Author: smngrx01

You may not know her name, but you’ll have heard Diane Warren’s songs – she’s written hits for everyone from Aerosmith and Bon Jovi to The Cult and Cheap Trick. In 2011, Classic Rock’ Presents AOR magazine sat down with her to uncover the secrets of her stellar success.

Chatting with Diane Warren, it’s very easy to forget she’s a multi-millionaire with a reputed annual income of around $20 million, a significant chunk of which she donates to animal charities.

She’s won dozens of awards but is still starry-eyed when talking about winning the 2011 Golden Globe for You Haven’t Seen The Last Of Me, the powerful ballad Cher sings in the film Burlesque, confiding that she’d really like to be nominated for an Oscar.

Everyone knows a Diane Warren song, whether it’s I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing (recorded by Aerosmith), If I Could Turn Back Time (Cher), Because You Loved Me (Celine Dion), Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now (Starship), Time, Love And Tenderness (Michael Bolton) or How Do I Live (a hit for both LeAnn Rimes and Trisha Yearwood).

Her songs are mini-masterworks of pop songwriting craft that any would-be writer would do well to dissect and analyse. Choruses full of hooks, verses jammed with catchy melodies, all seamlessly held together by lyrics that are universal enough for most listeners to identify with, without feeling that they’ve heard it all before.

Diane Warren writes across such a breadth of styles with such ease and confidence that her songs have been recorded by artists from Kiss to The Cult. These songs transcend genre and translate into many different music forms, often sung by hugely different performers. Her Don’t Turn Around, co-written with Albert Hammond and a UK No.1 for reggae band Aswad in 1988, has also been recorded by eight other artists, among them Ace Of Base, Tina Turner and Neil Diamond.

Because You Loved Me, written about the support and encouragement Diane received from her late father David Warren, and featured in the 1996 Robert Redford/Michelle Pfeiffer screen romance Up Close And Personal, has been recorded by 11 different artists to date, winning Warren a Grammy and nominations for both an Oscar and a Golden Globe award.

Warren has been writing hits for over 25 years, and even though her songs have been performed by the cream of rock royalty and pop’s most prestigious stars – including Bon Jovi, Rod Stewart, Tom Jones, The Jacksons, Heart, Ratt, Al Green, Whitney Houston, Pet Shop Boys, Chicago, Gloria Estafan, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, The Pussycat Dolls and Mariah Carey, among countless others – she still sounds like a fan when talking about calling Jay-Z to persuade him to put a new song she’s written on the forthcoming Beyoncé album.

“After I’d played him the song on my guitar he had her call me,” she smiles. “This is after just hearing it over the phone. I did a demo that wasn’t amazingly arranged or produced, and put a little keyboard cello part on it. The song is very hard to sing, but it sold it. She got the emotion through what I’d done. The album was finished but Beyoncé went back into the studio and was recording it a couple of days later.”

Diane Warren is endlessly enthusiastic about her songs. She demos them in exactly the same way she did when she started 27 years ago, on an old cassette recorder using only the most basic instrumentation, including a 1980s Yamaha DX7 keyboard. The cassettes are then passed over to one of several in-house engineers employed by her Realsongs company, to be turned into polished, produced demos that sound like finished records.

Warren supervises the final product and frequently works in the studio with artists when they’re recording her songs.

She arrives at her office at 8.30 am, six days a week, and often stays there for 12 hours. Fiercely tenacious, she usually writes in the mornings and spends the afternoons pitching her songs to artists, record producers and film companies.

Even though she has a team of 12 people – administrators, promoters, studio engineers and producers – working for her, and has a reputation for being a tough negotiator, it’s all about the songs for Warren. Financially, she need never work again; creatively, as she admits, she’d go crazy if she didn’t write songs.

For her, every song recorded by a major artist is like the first, not the 1,500th.

What Warren doesn’t know about songwriting probably isn’t worth knowing. If she was to appear on Mastermind, her specialist subject would undoubtedly be Pop Songwriters Of The 20th Century. It’s an interest that began for her very early on, as she explains.

“Growing up, I was influenced by songwriters, the whole 50s and 60s Brill Building thing. I was influenced by Carole King, but not Carole King the singer/songwriter – more Carole King’s work with Gerry Goffin, and the work of people like Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Burt Bacharach and Hal David. All those amazing writers from that amazing time.”

Despite her almost fanatical interest in pop music, and unlike many songwriters who originally started out as performers and subsequently became full-time writers, Diane never caught the performing bug.

“I didn’t want to be an artist and get up on a stage,” she explains. “I had really bad stage fright. I wanted to be the person behind the scenes writing the songs for everybody.”

Even so, with scores of hits worldwide, including over 100 in the US charts alone, it would be very easy to imagine that she’s been offered more than her fair share of record deals.

“I haven’t actually had lots of offers,” Diane replies. “That’s not what I’m putting out there. I might do a record someday, just for the hell of doing a record. Everyone should do one! When I meet with artists, I’ll often sing and play stuff to them. Even though I’m not a great singer, there’s passion and emotion in it, because I wrote the song.

“I always wanted to do Blame It On The Rain with strings,” Diane continues, referring to her 1989 US No.1 hit for pop duo Milli Vanilli (who, infamously, were later revealed to have not been singing on their own records). “I’d make a record by taking a couple of songs like that, that people know I wrote, and put them with some new ones.”

Recording such an album would be following in the footsteps of one of Diane’s great heroes, Burt Bacharach, who, in addition to writing for some of pop’s great vocalists like Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield, has also put out a series of his own solo records.

“Sure,” Diane nods. “And Burt’s not a ‘real’ singer. There’s just something cool about hearing those songs by the person they were born from.”

Many performers write their own songs, of course, but Warren doesn’t see this as a barrier to them recording one of hers. A particular case in point is her classic ballad from the 2000 Michael Bay blockbuster Armageddon.

“Aerosmith write great songs, but they were cool enough and open enough to do I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing, which gave them a whole new career surge. Once Steven Tyler sang it, it became an Aerosmith song.

“I’d written songs with Steven and Joe Perry a long time ago – around 1988 – and nothing happened. I think they used one of those songs, Devil’s Got A New Disguise, on their last album [the 2006 compilation of the same name]. After I’d written I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing, Kathy Nelson, who at the time was the head of music at Disney, said that since Steven’s daughter Liv was in the movie, why don’t we try and get Aerosmith to do it? As they write their own songs I never thought they’d agree.

“In the movie Bruce Willis, who plays the father of Liv’s character, dies. Steven saw that and found it very emotional,” continues Diane, adding: “It touched him, and he loved the song so much he agreed to do it. Steven is such a great guy. His heart is so on his sleeve.

“I remember sitting on the piano next to him while he was learning the song. Hearing that voice was one of those moments I’ll never forget. The song wasn’t alive until he sang it.”

It’s taken 13 years, but this winning team has recently been reunited, as Warren explains: “I was just in the studio with Steven last month and we did some things as good or better than that. It’s harder for an artist to convince the listener with someone else’s song. To me that makes you a greater artist because you’ve convinced me.

“It becomes their song and their record,” continues Diane. “I’m not going to nitpick and tell Steven Tyler how to sing. He’s such a great artist and a great singer, and when we were in the studio he was doing things his own way. He was making it fit him. By virtue of him singing it, he made my song better.”

And will the song be released by Aerosmith or as a Steven Tyler solo track? The diplomatic Warren refuses to be drawn on the subject: “You know, I’m not sure. It’ll be one or the other. It’s a really great song. Really exciting.”

After the success with Armageddon, Aerosmith had been planning to record another of Warren’s songs for inclusion in 2000’s Nicolas Cage-fronted remake of the classic chase movie Gone In 60 Seconds. Record company politics got in the way and The Cult recorded the song instead. “The Cult did a great version of my Painted On My Heart,” says Diane. “I have a demo of Steven doing it as well, which was different.”

Diane often comes up with a songtitle first, and then writes words and music simultaneously. She takes a lot of care with the lyrics and it can be a slow process, sometimes taking up to a week to get a finished song she’s happy with.

Unlike many songwriters, she doesn’t use soundalike singers as she doesn’t want to limit who the song can be pitched to. Often Warren will come up with a song and subsequently decide who she’d like to offer it to based on how it’s turned out.

“I wrote a song a couple of years back that I thought would be right for Lenny Kravitz,” she explains. “He did it and totally made it a Lenny Kravitz song. No one would know I wrote it.”

And while Lenny Kravitz and Diane Warren might sound like an unlikely fit, any doubts about how he might treat her song were quickly dispelled, as Warren remembers: “I was sure when I first heard him sing it. If you question it, it isn’t working. I didn’t question it at all. It sounded great.”

Warren’s father was always very supportive of her songwriting, buying her her first guitar when she was 10. By the time she was 14, she was writing three songs a day and David Warren was ferrying her to meetings with Los Angeles-based music publishers. Breaking into what seemed like a closed shop was a long and frustrating endeavour, though one that, 40 years on, she can now be philosophical about.

“Everything worth doing is a closed shop,” Diane observes. “I just kept knocking on publishers’ doors. I was very persistent and very insistent.”

Her perseverance eventually paid off and, in 1983, Diane Warren accepted a staff writing job with Jack White, a producer who at the time was enjoying success with the singer Laura Branigan. Cologne-borne White’s real name was Horst Nussbaum, and he’d graduated from producing in Germany to making US and UK hits with Branigan, including Gloria and Self Control.

Jack White asked Warren to write English lyrics for a song by the French singer Martine Clemencau. The result, Solitaire, became a US Top 10 hit for Laura Branigan later in 1983, and Warren was on her way. Hot Night, another track for Branigan, was the first of Diane’s songs to be used in a film, in this case for the soundtrack of super-successful 1984 blockbuster Ghostbusters. Warren’s Rhythm Of The Night was then picked up by Motown’s Berry Gordy for his film The Last Dragon and recorded by the family band DeBarge.

A dispute between Warren and White caused Diane to leave in 1985. She’s subsequently said that the deal with White wasn’t a good one and that the success with the DeBarge song – No.3 on the US Top 100 chart and No.1 on the Adult Contemporary chart – meant she was now a hot property. Publishers were making her the sorts of offers that White was reluctant to match. But Warren’s lawyer suggested that she should leave White and start her own company, rather than sign with another publisher.

Realsongs was set up in 1985, after Diane and White personally settled their dispute. Today, Warren is very gracious about her former boss: “I kept my publishing and never looked back. The deal with Jack White was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Warren moved into her own small studio in a nine-storey building on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard. RCA Records’ offices were in the same building, and she became friends with someone from A&R who thought that Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now, which Diane had composed with British songwriter Albert Hammond, might work for Starship. The band – formerly known as Jefferson Starship – had re-invented themselves away from the agit-prop collective that grew out of Jefferson Airplane (one of the classic 1960s San Francisco bands), and had started having hits with tracks like We Built This City and Sara.

The process turned out to be a lot easier than Warren was expecting. “The song went off to the band and they did it,” she explains. “Usually it doesn’t happen like that.”

Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now became a massive hit, reaching No.1 in both the UK and the US in spring 1987. The song had been used for the soundtrack of ’87 romantic comedy Mannequin and graphically demonstrated how successful the ever-growing symbiotic relationship between the movie industry and the record businesses could be. The record promoted the film and the film promoted the record, setting a very lucrative gameplan for Warren’s career that continues to this day.

“I’ve always done songs for movies, starting with Ghostbusters and then The Last Dragon,” she says. “I did all the original songs for Coyote Ugly, and also Pearl Harbour. Up to date, Jennifer Hudson is starring in a movie about the life of Winnie Mandela, and I’ve written a song for that.”

Warren says she has no interest in writing film scores, but obviously relishes the exposure that comes from having a song featured worldwide as part of a blockbuster movie. The process can vary from project to project, but unlike with records, where she usually approaches artists with a song she’s already written, for movies she tends to write something specifically.

“The best thing to do is just see the movie,” she relates. “If that isn’t possible I’ll read the script or meet with the director. With Winnie, I’d heard about the movie and read the script. I work a lot with Jennifer Hudson anyway, so it was a perfect combination.”

The four songs that Diane wrote for Coyote Ugly included Can’t Fight The Moonlight, which became an international hit for LeAnn Rimes. The movie, about an aspiring songwriter, drew on Warren’s own career for inspiration.

“The director interviewed me a lot,” she reveals, laughing. “That’s why the main character has stage fright. She’s a lot prettier and younger, but some of the other things in there were loosely based on me.”

Does she wish, maybe, that she hadn’t been so candid? ”No. Twenty zillion albums later, I’m glad I told him everything.”

The chart success of Can’t Fight The Moonlight undoubtedly helped Coyote Ugly become a worldwide box office hit. But, as Warren tells us, the song almost didn’t appear in the film at all.

“It was crazy. I’d done another song for the end of the movie, and I kind of knew it didn’t work. I’d seen the footage and didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to have my song taken out. Then the producers realised it as well. The movie was due to be released in a month. I wrote Can’t Fight The Moonlight super-fast, and LeAnn came in and recorded it with Trevor Horn. They re-shot the scene a week before the movie came out. Literally last minute, but it worked.”

Diane Warren’s success and acknowledged mastery of the pop song has secured for her the opportunity to have her material recorded by some of the greats, including Elton John, Aretha Franklin, Meat Loaf and Eric Clapton, who recorded her song Blue Eyes Blue for Runaway Bride, the 1999 rom-com that reunited Pretty Woman couple Richard Gere and Julia Roberts.

“I wrote the song and we got Eric Clapton after,” explains Diane. “It was Kathy Nelson again who was doing that movie. I’d written the song, and she said she’d get Eric to do it. I went: ‘Really? You’ll get Eric Clapton to do my song?’ He loved the song, and I loved his version.

“I remember how nice Eric was. People like Paul Stanley and Eric Clapton, who’ve been doing this forever and are huge at what they do, are usually the nicest people. They’re the ones with humility.”

Because they’ve got nothing to prove, perhaps?

“Yes. Or they’re just cool people. I think success really exaggerates who you are. If you’re an asshole, you’ll be more of an asshole. If you keep your feet on the ground you’ll be okay.”

Warren vehemently refuses to play the game where a major artist agrees to do your song on the understanding that they can have a co-writing credit (and the resultant royalties), even though they’ve not contributed anything. This stance has cost her a professional relationship with at least one well-known singer who had previously recorded quite a few of her songs.

And even though most of Warren’s songwriting heroes wrote as part of teams, and she herself has done various very successful co-writes in the past – particularly with Michael Bolton and Albert Hammond – she prefers to work alone these days.

“To be honest, I just want to write songs by myself. Although… I’d loved to have met John Lennon. It would have been cool to write with him. Or just to talk to him and listen to his stories. I’d have been happy with that.

“I’ve met Paul McCartney a couple of times. Once was when we were both up for Academy Awards, and we both lost. We were hanging out backstage, and I said: ‘Wow, if the 14-year-old me knew I was a loser alongside Paul McCartney…!’ Which he thought was funny.”

Did the world’s two most successful songwriters try writing a song together when they met? “I’d have been up for that. We didn’t, but it would have been cool. And also a bit intimidating.”

Warren admits to getting a little jittery after agreeing to work with another, less ‘rock’n’roll’ but equally famous UK music export. “Two years ago I did a song called It’s My Time with Andrew Lloyd Webber for the Eurovision Song Contest. I was kind of scared, you know? Once we’d met, I said something funny that broke the ice, because I was nervous. It’s Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber! And I’ve got to be able to tell him something can be better.

“I said when we sat down together that we had to be totally honest with each other. He had to tell me if something could be better or vice versa, because we can’t have our names on a song that’s not really good. He played me something he thought was the chorus and I said: ‘What if we go here from that? Can that be the verse?’ And we did a really good job and were honest with each other.

“Once you realise… he might have been nervous writing with me! Who knows? It’s nerve-wracking, working with somebody new. We’re all insecure at our core.”

Workaholic Diane tells me that she’s getting “fidgety” to get back to her songwriting. But before she goes, any advice for budding songwriters?

“It’s the same as when I was coming up. You have to work hard. You have to knock on doors. Maybe it’s better these days to be in a band or be an artist yourself. Say something in a way that hasn’t been said before.

“Be great,” Diane concludes. “Be different.”

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents AOR magazine issue 4, September 2011

Ian Ravendale began working for BBC’s Radio Newcastle’s Bedrock show in the 1970s and soon after started writing for local and national music magazines. He’s written for Sounds, Classic Rock, AOR, Record Collector, The Word, American Songwriter, Classic Pop, Vive Le Rock, Iron Fist, The Beat, Vintage Rock and Fireworks, and worked with Tyne Tees Television and Border TV.

Since forming in 1981, IQ have established themselves as a veritable British prog institution. They’ve kept working consistently, their annual Christmas shows have become semi-legendary, and they retain a firm and ever-enthusiastic fanbase.

They could not, however, be accused of being overly prolific, averaging one album every five years. Dominion follows 2019’s substantial double Resistance, offering a more accessible and digestible prospect with a shorter running time, although it’s definitely a case of quality over quantity.

Epic opener The Unknown Door is presented as a four-part suite. Ushered in by a measured, stately synth fanfare, a clarion call in the near distance, and Neville Chamberlain’s announcement of the declaration of war from 1939 low in the mix, the first four minutes of first part Faint Equations is a graceful, reflective prologue that subtly nudges up the dynamic by way of carefully constructed keyboard layers, sparse vocal and gentle guitar.

The pace picks up considerably when Many And More Still crashes in and everything becomes more urgent, more insistent. It embraces a repeated Morse code-like figure, there’s brief guitar and organ soloing, and a good couple of minutes where neo-prog meets power metal. It slips into strident odd time signature motifs before collapsing under its own weight in a bout of organised chaos.

The third section, An Orbital Plane, provides a palate cleanser of acoustic guitar – utilised by six-stringer Mike Holmes far more than is usual for an IQ album – and then builds with layers of spooky keyboards and a lightly funky rhythm section into a big, bold crescendo. The final section, Dream Stronger, returns to themes from the very beginning of the track, now retooled to produce a soaring, triumphant denouement.

Of note almost immediately in The Unknown Door and throughout the album is the quality of Peter Nicholls’ voice. As the singer himself has admitted, his vocals could be somewhat jarring and overwrought in the early years. But his control, and his approach to constructing melodies, have developed over the years – and it’s very noticeable on Dominion.

He sounds very much more at ease with his singing and delivery. This is a smoother, more fulsome and more assured Nicholls than many may expect. While his lyrics provide a certain latitude for the listener to find meanings of their own, he seems to be channelling some decidedly personal, even intimate experiences and reflections at points here.

The delicate and bittersweet One Of Us, for example, features just acoustic guitar and voice with the merest wash of keyboards, in a song that has the feel of a Paul McCartney ballad. It seems to speak of a treasured yet failed relationship.

The initially elegant and yearning final track, Never Land, also captures elements of loss, the value of memories and the weight of grief; and it surely isn’t coincidental that Nicholls’ mother passed away just a few months before recording began. Rather than surrender to despondency, it builds into an exultant declaration.

There are themes that appear in various guises throughout the album, however. From the observation that ‘Beside the life that’s lived in, others pass by’ in No Dominion, the questioning of alternatives in the towering and majestic Far From Here and the grasping to deal with loss in Never Land, Nicholls appears to be emphasising the importance of taking control of our lives wherever and however we can.

In the exploration of possibilities previously overlooked or dismissed, and ultimately taking dominion over ourselves and the imprint we leave behind us, there is real positivity. Some of the darkness and bleakness that IQ are sometimes known for still lurks – but Dominion offers alternatives of both light and hope.

Simply listening to the changing keyboard arrangements and textures is a journey in itself

With Holmes producing this time around, the album has a terrific richness and depth. It also has an excellently-curated range of sounds, especially from Neil Durrant’s keyboards, which run the gamut from skittering sequenced figures to slabs of organ loveliness; from transportive synth strings to dramatic rumbling growls and much more besides; often in cleverly contrasting layers. Simply listening to the changing keyboard arrangements and textures throughout the album is a journey in itself.

It isn’t the most experimental album in the IQ canon, and it never strays too far from the templates the band have established over the years. However, it is a potent and affecting addition to their catalogue, which demonstrates great maturity – a group of musicians who have a precise understanding of their strengths and quirks. Absolutely worth the wait.

Dominion is on sale now via Giant Electric Pea.

Lamb Of God were already leading lights of the New Wave Of American Heavy Metal movement by the time they released their fourth album, 2006’s Sacrament. But as Metal Hammer caught up with frontman Randy Blythe on that year’s Unholy Alliance tour, they were turning away from the political towards something more personal.

It’s 9pm on TuesdayDecember 6, 2005, and Hammer is sandwiched between 1,800 drunken men (and a few women) at the cavernous Astoria venue in London. The roars around us are reaching their climax, and chants of “Lamb Of God!” fill every spare inch left in the space. As the lights dim and the intro music begins, we’re expecting fireworks.

But something seems wrong as the notoriously hard working, hard touring, hard playing band kick off their set with the riffing bombast of Laid To Rest. Vocalist Randy Blythe – known for being one of the most outspoken and politically incensed metal frontmen on the planet – is practically reeling. He slurs his words between songs and his dripping fringe seems to veil hazy eyes beneath. Fans share inquisitive looks: this isn’t what we came to see. This band look faint and tired, and within seconds, a lobbed beer can narrowly misses the singer.

“Yeah… I remember that show,” sighs the frontman. “It wasn’t that bad.”

As shitty moments go, that London show wasn’t anything to write home about for Randy Blythe. To him, it appears that one fumbled evening on stage is nothing compared to the frustrations and pain he and his band have accumulated over the past two years. For some time that resentment had nowhere to go, but now, all of the anger and exhaustion have come to a head for new album Sacrament. Unlike the political tirades of previous releases, Lamb Of God have instead turned inwards to exorcise the demons that have plagued their minds and lives for the past 24 months. From the sound of things, it seems that years of travelling and days of screaming have drilled this band into the ground. The London show, it appears, was just one step on a trail of hardships.

It’s 11 days since Lamb Of God last had a rest. It’s July 2006, some nine months after that Astoria gig, and the band are six and a half weeks into the US leg of the Unholy Alliance tour with Slayer and In Flames, and Randy (plus Mark Morton on guitar, John Campbell on bass and brothers Will and Chris Adler on guitar and drums respectively) has only just begun his new gigging schedule to promote their upcoming release. After one more US date, the band are due to start their own set of shows, then go to Japan… then to Australia… and then arrive in the UK in November for Unholy Alliance part two.

“Sure, we’re known for being a pretty hard touring band,” says the frontman with an air of genuine modesty. “We’ve been treated like a machine.”

It is this frustration at their own fatigue and their label’s mismanagement of their schedule – along with relationship problems, alcoholism, depression and more – that has prompted the lyrical and musical rage of ‘Sacrament’. Past releases were savagely brutal in their open attack on the US government, but the band now have more than enough anger at their own daily frustrations to fuel the 11 tracks and more. The lyrics spit the kind of rage that far outweighs your typical soapbox rant.

“No matter how many times you say ‘Fuck Bush, you suck’, he’s still there,” shrugs the singer. “We’ve been saying that right back to the days when we first started, and it’s time to take some time for us now.”

The life of a band on the road might seem as far removed from a nightmare as anyone can imagine, given what rock’n’roll has to offer. But for a group who have been doing this as long as Lamb Of God (their original collective, Burn The Priest, formed way back in 1990), the same routine near on every day, can start to take its toll.

From the very beginning, Lamb Of God’s members have been touring addicts. Racking up worldwide dates with Mastodon, Killswitch Engage and Children Of Bodom, as well as shows on Ozzfest and headlining 2005’s Sounds Of The Underground, they are regarded as one of the most hardworking metal bands on the planet. But as the soul-searching lyrics on ‘Sacrament’ suggest, all work and no play makes Randy – and Lamb Of God – angry and exhausted.

“It’s been fucking ridiculous,” sighs the frontman. “We’ve just done 11 dates with no break, and the other night we played in Arizona and it was 121 degrees. No one should have to play in that heat. It was terrible. It’s so bad for your throat.”

Playing sets of up to an hour in length each night, Randy’s voice has been put through a meatgrinder. The singer even claims that whilst recording the new album, producer Machine pushed him so hard that he was throwing up. As one of the most important and recognisable elements of Lamb Of God’s brutal style, Blythe doesn’t feel his health is being taken seriously.

“The record label don’t understand. I’m not like a guitar, you can’t change my strings, you can’t do anything,” he growls. “It’s just shout, shout, shout. My voice is wrecked.”

The singer is in fact so worried about physical deterioration that the infamously hard-boozing partier has recently given up drinking.

“It’s been 15 days,” he smiles. “I just wasn’t happy with it any more, what it was doing to me.”

What happened? Was there a day when you woke up and your hangover was just so bad that you thought, ‘fuck this’?

“Yep, that’s pretty much it,” he says. “You’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head. I dunno how long I’ll keep it up for. A good long while at least.”

For Randy Blythe, time on the road is getting harder to endure on every level he can think of. Sure, he and his band mates still enjoy those brief moments under the lights, but the hours before and after is where the strain is starting to show. It is in those moments that Blythe’s thoughts turn to the ones he’s left behind.

“The lowest point of it all is the being away from home,” sighs the singer. “Being away from home and away from my wife. There are times where I am away from her for a few months at a time.”

How do you keep the relationship going?

“We have cell phones and Blackberries,” explains Randy. “I have got myself a video camera that attaches to my Macintosh and she has one too so that we can see each other. We try and do that whenever we have a good enough internet connection.”

A marriage glued together with minutes of conversation grabbed when and where you can must be tough. Especially if there are kids involved.

“Well, I don’t have kids at home yet,” sighs the frontman. “I guess we’ll probably wait until I’ve finished touring.”

To Blythe, putting a family on hold for the sake of heavy metal is a massive sacrifice. And it angers him and the rest of his band that while they are busting their guts on stage each night, making the arduous treks across the world and keeping their long-term life plans on hold, their own label acts like Lamb Of God don’t even exist.

“We have people at our label in the UK, and they aren’t doing anything for us,” reveals the singer.

What do you mean? Hell, Lamb Of God are already big in the UK.

“It’s total bullshit,” says Randy. “The last time that we were in the UK there was no press. I had to set up an interview with you guys at Metal Hammer directly, and it’s like, ‘you know what, fuck this’. They just don’t know what to do with us,” he shrugs. “They have no idea what we do.”

From first to last breath, Sacrament reeks of the sweat and toil of a group that’s clearly incensed by its circumstances. It’s 46 minutes of prime Lamb Of God anger, all gritted teeth and cathartic, head-pounding rage – a sonic wall-punch. Though past releases were heavy to the most extreme and vulgar degrees, the confessionals injected into their latest release take Lamb Of God’s intensity into uncharted territories.

“It deals with depression, girlfriends, substance abuse – all that stuff,” says the singer. “We exorcised some demons on this record and we’ve written some pretty dark stuff.”

First single from the album – and the track that has been previewed on numerous websites since June – is the Pantera-heavy, Southern metal explosion known as ‘Redneck’. The accompanying video has Lamb Of God rock up and trash a kid’s birthday party; it portrays the band as wild party-boys. The inspiration behind the song, however, is slightly more sinister.

“According to Mark [who wrote the lyrics to that song], it’s about people in the music business who get a little too big for their britches,” he smiles. “They have a bit of a rock star complex.”

Who has riled you the most?

“Ha ha,” he smirks. “The song could be about anyone, but as a good journalist, you want me to dish dirt, right?”

Yep.

“Well, people are welcome to try and guess who it’s about,” he says, sounding playful. “I’ll just say to them, ‘it’s about your mom.’”

It seems that even after all the struggles, Lamb Of God are still ready to battle through. Their stresses may only ease a little from the catharsis of roaring about their ills on stage before an army of adoring fans, but they’re still as fired up as ever. If they’ve survived this far with all these setbacks then there’s no stopping them anytime soon.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 158, September 2006

When you’ve known someone like Ozzy Osbourne for over 30 years, it’s safe to say you’ve probably got a few stories to tell. Longtime Ozz solo guitarist and metal icon in his own right Zakk Wylde certainly had a thing or two to say when asked by Metal Hammer readers what his favourite wholesome moment with The Prince Of Darkness was for this month’s People Vs feature in the new issue of Metal Hammer.

“I remember we played the Budokan [Arena] in Tokyo. I’d always have a bag of beer with me, just in case anywhere we were going didn’t have beer,” Zakk recalls. “So, Oz comes in the room after the gig. He goes ‘Zakky, Zakky… you got any beers?’ I go, ‘Yeah, but I’m not giving you one here. You’re going to get us fired! Mom’s [Sharon Osbourne] right across the hall – she’s going to come and see the two of us drinking, is that going to be good?’”

“He goes, ‘Alright, tell you what, I’ll meet you in the bathroom.’ So I go in the bathroom, I’m waiting. All of a sudden, I hear the door open. He comes in the stall right next to me, and I push a Kirin or Asahi under there. I hear the ‘psssst’ of the can, then ‘glug, glug, glug!’ He downs it in one, puts the can down, pushes it back under and goes, ‘Thanks, Zakk. I’ll see you at dinner.’”

Granted, we’re not sure that sneaking beers on tour counts as wholesome, but it certainly shows the tight-knit camaraderie Ozzy and Zakk have had over the years. When that’s pointed out to him, Zakk laughs.

“We were like a couple of naughty schoolkids! It was hilarious!”

Later this summer, Zakk will join Ozzy – and a huge guestlist of stars and bands including Metallica, Slayer, Alice In Chains, Jason Momoa and more – to participate in a massive farewell gig for Ozzy and Black Sabbath at the band’s hometown in Aston, Birmingham.

Read the full interview in the new issue of Metal Hammer, on-sale now. Order it online and have it delivered straight to your door!

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Staff writer for Metal Hammer, Rich has never met a feature he didn’t fancy, which is just as well when it comes to covering everything rock, punk and metal for both print and online, be it legendary events like Rock In Rio or Clash Of The Titans or seeking out exciting new bands like Nine Treasures, Jinjer and Sleep Token. 

Skunk Anansie vocalist Skin knows a thing or two about stardom. Her band’s first two albums gatecrashed the UK Top 10 on release and in 1999, she became the first Black woman to headline the massive Glastonbury festival in the UK. By that point the band had crossed over from Britrock into the pop-star sphere, and in a new interview in the latest issue of Metal Hammer she discusses what it was like suddenly coming face to face with some of the biggest names in music.

“We played a lot with David Bowie,” she says. “He was the ultimate inspiration. I loved him. I was nervous meeting him, because there are certain people who’re elevated beyond everybody else. But he was just a down-to-earth dude. And his wife Iman is as hugely iconic as he is, and she was a delight as well.”

Bowie wasn’t the only rock icon Skin was close to, however. Early in their careers, Skunk Anansie found themselves adopted by fellow Brits Motorhead, becoming close friends with frontman Lemmy.

“He was very gentle,” Skin recalls when asked what the rock’n’roll legend was like. “He was the most authentic person I’ve met. He was who he was, and he wasn’t going to hide it. Also, he had absolutely the most perfect skin you’d ever imagine on a man, good baby skin. He was such a gentleman. We were writing music together whenever I was in LA, and I had the sweetest messages from him. I remember one time I was supposed to write with him, and I couldn’t, because I’d had a break-up, and he just left me the loveliest, kindest thing: ‘I’m here for you. Come over to LA and we’ll hang out.’ He was a sweetheart.”

Skin admits she wasn’t keen on everybody she met in the 90s, however. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a band who were staunchly outspoken and had songs like Yes It’s Fucking Political, she has some choice words about the phenomenon of 90s boybands.

“The only people that I didn’t like were boybands,” she admits. “Five were fucking horrible. I think it’s because they didn’t have control, they didn’t write their songs, they were just puppets.”

Read the full interview in the new issue of Metal Hammer, on-sale now. Order it online and have it delivered straight to your door!

Skunk Anansie’s new album The Painful Truth is set for release on May 23 via FLG. The band are on tour now and play UK shows with The Smashing Pumpkins later this year. For the full list of dates, visit their official website.

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Staff writer for Metal Hammer, Rich has never met a feature he didn’t fancy, which is just as well when it comes to covering everything rock, punk and metal for both print and online, be it legendary events like Rock In Rio or Clash Of The Titans or seeking out exciting new bands like Nine Treasures, Jinjer and Sleep Token. 

The woman in silver is a thousand light years from home. Like a regal visitor from ancient Themyscira, Tatiana Shmayluk shimmers beneath the bright lights of a small Los Angeles photography studio. She is the Ukrainian-born singer for Jinjer, and one of metal’s most dynamic, fastest-rising figures, clad in a gown of metallic fabric, arms smothered in tattoos, with a feathered serpent inked onto her throat.

She is quiet in front of the camera as the room is filled with a tuneful stream of alt rock hits from the 80s and 90s: The Cult, Nirvana, Social Distortion, all of it edgy and emotionally raw, but far removed from the intricate prog metal storm and precise math rock impulses of Jinjer. Asked if she would prefer a different soundtrack for this session, maybe something louder and more aggro, Tatiana says she is absolutely fine with it. “I listen to Tchaikovsky when I’m not onstage,” she adds with a smile.

Like the rest of Jinjer, she has settled into a new home outside of Ukraine, while her home country is at war with Russia. It’s an unsettling contrast, as the band continues its steady rise, with new album Duél powered by Tatiana’s superhuman range, shifting effortlessly from clean to screaming vocals, from the purely melodic to the purely enraged. On the album cover is the image of two bullets, abstract splashes of blood and what appears to be a gunshot wound – a sign of the times she’s living in.

A few steps outside is the fabulous Sunset Strip, playground to generations of heavy movers, from Led Zeppelin and Motörhead to Guns N’ Roses and Jane’s Addiction, but Tati’s spent little time on this glamorous stretch of boulevard, preferring the domestic bliss of Southern California with her husband, drummer Alex Lopez (formerly of Suicide Silence), out in the Orange County suburbs.

While Tatiana now lives safely in the US, the rest of her band remain scattered in Europe: guitarist Roman Ibramkhalilov and drummer Vladislav ‘Vladi’ Ulasevich live in Warsaw, Poland, and bassist Eugene Abdukhanov is in Bulgaria. Their crew is based in Germany. But in 2024, all of them reconvened in Poland to record Duél, creating another fiery collision of genres: metalcore, djent, prog, nu metal, groove, even reggae.

Later, Tatiana sits on the outdoor patio as the afternoon turns cold. She’s bundled up in a fuzzy grey jacket as she lights up a cigarette. The singer speaks excellent English, a student of the language for 10 years in school. This interview will end up being her longest to date. Offstage, Tati is softly spoken and refers to herself as an introvert, but live she is in total command: strolling and stomping across the stage, leaning over the edge to preside over a frantic circle-pit, falling to her knees and bouncing back up to wail, swinging her hair back and forth.

“I’m a hermit. I like to be unseen, but somehow I do this,” she says of her career with a laugh.

On Duél, she is refining her approach, layering guttural and melodic vocals in more sophisticated arrangements. In part, the title refers to rebirth, letting go of your old flawed self in order to find a new, improved version. It is about the ‘duel’ with one’s self, and the casting off of bad habits. Some of the new songs reflect her decision to quit drinking. On the swirling Green Serpent, she alternates between her most raging and most delicate: ‘Please add some sober water / into heady wine. Don’t turn into a raging storm / This peaceful night.’

“It wasn’t a serious problem,” Tati says of her drinking issues on the road. “The thing is, our people, like Ukrainians and Russians, we have to deal with that by ourselves. There’s no such thing as going to rehab for that.”

Even so, as the singer typically refuelled and loosened up for her stunning performances, she felt herself slipping into an unhealthy pattern.

“I tour all the time, so that means that I drink all the time, like almost every day. Right before the show, after the show,” she adds. “And then I started getting aggressive at my bandmates. I got into a fight, and then the next morning I felt so bad, like mentally, so I said, ‘I don’t want to do it anymore.’ I’m uncontrollable when I drink, so I don’t know what happens next. I stopped and it was pretty easy. I still like to be around people who drink, because I still enjoy that vibe of people getting drunk and getting all funny and happy and everything.”

Tatiana stayed sober for two years, then celebrated the milestone with her husband by having a drop of Prosecco.

“I learned how to control myself, and I learned a lot,” she says, choosing moderation over abstinence, though she’ll no longer drink on the road. “I never gave a promise to myself that I will never drink again. I just wanted to control it, you know?”

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Tatiana’s story begins in eastern Ukraine. Between drags on her cigarette, she begins to discuss her musical evolution: “I started listening to Russian rock music when I was nine because of my elder brother and…”

She stops as an ominous rumbling fills the air, and laughs. “What can it be?” she wonders, as the sound grows louder and closer. Finally, the noise is above and she looks up to see a quartet of US military Osprey aircraft – part aeroplane, part helicopter, and loud as fuck. “Oh, shit…”

It’s a weird show of military muscle right above the Strip, heading east in formation as if they’re preparing to attack the Hollywood Bowl. If the moment is a reminder of her war-ravaged home country, she does not say. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the peaceful coexistence between border nations, where the locals once seemed close and neighbourly, has been shattered by conflict and civilian death. Things are now impossibly delicate and complicated. It clearly weighs on Tati, but she says she simply cannot discuss the war in Ukraine.

The subject has been the source of threats, attacks and nasty rumours online directed at her and the rest of Jinjer. But she grew up in the Donbas region, which is now mostly under Russian occupation. This may or may not have inspired the new song Tumbleweed, and the anguished lyrics: ‘Have you heard of the storm / That uprooted my home? / A shower crushed down / On my beautiful town.’

“It’s a song about refugees,” she says. “That is because of war or whatever is going on in your country. You have to leave, you have to roam around the world, finding your own place, but you cannot find it.”

For Tatiana, her small town in Ukraine was where she discovered her love for music. As a girl, she’d been a fanatic for The Offspring. Her evolution as a listener took her young ears from pop-punk to grunge to nu metal to groove metal and much more. That range of musical obsessions would prepare her well for the career ahead of her.

“I watched a lot of MTV when I was a kid,” she says with a laugh. “Even when I was, like, four years old, I sang and I screamed so loud that my mom said that I had a hernia because of that.”

She also drew pictures of herself onstage, singing and playing guitar, performing with other girls in an all-female group. By the age of 14, she was singing in a band. Her first concert as a fan was Soulfly, requiring several hours on the train to Kyiv with her boyfriend, smoking and partying along the way. Her first tattoo – of a bumble bee – appeared on her back at age 17. After that, she got one of Clown from Slipknot (which she got to show him backstage years later).

The direction Tati’s life was heading in was confounding to her parents. Her father worked in a mercury plant, and her mother was an accountant. All this loud music, and the tattoos, didn’t seem like a path towards a career and marriage.

“They didn’t like it at first, ’cause they are old-school people,” the singer says. “They wanted me to get a good education, find a job, get married, have kids. Nothing of this happened. I mean, I got married, but my job is far from what they wanted me to do. But now they are supportive.”

“I’m really shy and I followed their instructions. But at some point I went against their will – quietly. I didn’t make scenes or anything. I was cutting classes and going to rehearsals.”

She first tried out a guttural vocal sound in a local deathcore band in 2004. “That’s when I realised that I can do it,” she says. “I trained. I really wanted to, and it was really hard for me to train myself.”

Tati took some inspiration from Melissa Cross, master screamer and heavy metal vocal coach, known for proselytising her ‘Zen of Screaming’. But she mostly learned by the example of Lamb Of God’s Randy Blythe and other male screamers. Her goal was to reach a level where gender was not an issue.

“I wanted to be as good as them, so that you even cannot tell that it’s a girl singing,” she says.

At the same time, she kept a more traditionally feminine, emotional, melodic vocal ability as part of her repertoire. In time, it would become a key element in her singing style: “I felt like it was so tough to be that person who can do both – and to do it not as a garage band, but bring it to the new level, to have really technical, really good-quality vocals.”

In Ukraine, Tati was friendly with a year-old metal band called Jinjer. She was invited to step in for one small local show, since the founding singer, Maksym Fatullaiev, was leaving for the US. In the Donbas, there weren’t many screamers available, and since Tati’s own deathcore band had recently disintegrated, she agreed. Things went well enough that she continued with the band, and rearranged the vocal parts of their existing songs to suit her tastes (Maks now sings in the band Evermorphing, who sometimes share stages with Jinjer).

Jinjer self-released the EP Inhale, Do Not Breathe in 2012, and the album Cloud Factory in 2014. That year, conflict in eastern Ukraine led the band to pack up and relocate west. They signed to Napalm Records in time to release their second album, King Of Everything, in 2016, and then moved to the relative safety of the capital, Kyiv, in 2017.

“Little by little, I turned it into mine,” she says of Jinjer with a laugh. “And that’s when I started liking it.”

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The real turning point for Tatiana and Jinjer was the song Pisces, from King Of Everything. The track begins with a delicate and graceful vocal, before shifting into the depths of guttural despair, the singer’s wide-ranging vocal abilities front and centre. It went viral, spawning numerous reaction videos. The lyrics, written by Tatiana and bassist Eugene, move from the cosmic to the earthbound.

“I started believing that this kind of music… it still has a chance to be played at big festivals, big tours in other countries, all around the world,” the singer says now. “That was our ticket to bigger stages.”

After King Of Everything, the band’s sound shifted again, with the arrival of drummer Vladislav Ulasevich, who also began writing material for Jinjer. That first showed itself on 2019’s Macro.

“It was a starting point of us going in a different direction,” Tatiana explains, “being less understandable, more complicated, but mixing different genres as well.”

Not every fan approved, but Tatiana was happy to go deeper. “We don’t care if people like it. That’s the thing – you cannot be a people-pleaser all the time,” she says with a smile. “We are being ourselves, and music is the vessel for that. And if you don’t like it, that’s why they’re called followers. You are following, you’re not dictating to us what to do. So if you don’t like it, don’t follow. It’s that simple. We don’t owe anyone. We just owe it to ourselves to stay true… We’ve never been a commercial project.”

By the time Wallflowers landed in 2021, Jinjer’s popularity had exploded well beyond their Ukrainian roots, with slots on major festival stages. That success came with new opportunities to tour and spread their messages.

“To see the world, to know a lot of cultures, to communicate with other people, it helped me grow as a personality, to expand my vision,” says Tati.

Wallflowers came after Covid-19 upturned the music world, and the band-members left Ukraine and scattered around the world. Tati had already begun her relationship with Alex Lopez in 2019, and got married during the first pandemic year of 2020. But with her work visa about to expire, she had to leave for Ukraine two weeks after her marriage. She waited an entire year there as Covid got under control and visas were available again.

Her new husband would visit for a month at a time, then have to return to the US. By 2021, she was finally settled in Southern California. She was already obsessed with Latino-American ‘cholo’ culture, drawn to the aesthetics and attire of Chicano gang life, from bouncing low rider cars to ornate black-and-white tatts. Early on, she also followed the lead of singer Sandra Nasi´c from the German band Guano Apes, and likewise wore baggy jeans, boots and tank-tops. That look faded as her many influences coalesced into a recognisable style that fit with the music of Jinjer.

“Little by little, as we made progressive music, I wanted to wear progressive clothing, since we sing about the cosmos and space and stuff,” Tati says of her personal style choices. “So it eventually turned into something futuristic. I started wearing futuristic stuff – and glowy make-up – to be out of this world.”

Making the new album while living in different countries wasn’t ideal. Before Covid and the war, they had always lived near one another, ready to practise and record together at will. For Duél, the band-members reconvened in Warsaw for months of work, and Tatiana rented an apartment for the long haul. They built a small vocal booth in their practice space and plugged into a laptop. Scattered or not, Jinjer have found a way not only to continue, but to keep pushing their music forward, even as their homeland is under a cloud.

The words on Duél travel meaningfully from the internal struggles of depression (Dark Bile) to larger crises of war and societal oppression (Rogue) that remain out of anyone’s control. As ever, Tatiana sings almost everything in English, which is how it’s been since the band started with Maks (aside from an occasional Russian-language verse here and there). For the singer, the reason is obvious. “We wanted to be known all around the world,” says Tatiana. “And I had a message to bring.”

Duél is out now via Napalm. Jinjer play Download Festival on June 15.

Steve Appleford is a Los Angeles music journalist who has also written for Rolling Stone, Revolver and the Los Angeles Times. Over the years he’s interviewed major artists across multiple genres – including Black Sabbath, Slayer, Queens of the Stone Age, System of a Down, KISS, Lemmy, the Who, Neil Young, Beastie Boys, Beyonce, Tom Jones, and a couple of Beatles. 

Unless you have a fanatical interest in, and encyclopedic knowledge of, unsigned British punk bands from 1977, chances are you’ve never heard of Bastards From Hell, the Glasgow quartet who later evolved into art-punks The Dreamboys. But there’s every chance that you’ll have heard of at least one of their members, for their line-up included two now-famous faces, Dr Who/The Thick Of It star Peter Capaldi, and comedian/actor-turned-talk show host Craig Ferguson.

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.