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Wishing a very Happy 61st Birthday to former #Nirvana bassist, Krist Novoselic! 💜

📷: Mick Hutson/Redferns

Sure, Led Zeppelin IV and Physical Grafitti are generally accepted as #LedZeppelin’s twin peaks, though you could find someone to make a case for each of their albums (even In Through The Out Door).

But if you want a true connoisseur’s choice, then this hugely influential live bootleg is the one. Bootlegs and Zeppelin have been synonymous for decades. Despite manager Peter Grant’s heavy-handedness when dealing with anyone he caught taping their shows, Zep became the most bootlegged act of all time.

The impact the band made on their initial American tours made them a prime target for the then emerging bootleg recording business. From their inception, it was more than evident that Zep’s studio output was just the starting point. On stage was where the real action occurred, as they constantly improvised and expanded their material. Peter Grant summed it up when he stated: “Led Zeppelin was primarily an in-person band… that’s what it was really about.”

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📷: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

#BenjiWebbe is one of British metal’s national treasures. For almost 30 years, he’s been the rabble-rousing, ultra-charismatic frontman of #Skindred, the ragga-metal four-piece who came rolling out of Newport, South Wales in the late 90s. But Benji was already a veteran of the music industry by the time Skindred were on the scene.

Born in Newport in 1967, he lost both his parents at an early age and was raised by his older brother. Before long, he became obsessed with music, with reggae, dub, punk and rock’n’roll dominating his listening. His first big break came with Dub War in the early 90s, sparking a decades-long career in rock – albeit one that has had its share of challenges along the way.

“I’m very grateful,” he beams, as he looks back over his journey. “Whether we play a club in Aberystwyth with six people or we play Brixton Academy with 5,000, I’m having a good time, all the time.”

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📷: Dean Chalkley

One of rock music's most eyebrow-raising stories of the 2020s so far has been the rise of #TwinTemple, the doo-wop wife-and-husband duo who have been embraced by the metal underground despite not playing a note of heavy metal themselves. Their seductive, #Satanic message has struck a chord nonetheless, and in early 2021, Metal Hammer met with Alexandra and Zachary James to chat about their music, their unique journey and the challenges they've faced.

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“Satan is good!”

Twin Temple singer Alexandra James is praising the Great Horned One because, after three failed attempts, we’ve finally managed to sort the connection for this evening’s interview. We can’t imagine that The Devil himself ever envisioned his name being praised courtesy of a Google Hangout, but then again, we can’t imagine he ever envisioned something like Twin Temple, either.

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📷: Travis Shinn

When #Slayer began their first real tour of the UK in April 1987, thrash was barely out of its infancy. For the average rock fan at least, the jury remained out on a style of music that naysayers considered a flash in the pan or just plain unmusical.

Compared to their peers and rivals #Metallica, #Megadeth and #Anthrax, there seemed something different about Slayer. They felt just a little more edgy, and a bit less cartoonish. Were they really Devil-worshippers? No one knew for sure, and few dared to ask.

Although the Californians’ third full-length, the Rick Rubin-produced Reign In Blood, was their most complete statement so far, distributors of Def Jam Records declined to release it as its opening track, Angel Of Death, was inspired by the Auschwitz concentration camp butcher Josef Mengele.

Slayer’s attitude was simple: Reign In Blood is art, and if you don’t want to put it out, it’s your loss. They found another distributor. The controversy only heightened an increasing sense of notoriety, though zero fucks were given when people began branding them as Nazis. “If you’re afraid of words then you’re a fucking idiot,” reasoned guitarist Kerry King.

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📷: Gene Ambo/IconicPix

By 1990, the hounds of Britain’s tabloid press were hot on #FreddieMercury’s trail. Day and night, the #Queen frontman’s Garden Lodge home in West London crawled with reporters, his increasingly rare outings dogged by shutter-clicks and thrusted microphones. His pursuers had a common goal: to confirm the rumour that Mercury was HIV positive, had AIDS – and was dying.

But for now, the press would be forced to seize on crumbs of evidence for their splashes. Mercury’s gaunt appearance at that February’s Brit Awards had fuelled the fire, though while Brian May parried it all with the party line: “He definitely hasn’t got AIDS, but I think his wild rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle has caught up with him.”

In an age before social media, the silence from the Queen camp was absolute. Yet the band’s public denials of Mercury’s worsening condition were at odds with their musical output of the era, with the following year’s Innuendo album all but admitting the singer’s diagnosis, while diving deeper into his headspace than any tell-all interview.

“We were dealing with things that were hard to talk about at the time,” May told Guitar World, “but in the world of music, you could do it.”

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📷: Photoshot/Simon Fowler

Biff Byford recalled it as the moment when “the dam began to burst”. In May 1979, #Saxon, the Yorkshire-based heavy metal band fronted by the foghorn-voiced Byford, released their debut album.

In the same month, in a Sounds review of a London show with three other young bands on the bill – Angel Witch, Samson and Iron Maiden – the phrase ‘New Wave Of British Heavy Metal’ was printed for the first time.

Change was in the air, a vibrant grass-roots rock scene was developing. As Byford said: “We were in the right place at the right time.”

The NWOBHM would make working-class heroes of former factory workers, labourers and dole-queue dreamers, and Byford and co. were as proletarian as they come. The band formed in 1976 as Son Of A Bitch, and it was in local Working Men’s Clubs that they honed their act. “We’d play three sets a night, maybe with bingo in the middle,” Byford said. “And in some really rough places. It was like the Wild West some nights.”

The primary influences for Son Of A Bitch were the big heavy rock groups of the early 70s: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep. But as guitarist Graham Oliver said: “In 1977 we did a few gigs with punk bands. We supported the Sex Pistols and The Clash. Their audiences didn’t know what to make of us, but we had so much energy we’d really stick it to ’em!”

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📷: Marka/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

On the night of January 26, 1980, #DaveGrohl sneaked out of his family home in Springfield, Virginia to hang out with his big sister, who was babysitting for a neighbouring family. Having packed the kids off to bed, Lisa Grohl was watching Saturday Night Live when her 11-year-old brother showed up, just in time to see host Terri Garr introduce the night’s musical guests. The four minutes that followed, would blow the future Foo Fighters leader's mind.

"I remember that moment like some people remember the Kennedy assassination," he told me in 2009. "When The B-52's played Rock Lobster, honestly, that moment changed my life. The importance and impact of that on my life was huge. That people that were so strange could play this music that sounded so foreign to me and for it to be so moving ... growing up in suburban Virginia, I had never even imagined something so bizarre was possible. It made me want to be weird."

For mainstream America, and the US music business, however, The B-52's remained a cult concern, "just too weird for the powers that be", as frontman Fred Schneider acknowledged in a 2025 interview with Vulture. To this day, the Athens, Georgia band have never even been nominated for the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, for instance. Nevertheless, the quartet have become national treasures, and global icons, thanks largely to 1989 single that, ironically, some of the group members originally wanted to abandon.

"I thought Love Shack had the most commercial potential we had done up to that point," Schneider told Vulture writer Devon Ivie, admitting that "some of the band" didn't even want to finish recording the song. "They said, 'We can’t nail the end, let’s just forget it," he recalled. "I had to be like, No, calm down, this can be done!"

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📷: Gie Knaeps/Getty Images

It’s 1982, and #Motorhead tickets only cost a fiver. You elbow your way to the front and yell impatiently at the curtains drawn across the stage, which you imagine hides a black-clad road crew beavering away with torches and gaffer tape on the drum riser and towering black backline.

But when the house lights go out and the curtains part, there's no sign of the band. Instead, a short film plays on the scrim behind Phil 'Philthy Animal' Taylor's drum kit. In the footage – soundtracked by Gustav Holst’s epic Mars, Bringer Of War – Motörhead emerge from mist dressed in medieval clobber with studded leather armour, brandishing fearsome gauntlets and arcane weaponry.

"I think most of the costumes were originally made for a film called Merlin, which John Boorman made way back when, director Nick Mead told Negative Insight. "It was lit by aircraft landing lights hidden behind a hill and we dropped a few smoke bombs to create eerie smoke, which the band walked through. Nothing that technical, and thankfully it wasn’t a windy night, the smoke basically did what it was told!"

Lemmy, Philthy Animal and ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke start playing, but they're still nowhere to be seen. There's only a giant mechanical fist, a 3-D realisation of the one on the album’s cover, flexing its spotlight-tipped fingers.

This was surprising, likewise the sound of the then-unreleased Iron Fist’s title track, but above us, there was more. As the searchlights built into said enormous iron fist’s fingers raked our bemused eyeballs, the penny dropped… the band were above us, being lowered from the roof over the stage!

Full story via loudersound.com

📷: Fin Costello/Redferns

#DepecheMode frontman Dave Gahan can vividly remember the first time he tried heroin, as a 17-year-old, on a night out in London.

"I snorted it thinking, This doesn't look like speed," he recalled to MOJO magazine in 2013. "I threw up all over myself and passed out in the corner, woke up, and the gig was over. Well, that was rubbish, I'm never doing that again."

But when Depeche Mode began focussing heavily on breaking America in the late '80s and early '90s, the drug entered Gahan's world once more.

"Everyone was doing it in LA, bands like Alice In Chains, Jane's Addiction," he told writer Martin Aston. "I never thought it was scary... the shoe just fit."

It was only when the band decamped to Madrid, Spain to make their eighth studio album, Songs of Faith and Devotion, that Gahan began to truly realise the extent of his reliance on heroin.

"Everyone scrabbled around to find what they thought I needed - booze, coke, hash pills," he recalled in his career-spanning MOJO Interview. "But heroin wasn't provided. I went looking in some subterranean club. I approached some guys who looked like they might be in that vein, but I got a severe beating outside instead. I remember rolling under this car, snow on the ground, and Martin [Gore] trying to intervene, and promptly getting punched. The next morning I told everyone.

"It was awful. It took years to earn back Martin's trust... It's such a selfish addiction. Even if you'd said my mother had died, I wouldn't have cared less... Addiction is a sad, boring existence. Years go by, You're still sitting on the couch, seeing the same dealer, talking the same bullshit."

In the mid '90s, Gahan asked builders working on his Los Angeles home to create a special chamber for his personal use, accessible via the bedroom he shared with his second wife, the band's publicist Teresa Conway. The Blue Room, as it was known, was exclusively reserved for the vocalist's drug taking. Gahan once spent three whole weeks alone in this room, with a friend checking in on him now and then, to see if he was still alive.

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📷: Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival

In 2016 #JeffLynne looked back on the second half of the 1970s, a period in which #ElectricLightOrchestra became arguably the biggest thing in rock music – which he hadn’t noticed at the time.

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ELO’s 1974 album Eldorado may have had a loose concept about a daydreamer journeying to fantastical places to escape his boring reality, but it was also their first bona fide pop album. It even contained a US Top 10 hit, Can’t Get It Out Of My Head. “I was always surprised when anything did well,” Jeff Lynne admits. “And they all started to do well at that point.”

The band’s upward trajectory continued apace with 1975’s Face The Music and its top-10 single Evil Woman, which Lynne professes to have written in minutes. “We were in the studio and I thought, ‘I ain’t got a single yet for this album.’ So I sent the other guys out to play football and said, ‘I’m going to make this up now in five minutes.’

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📷: Getty Images

Former R.E.M. frontman #MichaelStipe is applying the final touches to his debut solo album, and it promises to be an interesting listen.

Stipe has been working on the record for several years, and in a recent interview with The Times, he admitted that completing the collection has "taken longer than I wanted".

"Covid didn’t help," he acknowledged, "but I’m finishing it. When the band split, I just needed a break. I took five years but I got pulled back into music. It’s been a struggle. That’s the main thing. I want it to be great, but I’ve got the pressure of having been in REM and it’s a high bar, because I want this to be as good as that, and that’s near impossible. So it’s fucking exciting but also terrifying, and I’m doing the music for the first time too, and I think I’m good at it but not great."

Now, in an appearance on US TV talk show The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the 66-year-old singer says that he is "writing the final lyrics" for the record, and has shared one of its themes.

“One of the songs is the sound of a tree hearing itself for the first time,” he reveals. "It’s this confusing situation. My friend recorded a tree in my backyard in Georgia and played it back to itself, and so it sounds like Daft Punk."

Stipe also suggested that the song will incorporate a sea shanty.

Asked how the tree reacted to its own sound, Stipe replied, "The tree has not responded yet. We’re gonna let his people get back to my people and see what happens."

In his interview with The Times, Stipe suggested that his album might be titled, Meet THE Michael Stipe., and expressed the hope that it would emerge this year.

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📷: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images