Author: Logan Rocker

Lzzy Hale is too young to have been an actual 80s rock star, but she grew up dreaming of being one. When one of her favourite bands from that era, New Jersey hellraisers Skid Row, announced the departure of their latest singer, Erik Grönwall, for health reasons, she got the call to replace him, fronting the band for four spectacular shows. This is what it was like to temporarily land the gig of a lifetime.

Lzzy Hale, Skid Row frontwoman. It’s got a great ring to it. How did you end up singing with your childhood heroes? 

“Oh my goodness. It was a true full circle moment for me. When I told my dad, he was saying things like, ‘Hey, do you remember when you were rocking out to Skid Row’s Slave To The Grind in 1996, blasting it in your room?’ Every night [onstage with Skid Row], I was living out my teenage fantasy. Growing up, all I really wanted was to be that rock dude on MTV, riffing out in an 80s music video. It was so wonderful to be able to step into that role.” 

How did the guys first approach you with the idea? 

“Well, I’ve known Rachel [Bolan, bassist] and Snake [guitarist Dave ‘Snake’ Sabo] for the better part of a decade. One day, Rachel and I are eating cake at a birthday party. Out of the blue, he just asks me, ‘Would you ever consider playing some shows with us?’ My dumb brain goes, ‘Halestorm and Skid Row, that’d be cool!’ Obviously, that’s not what he means. 

He’s like, ‘No, dummy, I mean you fronting Skid Row!’ Not even a week later, he calls me up, and it’s actually happening. He asks, ‘Are you in?’ So I called my ‘adults’ in management and cleared my schedule immediately.” 

How did you prepare for it? 

“I was learning the songs like an Olympic sport. I’m singing on a trampoline, a stationary bike, working on my breath control. It was madness. But I was doing it because I wanted to be good for my friends. I can’t express how much I appreciate the trust they had in me. We didn’t even have proper rehearsal time, just one run-through together the day before the first show.” 

When the first show came around, how did you feel? 

“Before going out, I was nervous. Like, really nervous. But we got through it. By the second show, I just felt pure excitement. All I could think was, ‘This is amazing, I’m literally living out my teenage dreams right now!’” 

What was a standout moment for you? 

“On the third night, I’d started taking some liberties – holding notes a little longer, singing a little higher. When we got to Quicksand Jesus, I just kept dragging the song out. Snake played his usual guitar part, and I would imitate it with my voice – and he’d look panicked and play some more. After the show, he comes up like, ‘Lzzy, can I talk to you for a second?’ I immediately think I’m in trouble. But he gives me this huge hug. And he goes, ‘I have never gotten to improv with any of my singers.’ I will carry that with me forever.”

---

How did the fans react to the shows?

“When the shows were announced, it was like a dam broke loose. I was hearing from people back home that I hadn’t heard from in 15 years saying, ‘I’m bringing my daughter, I’m bringing my dad!’ There were two distinct groups that came to the shows: the Halestorm fans bringing their dads and the Skid Row diehards. Each night I would get such beautiful compliments from all kinds of people, even fans that had been seeing Skid Row since 1987.” 

Do any particular compliments spring to mind? 

“Well, Jon Bon Jovi knows who I am, apparently. He was doing a radio interview, and I was asked to submit a question. My name comes up, and Jon immediately goes, ‘Oh, Lzzy Hale, she’s incredible – she really needs to join Skid Row.’ I knew all his songs growing up – it was such a surreal moment for me.” 

There’s no love lost between Skid Row and their original singer, Sebastian Bach. Have you heard anything from him? 

“I did hear some feedback through a friend. Personally, I have no problem with Sebastian – I love him, y’know? It’s none of my business what went down with the band. But I was still nervous to hear what he thought of me. Apparently he was saying things to the effect of ‘I can’t stand those guys, but she’s great, she’s really cool.’ Isn’t that sweet?” 

Did the experience change you at all? 

“It’s been kind of life-changing for me. I’ve been in Halestorm since I was 13, then all of a sudden, I’m 40, but inside I’m still this 13-year-old girl living on a 20-acre farm with my parents. So, when everybody started noticing me, noticing my consistency, my passion, my commitment, it got a little scary. 

For most of my 30s, I was going through quite a bit of imposter syndrome. It was like, ‘Is that really me?’ When I turned 40, it was like something shifted. I’ve been giving myself a lot more grace and permission to be flawed, and I’m learning to accept what people think of me. I’m trying to believe that, for whatever reason, there is something inside of me that is beautiful that only I’m able to share. 

“Skid Row was the final push that I needed to knock some major insecurities. I got a multigenerational view of what I can bring to the table. It was also the first time I have performed without hiding behind an instrument, purely riding on my voice. When I got home after the shows, I walked back through my front door a totally different person. I’m forever grateful to those boys for asking me to tag along. I can’t wait to do it again.” 

So you’d be up for a second round? 

“We left it like, ‘I can’t marry you, but we can totally have an affair sometime.’ If the guys send up the bat signal in a time of crisis, I’ll be there.” 

Are you keeping yourself on top of the Skid Row stuff just in case? 

“Snake’s guitar tech is actually on tour with us right now – we’ve stolen him for now. When we went out to karaoke, he signed me up for all these Skid Row songs. We sent videos to the guys like, ‘Look, I still know the lyrics!!’”

Full-time freelancer, part-time music festival gremlin, Emily first cut her journalistic teeth when she co-founded Bittersweet Press in 2019. After asserting herself as a home-grown, emo-loving, nu-metal apologist, Clash Magazine would eventually invite Emily to join their Editorial team in 2022. In the following year, she would pen her first piece for Metal Hammer – unfortunately for the team, Emily has since become a regular fixture. When she’s not blasting metal for Hammer, she also scribbles for Rock Sound, Why Now and Guitar and more.

Assassins, superstitions and the work of Rudyard Kipling have all informed the lyrics on John Holden’s latest album Proximity & Chance, and his guestlist includes John Hackett, Sally Minnear and others.. The British songwriter tells Prog about working with Billy Sherwood, recreating orchestras on a budget and why he keeps a cautious distance from most streaming platforms.

---

Books, movies and popular song have always insisted it’s true: if you want something enough, it will happen for you. Then again, to suggest it’s all down to dedication and determination isn’t always helpful – doesn’t it inadvertently, insultingly suggest that musicians who are still struggling just aren’t trying hard enough?

Creatives needing inspiration to keep plugging away could take heart from Cheshire-based songwriter John Holden, who launched his career in earnest well into middle age, managed to recruit some major prog names to play alongside him, and has now released his fifth album in six years. All without being able to hold a tune himself on the vocal front: “My voice would strip paint,” he insists. “Honestly awful!”

His new LP Proximity & Chance might also be his best yet, wrapping intriguing topical themes and philosophical food for thought within stirring symphonic prog sounds and compelling songcraft. Not bad for a Yes fan who firmly parked his own musical ambition the best part of 40 years ago.

“I was in a few bands in my early 20s that went into the studio to record a few things in the early 80s,” he says. “But then things like getting married and jobs and mortgages came along and the whole of the musical side just disappeared.”

He eventually ended up running his own recruitment business, only for his dormant passion to belatedly awake. “Around the turn of the millennium I realised I missed playing music. So I bought myself some nice instruments – which I’d never been able to afford when I started – and I began messing around again.”

He used a digital audio workstation (DAW) to record his own material; and when his wife’s yoga teacher needed some music to accompany classes, he offered his services. It turned out she was also a singer, and lent her vocals to Holden’s slowly-evolving songs.

As a fan of Big Big Train, he sent their engineer Rob Aubrey some tracks. “He ripped them to pieces!” says Holden with a grin. “And rightly so.” However, Aubrey’s constructive criticism led Holden to focus on upping his game production-wise, and soon he was putting together what would become his debut album, 2018’s Capture Light.

But while doing so, he chanced his arm again, this time by reaching out to his teenage heroes’ latter-day bassist, Billy Sherwood. “I knew he did production work and I wanted to hear what my stuff would sound like professionally mixed and mastered. So I sent him some tracks. He said he really liked them, but I couldn’t afford him! He said, ‘Can’t you get your label to pay?’ I said, ‘What label?’

“He apologised and said he’d thought my demo was done in a professional studio. That was encouraging! Then he said since I didn’t have much money, he’d do the whole thing for the same rate he usually charges per minute. Really kind of him.

“So he worked on the tracks and came back saying, ‘I hope you don’t mind – I thought the guitar solo could be improved, so I’ve done one for you. I’ve added some bass as well.’ Wow!”

So it came to pass that Sherwood contributed to Capture Light, and has also played on several albums since. Holden found the collaboration “opened doors” to talent such as Oliver Wakeman, who appears on the current album, alongside Luke Machin (The Tangent, Karnataka) on guitar, Tiger Moth Tales singer Peter Jones and Sally Minnear on vocals, plus Silent Skies’ Vikram Shankar on piano, and John Hackett on flute.

Not a bad line-up – but on Proximity & Chance, it’s Holden’s vision that remains front and centre on a record whose themes concern the way humanity blindly puts its faith in superstition. People may use phrases like “touch wood” or avoid labelling the 13th floor of buildings, while failing to appreciate the role that fortuitous accidents of geography have played. Holden speaks of being inspired by Professor Brian Cox’s documentaries on how our planet offered the right conditions to nurture human life

Another theme is hubris, as addressed on the tapestry of pastoral folk, hard rock riffs and spiritual lament heard on The Man Who Would Be King (based on the Kipling stories), and Agents, which revisits the Russian agent poisonings in Salisbury a few years ago (‘If you run we will find you… this tourist trap is set’).

Musically he’s also been building a fuller sonic experience, creating a captivating soundscape for the theatrical Burnt Cork And Limelight, wherein piano, timpani and orchestral arrangements create something that could have come from The Phantom Of The Opera, while putting the listener into the head of the assassin who targeted Victorian actor William Terriss.

“I can’t hire a 60-piece orchestra,” Holden explains, “so I have to simulate those sounds. I listen to a lot of music that uses sample libraries and string pad effects to do that – to my ear, it sounds a bit fake. So I’ll record, say, eight separate violins, then mix them together. To me it makes for a truer sound. Trouble is, it takes ages!”

Still not a full-time artist, Holden wakes at 5am to begin work on his music before starting his day job. And despite being a multi-instrumentalist, he is also only too happy to invite outside input. “I know my limitations. If the song needs a really virtuoso piece of playing on guitar, or keyboard, I’ll just get in touch with Dave Bainbridge or Luke Machin; or if I want some amazing keyboards on there I’ll ask Vikram Shankar.

“For vocals, if I can use Pete Jones or Joe Payne or one of these people, it elevates it straight away. I’ll talk them through what I’m after, but I’ll also say, ‘Send me what you would do with it.’ And sometimes I’ll rearrange the whole piece to incorporate that.”

Maybe that’s one of the factors helping Holden’s go from strength to strength. Yet you may find your options to hear it limited, compared to the on-tap basis that of other artists’ music. He hasn’t played live, because, he explains, “to recreate my music you’d probably need more people onstage than would be in the audience. I’m not in this to make money – but I’m also not in it to lose money.”

For similar reasons, if you search his name on Spotify, you’ll draw a blank. “I refuse to put my stuff up for streaming,” he says. “It might do OK for you if you’re Taylor Swift, but at my level it’s like a turkey voting for Christmas.”

For the price of a couple of drinks, though, Proximity & Chance is a VFM investment, and Holden deserves all the remuneration his listeners can offer him, given the inspiring way he built a body of work from nothing. “I’m saying, ‘Look, if I can do it, anyone can do it,’” he says. And who would have the heart to deny him?

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock. 

By 1995, R.E.M. hadn’t toured in six years but you could hardly say the decision to take themselves off the road had caused a downturn in fortunes for the Athens, Georgia quartet. Quite the opposite: during that period, they hunkered down in the studio and released a pair of early 90s classics in 1991’s Out Of Time and quickfire follow-up Automatic For The People, which came out the following year. Both sold in the multi-multi-millions and made R.E.M., already a sizeable, arena-playing band, absolutely huge. Monstrous, in fact.

They were ready to get back out there and their 1994 record Monster was written with big stages and bigger crowds in mind: after the low-key, acoustic-heavy sounds that made up much of Automatic For The People, this was loud, crunching rock music built for mass projection. The tour, which hit the road 30 years ago this week when the band kicked off a near year-long trek with shows in Australia, would also require an about-turn from frontman Michael Stipe, who cut an introspective albeit captivating figure for some of the songs across those two records (OK, maybe he wasn’t so introspective on Shiny Happy People). He was certainly in the mood to embrace his inner flamboyant showman, and a few years ago he told this writer about what it entailed to get into the zone for the band’s biggest shows yet.

“I was so focussed on that tour,” he said. “Performing and being frontman required an immense amount of psychic energy, moreso than being a drummer. I say that with all the love in my hear for every drummer who’s ever sat behind a drumkit but being the frontman requires a different level of psychic energy to carry the crowd, to life them, to pull them up and out when they were not completely present, to really create the mood and the atmosphere that’s required for a successful live performance.”

Going onstage each night on a tour that took in arenas and then stadiums across the globe was an experience that Stipe described as “nerve-wracking” but he said at every show, by the third song he’d be firing on all cylinders.

“It’s always the third song. That’s when the adrenaline takes over and I become a Colossus of Maroussi,” he explained, referring to the titular character in Henry Miller’s 1939 novel. “I can do anything. Henry Miller is gonna write a book about me! It’s an absurd journey through adrenaline. Something that all of us will experience at least once in our lives, I experienced as part of my job for the best part of 32 years.”

After a batch of cancelled shows so that drummer Bill Berry could recuperate after suffering a brain aneurysm onstage, the tour resumed in April 1995 and the band arrived in the UK for a run of massive outdoor shows in good nick. Stipe had personally overseen the support slots, which included Blur, The Cranberries (“god bless Dolores and her spirit,” Stipe said) and Sleeper. “We had great opening acts,” he marvels. “I can say that I was always a fan of Blur and so being able to see them perform was a great joy.”

Radiohead also opened up for the Losing My Religion stars, a meeting that led to the new groups becoming well-acquainted and frontmen Stipe and Thom Yorke forging a lifelong friendship. “I went and presented myself to Thom,” Stipe recalled of the first time they spoke. “And then he presented me to the rest of the group. I think we were sunbathing together outside of the dressing rooms. It was a beautiful summer day.”

Selecting such a stellar support line-up, Stipe explained, was a good way of gee’ing himself ahead of his own performance. “I just watched from the side of the stage three astonishing acts do what they do and raise the bar,” he stated. “Not being naturally competitive is a good thing in these kind of situations because if you’re R.E.M., you have the ability to handpick the opening acts and so you choose bands you want to watch on the stage, but then they’re raising the bar with every performance so I’m sure that’s what was going through my head.”

“Those giant outdoor things,” he continued, “they’re really fun but it takes a different kind of psychic energy to pull the audience towards you through the entire course of a set. You have to really reach the back rows, you have to be at the back of the field, near the toilets, near the T-shirt stands, engaging those people as much as those right up front.”

By that point, Stipe said, he had become the frontman who could do that. “I had become this creature who could do that thing and do it really well. It was terrifying because since 1989, the size of the show had grown immensely.”

In terms of adapting to the now-gigantic setting, the band took inspiration from their old pals U2, Stipe said. “It was presenting it in a way that was pulling from the work they did with Achtung Baby and Zooropa,” he said, “and pulling from glam-rock and the historically British idea of music as theatre and presenting something in a very different way than R.E.M. had before. It was a new experience for us and something I was having a great deal of fun with.”

It was a role that Stipe would successfully inhabit for the rest of R.E.M.’s career. As you can see from their Glastonbury performance below, he was born to be a frontman doing his thing in front of the masses.

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.