Author: Logan Rocker

Known for a sultry fusion of blues, country, rock and folk, Bonnie Raitt has been releasing albums since 1971. Almost two decades later, her career went stellar with the multi-platinum album Nick Of Time. Its follow-up, 1991’s Luck Of The Draw, included the über ballad I Can’t Make You Love Me, later covered by George Michael, Adele and many more.

Below, the Californian-born singer, guitarist and political activist previews her upcoming European tour.

Having toured here two years ago, this is a fairly speedy return.

I wanted to play more than one city in Scotland, and other places in England that we didn’t get to last time, so I’m excited to be coming back again.

Prior to that 2023 tour you won three more Grammys in one night for your album Just Like That…, bringing your total haul of Grammys to a whopping thirteen.

The genre of Americana has gotten so big, I wasn’t surprised to get nominated in that category [for the song Made Up Mind], but I was really surprised to win Song Of The Year [with the album’s title track]. The Daily Mail had me on the cover saying: “Unknown blues singer wins Grammy”. That cracked me up.

Having success with a self-written song must have felt sweet, given that you are sometimes seen as an ‘interpreter’ rather than a writer.

It was wonderful. I was even more thrilled by the response to that song generally as it’s about organ donation, so if it brought more attention to that subject then it was doubly sweet.

But you’re not precious about the source of your material: a good song is a good song, regardless of who wrote it.

Oh yeah. And it would be quite boring for me to have my own view only. I love mixing a Richard Thompson song with an Al Green cover or something by John Prine. That’s part of the joy of what I do and why I’ve kept it up for so long, and also hopefully some of the reason that the fans love what I do.

Your most famous recording, I Can’t Make You Love Me, was a previously uncelebrated song written by a pair of unknown songwriters.

It was great that they [Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin] sent that song to me. When I heard it I almost fell over due to its greatness. It’s a stunning, classic heartbreak song with sophisticated lyrics.

Achieving mainstream success with your tenth album, Nick Of Time, at the age of forty, did you appreciate it more?

Absolutely. I don’t regret anything that happened until that point, but it was frustrating not to have the records in the store when I had worked so hard, selling out tours and working ten months per year. Also, I had been sober for a year when I wrote the album, which is sort of what it’s about.

You were briefly signed to Paisley Park Records by Prince.

Actually, I wasn’t, though we did discuss a collaboration. I had been dropped by Warners, and he said he loved my music. I went to Minnesota to meet him, but all he played me was finished songs that were not in my key and not topics that I would sing about, whereas I had wanted to work on songs from scratch. So it never got off the ground.

What was Prince like, in your experience?

He was pretty shy. You’d have dinner with him and he wasn’t good at making eye contact. But otherwise he was like you expected.

For an artist, what’s it like to play at a church of music like London’s Royal Albert Hall?

Oh, my goodness. I was so nervous the first time. I had never felt that I would get to that place, and, incredibly, we actually sold it out.

What about the songs you’ll be playing on this tour? Do you stick rigidly to a set-list?

No. I’m always conscious of what we played the last time we were in a city. This time, with no new album to promote, I can relax and pull out some deep cuts.

Three years down the line from Just Like That…, are you prepping a follow-up?

No. We’ve been on the road for so long there hasn’t been the time.

As an extraordinarily principled and compassionate person, and also a social activist, living in the US right now, each day must bring a new and different nightmare?

You couldn’t have put it any better. It’s an unprecedented situation. Our immigrant community is being rounded up unfairly, then there are the threatened cuts in Medicaid, and now there’s no more research on vaccines for the pandemic. The climate crisis gets worse, they’re looking to drill off the California Coast. There are no firefighters for the next disaster. It’s an illegal takeover by a man who is, in my mind, a threat to our democracy.

Do you fear for the nation’s future?

I do. And also for that of the world. We need to work together, and it isn’t happening.

Bonnie Raitt’s European tour begins on June 1 in Dublin, while US dates begin in August. For full dates and tickets, visit Bonnie’s website.

Dave Ling was a co-founder of Classic Rock magazine. His words have appeared in a variety of music publications, including RAW, Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Prog, Rock Candy, Fireworks and Sounds. Dave’s life was shaped in 1974 through the purchase of a copy of Sweet’s album ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’, along with early gig experiences from Status Quo, Rush, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Yes and Queen. As a lifelong season ticket holder of Crystal Palace FC, he is completely incapable of uttering the word ‘Br***ton’.

As The Cure arrived at 1987’s seventh album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Robert Smith and the ever-revolving gang were a very different proposition to the band that had started the decade. Gone was the tightly-wound, bleak intensity of their early albums, the gothic gloom replaced by a more two-pronged MO that swayed between fizzy, indelible pop songs and intricately-layered and atmospheric rock.

You could argue that the former approach reached its peak on Kiss Me…, released on 26th May, 1987, with the album’s imperious standout Just Like Heaven. A song both weighted with pop perfection and one that feels light-as-a-feather, it is the ultimate distillation of a band everything that made them such outsider heroes into a mainstream sound. Robert Smith agrees. “It’s the best pop song The Cure have ever done,” he told Blender in 2003. “All the sounds meshed, it was one take and it was perfect.”

Given the sense of blissed-out euphoria the song evokes, its creation was a little more mundane. Smith was living in a two-bedroom flat in Maida Vale, north London, at the time he came up with its warm, strummed chord sequence and yearning melodic hook, a product of forcing himself to get to work every day. “Just about the only discipline I had in my life was self-imposed,” he stated. “I set myself of writing 15 days a month; otherwise I’d have just got up in mid-afternoon and watched TV until the pubs opened then gone out drinking.”

You imagine that the Cure leader certainly gave himself a pat on the back that day, feeling satisfied he’d written a catchy little number and telling Blender he only realised later that he’d crafted a nod to The Only Ones’ wiry 1978 hit Another Girl, Another Planet.

After being something of a songwriting despot in the early years of The Cure, though, Smith was determined that Kiss Me… would be a more collaborative affair and was intrigued to see where the song might go in the hands of his band, at that point featuring Lol Tolhurst on keyboards, Simon Gallup on bass, Porl Thompson on guitar and Boris Williams on drums.

What was originally a slower, more considered composition was immediately transformed into something else by the rhythmic punchiness of drummer Williams. “He introduced a drum fill that gave me the idea of introducing the instruments one by one before the vocal comes in,” Smith explained.

Having gotten the music to the track down at Studio Miraval in the south of France, Smith decided to hand over the as-yet-wordless song (because the singer hadn’t written the lyrics yet) to French TV show Les Enfants du Rock when they asked if The Cure could provide them with a theme tune. His reasoning was sound. “It meant the music would be familiar to millions of Europeans even before it was release,” he said.

Now Smith’s focus turned to the lyrics, the song’s meaning scattered with signposts to different parts of his adolescence. The iconic opening line – “Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick…” – refers to Smith’s love of bamboozling his pals with magic tricks as a kid, the rest of the words delving into a night he’d had as a teen when he and his friends had been drinking and decided to go for a nocturnal stroll. “It was something that happened on Beachy Head, on the south coast of England,” he told Blender. “The song is about hyper-ventilating – kissing and fainting to the floor.”

The reason that the song’s Tim Pope-video ended with Smith embracing wife Mary is because that’s what happened in real life, he said. “Mary dances with me in the video because she was the girl, so it had to be her. The idea is that one night like that it worth 1,000 hours of drudgery.”

A few months after its parent album arrived, Just Like Heaven was released as a single, in October, 1987. Its impact was modest at the time, becoming a Top 40 hit in the UK and reaching number 40 in the US but time has given Just Like Heaven the kudos it deserves, now regarded as a Cure classic. Covered by a range of artists including Dinosaur Jr. (whose version is Smith’s favourite Cure cover ever), Katie Melua, The Lumineers and LA’s Section String Quartet, it has become one of The Cure’s most well-known and best-loved songs. One a groggy winter morning in early 1987, Robert Smith had to force himself to get up and get to work on writing songs. We’ll be forever glad that he did.

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.

Founded in the early 1990s and originally in existence until the end of that decade, underground British black metal label Cacophonous Records helped launch the careers of Cradle Of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, Sigh and more. In 2016. as the reactivated label prepared to release a shelved CoF album, label founder Neil ‘Frater Nihil’ Harding, the band’s frontman Dani Filth and more looked back on how Cacophonous shaped extreme metal.

In an era when there are almost as many record labels as there are bands making records, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when labels were fewer and further between, not least in the world of extreme metal. Back in the 80s and 90s, being signed became a genuine status symbol not least because, pre-internet, having a label behind you was often the only way to get your releases into the hands of fans and your music into the ears of potential listeners. No Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify or Facebook back then – hell, we didn’t even have MySpace.

It was against such a background that the explosion of second wave black metal took place and almost all the key releases of the 90s were scattered over just a handful of labels: Osmose, Candlelight, Deathlike Silence, Fullmoon, Misanthropy, Merciless, No Fashion and, of course, Cacophonous Records, who helped launch the likes of Cradle Of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, Bal-Sagoth, Gehenna, Primordial and Sigh.

The roots of Cacophonous are actually embedded in another iconic UK label, Vinyl Solution. Growing from the Portobello Road record store of the same name, it offered a diverse roster from the worlds of techno, hip hop and hardcore punk, alongside significant thrash and death metal bands such as Cancer, Macabre, Cerebral Fix and Bolt Thrower.

Initially folding lyric sheets in exchange for a few records, before eventually taking over the mail order, Frater Nihil – then known simply as Neil Harding – was pretty well-versed in the business by the time he was offered a position overseeing the label. Almost immediately he set about to separate its metal component and turn it into a new self-contained label; Cacophonous was born.

The plan at first was to just release seven-inch records and this is what he did, showcasing underground acts such as Sigh, Kawir, Psychic Pawn, Megiddo and Monolith. The latter was a homegrown thrash/death metal band perhaps most notable for featuring drummer Nick Barker, a soon-to-be member of Cradle Of Filth – as it turned out, it was a crossing of paths with Cradle in 1993, and their induction of Barker, that would set the course for both parties.

“The band left a copy of the Total Fucking Darkness demo in the shop while I was out,” Neil recalls. “I listened to it and thought it was amazing, so I called them up the next day and we went for a beer and talked about the future. They shared a similar ideology; it was Satanic music as I saw it and I thought it would fit very well into what I wanted to do with the label. Cradle were the first band that you listened to and thought, ‘This is the future,’ and really everything sprang from that. It was like, ‘OK, this is the band everyone should hear.’”

“I knew about the store at Portobello because I worked at my granddad’s flower shop in London every Christmas,” remembers Dani. “At lunchtime they’d say, ‘Go for lunch, here’s 20 quid,’ and I’d jump on a train, and come back with all these records saying, ‘Oh, that was delicious.’

“Principle… was originally going to be a seven-inch,” he continues. “We’d been on tour with Cancer and Nick was their drum tech. He came down to produce the EP and in the course of one day he went on to become the drummer and the EP became an album. It all happened very quickly, which was very exciting for a young band.”

Released early in 1994 with the memorable title The Principle Of Evil Made Flesh and the historic catalogue number NIHIL1, it represented Cacophonous’s most ambitious release to date, completely redefining the nature of the label in the process. Neil abandoned the seven-inch release schedule and instead concentrated on breaking Cradle. This was a much bigger task than it might sound, for while the band would ultimately sell half a million copies of the album, in the early days they were met with considerable bemusement and even active resistance. Even a 1993 UK tour with Emperor (a thing of legend today) struggled to pull attendees. “I remember at one show there were literally two people,” Dani laughs. “We ended up saying, ‘This isn’t going anywhere’ and walked off halfway through a song.”

Black metal was still a pretty unknown quantity in ’93 and ’94, particularly in the UK, and distributors baulked at this ballsy, corpsepainted six-piece. Many media outlets refused supportive coverage altogether due to the genre’s associations with desecration, arson, murder and totalitarian politics, and a ‘Satanic panic’ of sorts arose, with scare stories by UK tabloids and even the BBC. At one point both the group and Neil even had to sign a disclaimer distancing themselves from far-right politics in order to get distribution.

But while there were certainly elements of hysteria at work, there’s no doubt that both the band and particularly Cacophonous were intended as more than purely musical ventures. Here was an overtly Satanic record label that unapologetically took inspiration from some pretty extreme occult groups, a point largely reflected by Cradle themselves and evident in Principle…’s lyrics and artwork. Most telling of all was the final (unlisted) track, Imperium Tenebrarum – essentially a short statement of intent, spoken by Neil himself.

“You had various occult groups, people were talking about Satanic war and changing things from an occult sense,” says Neil. “There was a notion among people who listened to Satanic black metal that you were part of something greater. That’s why on Imperium Tenebrarum we’re talking about burning down temples and marching over dogma, because that’s what I really believed in and wanted to showcase with the label. And that’s partly why I championed Cradle.”

“There was a feeling that there was something revolutionary happening,” adds Dani. “It felt like the time was right. That was ’93. Metal had died a horrible death, grunge had killed the mainstream off, so it felt like a revolution. There were bands popping up all over the place, you had those famous magazines covers, the church burning, you didn’t know what was happening day to day and the seriousness of it just added to the excitement.”

A different but equally significant British band Cacophonous signed was Bal-Sagoth. Far less grave than Cradle and with fantasy literature rather than occult leanings, their blend of symphonic extreme metal and heroic atmosphere provided a musical template for future bands such as Turisas and Ensiferum, and Cacophonous would end up releasing the first half of the band’s six-album discography.

“They’ve got a very particular fanbase, but in some cases have wider appeal than Cradle,” says Neil of the Yorkshire clan. “There are more people I’ve met over the years who aren’t into metal per se who know Bal-Sagoth.”

While the albums were all larger-than-life, the band had been so disappointed by their demo that they only sent it out on request and even today vocalist Byron Roberts credits Neil’s foresight with regard to the signing.

“I sent a big letter with the tape,” he recalls, “I said, ‘If we’re ever given a decent recording budget, this is what we’d want: big symphonic keyboards, intros, extensive spoken parts. It’s basically supposed to sound very epic and orchestral.’ Neil saw the potential in those songs and offered us a three-album deal. So that was our big break because none of the other labels wanted to know.”

Irish Pagan black metallers Primordial were another early signing, the band releasing their acclaimed debut full-length Imrama in 1995. Neil was also keen to pick up some of the black metal talent coming out of Norway and, maintaining a focus on the more symphonic and ethereal side of things, he signed both Gehenna and Dimmu Borgir, the latter a tip from Emperor guitarist Samoth. Cacophonous’s release of Dimmu’s second album, Stormblåst, ultimately broke the band to a much wider audience, laying the groundwork for its follow-up, Enthrone Darkness Triumphant, which ultimately propelled them toward the mainstream.

Not all the label’s signings would prove so accessible, of course. Japanese black metallers Sigh signed to Cacophonous after the death of their former label owner, Mayhem mainman Euronymous. They then proceeded to perplex both their fanbase and their new label with a series of superb but increasingly experimental works integrating elements of jazz, rock and classical. Their acclaimed Hail Horror, Hail album even prompted the label to put a disclaimer on the back of the sleeve to explain its unusual nature to the unwary.

“When we were making Hail Horror, Hail, we seriously though that nobody would like it,” says Sigh founder Mirai. “Neil actually came to Japan while we were recording it and frowned upon what we were doing. We were really happy to see that. When a lot of magazines ended up giving it a high score and it was ranked in the albums of the year, we were so surprised.”

Sigh might have represented the more challenging side of the scene, but in general by the mid-90s black and occult metal were becoming increasingly popular. The label’s sales reflected this, and the growth led to the recruitment of more staff, most notably one Julie Weir. “Suddenly I was selling 10,000 units instead of 1,000 units; it was making money and it wasn’t just a bedroom project anymore,” Neil explains. “That’s why Julie came in, to do the things I didn’t want to do. All I wanted to do was listen to demos, go to gigs, sign bands and sort out artwork and recordings. I didn’t want to publicise what I was doing.”

Despite (and in part perhaps because of) this rapid expansion, Cacophonous began facing a number of challenges. A falling out with Cradle over the proposed second album, Dusk… And Her Embrace, resulted in the group departing the label altogether and re-recording the album for Music For Nations. While their contractual compromise, 1996 opus V Empire, did prove to be the most successful Cacophonous release ever, the loss of the band was a significant blow. Some rather Cradle-esque examples of vampire-themed goth/black metal were released by bands such as Finland’s Twilight Ophera and Germany’s Ancient Ceremony, but made little real impact. Meanwhile, other big sellers such as Dimmu Borgir and Bal-Sagoth also departed, signing contracts with Nuclear Blast. This was an awkward situation as the German label had been distributing for Cacophonous and led to a split between the two parties, one that would ultimately spell disaster for the UK label.

“We found another distributor who wanted to get into the metal market – they mainly dealt with rock and punk – and made a switch,” recalls Neil. “But they had no clue, no contacts and they didn’t have the same customer base, so instead of pre-selling 5,000 in Germany we plummeted and were selling 500. Effectively we lost our place in the market and suddenly we were being leapfrogged by lesser labels and there was no money. We weren’t getting the sales and so bands weren’t coming to us.”

The label was more or less silent between 1999 and 2002, and during these years a sister label arose, namely Visible Noise, driven by both Julie and, initially at least, Neil. Cacophonous would make a brief resurgence with a number of distinctly different groups between 2002 and 2004 (“I decided to try something new with blackened metal and deathcore,” says Neil, “it was a rebranding”) but the writing was on the wall and Cacophonous sank into the shadows.

A decade later, a conversation between Neil and Julie regarding the possibility of making vinyl releases of some of the back catalogue quickly ignited a spark that led to the two agreeing to bring back the label as a fully fledged operation with both reissues and new signings, including The King Is Blind and The Infernal Sea. And rather poetically, two decades later, Cacophonous finally released the original, unheard recording of Dusk… And Her Embrace by Cradle of Filth, featuring a completely different lineup than the version released in 1996.

“There are only two people who had the masters, Dani and myself, so if it had ever come out beforehand it would be pretty obvious who it was,” Neil laughs. “So I was always looking for a legitimate way to put those out. I hadn’t seen Dani for five years but we always hit it off and we always lapsed back into that 90s camaraderie.”

“It was a different era of the band,” says Dani of the unreleased album, “and that’s why it’s important it comes out. At the time we were very inspired by bands like Emperor and Immortal and this version harks more to that era than the more polished bombast of the MFN version. So it literally speaks of an era that will never be again. There were legal issues in the past but it’s been 20 years and 20 years is a long time – you get less for murder!”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 281, March 2016

Kneecap have issued a statement in response to the charge which they deny, and which they claim is “political policing” from the “British establishmemt”.

“To restrict our ability to travel. To prevent us speaking to young people across the world. To silence voices of compassion. To prosecute artists who dare speak out.

“We stand proudly with the people,” the statement concludes. “You stand complicit with the war criminals. We are on the right side of history. You are not.

“We will fight you in court. We will win. Free Palestine.”

Video footage of the band’s performance at the 02 Forum circulated on social media following the West Belfast trio’s controversial performance at Coachella festival, which led to discussions about the band in the UK Parliament.

In a subsequent statement, Kneecap apologised to the families of both late MPs.

Israel has been accused of carrying out genocidal acts during the ongoing war in Gaza by numerous organisations, including the UN Human Rights Council. Israel’s military campaign, sparked by the October 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas on Israeli soil that saw around 1,200 people killed and 251 people taken hostage, has resulted in the death of over 50,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Israel has denied any genocidal intent, which requires certain thresholds to be met in order to be legally recognised; a case brought forward by South Africa to the The International Court of Justice accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians is ongoing.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

With phones banned from the Skeletour, an initiative which means audiences approach each night of the tour with open minds and only vague ideas as to the magic which is about to unfold, you’ll need to grab a ticket to experience the fully immersive multimedia spectacular for yourself. But speaking to Metal Hammer from Chicago, where he’s currently on tour with Beyoncé, the chilled-out, affable and supremely talented Tobias Rylander reveals how he brought Ghost’s new sanctum of darkness to life.

Going from doing lights in a tiny punk rock club to designing stages for Beyoncé’s Renaissance world tour is quite the journey…

“Yeah, I’ve been really blessed. Like I said, I have no education whatsoever, so I’ve been absolutely self taught. I used to take maybe six lights and a console on the tour bus, and do everything myself: programming, setting up the lights, and running them. In 2012 I was asked to do more and more design work, for acts like The xx and The Strokes, at which point it became too much for me to do everything, myself. That’s how I started like to drift more and more into not just doing the design, but also production design. So if there was custom risers being built, or video screens, I started to design that, and decide how things looked more holistically.”

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

There’s an old saying in boxing: it’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get back up. In 2020 Caligula’s Horse defied the prevailing mood of doom and gloom with the uplifting Rise Radiant, and lead guitarist Sam Vallen told Prog about the beauty of human fragility, becoming a dad – and how a control freak trusted someone else with the mixing duties.

At a time when the world is in turmoil, optimism feels like an act of defiance – and
with Rise Radiant, Caligula’s Horse celebrate the resilience of the human spirit and mankind’s capacity for picking itself up and getting back on its feet in the face of adversity.

The new record is the Australian band’s most ambitious and diverse thus far and, in a break from its 2017 predecessor In Contact, it’s not a concept album. That was a deliberate choice, explains lead guitarist and producer Sam Vallen, who founded the group with singer Jim Grey in Brisbane in 2011.

Always eager to keep moving forwards, they were determined not to repeat what they’d made in the past; so as they began pre-production the quintet discussed how to approach what would become their fifth album.

“We take stock of what we’ve done,” says Vallen. “Maybe with the previous album, but more likely it’s a larger take on the things we’ve done since the very beginning of our career. We try to work out how we can position the next record as being a bit of a contrast. From Bloom [their 2015 third release] to In Contact, we went from having this very austere and direct album to a record which was much more dynamically intense and much more of a concept album. When it came time to do Rise Radiant we said, ‘How do we break away from that without repeating what we’ve done with the other non-concept albums?’”

They decided to write music that feels more personal than ever, expressing its messages without the need for a cast of fictional characters. “Each of the songs should embody something totally different; rather than talking through mythology or an extended metaphor, a lot of it instead is ‘I’ or ‘we’ or ‘me’.”

However, Vallen continues: “The problem with us is that we’re prog wankers and we immediately start moving towards similar thematic ground. When we did start on the lyrics and the meaning, we realised there actually was a shared theme – not enough that you could call it a concept album, but enough that you could trace it through the different songs. That theme, when we uncovered it, was what that I’d call
human experience.”

This led the band to drawing on their unique lived experiences in writing the lyrics. “As we started to delve into that more, we realised there is one particular human experience that this album embodied: what we referred to as ‘getting back up again.’ It’s really easy for an artist to preach about strength, power, love – things that are very positive and very lofty and, I would argue, safe. We thought, ‘What about how beautiful human fragility is?’ It’s not about what you overcome, it’s about the very fact that you’re willing to get back up and face another challenge.”

The idea resonated with Vallen and Grey from their own histories, dealing with changes in the band’s line-up, enduring tough times on the road, and facing transformations in their lives offstage. “Oceanrise is a musing on your own mortality and saying there’s a beauty to the idea of legacy, the idea that you are temporary,” reveals Vallen. “The Ascent and Autumn are two parts in this longer examination of fatherhood that Jim and I were both really fascinated by, because we’ve both recently become fathers.

“We wanted to explore the idea of being a prospective father, knowing this is coming, knowing there’s a big change, knowing you need to overcome that change. In other words, looking at it almost selfishly, as you do when you approach fatherhood.

“But then The Ascent takes over immediately after that and you realise that, the moment you have a child, your life is no longer about you in a really beautiful way. Your ego is nothing, because what’s much more important is being a guiding light for a new soul, someone whose legacy far outstretches your own.

So we wrote it using this mountain metaphor: instead of approaching it as this summit you must scale, it’s about creating some beacons as far up as you can and accepting that you will never finish the climb. Maybe that’s a more beautiful part of the story, knowing you have set as much up as you can for those who follow.”

In addition to his guitar-playing and songwriting duties, Vallen is also his band’s producer. In that latter role he’s a stickler for making detailed demos of songs. “I teach production and a couple of other things at university,” he says, “One of the things I always tell people is, when you’re with your bandmates and everything is playing at deafening volume, everything sounds exciting and amazing and perfect – but when you record all that and listen back to it, suddenly it doesn’t sound so perfect any more.

“A simulation of the finished product – even if it doesn’t yet have the liveliness of the performances, the energy that all our interaction brings – is evidence of whether something works or not. I can start pulling on all those little threads to make sure they’re all perfect. In that sense, I could take or leave being an instrumentalist, to be honest. I enjoy creating that part and I enjoy the performing element of it all, but what I much prefer is that big picture.”

He picks out Steven Wilson as a source of production inspiration. “He’s always been a fantastic guitar player,” he explains. “Admittedly, the guitar solos in Caligula’s Horse are probably a little more flashy, just by virtue of the fact that we like this big exuberant progressive metal thing.”

But the main thing Vallen admires is Wilson’s visionary ability to create records that have a completely different aesthetic from anything else around them. “He’s reinventing himself constantly. I’m not even comparing our process to that, but Robert Fripp from King Crimson is another good example in the same style of music. Maybe our style tends to have an in for that type of personality – let’s call it the ‘control freak madman!’”

Control freakery notwithstanding, Vallen handed mixing responsibility to Jens Bogren, who’s worked with Opeth and Katatonia, and who also mastered Bloom and In Contact. One of the most outstanding features of Rise Radiant is the dynamic range of the music, from full-blown prog metal heaviness to moments where the volume drops from a torrent to a trickle. It’s an attribute rarely found in modern mixing, where everything is often heavily compressed in the wake of the loudness wars – but Vallen was confident that Bogren would bring out the full textures of the sonic landscape the band had built in the studio.

“He’s been one of my biggest audio heroes since the mid-2000s,” he says. “I remember hearing Opeth’s Watershed, but also albums like Katatonia’s The Great Cold Distance; he did a whole bunch of progressive metal albums in that period which sounded unlike anything I was hearing around them at the time, especially with Watershed. You’re not hearing a big snare trigger; you’re not hearing guitars that are always full and always huge. It had a contour I wanted on this album, where there’s all this variety in sound.”

Vallen’s notes for Bogren included the direction that the album should sound raw, real, performative and dynamic, and the latter attribute was further intensified with input from Thomas Waber, head of InsideOut, who encouraged Vallen and Bogren to go further during the mixing process, making the quiet moments really contrast with the big, heavy sections.

“We were going through the mixes while Jens was doing them and Thomas was saying, ‘It’s too loud, it’s too loud.’ We’d say, ‘We thought it was really quiet, but okay, let’s bring it back a bit more.’ I remember letting that sit with me for a little while, listening to these far less compressed, very dynamically mixed songs. If music is going to have impact, it needs to have a contour. It can’t just be a flat line of sound; it must have a sense of ebb and flow.”

The album’s central messages about resilience, temporality and fragility seem to capture the zeitgeist of a world under the shadow of a pandemic. Caligula’s
Horse had scheduled an entire touring regime to support Rise Radiant, but all those plans have now been put on hold. However, despite the impossibility of going on the road, they were determined to press ahead with putting the album out into the world while the band themselves are staying home in Australia.

“We said, ‘It’s a really important time to release an album that has a positive message,’ It kind of foils the pessimistic views that so many people seem to be extolling about the music industry right now. It’s impossible to look at music forums and not feel this sense of apathy.

“So we thought it was important that we stuck to our guns. We made sure our fans didn’t feel like we were pulling the rug when everyone is already experiencing something kind of terrible right now. We’re still there offering that little piece of music that we uniquely offer the world, for good or ill.”

After starting his writing career covering the unforgiving world of MMA, David moved into music journalism at Rhythm magazine, interviewing legends of the drum kit including Ginger Baker and Neil Peart. A regular contributor to Prog, he’s written for Metal Hammer, The Blues, Country Music Magazine and more. The author of Chasing Dragons: An Introduction To The Martial Arts Film, David shares his thoughts on kung fu movies in essays and videos for 88 Films, Arrow Films, and Eureka Entertainment. He firmly believes Steely Dan’s Reelin’ In The Years is the tuniest tune ever tuned.

Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets have announced that they have released a Steven Wilson ATMOS mix of their version of Pink Floyd‘s 1972 classic Echoes to streaming platforms.

The band originally released the track on vinyl as a Record Store Day release back in April, which was recorded at the band’s show at the Centennial Hall in Frankfurt, Germany on August 1st, 2024.

The band introduced Echoes to their set in 2022, having not performed it prior to that. David Gilmour has gone on record as stating that he is unlikely to perform the epic from the band’s Meddle album without the late Richard Wright.

“I wouldn’t do that without Rick,” Gilmour said back in 2022. “There’s something that’s specifically so individual about the way that Rick and I play in that, that you can’t get someone to learn it and do it just like that. That’s not what music’s about.”

Prog said of the band’s new live take on the 23-minute track, “Echoes comes to define the evening… This is where music crosses the line into art, as it becomes an all-encompassing experience. Sight and sound overwhelm the senses as more than a few members of the audience are seen wiping tears from their eyes.”

Listen to Echoes.

Writer and broadcaster Jerry Ewing is the Editor of Prog Magazine which he founded for Future Publishing in 2009. He grew up in Sydney and began his writing career in London for Metal Forces magazine in 1989. He has since written for Metal Hammer, Maxim, Vox, Stuff and Bizarre magazines, among others. He created and edited Classic Rock Magazine for Dennis Publishing in 1998 and is the author of a variety of books on both music and sport, including Wonderous Stories; A Journey Through The Landscape Of Progressive Rock.