Author: Logan Rocker

Last September, Uriah Heep announced a final series of world tour dates billed as The Magician’s Farewell. As the trek begins with seven UK dates, ever-present guitarist Mick Box and Bernie Shaw, the band’s singer since 1986, explain that even after 55 years we haven’t seen the last of the Heep just yet.

Mick, as Heep’s elder statesman can we assume that saying farewell was your decision? And how did you break it to the rest of the band?

Mick Box: Having been there from day one you can kind of say that it came from me, but actually it was a joint decision. None of us are getting any younger, and since Brexit and covid the touring side of the business is becoming tougher and tougher, making it almost impossible to do the really long tours that we like to do. Tour bus prices have tripled. The Government only allows us ninety days outside of the country. It’s more and more difficult, on every front.

It’s the end of the road, but it’s a long road.

Box: This is only the end of long, arduous touring, and that process will take two to three years.

Bernie Shaw: A normal year of touring for us was two hundred days away from home, but Brexit has really kicked all of that in the pants. The only countries that used to require a carnet [a full list of a group’s equipment and merchandise] were Russia and Switzerland. Now it’s everywhere.

Does the door remain open for playing live?

Shaw: Yeah. We’ll stick to the local stuff – things like festivals and weekend gigs. Those are still fair game.

If the Download Festival was to offer Heep a slot, you’d be there?

Box: [Enthusiastically] Oh, a hundred per cent.

What about the possibility of Heep releasing new music?

Box: We’re not ruling anything out.

Shaw: With Davey [Rimmer, bassist] and Russ [Gilbrook, drums] contributing a lot to the last album [2023’s Chaos & Colour] as well as Mick and Phil [Lanzon, keyboards], recording won’t be affected. But touring, no. That’s a young man’s game. I mean, look… we’ve been doing this for fifty-five years.

How does the finality of it all affect you on an emotional level?

Box: In a way it makes me sad. But we don’t travel the world in private jets. For bands like ours it’s become a really hard slog. Now we can get the best of both worlds.

Shaw: It’s like before, just with a smaller suitcase.

Box: I take two suitcases: one for stage clothes, the other for my sense of humour.

What should we expect of the set-list for The Magician’s Farewell Tour?

Box: We haven’t really sat down and discussed it yet. I’ll suggest some songs and we’ll talk, see how they work out in the rehearsal room.

Presumably it won’t be a massively long show, in the style of the fiftieth-anniversary tour.

Shaw: No! Definitely not!

Box: We’ve got Tyketto and April Wine out with us, so that’s impossible. Most venues have a restriction on how long you can play.

Those are two rather fine special-guest bands. Tyketto have a great current line-up, and April Wine haven’t played the UK since, I think, 1981.

Box: We’ve played with April Wine before, so in some ways it’ll feel like a bit of a reunion.

Shaw: As a proud Canadian I grew up listening to that band. I’m looking forward to seeing them again.

It could still be a long way off, but in an ideal world where would you like the very last scheduled Uriah Heep gig to take place?

Box: We don’t try to put those goals in front of us, they become a burden. As long as we’re healthy and happy, I don’t really mind where it happens.

How do you expect to feel once the final notes have faded away?

Box: [grinning] I won’t feel anything. They’ll be nailing the lid down on me. I’ve already requested that my coffin be a big wah-wah pedal… so it’ll be the final ‘wah’.

Heep are gradually closing the door on performing live. What is your view on the longterm future of rock music?

Box: The [perilous] state of the business is dictating things, unfortunately. Everything’s being done through Pro Tools [recording software] and bands no longer seem to make it into the studio to record as a band.

Shaw: It’s all become way too sterile. In my own experience, there are a lot of ‘okay’ bands around, but nothing too special.

Box: We can play in sixty-four countries, so [rock music] is still alive and well. But, for me, the business has changed so much, and not for the better. A lot of the individuality has gone. Too many bands look and sound the same. Guitarists go to college and spend two years learning how to play, but you can’t tell them apart. Back in the seventies, Tony Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore and myself all had strong individual sounds. It was the sum of each musician that gave the bands their different flavours. Unfortunately, I don’t really see and hear that any more.

Uriah Heep’s final tour begins at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham on February 19. Tickets are on sale now.

In their original incarnation from 1966 until their split into two separate bands in 1998, Barclay James Harvest followed their own career trajectory. Snubbing the obvious route to success – and managing to upset several other artists as they went – they refused to embrace the idea of being part of a scene. In 2016 co-founder Les Holroyd told Prog that, despite all that, they’d achieved the form of success they’d been chasing.

Les Holroyd has his own theory as to why Barclay James Harvest never got the respect or recognition they deserved in the UK during the 70s.

“It seemed you had to be based in London and hang out with everyone else at places like The Speakeasy if you wanted to be noticed,” he tells Prog. But that wasn’t something we wanted to do. None of us wanted to be rock stars, so we never played those London games.”

The bassist, a founding member who left in 1998, looks back at the formative years as a time when he, John Lees, Mel Pritchard and Stuart ‘Woolly’ Wolstenholm were left to develop their own style without interference.

“Harvest, to whom we were signed at the time, really didn’t have much of an idea of what to expect from us,” Holroyd says. “The idea of progressive music was totally new, and we were right at the forefront of what was happening. So we were left to our own devices to write songs and create albums. We stayed in our farmhouse and just got on with the job of writing.”

He now feels the music business wasn’t prepared for the progressive explosion. “The labels were all used to dealing with commercial, mainstream artists. There were so few who appreciated how to handle a band like us.”

While a lot of musicians in the late 60s and early 70s had a strong bond, Barclay James Harvest were a little removed from any notion of a movement. In fact, Holroyd recalls, there was just one band with whom they had any rapport. “We got on really well with Argent. We did a lot of gigs with them. But we had very little to do with others like Yes, Genesis or any of the names getting attention at the time.

“Musically, we were often regarded as a cross between Genesis and Pink Floyd. Personally, I never quite got that comparison. We were also seen as being close soundwise to The Moody Blues – but a lot of that was down to the fact that both bands used the Mellotron.”

To some, Barclay James Harvest were regarded as being a second-rate version of the Moodies, which led to them recording the song Poor Man’s Moody Blues. That led to an uncomfortable encounter with the other band’s vocalist, Justin Hayward.

“I met Justin a long time after we’d done that song and we had a chat about it. He wasn’t too pleased about that song. I can understand why. For me, it was never funny or clever in the first place. John Lees wrote it, and I was uncomfortable recording the song. I wish we’d never done it.”

While Poor Man’s Moody Blues generated an undercurrent of controversy, it was the strained relationship with Robert John Godfrey that created the biggest waves of rancour over the decades. Godfrey was the band’s musical director on their first two albums, but the split was so acrimonious that The Enid founder still bristles over what he perceives as a lack of recognition from the band.

In particular, Godfrey believes he should have been given a songwriting credit on Mockingbird. Holroyd, though, offers little sympathy. “The business side of things should always be sorted before you go into the studio. It has to be made clear who gets credit for what. But Robert just assumed he would get it, and never did anything to confirm it. Sorry, but that was his problem.

“He wanted to become the fifth member of the band. But that was never gonna happen. We had nothing in common with him. He went to a private school and none of us did. He was trained at the Royal Academy Of Music and we didn’t have that type of musical education.”

Holroyd does confirm that, within the band, he was closer to one member than the others.“I was very friendly with Mel. But we’d known each other since the age of five. I suppose I wasn’t too close to John and Woolly. But on a musical level, that made no difference. We were equal partners. The four of us saw the band as a co-operative.”

Overall, Holroyd regards that period as being highly successful. “We followed our own musical journey. Being commercial never worried us. All that mattered was being true to our vision.”

It’s been a long break since his last album, bluesy garage rocker Witness, but Benjamin Booker is back with Lower, this time experimenting in noise rock and contemporary indie hip-hop – and some weighty subject matter. Now the proud head of his own label, he’s enjoying a new level of artistic freedom.

It’s seven years since your last record. What have you been doing?

I was just working on music. I had a specific idea of what I wanted to do for this record, so it was really just about following through and getting there. I spent a couple years trying to figure out what I wanted to do. It was different to other things that I’ve done, because there was a clear vision of what I wanted, and it wasn’t easy for me to get to.

What was that vision?

I’ve been listening to eighties UK indie stuff, noise pop, stuff like My Bloody Valentine, The Cure and Jesus And Mary Chain. And I was listening to a lot of indie hip-hop and ambient music from today, and just trying to figure out how to put all of these things together in a cohesive way.

How do you even begin to bring that sort of stuff together?

I started painting more and getting more into visual art, and learning more about art history, which made me think a lot more about music history. So I spent a lot of time studying the history of recording, which is so short, but just seeing what people had done with hip-hop and what things hadn’t been done in hip-hop – you don’t really hear distortion in hip-hop music.

What were you influenced by lyrically?

I was reading Book Of Longing by Leonard Cohen. I liked the simplicity of the poems, but how they felt so spiritual, there was a depth to them. And I’m a very big Dylan fan. Those people use a lot of biblical allusions in their work, and my song LWA In The Trailer Park is referencing Haitian voodoo. Every song, I was trying to write about something that I didn’t think had really been written about before. But also, there’s songs like Rebecca Latimer Felton Takes A BBC, which is referencing pornography and slavery.

Rebecca Latimer Felton was the first woman to serve in the United States Senate, and was pro-slavery and pro-lynching. Why did you want to reference her?

I had been reading about Jeremy O. Harris, this playwright who has a play called Slave Play, which examines slavery and interracial relationships and sex. I like to look through Library Of Congress catalogues, so I was learning about her, I was thinking about Jeremy O. Harris. I had wanted to incorporate pornography into a song. And they all came together.

The song Same Kind Of Lonely is genuinely disturbing. Where is the audio clip of shooting from?

It’s from a school shooting. The clip is this violent thing that kind of hits you in the music. But that’s how those things hit us in real life. They just come out of nowhere.

This is your first record on your own label. How do you find being a label boss?

I love it. There’s things that I’m doing now, where I would say it to people at labels and they would literally laugh in my face. I don’t even have to have those discussions any more. It’s just done, no questions.

Lower is out now via Fire Next Time Records.

The long-awaited movie Becoming Led Zeppelin is finally opening for business, and director Bernard MacMahon has revealed what it took to get Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones to take part in the film.

Speaking with The Guardian, McMahon reveals that all three surviving band members needed convincing to support the project, with Jimmy Page the first to agree after a seven-hour meeting in a London hotel in 2017.

“I wondered if he had brought sandwiches,” says MacMahon, revealing that Page had arrived for the meeting carrying shopping bags filled with his old diaries.

After agreeing to the project, Page called MacMahon and invited him to visit his former home in Pangbourne, a boathouse on the River Thames purchased for £6000 in 1967 and an early rehearsal space for Led Zeppelin.

Later, Page revealed that the invitation to Pangbourne had been a test, telling McMahon, “If you had said no to Pangbourne we wouldn’t have done the film.”

MacMahon would go on to talk to John Paul Jones, who came on board after watching MacMahon’s 2015 documentary American Epic – about the US music business in the 1920s and 30s – and a four-hour discussion. Finally, MacMahon spoke with Robert Plant, who agreed to be filmed after three separate meetings.

Becoming Led Zeppelin will show on UK IMAX screens today (February 5) and tomorrow before a non-IMAX release this weekend. The film will open in the United States and Canada this Friday, a week after a premiere in New York attended by Paul Stanley, Dirty Honey, Jessie Hughes, Scott Ian, and members of Stone Temple Pilots, Black Crowes, and Garbage.

“Led Zeppelin for me was a religious experience,” said Stanley. “The first time I saw them was 1969 and it was an epiphany for me because I saw how great something can be.”

Footage of actor and comedian Bill Murray singing Bob Dylan has gone viral, and it’s not for the first time.

Murray’s rendition of the 1965 classic Like A Rolling Stone was filmed at the Thalia Hall in Chicago last month during a run of dates by Bill Murray and the Blood Brothers Band, the blues band led by Mike Zito and Albert Castigli.

The Blood Brothers Band tour finds Murray playing percussion – with vocal duties shared with the other musicians – on songs like Wilson Pickett’s In The Midnight Hour, The Kinks’ Tired Of Waiting For You and Prince‘s Little Red Corvette. Like A Rolling Stone ends the set, as Murray steps forward to bark the lyrics with enthusiastic if not entirely in-tune gusto.

This isn’t the first time Murray has gone viral for Dylan-themed footage. A decade ago, a clip from Theodore Melfi’s coming-of-age movie St. Vincent, in which Murray’s character Vincent delivered a mumbled accompaniment to the original recording of Shelter From The Storm as the end credits played, was widely shared.

“By the end of the take, half the crew was crying,” Melfi told the Los Angeles Times. “They were just so moved by him doing nothing. He’s just a mess the whole way, and I guess that’s what the film’s about, how we’re all just kind of a mess, a beautiful mess.

“Bill is a beautiful mess, and Vin’s a beautiful mess, and I’m a beautiful mess, and everybody around is. How messy you get defines who you are and what your life is.”

Bill Murray and the Blood Brothers Band’s next show is this Friday (February 7) at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta, GA. Full dates below.

Bill Murray and the Blood Brothers Band tour dates

Feb 07: Atlanta Variety Playhouse, GA
Feb 14: Port Chester The Capitol Theatre, NY
Feb 15: New York Sony Hall, NY
Apr 12: St Louis The Pageant, MO
May 04: New Orleans Fillmore, LA
Oct 04: Louisville Palace, KY

Tickets are on sale now.

Technically, Billy Gibbons is on a break from ZZ Top right now. But in reality, he’s digging deeper into the band’s history than he has in a long time.

Gibbons is currently touring with the BFGs, leading a trio that also features bassist and Hammond B3 player Mike Flanigin and longtime Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble drummer Chris Layton.

Comparing one of the last shows of ZZ Top’s 2024 tour to the recent Cleveland stop of Gibbons’ trek reveals some cool similarities and differences. You can see the full set list from each concert below.

Seven ZZ Top classics (in bold below) appear in both sets: “Waitin’ for the Bus,” “Jesus Just Left Chicago,” “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Just Got Paid,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” “Brown Sugar” and “La Grange.”

Gibbons’ set with the BFGs was almost completely dedicated to ZZ Top’s ’70s catalog, moving into the ’80s only for Eliminator‘s two biggest hits. On the other hand, the ZZ Top show was fully half comprised of songs from the ’80s and beyond, with twice as many songs from Eliminator and two from 1981’s El Loco.

The increased focus on his main band’s first decade gave Gibbons the chance to dig out songs ZZ Top hasn’t played in years, including “Francine” ( last played in 2010 according to SetList.fm), “Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings” (2013) and “Thunderbird” (2019).

The BFG shows also feature a more organic sound, particularly comparing Layton’s stripped-down, club-friendly kit to the one ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard uses to replicate the band’s digitized post-Eliminator sound. You can hear the difference in the fan-shot videos of “Gimme All Your Lovin'” from both tours which are embedded below.

Flanigin switched to the Hammond for a couple of songs to further expand the BFG’s palette, and he tackled the late Dusty Hill’s vocal parts very nicely on “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers.”

Gibbons will be on the road with the BFGs until a Feb. 20 show in Bristol, Tennessee, and will then once again team up with Beard and bassist Elwood Francis for a ZZ Top tour that kicks off March 5 in Dothan, Alabama.

Read More: ZZ Top and Billy Gibbons Set 2025 Tour Dates

ZZ Top Nov. 23, 2024 Dodge City, KS Set List (from SetList.fm)

1. “Got Me Under Pressure” (from 1983’s Eliminator)
2. “I Thank You” (Sam & Dave cover, from 1979’s Deguello)
3. “Waitin’ for the Bus” (from 1973’s Tres Hombres)
4. “Jesus Just Left Chicago” (from 1973’s Tres Hombres)
5. “Gimme All Your Lovin'” (from 1983’s Eliminator)
6. “Pearl Necklace” (from 1981’s El Loco)
7. “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide” (from 1979’s Deguello)
8. “I Gotsa Get Paid” (from 2012’s La Futura)
9. “My Head’s in Mississippi” (from 1990’s Recycler)
10. “Sixteen Tons” (Merle Travis cover)
11. “Just Got Paid” (from 1972’s Rio Grande Mud)
12. “Sharp Dressed Man” (from 1983’s Eliminator)
13. “Legs” (from 1983’s Eliminator)
14. “Brown Sugar” (from 1971’s ZZ Top’s First Album)
15. “Tube Snake Boogie” (from 1981’s El Loco)
16. “La Grange” (from 1973’s Tres Hombres)

Billy Gibbons and the BFGs Feb. 2, 2025 Cleveland Set List

1. “Kiko”
2. “Waitin’ for the Bus” (from 1973’s Tres Hombres)
3. “Jesus Just Left Chicago” (from 1973’s Tres Hombres)
4. “Gimme All Your Lovin'” (from 1983’s Eliminator)
5. “Cheap Sunglasses” (from 1979’s Deguello)
6. “Got Love if You Want It (Slim Harpo cover, from 2015’s Perfectamundo)
7. “Blue Jean Blues” (from 1975’s Fandango!)
8. “Foxy Lady” (Jimi Hendrix cover)
9. “Francine” (from 1972’s Rio Grande Mud)
10. “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers” (from 1973’s Tres Hombres)
11. “Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings” (from 1975’s Fandango!)
12. “Just Got Paid” (from 1972’s Rio Grande Mud)
13. “Sharp Dressed Man” (from 1983’s Eliminator)
14. “La Grange” (from 1973’s Tres Hombres)
15. “Folsom Prison Blues” (Johnny Cash cover)
16. “Brown Sugar” (from 1971’s ZZ Top’s First Album)
17. “Thunderbird” (from 1975’s Fandango!)

Watch Billy Gibbons and the BFG’s Perform ‘Gimme All Your Lovin” in 2025

Watch ZZ Top Perform ‘Gimme All Your Lovin” in 2024