Author: wamdiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They did not sound fluffy, they sounded terrifying.

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

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

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

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

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

Where did that music come from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was one big question around The Smashing Pumpkins as Billy Corgan & co. prepared to release their fourth record Adore at the beginning of June, 1998: how were they going to replace Jimmy Chamberlin? The band’s drumming lynchpin had been fired midway through the tour to support 1995’s all-conquering Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness after overdosing with live keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin, who subsequently died. The tour had continued with Chamberlin’s spot filled by Filter’s Matt Walker but now that the Pumpkins were about to release their next record, everyone was keen to see how it was going to play out in the long haul.

Instead of answering that question though, in typical Corgan and Pumpkins fashion they went in a direction that brought a whole new set of queries to mind instead. First: the actual record. Adore featured three drummers (Walker on seven tracks, Soundgarden and future Pearl Jam man Matt Cameron on one and Joey Waronker, currently rumoured to be gearing up for a shift in Oasis, on three) at the same time as often sounding like there was no drummer at all, with programmed beats or a drum machine providing the rhythmic pulse. A mix of muted, wistful slow-tempo rock and warm electronic-pop, Adore certainly has its moments. There’s a really good 10-track record somewhere in its overblown 17-track, 73-minute run-time.

But the album wasn’t the half of it. When it came to the accompanying live performances, it became clear that this version of the Pumpkins were all over the shop, a period where one of rock’s most exhilarating and talented bands became a bit of a sprawling mess.

On the face of it, it felt like a good thing that the band were mixing things up. A tour with the tragic death of Melvoin hanging over it, the mammoth trek to support Mellon Collie… took in arenas all over the world and stretched on for over a year. This one was planned to be different – playing small theatres and bespoke venues, sometimes for free, in big cities over the course of four months.

There was a musical deviation too. Where on record Adore was often stark and minimalist, Corgan instigated an artistic expansion when it came to the live shows. Rather than just replacing Chamberlin, new drummer Kenny Aronoff was flanked by two percussionists in Dan Morris and Stephen Hodges whilst Mike Garson, a long-time collaborator of David Bowie, joined on piano and keyboards.

“Mike Garson is tremendous. We’re hoping to have enough room in the music to allow improvisation and re-interpretation of the songs on a nightly basis,” Corgan told radio presenter Jeff Woods. “They can freestyle things and me and James don’t always have to make the wall of sound, then the two percussionists providing a thicker rhythm track to play against, it’s gonna be really interesting. We’re flying by the seat of our pants.”

Curiously, Corgan also told Woods about the plans for US multi-instrumentalist Lisa Germano to feature in the line-up on violin but, by the time the tour began, she was nowhere to be seen. She gave an insight into her brief spell in the Pumpkins in an interview a decade or so later.

It doesn’t exactly paint a picture of the harmonious fresh start the band were after. But at least they had a new drummer, seasoned session man and former John Mellancamp and Melissa Etheridge sticksman Aronoff. “We had this weird night where we auditioned people through the middle of the night,” Corgan explained of how they found their new guy. “It was very bizarre. Everyone wanted to know what we wanted them to learn to play and we told them, ‘Don’t learn anything, we’re just gonna jam’ and that’s what we did with everybody, we were just seeing how someone would react. Kenny was the person who struck me, we played three songs and every song just got better and better. He’s a great drummer. He’s got more experience than us and is a little more mature than us, it’s a comforting feeling to know he’s not going to flake out on us. Not that Matt Walker flaked out on us. Poor Matt Walker, he had a year of people comparing him to Jimmy, it’s a lot of pressure.”

“There’s no escaping the Jimmy thing and we’re not trying to run from it,” Corgan continued, “but it can to be almost like a ghost where he’s bigger and stronger and better than he really was, he was mortal like the rest of us.”

The Adore tour began in Germany in mid-May, 1998, making its way across Europe and then moving on to Australia, Japan, North America and South America, wrapping up at the end of August. I was there at the London show, taking place at Shepherds Bush Empire as part of MTV’s Five Night Stand series of shows. Thinking back to it now, it was the sound of a band in the midst of an identity crisis, a group who still wanted to rock but had just made an album of material that definitely didn’t.

It was a wonky setlist to say the least. It began with seven straight songs from Adore, ironically the best part of the gig, the ballads delivered with a flourish, songs that sounded bare on the album now armed with a muscular amped-up flourish – Ava Adore and Daphne Descends, for example, came across as prime Pumpkins rockers and made their recorded counterparts seem like skeletal demos.

The rest of the set, though, was a confused jumble, reworked renditions of 1979, Tonight, Tonight, Bullet With Butterfly Wings and Thru The Eyes Of Ruby all stripping out what made them so great in the first place. It was self-sabotage with an added percussion solo, a point hammered home by the fact the encore was Duran Duran cover (featuring an appearance from Simon Le Bon himself) and an OTT, 18-minute version of Joy Division’s Transmission. Somewhere in the middle of it all, an Aussie punter standing next to me pissed on my foot. Don’t worry, 16-year-old Niall, it’s a metaphor for the mental state of your favourite band in 1998.

It was very much a vibe they maintained for the entire run, the percussion solo taking pride of place in the middle of the performance every night. “I discovered the use of space,” Corgan said by way of explanation. “So much of our other stuff, there’s so much density to it, we’re using things in fractured ways to create space. The song Crestfallen is a nice example of that, and To Sheild, just letting things breathe, drums don’t have to be huge, for me it was more about texture.”

Looking back on the jaunt in the liner notes for Adore’s deluxe edition reissue a few years ago, Corgan admitted that it was an odd moment for the band. “The band was drifting apart internally, so it became a strange tour.”

Having the two percussionists playing alongside Aronoff was a mistake, he said. “If I had it to do all over again, I would have had Kenny Aronoff — who’s an incredible timekeeper — play along with loops from the album. But I made the fateful decision to get two percussionists, Stephen Hodges and Dan Morris, and that drove Kenny up the wall because Kenny has perfect time and one guy played on top and the other behind. I remember Kenny saying, ‘I feel like I’m tripping on LSD’ because he kept hearing things that were not in time, and it drove him crazy.”

It was a version of the band that was a one-off. Corgan must have come off tour knowing they needed to rediscover themselves and to do that they’d require their OG drummer – by 1999, Chamberlin was back in. No extra percussionists needed, they had their octopus-limbed sticksman back on board. It makes the Adore tour one of the most curious and strange points in their history. Even for a band who always chose to take the hard way round, this was an era that left them momentarily out in the wild.

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.

A teen crush gave acclaimed singer and hit songwriter Siobhan Fahey her first prog kick. Then punk happened. But she named Bananarama in honour of Roxy Music, and the Shakespeare’s Sister mastermind will never get over her love of Pink Floyd, as she told Prog in 2009.

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“It’s always about a boy, isn’t it? When I was 14 I had a milk round in Harpenden and there was an older boy, about 16, who I had a crush on. So there I’d be, 5.30 on those freezing mornings in December, waiting to be picked up by ‘Ernie’ and his attractive assistant.

I knew nothing about rock music, but I was obsessed with Tamla Motown and Joni Mitchell, and I was a huge Melanie fan. This boy very quickly turned me
on to Pink Floyd and Roxy Music. To begin with, he lent me the first three Roxy albums, and although I couldn’t get my head round them, I totally fell for them – and I’d be listening to them for the rest of my life.

Then we progressed to the Floyd. They’re in a place way above prog rock. They have a space all of their own. My first taste was Meddle – the whole of Echoes on side B – wow! I would send myself off to sleep with that; utterly fantastic.

And next I heard Dark Side Of The Moon, and although I preferred the trippier aspect of Meddle, I grew to really love Dark Side‘s depth and scope. Sadly, I never got to see Floyd, and by the end of the 70s I was a punk rocker. So that was it, you hid your Floyd records – and I now had an uneasy relationship with this thing called ‘prog.’

Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs was a revelation

My first proper boyfriend was an art student, and he took me to Frank Zappa – but I was bored to tears and fell asleep at the gig. My boyfriend was really angry with me; he’d paid £3.50 for the tickets!

But this same boyfriend took me to see Hawkwind at the Roundhouse, which was amazing: a sound and vision spectacular. I knew the single Silver Machine, which I loved. It was 1976 and here was a prog band that fitted with the punkier things I was discovering.

They were angry, they were krautrock, they were trippy. Even today I would see them again. I hear they have the Angels of Death dancing with them, so I’m there!

Many years later I revisited Floyd. I love the title song from Wish You Were Here very much, and I did a version with my eldest son on guitar as a download from my website.

Then, on holiday in Ibiza, someone started playing Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs, which I’d never explored, and it was a revelation. In my mind, people like him are seers, they’re not mad, everyone else is. They see the truth.”

Jo is a journalist, podcaster, event host and music industry lecturer with 23 years in music magazines since joining Kerrang! as office manager in 1999. But before that Jo had 10 years as a London-based gig promoter and DJ, also working in various vintage record shops and for the UK arm of the Sub Pop label as a warehouse and press assistant. Jo’s had tea with Robert Fripp, touched Ian Anderson’s favourite flute (!), asked Suzi Quatro what one wears under a leather catsuit, and invented several ridiculous editorial ideas such as the regular celebrity cooking column for Prog, Supper’s Ready. After being Deputy Editor for Prog for five years and Managing Editor of Classic Rock for three, Jo is now Associate Editor of Prog, where she’s been since its inception in 2009, and a regular contributor to Classic Rock. She continues to spread the experimental and psychedelic music-based word amid unsuspecting students at BIMM Institute London, hoping to inspire the next gen of rock, metal, prog and indie creators and appreciators. 

Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett has picked out the album from his career on which he thinks he nailed his playing the most. Speaking to Metal Hammer in their latest issue, Hammett is asked what he thinks his finest moment as a player is – and he may surprise some fans by not exactly picking Metallica’s most technically complex material as his answer.

“It’s weird, because my opinion of that changes all the time,” he explains. “I don’t sit around listening to Metallica, so sometimes something comes on and I’m like,
‘I haven’t heard this in fucking five years! I forgot about that sound.’ I don’t look in the rear-view mirror too often. The whole band is like that – we just move on. What’s the next cool thing we can do? It’s just how we are. But I will say, there was a period where I thought my playing was fucking spot on, and that was The Black Album. Those solos wrote themselves! Almost all of them worked out instantly.

“There were only a few things I wasn’t prepared for, and that was The Unforgiven solo, which is pretty well documented,” he responds, referring to the problems he had coming up with a solo that fit the song after producer Bob Rock expressed dissatisfaction with his initial ideas. “And the solo for My Friend Of Misery. But because the solo of The Unforgiven ended up being so spontaneous, that made me want to do them all like that from that point on.”

Metallica recently announced yet another leg to their ongoing 72 Seasons world tour, including two shows in London promising a different set each night. Support on the dates will come from a mix of Gojira, Pantera, Knocked Loose and Avatar.

Read more from Hammett in Metal Hammer‘s latest issue, out now.

Merlin moved into his role as Executive Editor of Louder in early 2022, following over ten years working at Metal Hammer. While there, he served as Online Editor and Deputy Editor, before being promoted to Editor in 2016. Before joining Metal Hammer, Merlin worked as Associate Editor at Terrorizer Magazine and has previously written for the likes of Classic Rock, Rock Sound, eFestivals and others. Across his career he has interviewed legends including Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy, Metallica, Iron Maiden (including getting a trip on Ed Force One courtesy of Bruce Dickinson), Guns N’ Roses, KISS, Slipknot, System Of A Down and Meat Loaf. He has also presented and produced the Metal Hammer Podcast, presented the Metal Hammer Radio Show and is probably responsible for 90% of all nu metal-related content making it onto the site. 

Moametal, one third of globe-conquering Japanese kawaii metal sensations Babymetal, has revealed the touching message she’d give her younger self if ever given the opportunity. Speaking to Metal Hammer in their new issue, in which Babymetal star on the cover, Moametal is asked what she’d have to say if she could go back in time and meet the Moametal of 2010 – the year Babymetal first formed.

Moametal, now 25, says she’d be pretty effusive about the journey she’s been on. “I want to give myself lots of praise, like: ‘You’ve been doing Moametal for 15 years without ever giving up – that’s amazing!'” she beams. “‘You jumped into it without fully realising how hard it would be to keep going and keep putting in the effort, but you never lost your sense of responsibility or the love you have for what you do. That’s something to be proud of!’”

She’s also quick to point out that she’d have some productive advice for her younger self, adding with a chuckle: “And, over the past five years especially, I’ve realised just how important stretching is. So, for anyone reading this: it’s not too late! Let’s all make stretching a habit!”

Babymetal play their biggest ever UK headline show tonight (Friday May 30), as they headline London’s 20,000-capacity O2 arena with a stacked support of chameleonic genre-meshers Poppy and Bambie Thug. Their latest studio album, Metal Forth, arrives June 27 and features guest appearances from the likes of Poppy, Slaughter To Prevail, Bloodywood, Electric Callboy and more. Read all about it in that aforementioned new issue of Metal Hammer, out now. Order your copy online.

Merlin moved into his role as Executive Editor of Louder in early 2022, following over ten years working at Metal Hammer. While there, he served as Online Editor and Deputy Editor, before being promoted to Editor in 2016. Before joining Metal Hammer, Merlin worked as Associate Editor at Terrorizer Magazine and has previously written for the likes of Classic Rock, Rock Sound, eFestivals and others. Across his career he has interviewed legends including Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy, Metallica, Iron Maiden (including getting a trip on Ed Force One courtesy of Bruce Dickinson), Guns N’ Roses, KISS, Slipknot, System Of A Down and Meat Loaf. He has also presented and produced the Metal Hammer Podcast, presented the Metal Hammer Radio Show and is probably responsible for 90% of all nu metal-related content making it onto the site. 

June is upon us! Well, almost, anyway. European festival season is about to kick off in a big way and it seems we can barely move for new tour and album announcements. But then, isn’t that just the way we love it?

First, let’s get the results of last week’s vote out the way! It was a diverse showing from across the metal spectrum with metalcore, black metal, hardcore, death metal, punk and more all in the running, but ultimately there could be only one winner. That said, it was a tight finish for third place, with Ukraine’s Death Pill nabbing bronze by just one vote. They were only shortly behind returning death metal troupe Sinsaenum, who announced their first new album since the death of former drummer Joey Jordison. But our overall winner – and with little surprise given just how much of a phenomenon they’ve turned out to be – were Germany’s Electric Callboy. Prost!

This week we’ve got a stacked roster to offer. There’s new music from Babymetal, Halestorm, Lord Of The Lost and Avatar – all previous winners of these weekly polls – as well as fresh cuts from the likes of Urne, Margarita Witch Cult and Calva Louise representing a wonderfully diverse selection of metal brilliance.

As ever, we need you to tell us which song excites you most, so don’t forget to cast your vote in the poll below. And have an excellent weekend!

Halestorm – Everest

Halestorm have a proven track record when it comes to writing massive rock tunes. Even by their lofty standards, Everest feels like a gloriously theatrical and showy tune. With some of the best lead guitar lines you’ll hear this year, the title-track of the band’s new album – due August 8 – has us plenty excited for what Halestorm have in store.

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Avatar – Captain Goat

Speaking of theatrical, it seldom gets more outlandish than the harlequin antics of Sweden’s Avatar. Johannes Eckerström and co try their hand at a sea shanty on Captain Goat, the first glimpse of a possible follow-up to 2023’s Dance Devil Dance. Delivered with a sense of bombastic and thumping, steady beat, it’s certainly piqued our curiosity; are they working on a new concept album, a la Avatar Country? We’ll find out in due course, we’re sure.

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Heaviest Babymetal song ever? There’s definitely an argument to be made for Song 3, the Japanese metal sensation drafting in deathcore stars Slaughter To Prevail for a track that swings from grunting, stomping death metal to hale, breakout melodies. Much like with their other collabs, Babymetal find ways to strengthen their sound with outside influences whilst not losing their own undeniable uniqueness, and even if Metal Forth is still a way off with an August 8 release date there’s plenty to be excited about – especially with their biggest UK show to date happening tonight (May 30) at The O2.

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Lord Of The Lost – I Will Die In It

After the colourful flamboyance of Blood And Glitter, Germany’s Lord Of The Lost are back on more familiar footing in the realms of thumping, symphonically-underpinned industrial goth on I Will Die In It. Vocalist Chris Harms’ baritone intonations of “I was not born in love/but I will die in it” offer a bridge between Till Lindemann and Peter Steele, spelling out exciting things for new album Opvs Noir Vol. 1 when it arrives August 8.

Margarita Witch Cult – Scream Bloody Murder

There’s plenty of love for Sabbath to be found at the moment as we round in to the final weeks before the big gig. How appropriate then, that Birmingham’s own Sabbath-worshipping doomsters Margarita Witch Cult are rumbling back with Scream Bloody Murder, the first single from their upcoming second album Strung Out In Hell, due July 18. If you can’t get enough of those Iommi style riffs and hooks over a fuzzy bed of dread, MWC are exactly what you need to go into the weekend.

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Urne – Harken The Waves (ft. Troy Sanders)

Riffs, you say? With their first two albums, Urne showed they’d mastered the art, and now return with a new prog metal flavoured epic in the form of Harken The Waves. Drafting in Mastodon’s Troy Sanders, the nine-and-a-half-minute track feels like another colossal leap forward for the band as they gear up for their third album, crafting something gorgeously expansive, heavy and utterly exhilarating. Set to tour with Orange Goblin on the latter’s farewell tour in December, you’d be mad to miss this.

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The Narrator – Unbind Me

Freshly signed to Nuclear Blast, German metalcore troupe The Narrator have wasted no time in putting out new music. Unbind Me goes big on atmospherics with a sense of scope that betrays some seriously big ambitions, calling to mind the likes of Architects and Bury Tomorrow with clanging riffs and hefty beatdowns. Considering the band only released their debut last year, there’s no word if a follow-up is imminent, but either way it seems they’re setting their sights high.

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Hanabie – Spicy Queen

Hanabie might be a fresh force this side of the world, but they’ve been building up steam in their native Japan for a decade. To celebrate that fact, the band worked on a counterpoint to their breakthrough track We Love Sweets, a hyperactive, impossible to duplicate blast of riffs, snarls and techno-enhanced guitar tones that lend some real credence to the idea of this being the future of metal.

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257ers – Unicorns (ft. Electric Callboy)

Electric Callboy might not have announced a follow-up to Tekkno yet, but they’re certainly getting around by this point. After popping up with Babymetal and releasing a new single of their own last week, now they’re featured as guests with German comedy hip-hop duo 257ers. The resulting track – Unicorns – sounds exactly like an EC song should, and comes with a typically brilliant, bonkers video.

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Stain The Canvas – 554th

Prepare for sonic whiplash. It’s impossible to tell exactly where Italians Stain The Canvas fit in; one minute they’re shrieking, high-speed deathcore style brutes, only to break out into electro rave underpinned metalcore choruses. It’s wild to watch them switching gears so effortlessly across the track, marking them as a band to watch out for going forward.

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Calva Louise – Impeccable

Calva Louise’s Impeccable might be the danciest metal tune since Rob Zombie’s Living Dead Girl. Lofty praise, but well earned by the UK-based group who blend styles together with impressive panache, swinging from howling metalcore to twinkling dancefloor fillers with ease. Though Impeccable fits squarely in the latter category, there’s so many different facets to new album Edge Of The Abyss that you’re sure to find something to tickle your fancy.

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Flesh Parade – Repercussions

NOLA grindcore with added spice, Flesh Parade’s Repercussions is all fangs and rabid nastiness. From its sludgy, lurching bass to the high-speed, punkish breakouts, it’s pure underground filth – glorious and ‘orrible in equal measure.

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. 

Former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist and current touring member of Pearl Jam Josh Klinghoffer has avoided a possible jail sentence after entering a plea deal in the vehicular manslaughter case that was brought against him last year.

Klinghoffer attended court in Alhambra, California, yesterday, and entered a no-contest plea in the case, which was brought after a vehicle Klinghoffer was driving struck a 47-year-old pedestrian, Israel Sanchez, in March 2024. Sanchez subsequently died from his injuries.

The no-contest plea means that Klinghoffer accepts conviction but does not plead or admit guilt. He’ll serve 60 hours of community service and a year of probation, and will also undertake a driver safety class.

At the time of Kilnghoffer’s arraignment, Sanchez’s family lawyer, Nick Rowley, claimed to be in possession of “a video of him on his cell phone at the time he hit and killed Israel Sanchez.”

During court proceedings, the prosecutor warned Klinghoffer about his future conduct, saying, “If you continue to drive while distracted, and as a result of your driving someone is killed, you can be charged with murder.”

Klinghoffer played guitar for the Red Hot Chili Peppers for 12 years, appearing on 2011’s I’m With You and 2016’s The Getaway. Since John Frusciante’s return to the RHCP, Klinghoffer has played with Iggy Pop and Redd Kross in addition to Pearl Jam, and on Elton John and Brandi Carlile’s collaborative album Who Believes in Angels?

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.

The mysterious woman on the cover of Black Sabbath‘s debut album is raffling her autograph to raise money for a cat rescue project. Louisa Livingstone, whose identity was revealed five years ago after decades of speculation, will sign a hand-written letter to the raffle winner.

“Many Black Sabbath fans have asked me online for my autograph and to this day nobody has one – for a variety of reasons!” says Livingstone. “But I have now decided, at this epic time with Black Sabbath doing their last ever gig, to raffle my autograph. This way, everyone gets a chance, for a minimal outlay.”

Tickets for the raffle cost just $1, with fans able to make multiple purchases to increase their chances of winning. The draw will take place on July 20, two weeks after the Sabbath show.

“The only other autographs of mine already floating around are minimal, if they even still exist,” says Livingstone. “[The autographs were] given on very rare occasions after stage performances at the National Theatre in London decades ago when I was acting in various plays including Lark Rise and Candleford.“

The mysterious object in Livingstone’s hands on the cover of Black Sabbath has always been the source of debate, although photographer Keith Macmillan insists it was a black cat.

“I think it might just be the way my hands are there,” Livingstone told Rolling Stone in 2020. “I’m sure I could remember if it was a cat.”

Livingstone also releases her own music under the name Indebra, although anyone expecting doom-laden riffs will be disappointed by the synth-friendly new song Anthem to Truth – See More, Oh Yeah. Although, to be fair, it is kinda spooky.

“Black Sabbath is just not my kind of music,” she said in 2020. “I feel awful for saying it, because it’s probably not what people want to hear, but it isn’t particularly my kind of music. When I got the album, I gave it a listen and moved on.”

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.