Author: wamdiness

Originally comprised of former members of Yes (guitarist Steve Howe and keyboard player Geoffrey Downes), King Crimson (bassist/vocalist John Wetton) and ELP (drummer Carl Palmer), Asia’s aural slush puppy of soft rock and prog produced a self-titled debut that became America’s best seller of 1982.

Forty-three years later, Downes – a last link with those days – and a new line-up play three nights in which they will be performing the first three Asia albums in full, one per night, at Trading Boundaries in Sussex.

This line-up of Asia debuted at the John Wetton Tribute show in 2023.

It was a brilliant night, lots of great people including Rick Wakeman came along. Bill Bruford even stepped out of retirement to be a part of it all. It showed what a great impact John had on so many artists. It was also a trigger for going out on the road in America last summer with Martin Turner, Focus and Curved Air.

That first show as the ‘new’ Asia must have been an emotional and stressful experience for you.

It was, yeah. From my own standpoint it was great to carry on with the music that John and I wrote together all those years ago. I know that John would have been appreciative of that happening.

John’s widow Lisa believes he would have “endorsed” the band’s continuation as he “wanted the music to live on”.

That’s correct. For me, the last thing I wanted was to put Asia music into a locker and say I’ll never do that again. And now we’ve got the opportunity to get back out there again and play those first three albums, which were so significant. Of course there’s a type of keyboard warrior who noisily disagrees.

Do you take any perverse interest in such negativity?

It can be quite funny if you choose to look at it that way. Everybody’s got a voice, and some of the comments are quite amusing, but I’m long enough in the tooth to brush off that sort of thing and just keep moving. The haters won’t stop us from doing what we do.

Could you tell us about the other members of Asia 2025, starting with guitarist John Mitchell?

John was in the [solo] band of the other John [Wetton] for quite some time and they had a very good relationship. He was also a member of the Icon project that I had with John Wetton, so I’m very happy that he agreed to become a part of this new Asia.

Mitchell is also an accomplished singer. Was any thought given to him becoming the frontman?

John is a great vocalist, but when I discovered Harry that really changed the game. That’s Harry Whitley, on bass and lead vocals. Yeah. Harry is another great musician. He has a fantastic understanding of John’s voice. At the time, Harry was working on a farm in North Wales, and I thought: “He’s got all the right credentials” [laughs]. I called him up, he came on board and we had our lead singer.

How exactly did you find him?

Harry sent some Asia covers via Twitter, and they were so good they gave me a chill down my spine. People will be very impressed by him. At times you close your eyes and it’s quite eerie – he could be John. He’s only thirty. It’s good to have some young blood in the band, it brings the average age down quite a bit.

And Virgil Donati played drums with Planet X and Ring Of Fire.

John [Wetton] had worked with Virgil in UK, so there was a connection there. Carl [Palmer] was very busy with his ELP show [Welcome Back My Friends], so Virgil came in. He’s really warmed to the subtleties of the material.

Across three nights at Trading Boundaries this line-up will play the first three Asia albums.

It’ll take an enormous amount of preparation, because some of those albums were years in the making. Rattling them off will be a heck of a challenge, no doubt about it, but it’s one that we are relishing.

Are any songs yet to be performed live, maybe from Astra?

We only ever did Voice Of America from Astra, so that show will have a lot of very, very deep cuts. It wasn’t everyone’s favourite, but there’s a posse of fans that really, really loves it.

Many fans will be unable to make it to Sussex. What about recording these three shows, or taking the concept on the road?

We will definitely record the Trading Boundaries shows, and then we head straight off to Japan to do the same thing. I’d be well up for touring it in Britain – so we’re open to offers.

What’s going on with your other band, Yes?

We’ve been working on an album for the past six months. Steve [Howe, guitarist and now producer] is at the helm and I think it will be out later in the year.

Will there be any new music from Asia?

It’s being talked about. I’ve even got some stuff that I worked on with John [Wetton] many years ago, so recording that might be interesting.

Asia play Trading Boundaries on in East Sussex on April 10, 11 and 12.

Paramore’s Hayley Williams joined Deftones onstage for a performance of the nu metal-era band’s 2003 track Minerva.

The frontwoman sang with Chino Moreno and company onstage during their show in Nashville on Wednesday (March 26). Watch the footage below.

This isn’t the first time Williams has joined Deftones for a song live. In 2010, she sang White Pony favourite Passenger with the band during a show in Luxembourg.

Deftones, who released Minerva as the lead single of their self-titled album, stopped at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena as part of their ongoing North American tour with The Mars Volta. They played a career-spanning 20-song setlist including such hits as Change (In The House Of Flies), Hole In The Earth and Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away).

Meanwhile, The Mars Volta have reportedly been playing material from an as-yet-unreleased studio album called Lucro Sucio; Los Ojos Del Vacio. According to a recent report by Brooklyn Vegan, the progressive rockers’ ninth album will come out on April 11 and is available for preorder. One Reddit user claims to have heard the album after being given Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s personal copy by the frontman himself.

Deftones and The Mars Volta will tour North America together until April 9. After that, Deftones will head to Europe for a leg of festival slots and headline shows. The tour includes stops at London’s 15,000-capacity Crystal Palace Park and The Eden Project in the West Country. They’ll also appear at Glastonbury festival.

The band are also set to headline two shows at Rogers Stadium in Toronto, Canada, alongside System Of A Down on September 3 and 5. The gigs are part of a larger North American run in August and September.

See all of Deftones’ upcoming live plans and get tickets via their website.

Deftones released their latest album Ohms in 2020 and have been working on a follow-up. In an interview with Billboard Español in December, Moreno said the band’s new album will drop in 2025.

Paramore released their sixth and latest album, This Is Why, in 2023. The band have no future tour dates set at time of publication.

Bruce Springsteen and Flea joined forces on Wednesday night in New York City for a performance of “Because the Night.”

It was part of People Have The Power: A Celebration of Patti Smith, which took place at Carnegie Hall. Springsteen and Flea played with Tony Shanahan, a longtime member of Smith’s own band, plus Charlie Sexton, a regular guitarist in Bob Dylan‘s touring band, and Steve Jordan, the Rolling Stones‘ touring drummer.

Other artists to perform at the show, which raised money for underserved youth music programs, included Karen O, Michael Stipe and Johnny Depp.

You can watch fan-filmed footage of “Because the Night” below.

Why Bruce Springsteen Gave ‘Because the Night’ to Patti Smith

Springsteen originally tried recording “Because the Night” with his E Street Band in June of 1977, but felt it lacking. His producer, Jimmy Iovine, then gave Smith a tape of the song, who added lyrics and recorded it with her band the Patti Smith Group for their 1978 album Easter. It was a hit, reaching No. 13 in the U.S. and No. 5 in the U.K.

“I was a tremendous admirer of Patti, you know,” Springsteen would later explain for the book Why Patti Smith Matters (via Variety), “and I was just flattered that she was interested in collaborating, and I was just happy that she found something that she could do with the song, you know, because that song would still be in my archives if it wasn’t for her. And it would be something that nobody had ever heard of.”

Bruce Springsteen Live Albums Ranked

Longtime fans will tell you his studio records are only half the story – concert performances are the other, and maybe more essential, part.

Gallery Credit: Michael Gallucci

More From Ultimate Classic Rock

John 5 said he once spent five hours on the hunt for an autograph from Gene Simmons – then at the last moment decided not to take it.

The incident took place when the future Motley Crue guitarist was around 13 or 14 years old, and Kiss were playing Detroit one night in the early ‘80s.

“I wanted to meet my heroes and I was waiting at the Pontchartrain Hotel,” 5 told 101 WRIF in a recent interview (video below). “I’m this little kid, skipping school; kind of preppy and all that stuff. And I’m the only one in the lobby.”

READ MORE: John 5 Responds to Accusations of Guitar Miming With Motley Crue

He’d identified the correct hotel when he saw tour buses parked outside; and the scene was to become familiar to him. “I was waiting there all day — all day,” he said. He recalled thinking, “Hopefully he’ll come down and have something to eat or go get coffee… or who knows, one of the guys.”

That’s more or less how it went down. “So, here comes Gene Simmons! He was walking out of the bus into the hotel. And I had my Originals booklet… I said, ‘Mr. Simmons! Mr. Simmons!’’And he walked right by me. I’m this little kid.”

When Gene Simmons and Young John 5 Shared an Elevator

5 wasn’t going to give up, though. “And he gets in the elevator; and I was like, ‘Screw this!’ So I get in the elevator too. And he’s standing there, and I have my booklet and my little marker.”

Soon came the moment that made the day so memorable. “The elevator opens to his floor, and he goes, ‘You want me to sign that?’ And I go, ‘No, it’s okay.’ Isn’t that great?

“True story. I don’t know what it was; I was just so, like, upset… I was no threat – I was just a little kid. … I was waiting there for, like, five hours, and he goes, ‘You want me to sign that?’ And I was like, ‘No, it’s okay.’ Then the elevator shut!”

5 will be inviting fans to enjoy his massive collection of classic-era Kiss memorabilia with the Knights in Satan’s Service museum, which opens in May of 2025.

Watch John 5’s Interview with 101 WRIF

Kiss Live Albums Ranked Worst to Best

You wanted the best, you get the best.. and the rest.

Gallery Credit: Matthew Wilkening

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For Kansas vocalist Ronnie Platt, it was a moment where his entire life flashed before his eyes after he heard the news he had cancer.

“You know, I’m a singer that sings a couple high notes and not knowing anything about what I had, it was pretty scary,” he said during a conversation for the UCR Podcast. “The first thing that entered my mind was, okay, how much time do I have?” Thankfully, a little more than a month and a half after revealing his diagnosis of thyroid cancer, Platt is walking with a clean bill of health and preparing to return to the road with Kansas on April 4 in Ivins, Utah. But as he shared, it’s been an emotional journey.

After his initial diagnosis, he went to seek a second opinion and found out the doctor wouldn’t be able to see him until mid-April. Thanks to lucky circumstance, it turned out that guitarist Frank Sintich, his former bandmate in the ’80s Chicago-area band Chaser, had a direct connection. His girlfriend worked for the very doctor that he was trying to get in and see. Before he knew it, he was set for an appointment with Dr. Peter Angelos at the University of Chicago. By late February, he was scheduled for surgery on March 4.

As his doctors discovered, the cancer itself was possibly the result of radiation therapy he’d had in the early ’60s when his parents took him in as a young child to address a birthmark on the tip of his nose. It was something that had been incubating potentially for decades, but also was slow-moving, to the point that his doctor told him, “For [these] nodules to impact your life, you’d have to live to be 150 years old.” Though it was stressful navigating through the series of appointments and logistics, Platt is grateful with how things ultimately worked out.

How He’s Feeling Now

“It was just crazy how everything [eventually] fell into place so seamlessly,” he says. “My cousin Karen and her husband Bill took me to the hospital. They checked me in and I was out before [I knew it]. You know, [they’ve got] good drugs in them hospitals. [Platt chuckles]. The next thing I know, I’m waking up in the recovery room. All the doctor had to do is take the nodule. I still have my thyroid. It’s unbelievable. I think I was awake for an hour in the recovery room and I walked [out]. I didn’t take a wheelchair. I walked the length of that hospital to the parking garage. They gave me a prescription for pain, I never even opened the bottle. I had no pain and you can’t even see [where they went in for the procedure].”

“Here we are, 20 days [after] my surgery and I’m going to be back to work April 4 in Ivins, Utah,” he continues. “It’s just amazing. It was such a crazy roller coaster ride to find out what was going on with me and really, having the thought of, how much life do I have left? Then learning so much stuff, the ups and downs of dealing with the insurance and the frustrations to come out with the absolute most positive, uplifting outcome that could possibly happen [is wonderful].”

READ MORE: Kansas and 38 Special Announce Summer 2025 Tour

“It really feels like it was just a bump in the road,” he concludes. “When I think about other friends who have gone through things like chemotherapy and being sick all of the time. I haven’t gone through that and I feel very lucky. I really feel lucky that Mother Nature sent me up a flag. You know, something told me, ‘Don’t put off seeing a doctor this time.’ The things that happened, the people that helped me and [those who] I met along the way were just amazing.”

Listen to Ronnie Platt on the ‘UCR Podcast’

Back in 2010 UK prog metal quintet TesseracT were just starting out, introducing themselves to the world with a 27-minute concept piece Concealing Fate, aheads of their debut album One. This was the band’s very first piece in Prog Magazine…

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You’ll be forgiven if you haven’t come across TesseracT before. Having formed from what is quite possibly the geekiest musical scene ever – it was born, raised and still thrives in internet-based communities – it’s not a stretch to say that the British prog metal quintet is quite a modern phenomenon. The sub-genre in question has the peculiar title – djent. The band explain:

“It was back in 2002 or 2003 when the online community of producer-musicians who spawned the bands of this new wave of progressive metal began to come together,” says Acle Kahney, lead guitarist and chief songwriter of TesseracT. “A key factor that set this community apart from others is that it had no geographical base. People from all over the world were sharing ideas, recording parts for each other and even jamming via the internet. Like punk came from the bars, clubs and rehearsal rooms of New York, this scene started in chat rooms, forums and home studios. This would have been impossible without the internet.”

‘Djent’ is an onomatopoeic word used to describe the iconic chord that Swedish prog metallers Meshuggah have trademarked over the past two decades. It was via their online forum that Kahney originally learnt how to play the complex power chord. When Meshuggah’s lead guitarist, Fredrik Thordendal, heard some of Kahney’s riffs on another forum and complimented them, it was all the encouragement he needed to forge ahead. But TesseracT are far from being a tribute act.

“These influences… you can’t really hear them in the music – they’re just what we like, so it’s fairly subtle. If you ask the boys from Meshuggah, they’d say ‘Those boys sound nothing like us,’” says bassist Amos Williams matter-of-factly. “It’s a great compliment though because I’m sure you’ve seen them live so to be lumbered in the same class as them is just awesome.”

And what of the name? A tesseract is a complex, four-dimensional, cube-like geometric entity that has been used in surrealism and also within references to the unknown. Coupled with the internet-based origins of their music, surely this is the ultimate geek band?

“Honestly, man, people just assign so much more to the name than what you actually think about when you start things. The reality is we just like music that makes us dance,” sighs Williams. “Yeah, the music’s pretty progressive, but it’s not Rush is it? It’s not exactly Dream Theater. The virtuosity comes in the details and the subtlety, rather than… over-playing, shall I say.”

TesseracT started out back in 2003 as an archetypal djent band in a teenage Acle Kahney’s bedroom. What started as an outlet for creativity and experimentation grew and grew and the young guitarist posted clips of his technically accomplished heavy guitarwork on said forums, taking the resulting feedback on board and gradually improving his technique. He is a shining example of making the most of the modern world we live in.

Embodying the trans-national vibe of the genre, Frenchman, Julien Perier supplied vocals but the logistical difficulties meant that the band – completed by guitarist James Monteith, Jay Postones on drums and Williams – settled on Dan Tompkins on vocals in the summer of 2009. Now, while the band is musically attuned to the discordant sounds of their Swedish inspiration, Dan Tompkins brings a vast, haunting and melodic side to their sound. Eschewing screams for the majority of the songs, Tompkins’ soaring melodies bring a whole new world of accessibility and, with a US tour supporting Devin Townsend approaching, user-friendliness is exactly what they are aiming for.

“Our main hopes from the tour is to seriously raise our profile,” says Monteith. “It will definitely be the longest tour we’ve ever done – and the fact we’re playing with Devin and the fact that’s it in the States makes it by far the biggest thing we’ve undertaken, so we’re hoping that a lot of people are willing to check us out.”

“I imagine a lot of people will go to watch Devin,” Postones says on the matter. “Anyone who’s there to see us will either know who we are from listening to us on the internet – or hopefully they’ll definitely know who we are at the end.”

As the band’s first trip to North America and their longest stint on the road, Williams is at pains to point out how much it means to them. “We like music that we can share with other people, and that really is about not only being able to do this on the record but also doing it live,” he says. “We’ve spent the last three days just solidly rehearsing for this tour and we’re all knackered as a result! That just shows the importance of us being able to play well. We take a little bit of pride in what we do.”

None of this would have been possible without the support of the worldwide record deal the band signed with Century Media Records earlier in 2010. Having been signed by the US division it was clear that the label has grand plans for them Stateside and have started well by placing them on this tour. It’s an important area for TesseracT to gain exposure. Again we return to the world of technology and its inherently traceable exploits as James Monteith, displaying a high level of business nous, explains why the decision was made to sign to an internationally renowned label.

“We were looking at our stats on the net and we get 60 per cent of web hits from the US and most of the rest from mainland Europe,” says Monteith. “We’re not really focusing on America, but the US office of Century Media want us to go out there quite a bit.

“We’ve found in general after touring a few times that a lot more people in Europe are into our sort of sound than in the UK, which is interesting,” Kahney continues. “We can’t quite figure out why that is. We’ve got the wrong haircuts maybe! Hopefully people in the UK will come round to us, though.”

There is already talk of returning to America and touring Europe next year to support the release of their debut album which has also been produced by Acle Kahney and Amos Williams. In the meantime, however, you can whet your appetite with conceptual EP, Concealing Fate.

“It’s a concept; it’s a 27-minute long track in six parts and that means 27 minutes from the album but the album will have a lot of extra material on it,” explains the bassist. “The EP has six songs designed around each other. Now that’s a very prog thing, to have a concept record…”

Indeed it is. The title track started life as a two-minute clip, and then the band built the other 25 minutes around it, weaving riffs into other sections and bringing the whole piece of music back around from the last to the first part, completing a body of work that is quite rightly described as coherent. Kahney denies that the concept has any real message other than aesthetically.

“There’s no real story to it,” he shrugs. “I know Dan sang along to it but musically there are no intentional themes – just good grooves pieced together into a package. Some of the music from part one appearing in part six wraps it all up a little bit, but it wasn’t really a conscious thing. It’s just what happened after refining it for a couple of years.”

“It felt like it was more done and dusted when we finished mixing the album to be honest,” Kahney answers when asked whether this first release feels like the culmination of the best part of a decade’s work. “When it’s released it’ll be nice to have it set in stone, but it’ll nice to move on because we’ve already started writing album two. We’ve already got almost half an album’s worth of music.”

After a couple of years bubbling just under the surface of the UK’s prog metal underground, it appears that it’s time for TesseracT to show the world exactly who they are. You just get the feeling with this band that you won’t be asking questions about them for long.

After all, we do know that geeks will inherit the Earth.