaded by the Melvins, served as a clear influence and gave them a much-needed sense of aspiration early in their career.

Novoselic even went as far as to say that “School is the ultimate grunge song,” and thus, consequentially, the ultimate Seattle song.

Bleach, released on June 15, 1989, did not chart upon initial release, and Cobain in particular was frustrated by Sub Pop’s lack of promotional efforts.

Things started to shift after the British music press began touting the band as rising stars, and Bleach became a staple on many US college radio stations.

Then, following the release of their many-times-Platinum album Nevermind in 1991, Bleach finally received the widespread attention it deserved and became a cornerstone of the grunge movement.

In more recent news, the backline used on Nirvana’s Bleach tour hit the auction block just two months ago.

Billy Idol and Steve Stevens are the latest names to be inducted into Guitar Center’s Hollywood Rockwalk.

The star-studded strip at Sunset Boulevard has been Guitar Center’s way of honoring rock greats since 1985, with the pair now joining the likes of Eddie Van Halen, Carlos Santana, and 2024 inductee, Gary Clark Jr.

Stevens – who is also famed for the Top Gun anthem – has been Idol’s flamboyant foil since day dot, which has seen him craft guitar solos with toy ray guns, and pen a score of rock classics.

“Billy Idol and Steve Stevens didn’t just write hits, they built a partnership where a punk frontman and a virtuoso guitarist made each other sharper,” says Guitar Center CEO, Gabe Dalporto. “The Rebel Yell intro alone has inspired generations of guitar players. Walk into any Guitar Center on a Saturday, and you’ll still hear someone chasing that tone. That’s the definition of Rockwalk-worthy.”

“Steve and I have spent so much of our lives around music shops, trying new things while working hard to perfect our sound, with Guitar Center right at the center of it all,” Billy Idol returns. “Being inducted into the Rockwalk together feels like a real full-circle moment after all these years of making music side-by-side.”

Stevens is equally as honored at the nod, which will see their handprints and signatures cast in cement at an in-store ceremony.

“We join some of the greatest musicians ever in this honor,” he notes. “I hope some young guitarist looks down at our impressions and marches inside to buy his first guitar, just as I did. This building is filled with dreams and possibilities. All you need is desire and passion.”

Eric Clapton, Black Sabbath, and Jimi Hendrix (posthumously) have also been inducted into the Guitar Center Rockwalk, with Zakk Wylde performing at the late Dimebag’s 2007 induction.

Elsewhere, Dalporto has been talking to Tosin Abasi about why the electric guitar design needs to evolve as the launch of Guitar Center’s in-house guitar brand draws nearer.