Author: uylrjp

Welsh rock band The Alarm followed in the footsteps of their friends U2, rising out of the fertile late 70s UK post punk scene to some of the world’s biggest stages before acrimoniously splitting in the early 1990s. But for frontman Mike Peters, it was a cancer diagnosis in 1996 that would change his life forever.

It’s 1996. The M1 flickers by, measured in concrete stanchions and distant towns. In the back of a people carrier taking him to play an acoustic show in South Shields, Mike Peters feels a lump in his collar-bone. He pushes it tentatively and the small ball moves up over the bone. He presses it again and it slides downwards. He moves his hand away and it resumes its original position, an unmoving bulge in his skin.

“I thought it was my lymph glands,” says Peters. “So I had a blood test. I was with the doctor, and I could see this piece of paper on the desk, and it had the word ‘cancer’ written all over it. He said: ‘I think you’ve got a 50/50 chance of making it, and you might not want to tell your wife because of how bad it is.’”

The doctors diagnosed him with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Peters says he has never been so scared in his life. But a few months later, following contact with a faith healer, the cancer went into spontaneous remission. No one knew why. Peters thought he was free of it forever.

He was back on tour in 2006 when the cancer returned. One morning after a show and a few beers, he woke up with an erection that sent a pain shooting through his torso. The pain lasted for hours. The next time he took a drink, the same thing happened. He went back to see the same doctor, the one who had warned him that he might go into shock at the news of cancer 10 years before. This time it was doctor’s turn to look ashen.

“His face turned white,” says Peters. “He said my liver and spleen were enlarged, and I knew straight away that it had come back. I had leukaemia. To be dragged back in was terrible.”

It’s afternoon in the market town of Welshpool. In a studio a few miles down the road, Peters and the latest incarnation of The Alarm – the band he has fronted on and off since the early 80s – are recording The Sound And The Fury, an album of re-workings of some of the band’s songs that the singer feels might have slipped through the cracks.

For a man who has stared down death twice and is still undergoing treatment for his most recent cancer, Peters looks remarkably well, with a thatch of blond hair and a few lines around that familiar grin. The exploding mullet and cowboy shirt have gone, but he still looks like that bloke who sings in The Alarm. Literally a rock’n’roll survivor, it says much about his sense of humour that, in the early days of the 21st century, he formed a band called Dead Men Walking with Spear Of Destiny’s Kirk Brandon, the Damned’s Captain Sensible and Pete Wylie of The Mighty Wah!.

For many people, The Alarm blew up after they performed what proved to be their breakthrough single, Sixty Eight Guns, on Top Of The Pops. It was September 1983 and the band had flown in from America just to record the show. Musically tight from months on the road, their performance propelled the song into the Top 20. For the rest of that decade, their call-to-arms anthems and unashamed politicking earned them an avid fan-base that still travels the world to catch them – as well as the derision of the British music press. Stirring albums such as 1984’s Declaration and the following year’s Strength tapped into the socio-political vibe being meted out by their musical peers U2, Simple Minds and Big Country. The Alarm’s statements were bold and full of bravura; they sang of a future; they sounded hopeful, if often dismayed.

The story of The Alarm really starts seven years earlier, in 1976, in the fading Welsh seaside town of Rhyl. The 17-year-old Peters lived in a house on Edward Henry Street; future Alarm bassist Eddie Macdonald grew up two doors down. Peters had bought an acoustic guitar as a kid, because Dylan played one and because they were cheaper than an electric. He listened to The Who and the Stones. Local entertainment was limited to the odd seafront performance by Mud, so Peters had to look further afield. He saw Sabbath at Birmingham Odeon ,and drove to London to see Bowie (Peters nodded off in the car park and slept through the entire show). He saw the Sex Pistols play Chester in 1976, and the Clash on the White Riot tour the following year. The Pistols made him want to play; the Clash showed him how to dress.

“I came back from that and decided to be a punk,” he says. “But I was fat, and I knew I had to lose weight to be a punk.”

By early 1977, Peters and Macdonald had their own punk group, the Toilets. They mutated into a mod band, Seventeen. That same year, they were joined by guitarist Dave Sharp and drummer Nigel Twist, both from the unfortunately monikered Quasimodo. Sharp and Twist had been together in a band in their home town of Manchester. The drummer moved to Wales with his family, and the guitarist visited to play with him when he was on leave from the Merchant Navy. As Seventeen, the four-piece released a single (1980’s Don’t Let Go), and toured with the Stray Cats, before temporarily splitting and then re-forming with a new name: The Alarm.

It was in 1981 that the band went from a standing start to a sprint. In June they played their first show as The Alarm, at the Victoria Hotel in nearby Prestatyn. A few months later they recorded their debut single, Unsafe Building, a ringing acoustic track that built to a thrumming chorus, with Peters’s plaintive and heartfelt vocal on top.

Aware that a band couldn’t survive for too long in Rhyl alone, they knew they had to move their base to a bigger city. Their options were cold, post-punk Manchester, or glamorous, rock’n’roll London. They chose the latter. A friend lived south of the Thames in Battersea; by September the four of them were living on his floor, scratching around for gigs and watching their savings fade into oblivion. They were there to work, though. No one mentioned turning back.

The Alarm had one other friend in London. Louis Parker was a Welsh nightclub entrepreneur-turned-promoter (he went on to book Nirvana’s first gig in the UK; he died from cancer in 2000). When Peters called him, Parker passed on the number of The Fall’s manager for Peters to try to get on the bill at their next show.

“I got through,” says Peters, “and this voice asked if we were anything like The Fall. I admitted we weren’t, and they went: ‘Great! We hate bands that sound like The Fall.’ We got the gig at The Venue in south London.”

A promoter from the London agency Wasted Talent turned up to the show to expressly tell them to please stop bothering her with demo tapes and phone calls. Blown away by what she saw when The Alarm played, the promoter collared the band after their set to buy them drinks. Despite her original plans, she never once mentioned that they should leave her alone.

The Alarm were were four gigs old when the breakthrough came. On December 19, 1981 they played a showcase at subterranean London club the Rock Garden. To The Alarm’s surprise, the place was rammed; The Cure’s Robert Smith was by the bar next to a string of A&R men, managers and music industry executives. Among them stood Ian Wilson, agent for the then-rising Irish rockers U2. The Alarm played with their hearts in their mouths, finished their set, staggered off stage and went back to their dressing room. While the promoter kept a string of impressed record label types outside the door, Ian Wilson told the band how much he’d like to work with them.

And he was true to his word. On December 22, their phone rang. It was Wilson.

“We were packing for the trip home for Christmas,” says Peters, “and Ian went: ‘Want to play with U2 tonight?’ We had this policy that we wouldn’t support anyone any more, so I said no. Nigel, thank God, grabbed the phone, and said: ‘Of course we’ll play with U2, Ian!’”

That night at London’s Lyceum theatre, Bono watched The Alarm’s set from the side of the stage. Later he bought them drinks and told them how much he liked what they did. Unwittingly, they were making friends in high places.

After the excitement of 1981, 1982 dawdled. The Alarm spent the year having their demos rejected by one label after another. Ian Wilson, by now their manager, sent them out on the road with anyone who would have them: Boomtown Rats, The Jam, Dexy’s Midnight Runners. It kept them busy.

Their break came via their friends in U2. The Irish band’s management were trying to convince U2 that one more American leg of their War tour would make them stars in the US They’d do it, the band said, as long as they could take out someone they liked as support. Which was The Alarm’s cue.

“Our first show was in San Francisco at the Civic,” says Peters. “Our hire truck had a 50mph limiter on it, so we got there late. Bono and The Edge met us at the door and helped us hump our gear in. I can remember a fan going: ‘That roadie looks like Bono!’ They had their caps pulled down, but they were throwing our gear up on stage.”

And so began The Alarm’s love affair with America, albeit one-sided at first. While they triumphed on U2’s War tour, they still had to put in weeks opening for US artists such as Pat Benatar. “It was tough playing to baseball and cowboy hats who only liked 70s rock,” recalls Peters. “Punk hadn’t happened in those parts of America. But Iggy was from there, the Ramones, the New York Dolls. So there was an audience. You just had to find them.”

“They seemed so honest and hard working from a distance,” says Billy Duffy, a post-punk peer of Peters’s in Death Cult (a revamped version of the earlier Southern Death Cult), who would transform into The Cult (currently preparing to impress themselves on a new generation of fans at this year’s Download festival). “Like us they were punk fans who learnt to play their instruments and were searching for something to fill that vacuum left by punk. They looked west for inspiration.”

Back in the UK, Unsafe Building and follow-up singles Marching On and The Stand hadn’t worried the charts unduly. But The Alarm’s stock in the US was rocketing. In September 1983 they headlined two nights at the Ritz in New York, and Bono joined them on stage. When they got back to London a few days later, girls screamed at Peters in the street and asked for his autograph. He did not, one of them told him, sound American at all.

Remarkably, while they had finally bagged a deal with IRS Records, they hadn’t even recorded an album yet. But when they eventually did, their debut, Declaration (1984) and the following Strength and Eye Of The Hurricane would chart on both sides of the Atlantic, ultimately selling five million copies between them. When the band teamed up with MTV in April 1986 to perform one of the first shows to be broadcast live across America, at the UCLA campus in Los Angeles, more than 25,000 people turned up, a barrier collapsed, and the band almost missed the satellite hovering overhead.

That summer The Alarm were back in London to support Queen at Wembley Stadium. But what should have been a celebration was, in Peters’s words, “weird”. Drummer Nigel Twist had spent the night before out on the tiles with INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, and had arrived home only moments before the band were due to pick him up. Twist was forced into a shower and fed coffee; he still missed some shots during what was the biggest show band had ever played in the UK. Peters admits that he couldn’t help but resent him.

And, somehow, despite their growing success, The Alarm still had no money.

“I remember going to the hole in the wall after the Wembley show, and the crew guys had more cash than us,” says Peters. “You’d get home and have parents and friends going: ‘You’re rock stars, why are you broke?’”

When the band convened a few weeks later to start work on Eye Of The Hurricane, the strains were beginning to show. Sharp and Twist told Peters and Macdonald that they wouldn’t record songs the singer and bassist had written; they had to start writing together as a unit. It was a stand-off that lasted a year.

Two camps were forming: Peters and Macdonald in one, Sharp and Twist in the other. They barely talked to each other. When Sharp became smitten by Stevie Ray Vaughan after The Alarm supported the Texan guitarist, blues licks began appearing in live versions of Sixty Eight Guns and Marching On. Peters asked him to stop; the guitarist resisted.

To the outside world The Alarm were flying high. They spent the summer of 1987 supporting Bob Dylan, who invited Peters up on stage to perform Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (“It was cheek to cheek with Dylan,” Peters recalls. “Amazing.”). Jack Nicholson said hello at one show in Los Angeles, and even ex-President Jimmy Carter turned up at their gig in Atlanta.

Two years later, after releasing their fourth album, Change, Neil Young joined them on stage in New York as they encored with a cover of Young’s Rockin’ In The Free World. The band left the stage to rapturous applause. It should have been a triumph. But as they were exiting, Peters all but collapsed from fatigue. “My sister had a brain haemorrhage a few days before that show,” he says today. “She survived, but she’s never recovered the power of speech or recognition. I’d been flying back and forth from America to the UK to see her and it had taken its toll physically and mentally. I think my body just gave in.”

And things were about to get even worse. Instead of taking a planned break, they decided to make a new album, Raw. But tragedy struck when Nigel Twist’s stepdad killed himself in the barn in which the band rehearsed. The drummer discovered his body. Then Peters’s father died.

“Those external things, they were what broke us up,” says the singer, who admits that he was already distancing himself from his bandmates.

Macdonald takes a different view. The bassist blames himself and Peters for unwittingly creating an imbalance in the band. “We always viewed it as our band, supported by Dave and Twist,” he says. “We made it difficult for them to express themselves creatively.”

Either way, Peters’s relationship with Sharp – who had already lined up a solo tour without telling the rest of the band – was almost beyond repair. On June 30, 1991, the frontman stepped out on to the stage of Brixton Academy and announced he was leaving the band. As the show ended, he walked off stage and just drove away. The end was a relief for all of them.

“That was it for me,” says Peters. “I still find it hard to talk about.”

“The final curtain didn’t come soon enough for me,” says Macdonald, “Mike had left in spirit before we finished Raw. I think he’d agree with that.”

After the dust settled on The Alarm’s split, Peters moved back to Wales with his family. He released two solo singles, but waited until 1995 to record his first solo album, Breathe. He was determined to do things his own way; his first battle with cancer only emphasised that.

Peters had always stayed in touch with Ian Wilson, the band’s former manager, and when, in 1996, he was diagnosed with cancer, it was Watson who suggested the idea of trying a faith healer. Peters agreed, and called a woman recommended by Watson. They talked on the phone, and the faith healer told him she was “seeing green” as they spoke. During this time they never met in person.

Peters had postponed conventional treatment to finish dates he’d already booked in the US. His doctor told him he was a fool. He was, by his own admission, terrified.

“I knew I had to focus on something or I wouldn’t get through those next few months,” he says. “I thought of Lennon wearing his army jacket, and I went down that route: go to war against the illness. I went to an army surplus store and kitted my self out in green fatigues.”

He spent six weeks playing city-to-city and wondering if he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. He flew home fearing for his life.

And then a miracle happened: blood tests showed the disease had reversed. The doctors had no idea what had happened. Neither did Peters.

“I thought the cancer was over then. I felt so lucky and so glad to be alive. It really fuelled the whole of my life from that point on.”

Which is why he started to do things for himself. He built up a music and DVD catalogue online, and slowly turned himself into a one-man industry, playing live and releasing exclusive albums to an eager audience long forgotten by any label. He resurrected The Alarm name in 2000, eight years after he’d instituted the yearly Gathering, which brings fans from all over the world to North Wales for a weekend of all things Alarm.

In 2004 he sent one of his songs, 45 RPM, to friends in the media without saying who it was by. The response was emphatic: it was a rabble-rousing, dynamic three minutes; people couldn’t help but love it. When they asked who the band was, Peters told them they were some kids called The Poppyfields.

“We told people we managed them, made a fake video and website,” he remembers (the band miming to the song on the video were actually the young Chester punk’n’soul outfit the Wayriders). “It charted, and we went mental. It was like Sixty Eight Guns all over again. Then the story broke that we’d made the whole thing up. We had CBS fly in and film us for Dan Rather (the famous American TV news anchor) in the US. It was huge. And now there’s going to be a film made about it [Vinyl, starring Phil Daniels]. It gave us a new lease of life.”

Sometimes, though, life is too good to be true. In 2006 Peters’s cancer returned.

“My doctors said that I’d probably had the same thing 10 years ago, as it’s a very similar disease to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” he says. “What I have, chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, has only really been recognised in more recent times.”

Despite – or maybe because of – his illness, he keeps moving. After being diagnosed for the second time he founded the cancer charity Love Hope Strength Foundation. In October 2007, Peters and 38 other musicians, including Squeeze’s Glen Tilbrook, and Slim Jim Phantom of the Stray Cats, played a charity show at Mount Everest base camp – the highest concert ever to have taken place on land. He works hard, too. As well as The Alarm and his parallel solo career, he joined the recently reactivated Big Country, replacing the late Stuart Adamson as singer.

“Mike has a light that shines through him, and most folks who are lucky enough to spend time with him pick up on its positive radiations,” says Billy Duffy. “At least that’s been my experience.”

To hear it, Peters is shining still.

“I’m all about going with the positives and trying things, given all that has happened,” he says. “We are defined by the choices we make in life. It’s not an outcome; you take your chances.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 158, April 2011

Dire Straits were one of the most unlikely success stories of the 80s, making 1985’s world-beating Brothers In Arms album before guitarist and leader Mark Knopfler ended the band at the height of their fame. In 2015, Classic Rock looked back on their tangled tale of multi-platinum albums, fraternal rivalry and the high cost of fame.

At 10.10pm on October 9, 1992, Mark Knopfler bid goodnight to 40,000 people and walked off stage in Zaragoza, Spain. It was the last time he did so as the singer, guitarist and undisputed leader of Dire Straits. It brought to an end a 15-year journey during which time the band had risen from the pubs and sweaty clubs of London to the very biggest stages in the world.

The simple facts are these: Knopfler formed Dire Straits in London in 1977 with his younger brother David on rhythm guitar, John Illsley on bass and Pick Withers on drums. Emerging from the city’s fertile pub-rock scene at the dawn of the punk era, they were an overnight sensation. The white-hot success of their first single, Sultans Of Swing, and self-titled debut album was founded on the elder Knopfler’s fluid, finger-picked guitar style, which sounded as lovely as a bubbling stream. Theirs was no fleeting moment, either, with three more hit records following before they reached their apogee on their fifth studio album, Brothers In Arms.

That record was unstoppable from the moment of its release in May 1985. It made Dire Straits superstars, but it also warped the popular perception of both Knopfler and his band. Dire Straits became a byword for a certain sort of safe, homogenised music, and Knopfler was turned into a caricature of the middle-aged rocker, with jacket sleeves rolled up and wearing a headband.

What was forgotten in the wake of its stellar success was just how striking and sometimes radical Dire Straits had seemed from their inception. The bare-boned economy of Knopfler’s songs and his dizzying guitar fills were a breath of clean air amid the lumbering rock dinosaurs and one-dimensional punk thrashers of the late 70s.

He was peerless as craftsman and virtuoso, able to plug into rock’s classic lineage and bend it to sometimes wild forms. He wrote terrific songs, too: from Sultans Of Swing to Romeo And Juliet, Tunnel Of Love to Private Investigations. These were taut mini-dramas of dark depths and dazzling melodic and lyrical flourishes. In quick time Knopfler was fêted by the rock aristocracy. Bob Dylan invited him to be his band leader and producer, and a parade of other icons also beat a path to Knopfler’s door, among them Phil Lynott, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison and Tina Turner.

It would be hard to conjure a less likely rock star than Knopfler. Balding and outwardly taciturn, he seemed born to the role of sideman. Yet his formidable talent was yoked to an iron will. He drove Dire Straits on, expanding their boundaries right up to the point Brothers In Arms became too all-consuming to contain. It wasn’t even as if he had contrived to make a blockbuster. In large part it was hushed and melancholy, a sigh rather than a roar. But it was damned by having its signature single explode out of context. At its core, Money For Nothing was an old-school boogie, but a dash of studio polish, Sting’s mannered backing vocal and a computer-generated promo video were enough to turn it, and Dire Straits themselves, into the very embodiment of 80s naff.

Small wonder that Knopfler once told Rolling Stone: “Success I adore. It means I can buy 1959 Gibson Les Pauls and Triumph motorcycles. But I detest fame. It interferes with what you do and has no redeeming features at all.”

Mark Knopfler was born into a middle-class household in Glasgow in 1949. His brother and future Dire Straits bandmate David followed three years later. Their father was an architect expelled from his native Hungary on account of his firebrand socialism. When the family moved to Newcastle in the 50s their English mother became a headmistress, and both boys attended a local grammar school in Gosforth.

Music was a fact of life in the Knopfler house. The brothers latched on to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and, later, The Shadows. Hearing the latter, and in particular their bespectacled lead guitarist Hank Marvin, opened up a future filled with possibilities for Mark Knopfler. He traced the arc of Marvin’s distinctive sound back to American wizards like Chet Atkins, Elvis’s guitar slingers Scotty Moore and James Burton, and blues greats such as Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf. At 15 he persuaded his father to buy him his first guitar, a £50 copy of Marvin’s red Stratocaster. Soon he’d taught himself the basics and was playing in school bands and on the city’s club circuit. Brother David followed suit, performing at working men’s clubs in a folk duo.

“On one hand our parents were horrified that we wanted to make a career of pop music,” David Knopfler says now. “On the other they had a liberal bias for letting us follow our own path. But they would have preferred us to be architects or lawyers, not ‘My son the unemployed strummer’.”

Mark was first to flee the nest, when he got a job as a cub reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post in Leeds. One of his first tasks for the paper was to write Jimi Hendrix’s obituary in September 1970, handed to him on account of him being the only person in the office young enough to know who Hendrix was.

Another was to interview a local blues guitarist, Steve Phillips. The two of them hit it off and began performing together as an acoustic duo called Duolian Stringpickers, and spent the next few years playing gigs in the north-east. “Mark was already a very capable guitarist at eighteen or nineteen, way above the norm,” notes Steve Phillips. “But he hadn’t developed his own style. He was far more withdrawn then as well. He didn’t have the confidence he acquired later as a musician, and didn’t see himself as a singer at all. His idea was that he would be the guitar player behind somebody else.”

During that time Knopfler left the paper to take a degree in English at Leeds University, and married his school sweetheart, Kathy White. As soon as he graduated in 1973 Knopfler headed for London. He answered a classified ad in the Melody Maker to join jobbing pub-rock band Brewers Droop. The group had a record deal with RCA but were in the process of falling apart. Two months later Knopfler was out of a job, destitute and newly divorced, the move to London having brought about the end of his marriage. He returned to Newcastle. Later he took a post as an English lecturer at Loughton College in Essex, and put together his own pub-rock band, the Café Racers.

The teaching job gave Knopfler a lifeline and disposable income. He bought a motorbike and his dad’s car, allowing him to transport his growing collection of guitars from one pub gig to the next. In 1976 he struck out on his own on a trip to America, travelling the country on a Greyhound bus and starting work on what would become Dire Straits’ first set of songs.

At the same time, David Knopfler moved to London to work as a social worker in Deptford, a down-at-heel neighbourhood south of the Thames. He moved into a council flat shared with 26-year-old John Illsley, a bass player who’d grown up in rural Leicestershire and was then studying sociology at nearby Goldsmith’s College. The senior Knopfler became a regular visitor to the flat, bringing along his guitar for jamming sessions that took off after last orders at the pub.

“We got along well from the start,” Illsley recounts now. “I did a couple of gigs with Mark’s band because the bass player’s girlfriend was having a baby. After that we were sat in the pub one night and decided to start our own band. There was always a strong consensus between Mark and me about how things should be. We rarely disagreed about anything.”

Knopfler introduced his brother and Illsley to Pick Withers, a propulsive drummer he’d first met while doing an aborted session with Rod Clements of Lindisfarne. The four of them began rehearsing together in the poky flat, padding the walls and trusting to the benevolence of the neighbours.

“We didn’t talk about it, we just got on with it and it evolved,” says David Knopfler. “But then I think both Mark and I had a different vision of what we were up to. I was building a democracy, and Mark was making an autocracy.”

It was Pick Withers, the only member of the fledgling band without a day job, who suggested the name Dire Straits. The newly christened four-piece played their first gig together in the summer of 1977. It was at a makeshift festival that took place on a patch of grass out the back of the Deptford council block, and they ran a power cable from their flat to the small stage. Illsley recalls sharing the bill that afternoon with a bunch of snarling punk bands, though in fact it was the more approachable Squeeze who headlined.

Using £500 Illsley had inherited from his grandmother, the band cut a demo at the tiny Pathway Studios in north London. Among the five Mark Knopfler originals on the tape were Sultans Of Swing, a loose-limbed account of watching a hapless jazz combo flailing in a London pub, and a languorous shuffle titled Down To The Waterline. Lyrically evocative, beautifully played and sung by Knopfler in a laconic drawl, the tracks sounded fresh and different. DJ and rock historian Charlie Gillett got hold of the tape and began airing it, alerting Phonogram Records A&R man John Stainze, a rockabilly buff who snapped the band up to the major label.

Stainze reached out to a booking agent contact of his, Ed Bicknell, inviting him along to see his new band playing at the Dingwalls club in Camden. Bicknell had taken his first steps into the music business at Hull University in the 60s, where as social secretary he booked gigs by the likes of Led Zeppelin, The Who and Pink Floyd before joining the prestigious NEMS agency that handled such heavyweight clients as Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Elton John. Fortuitously, Bicknell too had had his road-to-Damascus moment with music through the Shadows.

“I listened to two songs that night and turned to John and said: ‘He’s got a red Stratocaster like Hank Marvin’s. Who’s managing this group?’” Bicknell recalls. “If Mark would have had a blue Gibson I’d have walked out, but he encapsulated everything that was my dream. I remember I was wearing a long suede coat with a nylon fur collar that night. When I went into the dressing room to meet the band, the hem of the coat caught the red Stratocaster and knocked it off its stand to the floor. That went down like a lead balloon.”

Bicknell cemented his credentials by booking the band onto a 23-date UK tour with Talking Heads in December 1977. By the end of it he was their manager and within two months Dire Straits were recording their first album at Island Records’ Basing Street studios with producer Muff Winwood, elder brother of Stevie and former bassist with the Spencer Davies Group.

“Or Spluff Windbag, as we called him,” says Bicknell, laughing. “He pretty much recorded a live record but without the audience. It cost £12,500, including the sleeve, and it sold eight million within nine months of coming out. We were reeling: ‘Fuck me. What’s happening?’”

The Dire Straits album was released in October 1978. At a point when such second-generation punk and new-wave acts as The Jam, Boomtown Rats and Generation X were making an impression, it stood apart. Knopfler’s songs were characterised by the intricacies of his guitar playing, the rolling gait of the band’s rhythms and by their open spaces, as uncluttered as prairie lands. It was a rich musical terrain that drew comparisons with Dylan, JJ Cale and Ry Cooder. But in spirit it was closest to another great record released that year, Bruce Springsteen’s symphony to the working man, Darkness On The Edge Of Town. Like that record it had the same connection to time and place. In Dire Straits’ case this was to the back streets of Newcastle and the bright lights of London, with Knopfler narrating his journey from one city to the other.

It was a success from the off, going Top 10 all across Europe. When it was released in America six months later it vaulted to No.2 on the Billboard chart. The band drove themselves around the States on their first tour of the country at the start of 1979. Dylan came to see their show in LA, popping backstage afterwards to ask Knopfler to play on his next album, Slow Train Coming. Knopfler, who had seen Dylan at Newcastle City Hall on his first electric tour in 1966, would later recall hiring an open-top convertible and driving down Santa Monica Boulevard to the session, getting sunburnt on route and thinking to himself: “This is it.”

“Mark was our standard bearer and ticket to being exceptional rather than merely good,” acknowledges David Knopfler. “He was actually rather humble at that point – hard for me to imagine now. John Illsley and I pretty much dragged him to the altar all the way.”

Before they even got to America, the band’s UK record company hurried them for a follow-up record, winging them out to the Bahamas to make Communique with producer and impresario Jerry Wexler, the man who had signed Led Zeppelin and recorded Ray Charles. Wexler smoothed the rougher edges of their sound. The album was rushed out less than a year after their debut, to a cooler response and slower sales. In retrospect it sounds like a logical step forward: Wexler’s sheen bringing Knopfler’s textured melodies into sharper focus, heard to best effect on Once Upon A Time In The West and the quick-stepping Lady Writer, each as coolly embracing as a Bahamian sunset.

As their whirlwind schedule intensified, the first strains began to show. Tensions within the band were brewing, intensified by the claustrophobia engendered by being constantly on the road or in the studio, and arising most damagingly between the two brothers.

“Everything put a strain on us,” says David Knopfler. “It was just through being exhausted: drinking too much every night, partying and wrecking your physical and mental health in the way that rock bands did then to excess.”

“Nobody involved is prepared for success like that,” adds Bicknell. “Everything changes, of course, but you stay the same. You’re probably still in your horrible little flat eating bacon sandwiches because none of the money has flowed through. Or if it has, you’re so terrified of it that you don’t spend anything, which is what happened with us. You think the tax man is going to take it away or that this is going to stop tomorrow.”

Bicknell suggests that the tension between the Knopflers ran deeper than Dire Straits. “David’s problem was he thought that the band should be a democracy, and it was more like a brutal dictatorship – as far as he was concerned. The issues between him and Mark, which for public consumption have been packaged up as musical issues, they weren’t. As John Illsley said to me at the time: ‘This has been going on since David was born.’ I’m stating the obvious, but David was in the group because he was Mark’s brother, not because he was the greatest rhythm guitarist that Mark could have found.”

John Illsley and I meet at a coffee shop in Notting Hill on a bright spring morning. The moment he walks through the door, Dire Straits’ 1980 hit Romeo And Juliet begins playing on the radio. Illsley smiles at the coincidence and suggests – entirely accurately – that the 35-year-old song sounds as if it had been made just yesterday.

At the time of its release it represented a crossing of the Rubicon for Mark Knopfler as a songwriter and for the band in general. Knopfler always was a prolific writer, but as he approached Dire Straits’ third album he had new horizons in mind. He envisioned the band’s sound being enhanced by keyboards, and of this freeing him to explore more complex terrain. Romeo And Juliet was the first signpost to his intentions: a near six-minute roller-coaster ride rumbling through the wreckage of a shattered love affair.

“I remember him coming into the office and playing it to me for the first time,” says Ed Bicknell. “I didn’t know what to say: I just sat and stared at the ground in complete disbelief. By then Mark had cottoned on that this was his group and he edged himself into pole position.”

The act of Knopfler conclusively seizing control would have been provocative enough, but it was exacerbated by other issues bubbling to the surface as the band gathered in New York to record their third album, Making Movies. According to Bicknell, three years of constant work had left them in a parlous state. It transpired that Romeo And Juliet was drawn from very personal experience.

“There were issues with various band members that related mostly to the girls in their lives and were calamitous,” says Bicknell. “We went into that record off the back of three out of four of them going through break-ups. Certain people also didn’t like certain people. It got very fractious. I thought the band was about to break up.”

To begin with, nothing was helped by them being in the studio with producer Jimmy Iovine. A brash New Yorker just off the back of making hit records with Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty, Iovine had a painstaking way of working; the first week of recording was spent attempting to get the perfect drum sound. In this hothouse atmosphere the Knopflers were soon at each other’s throats.

“Before we started recording, Jimmy took Mark to watch a Springsteen session and his jaw was on the floor,” says David Knopfler. “Everyone was calling Springsteen ‘Boss’ and he completely called the shots. But Bruce had spent thirty years learning to be boss and he’s very good at it. Mark had not long come from being a college lecturer and hadn’t been schooled in people skills.

By that point the Knopflers’ relationship was as bad as it could be. “By the time of Making Movies he was king,” recalls David. “But he was the bloke I’d shared a bedroom with. How could I be deferential to him?”

When the blow-up came it was swift and brutal. The brothers had an explosive argument and David Knopfler quit. He returned to the UK, where he would begin a solo career. Three years later his elder brother guested on his debut solo album, but the two of them were estranged.

“David’s going wasn’t nice but it was absolutely inevitable,” says Ed Bicknell, who says that same issue of control led to Pick Withers’s departure within two years. “Mark’s got a strong personality and he’s very determined, and quite ruthless. But you need to be ruthless if you’re going to climb the greasy pole, and democracy in groups never, ever works.”

With David Knopfler gone, the pace of recording picked up and Making Movies took shape. Iovine brought in Springsteen’s E Street Band pianist Roy Bittan, and his heart-stopping fills gave wings to another epic, Tunnel Of Love, on which Knopfler located the sweet spot between the E Street Band’s hulking engine and Dylan’s rolling thunder. Hearing the track come into being, says Bicknell, “it felt like a jet plane taking off”.

A glut of boldly ambitious records came out in 1980 – Springsteen’s The River, John Lennon’s Double Fantasy, Sandinista! by the Clash and Talking Heads’ Remain In Light to name but four. Making Movies stood at least shoulder to shoulder with each of them. Fired by the extra dimension Bittan brought into play, Knopfler subverted his guitar to the songs, and in doing so extracted from them greater heft and a new-found emotional resonance. Romeo And Juliet and Tunnel Of Love initially towered over the rest, but repeated listening revealed more jewels in Solid Rock, Espresso Love and the surging ballad Hand In Hand.

For the ensuing tour Knopfler brought in American guitarist Hal Lindes to fill his brother’s shoes and fellow Geordie Alan Clark on keyboards. Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan were among those turning out to pay their respects at one triumphal show at the Roxy on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip.

As the 80s unwound Mark Knopfler was like a man released. He wrote a thoroughly fitting soundtrack for the bittersweet British film Local Hero, produced Dylan’s Infidels album and, in 1982, reconvened Dire Straits for the grandiose Love Over Gold. That album featured just five songs – all of them long and involved, and two of them stone-cold classics. Fifteen-minute opener Telegraph Road was pieced together during sound-checks on the Making Movies tour and unfolded like a literary novel, documenting America’s industrial revolution. Private Investigations was even more outlandish, a somnolent musical noir that Knopfler insisted be released unedited as a seven-minute single. Remarkably it reached No.2 in the UK.

Next up was the live double Alchemy, taped on the Love Over Gold tour and showcasing a band at the peak of its powers. Free from the confines of the studio, Dire Straits were able to stretch out and take flight, nowhere more so than on Sultans Of Swing and Telegraph Road. Both were longer and far more powerful than their studio counterparts.

Knopfler saw this as the end of an era for the band. “I’d like to try something else now,” he said at the time. “It could be acoustic guitar, or it could be all brass instruments, I really don’t know.”

Perhaps least of all he anticipated making one of the defining albums of the decade.

Towards the end of 1984 Knopfler assembled a new line-up of Dire Straits in London to rehearse their next record. He appeared more single-minded and attentive to detail than ever, rigorously putting the group through their paces for a month before whisking them off to Air Studios on the Caribbean island of Montserrat to cut Brothers In Arms.

Air Studios, later razed to the ground by a hurricane, was an idyllic location, and the tranquillity of island life seemed to relax Knopfler to his task. There was an ease to much of Brothers In Arms, as if the music had seeped from his fingertips unbidden. The mood of much of it was low-key and reflective, shifting from the late-night whispers of Why Worry and Your Latest Trick to the near-whispered title track. When it was roused, as on the crashing chords of The Man’s Too Strong, the effect was that much more magnified.

Yet one of Knopfler’s new songs immediately stood out from the rest. It began with a fuzzed guitar riff that Ed Bicknell suspects was inspired by ZZ Top, and proceeded to recount verbatim a rant at MTV that Knopfler had overheard a deliveryman making in an electrical goods store in New York. Sting added his distinctive vocals to the intro section of the track – singing the single sorrowful refrain: ‘I want my MTV.’

“Sting used to come to Montserrat to go windsurfing, and he came up for supper at the studio,” says John Illsley. “We played him Money For Nothing and he turned round and said: ‘You’ve done it this time, you bastards.’ Mark said if he thought it was so good why didn’t he go and add something to it. He did his bit there and then.”

Knopfler had another song, the gambolling boogie Walk Of Life, set aside as a B-side, until Ed Bicknell happened upon it while it was being mixed and persuaded him to include it on the album at the last minute. In the event it was an even bigger-selling single than Money For Nothing.

Upon its release, Brothers In Arms met with lukewarm reviews, but it arrived at precisely the right time. MTV was about to launch in the UK, and the music station leapt upon the animated promo for Money For Nothing, choosing it as the first video to be aired on the channel. The compact disc had also arrived, and Brothers In Arms’ exquisite production was tailor-made for the new format. The album sold more than a million copies on CD alone, taking Dire Straits to a new generation of consumers who saw music a status symbol. It took up a four-year residency in the UK chart and spent nine weeks at No.1 in the US, elevating Knopfler and his band to the top table of 80s megastardom alongside Springsteen, Prince, Michael Jackson and Madonna.

In its wake, Dire Straits set off on an 18-month world tour that took in 247 sold-out stadium and arena shows in 100 cities. By the end of it the endless attention and the sheer weight of numbers had lost all meaning for the band members, and for Mark Knopfler most of all.

“I would do a report for them every week which was then shoved under each of their hotel room doors,” says Ed Bicknell. “It would give world chart positions, and album and singles sales figures. I’m absolutely sure in my own mind that Mark would take his copy and put it straight in the bin.”

After Brothers In Arms Knopfler retreated from the spotlight for the best part of five years, but was eventually tempted back. In 1991 he gathered Dire Straits once more, for the On Every Street album. It sounded worn and tired, but still racked up 10 million sales. They embarked on another mammoth tour on the back of it, playing close to 300 shows in two years. It was a vast undertaking and also a ruinous one. Knopfler’s second marriage disintegrated, and he recoiled from the dehumanising nature of existing on such a grand scale. It was all over after that last gig in Zaragoza, but he formally laid the band to rest in 1996 and has barely spoken of them since.

“The last tour was utter misery,” says Ed Bicknell. “Whatever the zeitgeist was that we had been part of, it had passed.”

“Mark and I agreed that was enough,” recalls John Illsey. “Personal relationships were in trouble and it put a terrible strain on everybody emotionally and physically. We were changed by it. Neither of us wants to go back to those days. Mark described it to me just the other day as being too much ‘white light’ – too much in the spotlight, and he was never very comfortable with that.”

With the band laid to rest, John Illsley settled down to indulge his love of painting and is currently preparing an exhibition of his work in London. He also continues to record and tour with his own band. Ed Bicknell managed Mark Knopfler for several years after the split but has now retired.

Having run his race with Dire Straits, Knopfler has since contented himself in a quieter, more comfortable niche – composing soundtracks, collaborating with the likes of Chet Atkins and Emmylou Harris, and making a succession of roots-based solo albums, of which the latest, and possibly best, is this year’s Tracker. He was married for the third time, to actress Kitty Aldridge in 1997, and continues to indulge his lifelong passion for motorbikes and collecting classic cars. He and his brother are still not speaking.

“I spent a lot of time doing therapy and dealing with my issues and ghosts and demons,” says David Knopfler. “Maybe Mark has too. I don’t know what he does. Of course, it casts a huge shadow on both our lives and on our families. We’ve got cousins who don’t know each other.”

Ed Bicknell says that people ask him regularly when Dire Straits are going to get back together. His answer remains the same.

“I tell them the same thing: why would they? None of them needs the money. Peter Grant once said to me: ‘When you’ve had an experience like I had with Led Zeppelin and you had with Dire Straits, there is no point trying to reproduce it.’ And he was exactly right. That was the one.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 210, April 2015

Paul Rees been a professional writer and journalist for more than 20 years. He was Editor-in-Chief of the music magazines Q and Kerrang! for a total of 13 years and during that period interviewed everyone from Sir Paul McCartney, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen to Noel Gallagher, Adele and Take That. His work has also been published in the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, the Independent, the Evening Standard, the Sunday Express, Classic Rock, Outdoor Fitness, When Saturday Comes and a range of international periodicals. 

In 2011 – a year after his traumatic departures from Dream Theater and Avenged Sevenfold – Mike Portnoy returned with a new outlook on life, determined to explore new musical directions. He told Prog about just some of his plans for the near future.

---

“You wouldn’t believe what I’m doing right now – I really wish you could see what’s going on,” laughs Mike Portnoy down the phone, sounding out of breath and unusually flustered. “Dream Theater have sent back all of my drums from the last 25 years which have been in their storage. So we’re out behind my house and my life is flashing before me.

‘It’s all very nice and nostalgic, but I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with all this stuff. For each tour, I had multiple kits. As if one of those massive kits wasn’t enough, you have to times that by two or three, and then that multiplied by six or seven tours. So it’s pretty insane!”

In spite of such wistful and probably painful visible reminders of past musical triumphs, it’s a relief to find that Portnoy has – superficially at least – returned to his buoyant, optimistic self. Effectively left musically homeless at the end of 2010 following his resignation from Dream Theater and subsequent departure from Avenged Sevenfold, the drummer says he found solace through his family, and by working with Neal Morse during those shady times when uncertainty prevailed, and he’d become the target for open abuse by some disillusioned fans.

“I surrounded myself with Neal’s tremendously positive spirit,” Portnoy says. “We did his Testimony 2 album and a couple of other projects right off the bat. Neal has such a calming and positive spirit that was just very, very good for me on a personal and musical level at that time. I was also able to spend a good amount of time with my family, sitting by the pool and having barbecues.

“That’s not to say I wasn’t itching to go on the road. You might think my wife would say, ‘Now you don’t have Dream Theater you should relax and stay home awhile.’ But actually she’s been so supportive – any time the phone rings she wants me to go for it. It’s been really great to have that in my life.”

Not that he needed much pushing. With an incessant love for music and a personality which he readily admits to being obsessive compulsive, it came as no surprise when news of multiple new projects broke.

“I need to work and I have to stay busy,” he confirms. “You can imagine that, once I didn’t have Dream Theater in my life, I was champing at the bit to fill up my time with a million other things. I saw a lot of people posting online like, ‘I thought you left Dream Theater because you wanted a break’ – but my intention was not to take a break from music, or from working or being creative. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that. I just needed a break from the Dream Theater machine.”

Every Flying Colors song has a very different style to it and it’s something that’s unlike Neal, Steve, Dave or myself have ever done

It transpires that the first of these projects, Flying Colors, had already been planned before his split with the prog metal giants. Featuring Morse, Steve Morse (Dixie Dregs/Deep Purple) and Dave LaRue (Dixie Dregs), it’s obvious why the project has garnered so much interest. “The Flying Colors concept basically stemmed from Neal and Steve starting work together,” Portnoy recalls.

“Then, once we had the four of us, we wanted to get a separate singer, as we knew Neal was going to be more of a supporting player. I brought up the idea of Casey McPherson because I had been a friend and fan of his for years; I loved his work in Endochine and Alpha Rev.

“It’s really hard to put my finger on it musically, though – every song has a very different style to it and it’s something that’s unlike Neal, Steve, Dave or myself have ever done. It’s more song-oriented, alternative pop with a progressive edge. On top of that, it was great to have Peter Collins producing; he’s produced so many great Rush albums as well as classic Queensrÿche albums like Operation: Mindcrime and Empire.”

It’s intriguing to watch Portnoy embark on an assortment of projects far-remove from his past. Even the much-heralded Adrenaline Mob – in which he teams up with Symphony X frontman Russell Allen – owed more to such metal luminaries as Black Sabbath or Judas Priest than the progressive, neo-classical metal that many were expecting. With Adrenaline Mob now set to release an album, Portnoy stresses that deliberately exploring music that’s far away from Dream Theater has been key to his current happiness.

Adrenaline Mob was the first time I’ve ever been on stage and felt like I was the least animated person

“Everything I’m doing is purposely very different. If I’d wanted to keep doing what Dream Theater do then I’d still be in Dream Theater,” he asserts. “I wanted to explore other things with different types of singers, instrumentation and musical influences. Although I love progressive metal and it’s a huge part of my background, it’s not the only thing I do.

“Now it’s about exploring different territory and different sides of my musical tastes, which are incredibly broad. Adrenaline Mob isn’t a prog metal thing and as long as people go in understanding that, then [Omertà] is a tremendously powerful album.

“We did a little touring in America and everybody in the band is a full-on performer. It was the first time I’ve ever been on stage and felt like I was the least animated person in the band.”

Another of his musical influences is 70s classic rock, with bands like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Whitesnake all a portion of his musical psyche. Keen to tap into that, he recently joined with former Whitesnake, Thin Lizzy and Blue Murder guitarist John Sykes for a proposed side-project that now seems to have petered out. Undeterred, he’s also teamed up with bassist Billy Sheehan (Mr Big), guitarist Tony MacAlpine and former Dream Theater keyboardist Derek Sherinian for live appearances at a handful of drum shows as PSMS.

“I thought it would be cool to put together an instrumental band, and this was the line-up that came to mind. So we’re going to do a couple of these shows and while we’re together, we’re going to film a DVD as well.

There a lot of things that could come up and Transatlantic is one of them… that’s really a fourth band in the mix

“It’s probably going to be a lot of covers and jamming as it’s not going to be a real band in terms of writing original material – although who knows if something like that could develop in the future? It’ll be the type of fusion prog stuff Bill Bruford played with Allan Holdsworth, and I’m sure the four of us will be able to tap into some serious playing.”

There are also strong hopes that Transatlantic will record a new album in 2012, although Portnoy explains that this will be reliant on finding a suitable timeslot in which the band can reconvene to write and record. “There are still a lot of things that could come up and Transatlantic is one of them,” he says.

“All four of us have openly stated that we’d love to continue working together. There are rumblings of trying to fit it into each of our schedules and get another album going. If and when that album comes out, we can hit the road possibly at the end of 2012 or early 2013. So that’s really a fourth band in the mix.”

For all his foibles, it remains hard not to have a huge amount of sympathy over the position Portnoy found himself in a year ago. Idealistic in the vision that Dream Theater would share his yearning for a break, it all backfired when the band called his bluff and carried on without him. The public baring of war scars that followed was messy. Yet it’s apparent that this is a year which will see him busy – and, as a natural consequence, undeniably happy.

“It’s absolutely about having fun,” he says. “It’s not about money for me – I could have been financially secure for the rest of my life if I’d just continued riding the Dream Theater machine. When I decided to leave, with that choice went a lot of security and stability which I could have rode for the rest of my life. But for me it’s not about that.

Sometimes you have to walk away from security – you have to roll the dice and go for it

“It’s about being artistically and creatively inspired to do new things; and sometimes that means you have to walk away from security to follow your dreams – you have to roll the dice and go for it. So everything I’m doing right now has everything to do with fun and wanting to spread my wings.

“I’m doing this for the love of music. I love the Dream Theater fans and my fans who have supported me through everything I’ve done. I’m just hoping they stay along for the rest of the ride, because there are surely some great things to come.”

When they emerged in the mid-90s, Supergrass were the most effervescent of British guitar bands. The Oxford trio (and later quartet) were stacked to the pearly whites with fizzy, playful indie anthems. Their music was 60s pop in a punk hurry, a hurtling rush of indelible anthems being played like someone was about to call last orders. Perhaps that’s because that’s how guitarist and vocalist Gaz Coombes, bassist Mick Quinn and drummer Danny Goffey actually wrote many of their early songs, bouncing mischievously from pub to party to pub on the outskirts of Oxford, making up songs about the characters they would encounter, songs that within a year or two would become huge, era-defining hits.

“A few were written just on our way out to the pub in the village, picking up an acoustic as we were going out the door. They all came about like that, without trying to force the issue,” Coombes told this writer a few years ago. “We weren’t trying to think, ‘We’re gonna be this incredible band…’, we were in our own little mad world writing mad songs.”

Two-thirds of the band were still in their teens at the point that their classic debut I Should Coco was released. The album turns 30 next month but it has lost none of its juvenile, feverish charm. There isn’t another 90s record that captures the heady thrills of being in your late teens as perfectly as I Should Coco, a record that, to paraphrase the timeless, bounding Alright, sounds like it’s been made by three people who firmly believe they are gonna be young and run free forever.

When Coombes thinks back to that time, he remembers pinballing about the place with a youthful get up and go. “It was going out and scoring and getting some hash and going to pubs and hanging with either posh students or really dodgy dealers,” he said. “We were just hoping to make a record or get signed.”

It quickly became evident that there was a very strong possibility that their ambitions would be realised. Originally calling themselves Theodore Supergrass and then just Supergrass, they soon became a big local draw in their hometown. One hectic show at the now-closed venue Jericho Tavern had Coombes thinking they were onto something. “It was full and everyone went fucking mental,” he recalled. “I think I knew then. The way that it was and the vibe that it was, it wasn’t just ‘Local band come good’. I remember that intake of breath, like, ‘Fuck, this is it’. The rest of it… it’s like you don’t notice your kids growing up. I wish I’d kept notes of things. I can think about it when I’m old and I need to bask in some warmth. I don’t need to do that now.”

Signing to Parlophone and putting out a run of fantastic singles including Caught By The Fuzz (about Gaz getting arrested) and the galloping Mansize Rooster, they got down to work on their first full-length at Cornwall’s Sawmill Studios.

“The recording of it was amazing, that whole time down at Sawmills,” remembered Coombes. “I thought it was magical, just what we wanted and what we were ready for. We were still able to be close friends as well, to talk about music or play FIFA 95 on the Mega Drive or make loads of little joints and go out on a boat with an acoustic guitar. It was all really perfect in terms of what we wanted to do, which was make some mad songs and be together.”

By the time I Should Coco was released in mid-May 1995, an army of diehards had climbed on board. It went to Number One in the UK charts and stayed there for three weeks, going on to sell over a million copies. “It happened really quickly,” said bassist Quinn. “We didn’t have any scope for where it could go, then we toured round the States and Alright came out and we realised how big it had become.”

From the outside, the transition from local heroes to chart-toppers seemed meteoric, but drummer Goffey said they took it in their stride. “Eight months is a long time when you’re a teenager,” he reasoned. ”We probably had these subconscious goals but not in a contrived way. It was probably, ‘Imagine playing at Jericho Tavern!’, and we did that. Then it would be, ‘Imagine having a tour bus!’ and sort of thing. But we didn’t sit around thinking about it. I think it was in the back of our head, ‘What’s the next really mental thing we could do?’ Even making a video was brilliant. We were constantly filming with little video cameras. That whole feeling of creating new stuff was always on the cards.”

It was a playful approach to making things and filming themselves – you could call them content trailblazers – that they injected into their most classic and well-known video clip, the sunny, Monkees-esque promo made to accompany Alright. “We were just being ourselves,” said Coombes. “We were irreverent and cheeky. We had that energy. It’s how we looked. When we went to Japan, Japanese fans were doing cartoon drawings of us. The whole cartoon thing seemed to fit with being a little three-piece young band… It was a great antidote to American earnest rock bands who seemed to think it was all about them and that seriousness so we fought against that.”

It’s that spirit of anything-goes adventure that ensures I Should Coco remains a scintillating listen three decades on. Supergrass got off to an absolute flier.

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he’s interviewed some of the world’s biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.

Name the drummers who helped shape the sound of heavy metal, and Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham and Black Sabbath’s Bill Ward will be at the very top of the list. Both men combined hard-hitting power with dexterity, incorporating everything from James Brown-inspired funk beats to jazz swing into their playing, inspiring countless drummers and bands who followed.

Coincidentally, the pair were born within a month of each other, less than 20 miles apart – Ward on May 5, 1948 in Aston, Birmingham, and Bonham on May 31 the same year in Redditch, just south of the city.

As drummers coming up on the same circuit, they got to know each other long before they joined the bands that made them famous. Ward was a member of The Rest, before joining up with future Sabbath bandmate Tony Iommi in Mythology, while Bonham passed through several local bands, including Terry Webb And The Spiders, The Senators, Crawling King Snakes and Band Of Joy, the latter two with Zeppelin singer Robert Plant.

But was there a rivalry between these two pioneering drummers? And what did Ward think of Bonham. Speaking to Classic Rock in 2022, Ward shed some light on their relationship, onstage and off.

“When I was in The Rest I used to go and watch John play whichever band he was in,” said Ward. “We’d crossed paths all the time. I remember seeing him when he was in with The Crawling King Snakes and he was just whacking the shit out of his kit. I’d just sit there and watch him.’”

The feeling was reciprocated. Recalling his early days on the West Midlands club circuit with Ward, Tony Iommi remembered Bonham attending gigs by their pre-Sabbath band Mythology as well as the formative incarnation of Black Sabbath.

“When we were playing clubs, John would sometimes come along, and he’d want to get up and jam,” Iommi told Classic Rock in 2016. “The first time we said, ‘OK then.’ So he got up and played Bill’s drums and just wrecked them. Bill was really pissed off, so after that anytime John came along and said, ‘Can I have a go?’, Bill would go, ‘No’ and not let him play.”

By the early 70s, both Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath had established themselves as transatlantic stars, but the bonds from the old days on the Birmingham scene remained. Bonham even acted as best man at Iommi’s wedding in 1973, while the two drummers spent time at each other’s houses.

In the summer of 1973, the worlds of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin came together when Bonham turned up at London’s Morgan Studios, where Sabbath were recording their fifth album, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. He’d brought Zeppelin bandmates Robert Plant and John Paul Jones with him. What followed was a jam session between two of the greatest bands in history.

“They came in and John’s going, ‘Let’s play Supernaut!’, cos he loved that song,” Iommi told Classic Rock. “So he sat behind the kit and we started to play it. Of course, he didn’t play it right, but we just carried on and went into a jam. We were just jamming, making stuff up. Our session went totally out of the window.”

Ward backed up Iommi’s memories.:“He really loved Supernaut. He really had that song down. We were in the studio one day and he came by. He saw I was playing the double bass drum. He said: ‘I’ll do it on one.’”

Despite any potential rivalry between the two drummers, Ward remained hugely respectful of his friend. “He was, without question, the best drummer in the world,” Ward told Classic Rock. “The legacy he gave us, and Led Zeppelin gave us, continues long after John passed away.”

Classic Rock is the online home of the world’s best rock’n’roll magazine. We bring you breaking news, exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes features, as well as unrivalled access to the biggest names in rock music; from Led Zeppelin to Deep Purple, Guns N’ Roses to the Rolling Stones, AC/DC to the Sex Pistols, and everything in between. Our expert writers bring you the very best on established and emerging bands plus everything you need to know about the mightiest new music releases.

Shock rock king Alice Cooper and heavy metal legends Judas Priest have lined up a 22-date co-headline US tour for later this year. The schedule begins on September 16 at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum in Biloxi, MS, and wraps up at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in Houston, TX, on October 26.

Support at all shows – apart from the September 18 show in Alpharetta, GA – will come from Corrosion Of Conformity. Artist presales will begin tomorrow (April 16) at 10am, with the general sale kicking off on Friday at the same time.

The new dates are in addition to an already-announced UK co-headline show at the O2 in London on July 25, and follow the conclusion of Cooper’s Too Close For Comfort tour in late August. Meanwhile, Priest will complete their 2025 European Shield Of Pain schedule in July. Full details below.

Alice Cooper: Too Close For Comfort 2025 tour

Jul 05: Hannover Stadium, Germany *
Jul 08: Bologna Sequoie Music Park, Italy
Jul 11: Athens Rockwave Festival 2025, Greece
Jul 13: Mogilovo Midalidare Rock in the Wine Valley, Bulgaria
Jul 19: Spalt Strandbad Enderndorf, Germany
Jul 22: Cardiff Utilita Arena, UK
Jul 23: Edinburgh Playhouse, UK
Jul 25: London The O2, UK ∞
Jul 26: Mönchengladbach SparkassenPark, Germany
Jul 28: Amsterdam AFAS Live, Netherlands
Jul 30: Schaffhausen Stars in Town 2025, Switzerland

Aug 15: Philadelphia Citizens Bank Park, PA
Aug 19: Salem Salem Civic Center, VA
Aug 20: Knoxville The Tennessee Theatre, TN
Aug 21: Chattanooga Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium, TN
Aug 23: Chesterfield The Factory, MO
Aug 26: Waukee Vibrant Music Hall, IA
Aug 27: Omaha Orpheum Theater, NE
Aug 30: Memphis Elvis Presley’s Memphis: Graceland Soundstage, TN

* with Scorpions and Judas Priest
∞ co-headline show with Judas Priest

Judas Priest Shield Of Pain tour 2025

Jun 14: Oslo Tjuvholmen Arena, Norway
Jun 17: Stuttgart Schleyerhalle, Germany
Jun 18: Hessentag Festival, Frankfurt, Germany
Jun 21: Clisson Hellfest, France
Jun 25: Viveiro Resurrection Fest, Spain
Jun 27: Lisbon Evil Live Fest, Portugal
Jun 29: Barcelona Rock Fest, Spain
Jul 01: Ferrara Summer Festival, Italy
Jul 03: Zurich Hallenstadion, Switzerland
Jul 05: Hannover Niedersachsenstadion, Germany (supporting Scorpions)
Jul 07: Lodz Atlas Arena, Poland
Jul 10: Rattvik Dalhalla, Sweden
Jul 13: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Jul 15: Carcassonne Festival De Carcassone, France
Jul 17: Sion Sous Les Etoiles, Switzerland
Jul 19: Luxembourg Rockhal, Luxembourg
Jul 20: Oberhausen Rudolf-Weber-Arena, Germany

Jul 23: Scarborough Open Air Theatre, UK
Jul 25: London O2 Arena, UK ∞

∞ co-headline show with Alice Cooper

Alice Cooper & Judas Priest: Co-headline tour

Sep 16: Biloxi Mississippi Coast Coliseum, MS
Sep 18: Alpharetta Ameris Bank Amphitheatre, GA*
Sep 20: Charlotte PNC Music Pavilion, NC
Sep 21: Franklin FirstBank Amphitheater, TN
Sep 24: Virginia Beach Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater, VA
Sep 26: Holmdel PNC Bank Arts Center, NJ
Sep 27: Saratoga Springs Broadview Stage at SPAC, NY
Sep 29: Toronto Budweiser Stage, ON
Oct 01: Burgettstown The Pavilion at Star Lake, PA
Oct 02: Clarkston Pine Knob Music Theatre, MI
Oct 04: Cincinnati Riverbend Music Center, OH
Oct 05: Tinley Park Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre, IL
Oct 10: Colorado Springs Broadmoor World Arena, CO
Oct 12: Salt Lake City Utah First Credit Union Amphitheatre, UT
Oct 14: Mountain View Shoreline Amphitheatre, CA
Oct 15: Wheatland Toyota Amphitheatre, CA
Oct 18: Chula Vista North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre, CA
Oct 19: Los Angeles Kia Forum, CA
Oct 22: Phoenix Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre, AZ
Oct 23: Albuquerque Isleta Amphitheater, NM
Oct 25: Austin Germania Insurance Amphitheater, TX
Oct 26: Houston The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, TX

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 39 years in music industry, online for 26. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.

Ghost have played the opening show on their 2025 Skeletour World Tour, at the 23,000-capacity AO Arena in Manchester, UK, playing a set that mixed tracks from new album Skeletá with a glut of certified bangers.

The new songs included set opener Peacefield, current single Lachryma, last month’s Satanized single and Umbra, while there were live debuts for last year’s The Future Is a Foreign Land and Darkness At The Heart Of My Love from 2022’s Impera album. Among the surprises were Majesty, which hasn’t been played live since 2019, and the return of Monstrance Clock, which was last aired on the band’s North American A Few Shows Named Death tour the same year. Full details below.

While the setlist might be in the public domain, the band’s phone-free policy means we’re unlikely to see much footage emerge from the shows.

“This show will be a phone-free experience,” reads the small print accompanying the dates. “Phones will be secured in Yondr pouches. Guests maintain possession of their phones at all times.”

Earlier this year, mainman Tobias Forge told Rock Sound how the policy had improved the experience for everyone involved.

“I have never seen a crowd interact the way that they did since I was in a club band,” he said. “They were the best shows I’ve ever done with Ghost, just because I didn’t have to see those fucking mobile phones.”

The next show on Ghost’s world tour is at the OVO Hydro in Glasgow, tomorrow night, before the UK schedule finishes with dates in London and Birmingham. Mainland Europe shows begin in Belgium on April 22, with US dates kicking off in July. Full dates below.

Ghost setlist: AO Arena, Manchester, UK

Peacefield
Lachryma
Spirit
From the Pinnacle To The Pit
Majesty
The Future Is A Foreign Land
Cirice
Darkness At The Heart Of My Love
Satanized
Ritual
Umbra
Year Zero
He Is
Rats
Kiss The Go-Goat
Mummy Dust
Monstrance Clock

Encore
Mary On A Cross
Dance Macabre
Square Hammer

Ghost: Skeletour World Tour dates 2025

Apr 16: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Apr 19: London The O2, UK
Apr 20: Birmingham Utilita Arena, UK
Apr 22: Antwerp Sportpaleis, Belgium
Apr 23: Frankfurt Festhalle, Germany
Apr 24: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Apr 26: Lyon LDLC Arena, France
Apr 27: Toulouse Zenith Metropole, France
Apr 29: Lisbon MEO Arena, Portugal
Apr 30: Madrid Palacio Vistalegre, Spain
May 03: Zurich AG Hallenstadion, Switzerland
May 04: Milan Unipol Forum, Italy
May 07: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
May 08: Amsterdam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
May 10: Lodz Atlas Arena, Poland
May 11: Prague O2 Arena, Czech Republic
May 13: Paris Accor Arena, France
May 14: Oberhausen Rudolph Weber Arena, Germany
May 15: Hannover ZAG Arena, Germany
May 17: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
May 20: Tampere Nokia Arena, Finland
May 22: Linköping Saab Arena, Sweden
May 23: Sandviken Göransson Arena, Sweden
May 24: Oslo Spektrum, Norway

Jul 09: Baltimore CFG Bank Arena, MD
Jul 11: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Jul 12: Tampa Amalie Arena, FL
Jul 13: Miami Kaseya Center, FL
Jul 15: Raleigh PNC Arena, NC
Jul 17: Cleveland Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, OH
Jul 18: Pittsburgh PPG Paints Arena, PA
Jul 19: Philadelphia Wells Fargo Center, PA
Jul 21: Boston TD Garden, MA
Jul 22: New York Madison Square Garden, NY
Jul 24: Detroit Little Caesars Arena, MI
Jul 25: Louisville KFC Yum! Center, KY
Jul 26: Nashville Bridgestone Arena, TN
Jul 28: Grand Rapids Van Andel Arena, MI
Jul 29: Milwaukee Fiserv Forum, WI
Jul 30: St Louis Enterprise Center, MO
Aug 01: Rosemont Allstate Arena, IL
Aug 02: Saint Paul Xcel Energy Center, MN
Aug 03: Omaha CHI Health Center, NE
Aug 05: Kansas City T-Mobile Center, MO
Aug 07: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Aug 09: Las Vegas MGM Grand Garden Arena, NV
Aug 10: San Diego Viejas Arena, CA
Aug 11: Phoenix Footprint Center, AZ
Aug 14: Austin Moody Center ATX, TX
Aug 15: Fort Worth Dickies Arena, TX
Aug 16: Houston Toyota Center, TX

Sep 24: Mexico City Palacio De Los Deportes

Tickets are on sale now.

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 39 years in music industry, online for 26. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.