Author: fgt

US rockers Styx shared the first new music from their upcoming new album, Circling From Above, releasing a video for new single Build And Destroy.

The septet have just announced that they will release their 18th studio album, Circling From Above, through their Alpha Dog 2T/UMe label on July 18, and which the band say looks at the “complexities of the human experience through the intersecting lenses of technology and nature.”

The new album continues the more progressive direction the band have taken on recent albums such as The Mission (2017) and Crash Of The Crown (2021), mixing the prog approach of the early Wooden Nickel albums with the melodic hard rock with which they made ntheir name in the late 70s and early 80s.

“When you start writing an album, there’s generally something that piques your imagination, and all of a sudden, you’re a storyteller starting with the seed of a story,” says guitarist and vocalist Tommy Shaw. “A good song is like a straight road — it’ll get you to the next place.”

“That little melody, I kept singing Build And Destroy,” explains singer/keyboardist Lawrence Gowan, who takes the lead vocal on the new single. “Even though we don’t sing over that part, I kept thinking that would be a good title. It’s thematic. The melody feels like a little Star Trek or Twilight Zone thing — just a small tag that reinforces the title.”

“We knew it was strong,” Gowan says. “Even though it was the second-to-last song we finished, it felt like a quick way into the album’s overall theme.”

Circling From Above has been produced by the band’s guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Will Evankovich, who also produced the band’s previous two albums before becoming a full-time band member.

Styx will embark on a summer tour of the US with The Kevin Cornin Band, on what is being dubbed the Brotherhood Of Rock tour.

Pre-order Circling From Above.

Styx: Circling From Above
1. Circling From Above
2. Build and Destroy
3. Michigan
4. King of Love
5. It’s Clear
6. Forgive
7. Everyone Raise A Glass
8. Blue Eyed Raven
9. She Knows
10. Ease Your Mind
11. The Things That You Said
12. We Lost the Wheel Again
13. Only You Can Decide

Writer and broadcaster Jerry Ewing is the Editor of Prog Magazine which he founded for Future Publishing in 2009. He grew up in Sydney and began his writing career in London for Metal Forces magazine in 1989. He has since written for Metal Hammer, Maxim, Vox, Stuff and Bizarre magazines, among others. He created and edited Classic Rock Magazine for Dennis Publishing in 1998 and is the author of a variety of books on both music and sport, including Wonderous Stories; A Journey Through The Landscape Of Progressive Rock.

U2 frontman Bono has spoken about his band’s work on a new album, saying, “Nobody needs a new U2 album unless it’s an extraordinary one.”

The 65-year-old Dubliner was talking to US chat show host Jimmy Kimmel, promoting his new film, Bono: Stories of Surrender, which will premiere on Apple TV+ tomorrow, May 30.

However, guitarist The Edge later stated that he and the vocalist were working on “some crazy kind of sci-fi Irish folk music.”

Watch the full interview below:

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Bono: Stories of Surrender, filmed at the Beacon Theatre in New York, is described as “a bold and lyrical visual exploration of Bono’s one-man show by the same name, based on his celebrated memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, and the accompanying book/theatre tour.”

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

CMAT, Black Country, New Road and Katy J Pearson are among the artists who’ve been added to the line-up for The Maccabees’ All Points East headline show on August 24.

This summer’s other All Points East events are headlined by Chase and Status (August 16), Barry Can’t Swim (August 22) and Raye (August 23).

Full details of the shows, and remaining tickets, can be found here.

CMAT’s set at Wide Awake festival was one of the highlights of the south London event, staged at Brockwell Park on May 23.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

As jazz rock pioneer John McLaughlin neared his 70th birthday in 2012, he showed little sign of slowing down, artistically or otherwise. That year he told Prog about his latest album, Now Here This, looked back on some of his career highlights to date, and reflected on the nature of music and musicians.

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“Am gannin doon the road to get mesel’ a paper!” laughs John McLaughlin. A rough-as-rivets Geordie accent isn’t quite what you expect to hear from this remarkable musician, whose work as a solo artist – and with the likes of Miles Davis, Carlos Santana, the genre-blurring Shakti, and, of course, the Mahavishnu Orchestra – have made him a legendary figure in the worlds of jazz and rock.

Although born in Yorkshire, after his parents split up his formative years were spent in the North East seaside town of Whitley Bay near Newcastle. It was here that he first picked up on the sing-song vagaries of the Geordie dialect, and more importantly, where he first picked up the guitar.

“I was 11 years old when it first arrived in my hands. I’d been playing piano for a few years prior to that. My mother was an amateur violinist who did nothing but encourage me to play music. She was a great woman. I fell in love with that guitar and took it to bed that night. It was just a cheap thing, but I was absolutely entranced by this instrument and I have been ever since. Without my mother’s support I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

He’s at his home in France, undertaking an intensive round of interviews supporting the release of a new album by the 4th Dimension Band, Now Here This. For a man now in his 70th year on the planet, he could be forgiven if he sounded a little jaded – yet his conversation is frequently peppered with laughter, and an infectious sense of wonder and boundless enthusiasm that would be more in keeping with a musician just starting out, rather than that of a player with countless albums to his name.

“If you trace my history through groups like One Truth Band and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, they’re kind of pivotal in my history, and the 4th Dimension Band is very much part of my continuing development as a player,” he says of his bandmates Gary Husband (keyboards and occasional drumming), Etienne M’Bappé (bass guitar) and Ranjit Barot (drums and Indian percussion). “This group gives me the possibility to grow, for want of another word. I can really grow with these people.”

Much like his work in other ensembles, a feature of the 4th Dimension Band is the way McLaughlin’s guitar bounces across the grooves and beats of the new album. It’s heady stuff at times, and clearly something he thrives on. “It’s like skimming stones, a wonderful feeling. There’s a turbulence, but there’s this marvellous golden connection between everything that just carries us along in waves. Of course, that’s wonderful for me as a player.

“I’ve been so lucky in my life to have played with so many of the greatest drummers: Tony Williams, Jack DeJohnette, Billy Cobham, Narada Michael Walden, Trilok Gurtu, Mark Mondesir, and of course in the band at the moment we have two drummers.”

If you’re a bit of a bugger in life then you’re going to be a bit of a bugger in music… I try to find the great players I can live with and laugh with

The album displays an unashamed virtuosity from each member; but as McLaughlin explains, the key to what makes for a successful group isn’t necessarily about how fast they can dash off a scale or a chorus. “If you’re a bit of a bugger in life then you’re going to be a bit of a bugger in music. There are some great musicians whom I admire, but with whom I have no real desire to play. You can’t be one way in life and another way in music. If you’re like that in life then you’re like that in music.

“So while it’s true you look for great players, you also look for somebody who’s on the same wavelength as you. This allows a kind of complicity to develop. I try to find the great players I can live with and laugh with.”

Being around great players is something he’s done right from the off. He spent years paying his dues in stints with Graham Bond, Alexis Korner, Georgie Fame and session work that took him into the light entertainment sphere populated by Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones and Cilla Black.

He was 27 when he recorded his first solo album Extrapolation in 1969 – a sparsely furnished but versatile album that showcased not only his fluidity, but his emerging abilities as a composer. By the time it was released he’d already swapped London for New York after receiving a call from Miles Davis’ drummer, Tony Williams, then in the throes of putting together his own band, Lifetime.

A month after completing Extrapolation, he found himself, alongside Williams, laying down tracks for Davis’ seminal work In A Silent Way. Part of the trumpeter’s mercurial genius was an antennae for truly talented musicians, and he immediately offered the guitarist a permanent job.

Shakti was very special because it was a real playing band. There’s no room for sitting back and coasting

Although he would play on groundbreaking albums such as Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson, McLaughlin knew he would have more freedom in Lifetime with Williams. If you want to know where jazz-rock begins, their 1969 double-album Emergency! is a good place to start. Completed by organist Larry Young, the trio unleashed an elemental storm that forced the brash dynamics of rock and the virtuosity of jazz together in ways that are still startling and daringly original.

Against the backdrop of Young’s ethereal organ and the constantly sizzling ride-cymbal of Williams, McLaughlin’s savage guitar runs gnawed and roared like a beast uncaged. Ceded within Emergency! and 1970’s Turn It Over were themes McLaughlin would revisit and refine in his next project, the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

If Lifetime had been a seismic explosion, The Mahavishnu Orchestra was a precision-guided missile. Powered by Billy Cobham’s high-octane drumming, McLaughlin was joined by Jan Hammer’s effusive keyboards and Jerry Goodman’s racing violin. Signed by CBS without the label having heard a note, the band not only wowed the critics but became a huge commercial success.

Given the complexity of their nuanced jazz-rock, how does he account for the way in which the record-buying public snapped up albums such as 1973’s Birds Of Fire, and – pausing briefly to change line-ups – 1975’s Visions Of The Emerald Beyond? “Maybe because we were the loudest, fastest band in the world? I don’t know!” laughs McLaughlin.

At a time when most guitar legends sported shaggy lion-like manes, his trademark white suit and short-back-and-sides haircut made him stand out. His sartorial choices reflected his very public spiritual quest and interest in Eastern philosophy and religion. “The Eastern influence started with me a long time before I left the UK. I stopped dropping acid around 1967, joined a meditation group and started doing yoga – and of course Indian music followed, because the philosophy and music are intertwined and inclusive.

“I saw the whole of the 60s: Coltrane, Miles, The Beatles, the psychedelic era and the social revolution. It was a phenomenal decade for me in the sense that a lot of dreams that came to fruition in the 70s were born in the 60s. The Mahavishnu Orchestra was just one of them – but Shakti was another.”

You can never get to the end. The whole point of music is to be who you are, and really that’s the whole point of life, isn’t it?

Although there’d always been an East-meets-West presence within his work, Shakti brought it to the fore in a thrilling and joyous fusion. McLaughlin abandoned the iconic double-necked guitar in favour of a distinctive acoustic setting, alongside virtuoso Indian musicians including tabla player Zakir Hussain and the violinist L Shankar. “Shakti was very special because it was a real playing band. There’s no room for sitting back and coasting – but who wants to coast when you’ve got players like Zakir and Shankar?

“I got a lot of flak from the record company, from my manager and my agent for forming Shakti, because I was giving up Mahavishnu Orchestra, you know, a very, very successful band. They said: ‘Whaddya mean, yer gonna sit on a carpet and play with these Indian guys? What’s that all about?’ But I wanted to do it, so I accepted the consequences and I lost a lot of sales. But as time goes by, Shakti is a group that people love all over the world. In the end, as long as we stay true to ourselves then we’re okay.”

Musicians and politics can be a fraught combination, but McLaughlin’s belief that music is a common currency and a positive force in the world is unshakable. The Wall Will Fall (recorded several years before the Berlin Wall was dismantled) and Blues For LW (composed when Polish Solidarity leader Lech Wałesa was under arrest) illustrate his interest in humanitarian issues.

When the reformed Shakti attempted to play a concert in the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the troubled West Bank region of the Middle East, it proved to be a controversial decision that took three years of complex negotiations before the concert finally happened in 2012. “I’ve been following the situation between Israel and Palestine for a long time, and of course there are some radicals and militants on both sides,” McLaughlin says. “We finally got through with an association in Ramallah who use music for traumatised children. It was a thrill to play for the most lovely people.”

When I go to a concert I want to be taken to the world where that musician lives; I want him or her to bring me into their world

He cites the conductor Daniel Barenboim and his celebrated West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – which unites Arab and Israeli musicians as a motivating force – in making the event happen. “I saw Daniel recently. He was playing a programme of Beethoven’s music. I saw him afterwards and thanked him for the inspiration to get to Palestine.”

Aside from plans to return to Ramallah with Shakti, McLaughlin has a constant stream of projects that he’s involved in, one of which includes reuniting with Carlos Santana for a series of concerts commemorating their epic 1973 collaboration, Love Devotion Surrender. Meanwhile he’s prepping for a world tour with the 4th Dimension Band, and has no inclination to slow down his ongoing musical and spiritual quest.

“You can never get to the end. The whole point of music is to be who you are, and really that’s the whole point of life, isn’t it? The spiritual search is wrapped up in one question: ‘Who am I?’ If you improvise, what are you going to say? The only thing a musician can talk about when he’s soloing is how he loves his instrument and the affection he has for the musicians around him. He can only tell the story of his life.

“When I go to a concert I want to be taken to the world where that musician lives; I want him or her to bring me into their world. They can only do it if the music is strong enough. Whatever it may be, whether it’s melancholy or joy or just laughter, then the door is opened.”

What’s been the greatest obstacle he’s encountered to entering that open door over the course of his career? He pauses a moment, then smiles. “My own ignorance, primarily. That’s been the great barrier.” His words are now punctuated by great gulps of laughter. “The minute we think we know something, then we’re even more stupid than we thought. It’s taken me 70 years to realise that I know almost nothing!”

Sid’s feature articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including Prog, Classic Rock, Record Collector, Q, Mojo and Uncut. A full-time freelance writer with hundreds of sleevenotes and essays for both indie and major record labels to his credit, his book, In The Court Of King Crimson, an acclaimed biography of King Crimson, was substantially revised and expanded in 2019 to coincide with the band’s 50th Anniversary. Alongside appearances on radio and TV, he has lectured on jazz and progressive music in the UK and Europe.  

A resident of Whitley Bay in north-east England, he spends far too much time posting photographs of LPs he’s listening to on Twitter and Facebook.

UK post-hardcore favourites Svalbard have announced their impending break-up.

The Bristol/London quartet will split in 2026, but will be prolific during their final months. They’ll play their final UK tour in November, supported by Cage Fight and Knife Bride, and have plans for later standalone shows, plus the release of one last song.

See the scheduled stops on the band’s farewell run below.

In an exclusive statement to Metal Hammer, singer/guitarist Serena Cherry explains that Svalbard are splitting to try and avoid a creative decline after releasing four critically acclaimed studio albums. She describes the break-up as amicable and expresses pride in the band’s achievements.

Her words read in full: “You know when a band you love starts churning out less-inspired, repetitive music that totally plays it safe? And you find yourself longingly reflecting on the magic of their previous albums, wondering if they will ever be able to reignite that creative fire again? Well, I know that feeling too. There’s loads of bands I adore who I wish had stopped writing music after four or five albums.

“From a musician’s perspective, it’s very hard to walk away from unlikely success that required so much work and sacrifice to achieve. It’s a daunting and depressing prospect – to lose the band you poured your entire life into.

“Some bands turn that fear of loss into fuel, marching onwards making albums that sound like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. We don’t want to do this. Svalbard does not want to plod on in the name of half-hearted musical compromise.

“We’ve always been an all-or-nothing band. And even though it’s utterly heartbreaking, we have accepted that our musical journey together is reaching its end. We have one song left within us as a band. We want to finish on a decisive high, having released four albums that we are 100 percent proud of.

“There is no animosity between band members and we wanted to give the band a proper send-off, with a final UK tour and final shows all over the world coming in 2026. It means a lot to us that we can give Svalbard one last year before we musically go our separate ways.”

Cherry co-founded Svalbard with guitarist/vocalist Liam Phelan in 2011. They released their debut album, One Day All This Will End, in 2015. The band became known for their distinct fusion of post-hardcore, post-metal and black metal, as well as their outspoken, principled lyrics, which have tackled such topics as rape culture, mental health and corporate greed.

Cherry spoke about her forthright writing style in a 2023 interview with The Guardian. “It was a very deliberate choice to be as lyrically direct as possible,” she said. “You could listen to a song by most metal bands and it might be about depression or something political but, dressed up in prose and poetry, that message becomes obscured. If you say something as concisely as possible, you can reach as many people as possible.”

Metal Hammer called Svalbard’s third album – When I Die, Will I Get Better? – “the most important British metal record of 2020”, and their final album, 2023’s The Weight Of The Mask, was met with similar goodwill.

Svalbard have toured with the likes of Enslaved, Alcest and Cult Of Luna and graced the stage at such festivals as Hellfest, Arctangent, Summer Breeze and 2000 Trees. The band are booked to play their first-ever set at the UK’s blockbuster Download festival on Friday, June 13.

Svalbard 2025 UK farewell tour dates:

Nov 19: Glasgow Slay
Nov 20: Manchester Rebellion
Nov 21: Newcastle Think Tank
Nov 22: Bristol Thekla
Nov 23: London Oslo Hackney

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Metal Hammer and Prog, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, NME and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

“I’m actually dead,” says Kirk Brandon. “I’m speaking to you from inside my coffin.”

In May 2023, Brandon was in Nottingham fronting one of his two ground-breaking bands – in this case, Spear Of Destiny, not Theatre Of Hate – when, he says, “I just had a little heart attack.”

He ended up in Northampton General Hospital for three and a half weeks. “But that’s easy,” he says. “I’ve done a four-month stretch before. That was hard.”

The ‘four-month stretch’ was the result of endocarditis (defined by the NHS as “a rare and potentially fatal infection of the inner lining of the heart”). While he was in, he says, they replaced his aortic valve with a titanium one.

He smiles: “It was a lotta laughs, y’know.”

And how is he now? “Honestly,” he says, “I’m fine. I’ll live forever.”

Kirk Brandon was – and still is – the beating titanium heart of post-punk bands Theatre Of Hate and Spear Of Destiny: singer, guitarist and chief songwriter. Inspired by punk, but looking for something more than “three chords and sloganeering”, he came up with something completely unique – although people didn’t always notice.

“When we first started,” he says, “people said, ‘Look at these young pretty boys. Aren’t they lovely? Let’s take them home’ and they pushed that aspect of it – or the media did. ‘Oh, look, they’re fluffy and harmless – wonderful!’ But that wasn’t really what we were doing.”

No shit. A stew of tribal beats, twanging Morricone guitars and searing saxophone, topped by Brandon’s withering, dramatic singing, Theatre Of Hate sounded like a band playing a dive bar on the Eastern Front in a Brecht play.

They did not sound fluffy, they sounded terrifying.

“I looked fluffy,” he says. “I didn’t always look like this. This is after the car crash.”

He was a good-looking guy, Kirk, still is. Big-eyed, blonde-haired, with cheekbones and a pout that could’ve put him on a million teenage walls, he could have been a pop star – and he was, briefly – if it wasn’t for the racket he made.

“Compared to the music of today,” he admits, “Theatre Of Hate is definitely avant garde.”

In June, Theatre Of Hate play the Forever Now festival at Milton Keynes Bowl, alongside Kraftwerk, Death Cult, PiL, The Damned, Johnny Marr, The The, Psychedelic Furs, Peter Murphy and a load more unique, eccentric and visionary musical weirdos borne out of that same period – an extraordinary explosion of music that becomes almost harder to explain the further away from it we get.

In 2025, it’s almost completely impossible to imagine any teenager or 20-something making music like Theatre Of Hate or Spear Of Destiny.

Where did that music come from?

In some ways, Kirk Brandon had a traditional introduction to music. At the age of 12, he saw John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers – the 1968 line-up, with future Rolling Stone Mick Taylor on guitar. A lot of people who saw the Bluesbreakers went on to play blues – to this day, a legion of boring white guys with Strats are playing homage to that kind of music. Not Kirk Brandon.

Maybe it was the influence of the stuff teenage Kirk was exposed to, like Van der Graaff Generator (“strange stuff, absolutely incredible, but weird as hell”), another band with a high-pitched and theatrical singer.

And then there was his dad. A working-class bloke from Westminster who’d fought in World War II, Brandon Sr. was in love with opera and would sing around the house. (Could he have been a performer? “I don’t think so,” says Kirk. “He was never going to be an Enrico Caruso, you know, discovered on the streets of Naples, and turned into a superstar. Instead, they put a uniform on him and sent him out there to kill people.”)

Did opera influence his own singing style? “I don’t really think so. It must be in there but I just made it up as I went along. No one told me what to do, I just did it. It’s self-exploration.”

Brandon taught himself to play guitar, “making up chords” until it sounded like music. “Clueless, really, but it kind of worked in a funny, weird, kind of way,” he says. “Again, self-exploratory. I used to think that’s what music was – that it was meant to be exploratory. It wasn’t about learning somebody’s back catalogue and writing your own songs based around that. Then along came punk rock.”

Like many of his generation, he thought punk was exciting and inspirational, but it quickly seemed formulaic: “Three chords, four chords, and grown men shouting slogans, based around V-C [verse-chorus], V-C, V-C or V-C, V-C, C-out.

“To me, that’s boring,” he says. “I don’t want to do that. There’s a ton of minor chords and discord in Theatre Of Hate. Which is interesting, I think. Even today, it’s interesting.”

Theatre Of Hate toured with The Clash in 1981. The Clash themselves had just released the sprawling triple album Sandinista!, an album full of dub, funk, jazz and the occasional bit of rock’n’roll. It was a time for experimentation.

“People expected you to do something different,” says Kirk. “I think people were just curious. ‘What is this?’ Y’know, we had a saxophone, but it wasn’t used in the traditional way – it wasn’t playing hokey old jazz riffs and scales, y’know? It was strange. But at the time, there was room for self-exploration. It hadn’t become completely and utterly corporate.”

When Theatre Of Hate burned out prematurely, after one Mick Jones-produced album, Brandon and bassist Stan Stammers went straight into Spear Of Destiny. Agumented again by sax and keyboards, SoD developed into something slightly more commercial. With soulful backing vocals, elegiac pianos, and barn-burning sax, they were intense, politically-minded and anthemic – like the E-Street Band fronted by John Lydon.

It was a peak time for alternative music, just as it was Peak Monoculture. Now That’s What I Call Music, Top Of The Pops, Radio 1, the charts – that was how most people got their music. And then there was the underground – several of them, really – backed by independent record labels, the music press, DJ John Peel, left-field music shows like The Tube: post-punk, goth, psychobilly, thrash metal, skate punk, indie and a million other scenes bubbled away.

“You always felt you were at odds with the mainstream,” he says, “and in the background was always the shadow of George Orwell [“The papers talk about Orwell, almost every day,” goes Spear song World Service] and the wartime function of the Ministry of Propaganda.

“I felt that we were outsiders, to be honest. Ultimately, there was never going to be room in the mainstream for someone like us. So if you got a brief window of going on The Tube or even Top of the Pops, as we did, you took it because it wasn’t going to come again.”

Around that same time, in Soho, a scene was developing around the Blitz club, where DJ Rusty Egan was anticipating a Krautrock-and-Bowie-inspired future of frictionless beats and synthetic bass, and a load of artists – Visage, Ultravox, Gary Numan et al – were in a technological arms-race to get the latest keyboard sounds and beats into the charts.

Brandon was around that scene but not of it. In fact, he went in exactly the opposite direction: Something much more organic and analogue, with saxophones, pianos, and guitars and live drummers. He wanted friction.

“That’s the either the beauty – or the ugliness – of me,” he says. “I went in the opposite direction to whatever would help.

“I went to the Blitz club quite a lot, and Hell, and all them other ones. It was interesting. It was genuinely funny and fun and silly. Some people inside it took themselves incredibly seriously. Incredibly.

“I was there the night David Bowie turned up,” he says. “He went straight to see Rusty Egan. Bowie was wearing a suit with flares, a 1970s suit that he probably bought in the 70s. It was like an anti-Blitz fashion statement, this awful flared suit.”

Rock’n’roll is like Italian operetta. Everybody dies and loses. Women get raped. They sing beautifully, but it all goes wrong. It doesn’t all come wrapped in cellophane with ribbons.

If anything, Spear Of Destiny felt like an alternative E-Street Band: the drama, the social commentary, the musicality, the pianos and the sax. “I love Nebraska,” he says. “To me, that’s his greatest album. I would say that, wouldn’t I? It’s like [Tom Waits’] Swordfishtrombones: it’s all sort of ‘left side of the pitch’. More obscure, uncommercialised.

“But I was very aware of that Phil Spector-type way of doing things, that Springsteen used a lot. I was aware of that – and the Roy Orbison way – and I suppose sometimes in the arrangements, you would flip through ways of doing things and think, ‘That’s not a million miles from the E-Street band.’

“Somewhere in all of this, there’s rock’n’roll,” he says. “And that’s hard to divest yourself of. Eddie, Elvis, Gene, Fats – rock’n’roll is there, y’know?

I’m not gonna say it’s religion but it’s a religion, and we kind of buy into it, don’t we? We buy into the myth, the mythos.

“A lot of that stuff is like Italian operetta. And like a lot of opera, everybody dies and loses. Women get raped. That’s Italian opera. They sing beautifully, but it all goes wrong. So that’s in there too. It doesn’t all come wrapped in cellophane with ribbons.”

His greatest album, 1984’s One Eyed Jacks, leaned into that drama. Full of ghostly pianos, crisp guitars and soaring sax, Jacks wore its musicality on its sleeve, but still sounded powerful and authentic.

From the opening seconds of Rainmaker to closer These Days Are Gone, Kirk’s voice – a savage howl one minute, ridiculously soft and tender the next – provides a raw counterpoint to the band’s slick musicianship, piccolos and all. Lyrics like Playground Of The Rich, meanwhile, are more relevant now than they’ve ever been.

The money shots were Prisoner Of Love, a funky attempt at a crossover hit which grated at the time but makes more sense now, and Liberator – a raucous indie disco floor filler.

(What’s Liberator about? I ask him. Who’s being liberated? “You know,” he says. “I’ve forgotten. I used to have a conscience, but I’m better now. I can’t even remember.” Is it about freeing yourself from the tyranny of the mainstream? “Yeah,” he says. “That’ll do.”)

While the Blitz Kids ruled the charts, Spear of Destiny had more in common with another scene at the time. By 1984, the ‘Big Music’ was everywhere: Big Country’s The Crossing took Lizzy’s Róisín Dubh deep into the Scottish glens, Under A Blood Red Sky turned U2 into post-punk Springsteens, and – while The Clash were being overpowered by funk – The Alarm grasped the rebel rock baton and ran with it on their debut, Deliverance.

Spear Of Destiny were London’s answer to all this Celtic chestbeating. “The Barra boys from London, is that it?” says Kirk. “I don’t know. They were doing their own thing. I love Big Country. They had it right from day one. Stuart Adamson was a fantastic songwriter.”

Big Country’s career was sabotaged by record company politics and unsympathetic producers – Spear of Destiny had similar woes. Brandon says he didn’t like any of the band’s producers (“apart from Alan Shacklock and Zeus B. Held”), while “record companies just want the flagship hit single,” he says. “They want pretty-looking stars and they want hit singles.” In 1987, he gave them one: Never Take Me Alive went to no.14 in the UK singles charts.

Their manager Terry Razor (“a Scottish gangster,” says Kirk) and the record company couldn’t agree on what the single should be, so they turned to Kirk. “I said, Never Take Me Alive. They all looked at me like, ‘That’s suicide.’ I thought, ‘I’d rather it was suicide and a good song’. Luckily for everybody, it was a hit.”

Did his audience see this success as selling-out? “I don’t think Never Take Me Alive is a ‘sell out song,’” he says. “I tried selling out, failed miserably – but I’m open to offers.

“Never Take Me Alive was a good song. I nicked all this stuff from Beethoven’s Mass For The Dead and [Ants guitarist] Marco Pirroni came and played guitar on it.” Marco added one chord to it, he says, but it made all the difference.

Adam and The Ants and Theatre Of Hate had come up around the same time and had a similar MO: the outlaw chic, the twanging guitars, the tribal drums. The Blitz kids were trying to get people dancing and Theatre Of Hate…

“We were making dance music for people in asylums,” he says. “And we succeeded.”

Spear Of Destiny are on tour now. Theatre Of Hate are on tour from June and appear at the Forever Now festival at Milton Keynes Bowl on 22 June. For more info and tickets visit Kirk Brandon’s website or Forever Now

Scott is the Content Director of Music at Future plc, responsible for the editorial strategy of online and print brands like Louder, Classic Rock, Metal Hammer, Prog, Guitarist, Guitar World, Guitar Player, Total Guitar etc. He was Editor in Chief of Classic Rock magazine for 10 years and Editor of Total Guitar for 4 years and has contributed to The Big Issue, Esquire and more. Scott wrote chapters for two of legendary sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson‘s books (For The Love Of Vinyl, 2009, and Gathering Storm, 2015). He regularly appears on Classic Rock’s podcast, The 20 Million Club, and was the writer/researcher on 2017’s Mick Ronson documentary Beside Bowie.