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Slaughter To Prevail frontman Alex Terrible has adopted two baby bears.

The Russian musician has taken to Instagram and TikTok to share that he is now looking after a pair of cubs, named Kodi and Harley, and is hoping to raise money for their care through merchandise.

In a series of videos, Terrible can be seen babysitting the animals, from helping one climb a tree, to giving them adorable cuddles whilst they suckle on his nose. In another video, the two cubs chase after the vocalist before falling into his chest in a giant fluffy cuddle puddle, and it is seriously cute stuff.

Explaining the story behind the adoption, Terrible says in a social media post: “Long story short. My neighbor @kirillpotapov ( literally 10 mins away from me) saved 2 babies bears Kodi and Harley.

“He helps animals for long time and I want to help him. From this moment I will visit this babies every time Im at home in Russia and help them financially.”

He continues, “And I want to ask you guys for help as well. I will not just ask you for money and shit abut I will drop some merch with this lil cutie pies and you will buy it. All money will go to them. Stay brutal.”

In previous years, Terrible has made headlines for riding bears, and even wrestling them. Speaking of his unusual hobby in a new Metal Hammer feature, he says: “When you look into a human’s eyes, you feel emotions, you feel maybe anger or kindness. You feel this soul, right? You look into this bear’s eyes, you don’t see anything in there.”

Last month, Slaughter To Prevail became part of Metal Hammer’s New Heavy Class Of 2025, a cover series celebrating the most exciting rising bands in metal right now. You can pick up the Slaughter To Prevail cover issue alongside an exclusive t-shirt with – you guessed it – a bear on the front, via Metal Hammer’s online store.

Slaughter To Prevail are expected to release a new album this year, and have confirmed it has the bear-themed title, Grizzly.

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Liz works on keeping the Louder sites up to date with the latest news from the world of rock and metal. Prior to joining Louder as a full time staff writer, she completed a Diploma with the National Council for the Training of Journalists and received a First Class Honours Degree in Popular Music Journalism. She enjoys writing about anything from neo-glam rock to stoner, doom and progressive metal, and loves celebrating women in music.

There’s a pink-finned, double-horned mermaid in the lift. To most people, that might seem a bit strange, but not to Electric Callboy. In the video for the Germans’ single Elevator Operator, vocalists Kevin Ratajczak and Nico Sallach, both dressed in wigs and the kind of trainers your dad puts on to clean the garage, take a ride up and down a magic lift shaft, with surprises on every floor (kittens! A fire! A nightclub that looks like something out of Blade minus the blood and vampires!).

The warp-speed journey is commandeered by a mythical, moustached man dressed in a white fur coat and silver skin-tight trousers. Packed with WTF?! moments, not least ambient elevator music infiltrating a breakdown, the song is everything we’ve come to expect from the most fun band to hit the metal scene in years.

The video concept, Nico and Kevin tell us, was inspired by a real person, the genuine elevator operator at the House Of Blues in Chicago, where the band once played a gig.

“I was just asking, ‘Hey, what’s your job?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I’m the elevator operator,’ recalls Nico. “And the funny thing was that he was playing techno music, not typical elevator music. I stepped out of the elevator with Kevin, we took a look at each other, and I could see in his eyes he had the same idea… ‘That should be a song!’”

Wonderfully weird and wacky music videos have become Electric Callboy’s calling card, and it’s a strategy that’s worked: Elevator Operator clocked up more than one million views on YouTube in its first 24 hours. Previous clips have seen them perform choreography in satin shirts to reworked 00s trance, pump weights in 80s spandex, and mosh in space with Elvis-style quiffs. As funny as they are, it’s led to some critics pigeonholing the band as a novelty.

“There is a big difference between being funny and being ridiculous,” insists Nico.

“It has been a burden to be in a funny band and therefore not be taken seriously as a musician,” agrees Kevin, referencing their trademark metalcore-meets-EDM. “I have struggled with that during my many years of being in Electric Callboy, and I think I speak for every member in the band, but at some point, it changed. People finally saw that even if it’s funny music, it’s well made, that we invested time and passion in it.”

And these days, the band can afford to let their imaginations run wild. “We always had ideas, but the question was, ‘How pricey is the video shoot?’” says Kevin. “Like, ‘We need fire… I have a lighter and maybe you can make it bigger?’ Now it’s, ‘Give me all your pyro!’”

The budget isn’t the only thing that’s blown up. Last year, Electric Callboy reached 10 million listeners on Spotify. They’ve founded their own event, Escalation Fest, in Oberhausen, Germany. Meanwhile, fans and industry insiders have talked about them as future Download Festival headliners, in the same breath as Bad Omens and Spiritbox.

Ever since Nico joined as co-vocalist in 2020, replacing previous singer Sebastian ‘Sushi’ Biesler, and they released viral single Hypa Hypa – sparking a killer run of genre-bending bangers, and 2022 album Tekkno – Electric Callboy have been caught in a whirlwind that’s seen them become one of the most beloved bands in modern metal.

“I missed the moment when it happened, actually,” muses Kevin. “It’s like when you’re not satisfied with your body, you go to the gym, and you lift weights. You get fitter and fitter, and there’s one moment that you get out of the shower standing in front of the mirror and you say, ‘Damn, I’m jacked!’”

They can, however, pinpoint when they realised something Really Big was starting to happen. For Nico, it was the band’s set in front of a gigantic crowd at Nova Rock Festival 2022.

“It was so overwhelming,” he recalls. Like, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God. OK cool, calm down, everything’s fine, man.’”

For Kevin, it was March 2023, as the band prepared to play the Lotto Arena in Merksem, Belgium. “It was where we hung our LED walls and the whole production was in place for the very first time,” he says. “There were nearly a hundred people, busy driving forklifts. I remembered all the times I’d carried my own keyboards onstage, and I’m like, ‘This is all happening because we are making music tonight.’”

The band are still learning to navigate that new reality. These days, they get recognised more frequently in public. It’s something that Kevin, one of the most down-to-earth dudes you could wish to meet, could do without.

“When I meet my friends, for example I go to the gymnastics with my kids, there are other dads and it happens that they know my band,” he explains. “All of a sudden, they’re like, ‘Wow, you’re here!’ I don’t want it, because it takes away that natural conversation with people. I want to blend in, you know?”

Anyone who has been to an Electric Callboy gig will vouch that they’re one of the best live bands out there. Their half mosh/half raves are a riot of colour, fireworks and costume changes that resemble a hardcore, two-hour workout every night – this is something that’s not lost on Kevin, who turns 40 this year.

“When I was 29, the second I turned 30, I got the feeling my is body was aching more,” he jokes. “I need a little bit more of going to the gym right now, but I honestly feel great onstage.”

Still, a lot less partying goes on these days. Today, Kevin and Nico are taking time out from family duties to dial into our interview from their respective homes in Germany. Both are married, and Kevin has two kids, while Nico has his second on the way.

“The older as we get, the more boring it gets,” Kevin laughs. “Ten years ago, I could have told you about, like, naked hangouts in the bus, but now it’s like, ‘Yeah, there was this one time I rolled over on my sofa in the green room, from left to right… crazy story.”

Still, the creativity and pure, unadulterated fun that comes with being in a band like Electric Callboy certainly has its benefits.

“When I look at people at my age that I went to school with, or that live in my neighbourhood, they look so fucking old,” says Nico. “I think the band keeps us young.”

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All of this could have easily gone a different way. Back in 2020, before Nico joined, the band – then known under their original name, Eskimo Callboy – came close to calling it quits. After forming in the small German town of Castrop-Rauxel in 2010, they released five albums of fairly bog-standard, juvenile metalcore with previous singer Sushi, none of which made much of a dent on the scene.

Within the band, all was not well. By the time they went into the studio to record 2019’s Rehab, their final album with Sushi, relationships within the band had disintegrated to breaking point.

“Although we worked on one project, it was always a compromise,” remembers Kevin, who describes that period as “the worst time of my musical career”. “It was like when in a relationship two people go separate ways. It’s not a question about who is right or wrong, it’s just it didn’t work. It was toxic in the end.”

“I’ve almost forgotten the songs on Rehab,” he says. “Every single day I woke up to write that album, I’d have rather stayed at home. I didn’t even want to make music anymore. We did our music, we did our vocals, we shot some videos, but it was heartless, and it had no soul.”

When Sushi left in 2020, it was like a switch had been flipped. Almost immediately, the band found themselves written off by their label and industry colleagues.

“Everyone around us was like, ‘Oh, yeah, you have a contract, but could you please tell us first what you’re going to do, and could you show us some songs…”

Things weren’t gloomy for long, though. In 2020, Nico joined the band, auditioning with a video of himself singing EC song Prism (you can watch it on YouTube). A few months later, having recognised that their original name was problematic – a slur against the Inuit community – the band changed it to Electric Callboy and never looked back.

Now, the band view Nico’s arrival and the single Hypa Hypa as the true beginning of the band. Relationships are tight, based on honesty, respect and friendship.

“Each of us has the possibility to give his output and everybody gives it a chance,” smiles Nico. “Over the past five years, no single day has ever felt like work.”

Despite how big things have become, Electric Callboy are very much an in-house operation. The band gather around the huge table in their studio to brainstorm every move they make, with their videos handled through guitarist Pascal Schillo’s own production company, Schillobros.

It’s the reason everything they do feels authentic and packed with personality. That was never more obvious than with Ratatata, the band’s ludicrously fun 2024 collab with Japanese superstars Babymetal, which Metal Hammer readers voted song of the year.

With its delicious earworm melodies, buzzing EDM and juddering guitars, it was a hefty dose of pure joy, a perfect smash of West-meets-East bedlam that’s been played more than 35 million times on YouTube and 63 million times on Spotify. The video sees Nico and Kevin barging through walls like a two-men wrecking machine wearing disco ball helmets… because why not? While Su-Metal, Moametal and Momometal drink cocktails in a Tokyo karaoke room, like a typical girls’ night out. It’s easily the most relaxed we’ve seen Babymetal, a rare moment they seemed to let their guards down and their personalities shine through.

“We wondered, ‘Are we going to see them between the shots?’” says Kevin, who didn’t know what to expect when the two bands met up to make the video. “But it was a great time whenever we saw each other. We talked, they’re just good girls.”

“They were into it the second we asked them,” recalls Nico of the shoot’s general goofiness. “We didn’t have to play any cards to make them do it.”

The track itself was written online, sharing audio files and ideas over a long back-and-forth. “Normally when we finish a song, we have, like, six or seven versions,” explains Kevin. “In the end with Ratatata it was version 21, 22 or something.”

Both bands brought something to the table. “There were things, for example Babymetal’s ‘Fu! Fu!’s, that we didn’t like at all,” says Nico. “But they told us it is something they use in the karaoke scene, and that’s so typically Japanese that we said, ‘OK, it would be a bad decision not to try it.’ We met straight in the middle. Now, I can’t think of the song without the ‘Fu! Fu!’s anymore.”

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Elevator Operator is the first single from Electric Callboy’s upcoming, unnamed seventh album. It’s one of two songs recorded so far, which Nico states “could not be more different”. For the rest of the album, though, it looks like there’ll be a wait.

A relentless touring schedule over the last two and half years means there’s been a delay in recording it, and although Kevin and Nico are staying tight-lipped, they can give us an idea of what to expect…

“We don’t want to do a second Tekkno, but we want to keep up the vibe,” says Kevin. “We have some songs that are pretty similar to some Tekkno songs. On the other side, there are things we tried out in small parts on Tekkno, that we liked that much, we’re now trying to do whole songs out of them.”

“One of the coolest things about being a member of Electric Callboy is the freedom in writing new music,” adds Nico. “There are no boundaries. We can do whatever we want. Even if we drop a Schlager song, which we did [with 2022’s Hurrikan], people are not pointing their fingers at us and telling us that we are not Electric Callboy anymore. This is actually what the people expect – the unexpected.”

Meanwhile, 2025 looks to be their biggest year yet. In May, they will play their first UK festival headline slot, at Slam Dunk, and in November they will play their biggest UK gig yet, at London’s iconic Alexandra Palace, as part of a European tour that includes several 15,000- to 17,000- capacity arenas in Germany.

We note that Ally Pally tends to be the final stop before bands make the leap to arenas. It’s a far cry from the early days of the band, where they lost more money touring here than they made, but it’s all part of their new reality. Right now, it seems nothing can stop their onward march. Whatever fate throws at them, Electric Callboy are ready.

“It’s crazy that we’ve reached that kind of level, and I just can’t imagine there is another step,” says Nico. “I’m happy with what I have right now. Sure, we have to think big, but there’s nothing bigger I can imagine than an arena. I can’t imagine playing a stadium, or anything like that. I want to dream of it, and if it happens, I’ll pinch myself.”

Electric Callboy headline Slam Dunk in the UK next month. They play London’s Alexandra Palace on November 11. Order your exclusive Electric Callboy shirt & magazine bundle online now.

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Danniii Leivers writes for Classic Rock, Metal Hammer, Prog, The Guardian, NME, Alternative Press, Rock Sound, The Line Of Best Fit and more. She loves the 90s, and is happy where the sea is bluest.

In 1975, Elton John was the biggest rock star in the world. His last four albums had all gone to No.1 in both Britain and America and he’d notched up a dozen US Top 10 singles, including three No.1s. His most recent chart-topper, Philadelphia Freedom, was inspired by his new friend Billie Jean King, the American women’s tennis legend who had beaten Bobby Riggs in the famous Battle Of The Sexes match the previous year. King was now part of the Philadelphia Freedoms, a newly formed professional tennis team.

Elton’s previous single had also gone to No.1: Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, featuring backing vocals and guitar from another new best friend, John Lennon, who’d written and sung it in The Beatles.

Elton had a lot of new friends now, heavyweight celebrity groovers like Elizabeth Taylor and Cary Grant; Michael Parkinson and Miss Piggy. He was enjoying camp tabloid ‘spats’ with old tarts from the before-days like Rod Stewart and Marc Bolan. Cat fights with David Bowie, who believed Elton ripped off Space Oddity for Rocket Man (which Elton’s lyricist Bernie Taupin kinda had). Heart-to-hearts with Dick Cavett and Freddie Mercury.

It was his relationship with Lennon that really mattered, though. It was he who inspired Elton to fork out for his Windsor mansion, Woodside, after a visit to Ringo Starr’s palatial residence, Tittenhurst – formerly owned by Lennon – convinced him that a man of his stature should have a country mansion of his own.

When Philadelphia Freedom hit No.1 in March ’75, the more interesting conversation concerned not the Billie Jean connection nor the copycat Gamble & Huff production. What grabbed most attention was the B-side, a frenzied live recording from November ’74 of Elton and Lennon belting out early Beatles song I Saw Her Standing There – Elton holding down the McCartney vocals easily.

The two had become buddies, bonding over cocaine and a shared sense of bawdy English humour, during hot summer night sessions in New York for Lennon’s fifth solo album, Walls And Bridges. Elton played keyboards and sang harmonies on the track that would cement their musical kinship, the driving Whatever Gets You Through The Night. Elton had encouraged Lennon to release it as a single, betting him it would go to No.1. Lennon, who’d never had a solo chart topper in America, laughingly took the bet, agreeing that if he lost, the reclusive ex-Beatle would make a guest appearance at an Elton concert.

After Whatever Gets You Through The Night became Lennon’s first – and only in his lifetime – solo No.1 single in the US, he was on stage with Elton in front of a deliriously disbelieving audience at Madison Square Garden, his first live appearance for two years.

Things were running so hot for Elton John that year that his latest album, Caribou, had only just arrived at No.1 in July when he and Bernie Taupin returned to the Caribou Ranch studio (after which the album had been named) in Colorado to begin writing and recording their next album.

Some of the music had already been worked out during the five-day trip from Southampton to New York on the ocean liner SS France that Elton elected to make (he’d recently been gripped by a cocaine-induced terror of flying). Elton spent his lunchtimes working at the piano in the ship’s music room. However, the ship’s resident pianist, a classicist, resented this intrusion so much that she made a point of playing on the deck above him, battling to drown him out.

Back at Caribou in August, the serious work commenced on what Elton and Bernie now determined would be their magnum opus: a concept album on the level of other great 70s conceptualists like Pink Floyd, The Who, Genesis and David Bowie.

Despite selling more records than all of them, Elton and Bernie were acutely aware that they didn’t command the same level of respect as contemporaries like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, whose work always got the red carpet treatment, even when it disappointed. Elton and Bernie came up with Daniel and Your Song and Rocket Man and Candle In The Wind, and so on and so on.

With both men now resident far over the rainbow, they already had everything you could dream of. But they were doing Scarface levels of cocaine and had begun to glimpse immortality. The kind that Neil Young had. Now they craved that too. But Dylan didn’t crocodile-rock on The Muppet Show; Joni didn’t pretend to be black on Soul Train. Young didn’t go on stage dressed as a cat, in sunglasses, with cute ears, and start playing piano. Lou Reed was dramatising Brando-style shooting heroin on stage.

Elton and Bernie knew they needed something epic to move the critical dial on the tragi-comic singer in the oversized clown glasses and gold nine-inch platform boots. Elton considered growing back his Honky Château beard.

Then Bernie had it: the story of their own journeys from hopeful nobodies to spangly superstars. But it would need a compelling concept album title like Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, or The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Bernie came up trumps again: Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy. Both earthy and glam. Mysterious yet real. A musical origin story with Elton as the crazy Captain, and Bernie as the Cowboy with a conscience.

Given just four weeks to get it done even though it wouldn’t be released for another nine months, they set to work in a blizzard of cocaine. Meanwhile, Elton’s manager (and secret lover) John Reid made plans to launch what everyone agreed would be the most important album of the 27-year-old singer’s career.

Hubris, though, does its best work at such times. When Elton’s ’74 world tour ended with a show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon on Christmas Eve, for a live simulcast on BBC TV and radio, it was presented as a crowning achievement. For Elton, however, who was suffering from undiagnosed depression, paranoia and soul-deep loneliness, exacerbated by his excessive coke habit, it felt like an ending. And not a happy one.

A few weeks into 1975, without consulting anyone, he took the decision to fire his band. All gone in one fell swoop.

It seemed a bafflingly self-defeating move. Elton’s recent releases had been credited to “The Elton John Band”; many fans (and critics) thought it was about damn time. Built around longstanding mainstays guitarist Davey Johnstone, bassist Dee Murray and drummer Nigel Olsson, they had developed a distinctive sound across dozens of Elton hits. They were with him on TV, featured heavily on stage. For the big Thanksgiving Day show at the Garden, their names were spelled out in huge neon lights – Elton, Davey, Nigel, Dee and Ray (newcomer percussionist Ray Cooper). They had just recorded what was about to be pushed as the singer’s greatest album yet.

Dee Murray was scuba-diving in the West Indies when he got the call. “I could tell right off [Elton] was embarrassed about something,” he recalled. “He said: ‘I’ve decided to change the band. I think you, Nigel and I have gone as far as we can together.’” He told Murray he’d already called Olsen. Then both men called each other, confused, devastated, aghast. Only Davey Johnstone was spared – although he too would be gone in three years.

Recently it had become a thing, singers deciding they didn’t need the others. In 1975, Rod left the Faces, Bryan Ferry abandoned Roxy Music, Steve Harley sacked Cockney Rebel, and Ian Hunter fled Mott The Hoople. Maybe it gave Elton fresh ideas. Or maybe he’d been coked out of his mind one night and realised his whole life had been leading up to this point.

John Reid feared the rift might muddy the waters when they began rolling out promotion for the album. He needn’t have worried. Not in America, at least, where Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy made history by going straight to No.1 in its first week of release – a landmark not even The Beatles or Elvis Presley ever achieved. It remained there for seven weeks, going gold in the US based on pre-release orders alone, then selling 1.4 million within four days of release.

In Britain (where it was released in May 1975) it was a different story. It was one of the few territories in the world where Captain Fantastic didn’t top the album chart, stalling at No.2. The solitary single from the album, the almost seven-minute-long Someone Saved My Life Tonight, despite huge fanfare, was a flop by Elton’s standards. Top five in America, it crawled to No.22 in the UK. Initially in thrall to the true-life romance aspect of the ‘young Elton and Bernie’ narrative, critics struggled with the remaining nine somewhat gothic, often corny, occasionally moving tracks.

Appearing in the order they were written, Bernie’s lyrics are heartfelt and plainspoken, devoid of his trademark cluttering of metaphors and images. These were “songs about trying to write songs,” declared Elton. “Songs about no one wanting our songs.” He added later that Captain Fantastic “was probably my finest album because it wasn’t commercial in any way”. It certainly wasn’t. Disappointingly dour and surprisingly devoid of hits, the album was – whisper it – actually rather dull.

That fact was belied by the kitchen-sink cover artwork, created by the psychedelic artist Alan Aldridge, of Beatles fame, and based on Hieronymus Bosch’s unnerving medieval triptych The Garden Of Earthly Delights. Elton appears in circus ringmaster drag, saddling his piano like a magic carpet, surrounded by fantastical figures capering through an elaborate collage of twisted grins and creepy, elongated fingers; two women, crocodile- and bird-headed, pose naked close to a strange ceramic jug figure that appears to be excreting sunflower seeds.

One can only guess that the carnivalesque artwork had been delivered long before the music, which begins with no fanfare at all with the title track. It appears at first a gentle popfolk song, Elton’s cod-American drawl reflecting on his ‘raised and regimented’ upbringing, while Bernie, the boy from the Lincolnshire wilds, ponders: ‘Shall I make my way out of my home in the woods?’ From there the track flowers elegantly into an irresistible groove. Tasteful but tainted. More thoughtful than curtain-raising.

Tower Of Babel, which follows, is equally restrained, at first, although its terse chorusing of ‘Sodom meet Gomorrah, Cain meet Abel’ and Johnstone’s layers of fiery guitars add intensity. The mood picks up with next track, Bitter Fingers, a musically jaunty but lyrically downbeat depiction of Elton’s early years playing pubs and clubs for pocket money. ‘It’s hard to write a song with bitter fingers,’ he chirps as the band kick into high gear.

Strings breeze through Tell Me When The Whistle Blows, bringing shimmer to this opaque tale of youthful uncertainty. ‘Long lost and lonely boy, you’re just a black sheep going home,’ Bernie writes, recalling his long train rides home to Lincolnshire after songwriting sessions in London with his unexpected new friend.

This leads into Someone Saved My Life Tonight. Specifically it’s about Elton’s former fiancée Linda Woodrow, who ‘almost had your hooks in me, didn’t you dear’. They had met in 1968. Elton was 21, a five-foot-seven virgin. Linda was 24 and four inches taller. He a struggling musician, she the heiress to a family fortune.

After Linda informed him she was pregnant, Elton, still a closeted homosexual, felt obliged to “do the right thing”, and proposed marriage. Linda accepted. Then days later she watched Bernie drag her fiancée out of the oven into which he’d placed his head, on a pillow, and turned on the gas.

“You know inside you’re making the wrong move,” Elton reflected later. “You deal with it by being preposterous.” So preposterous that the next day Elton and Linda ordered a wedding cake, and furniture for the marital home. The sorry saga came to an end only after openly gay singer Long John Baldry took Elton to task: “You don’t really love her! Don’t be a damned fool…” Elton burst into tears, and the wedding was off.

Side Two, as it quaintly used to be known, opens with the soft-rockin’ chugalug (Gotta Get A) Meal Ticket, another true-life story from the hard-scrabble life of two penniless songwriters dreaming the dream. Better Off Dead follows, hovering somewhere between Billy Joel and Gilbert O’Sullivan, with Bernie on strident form: ‘Through the grease-streaked window of an all-night cafe, we watched the arrested get taken away’.”

What these days would be considered ‘a deep cut’, next comes the sickly sweet Writing. Making the rookie error of tethering the lyrics too literally to the narrative, it quickly descends into twee: ‘Oh I know you and you know me, it’s always half and half…’

The standout ballad is We All Fall In Love Sometimes, a musical conversation piece between lovers. Except again it’s Elton and Bernie staring into each other’s eyes. This far in, you wanna yell: “Okay, we get it! You had it tough in the beginning!”

You’re never allowed to lose focus on the fact that this is a concept album. Inevitably, then, the album closes with the suitably portentous Curtains, six minutes-plus of plodding everything-means-everything balladry; an all-hold-hands Wizard Of Oz dénouement.

While some critics found Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy overindulgent and whimsical, Elton was unrepentant. He scolded Melody Maker: “I can’t understand the critics who say that Bernie and I must be egomaniacs. The album wasn’t meant to say: ‘Here we are, we’re wonderful!’” Adding: “I identify with this album so much more than anything else I’ve done. For me it will always be my favourite album.”

The feeling of hubris only mushroomed, however. With the much-loved Elton John Band gone, he had announced that his new band – EJB remnants Davey Johnstone and Ray Cooper, plus drummer Roger Pope, guitarist Caleb Quaye, bassist Kenny Passarelli, and on synthesiser James Newton Howard – would debut at Wembley Stadium on June 21, where the album would be live-premiered as a musical state occasion, and played in its entirety.

After top-notch support sets from Stackridge, Rufus with Chaka Khan, Joe Walsh, the Eagles and the Beach Boys – the last of whom delivered a full menu of crowd-slaying hits – Elton’s headlining set was met largely with restless indifference from the audience, caught off-guard by the prospect of Elton, the renowned showman, drunk and weary after a long day and night of grooving around and having fun, taking himself so seriously. It didn’t help that the album had only been on sale a few weeks and that most people didn’t know the songs yet.

“People started to leave. I was terrified,” Elton recalled. “It was years since I’d lost an audience. I couldn’t just suddenly strike up with Crocodile Rock halfway through. We eventually got round to the hits, but it was too little too late, as the reviews quite rightly pointed out.”

Elton dealt with this latest calamity the only way he knew how: by plunging straight back into the studio – Caribou, again – to record a new album, titled Rock Of The Westies, which was released just four months later. It was his last album to reach No.1 in the US, while in the UK it barely scraped the top five. Elton John’s imperial period was over, the captain going down with the ship, announcing his retirement two years later. The first, but of course not the last…

Mick Wall is the UK’s best-known rock writer, author and TV and radio programme maker, and is the author of numerous critically-acclaimed books, including definitive, bestselling titles on Led Zeppelin (When Giants Walked the Earth), Metallica (Enter Night), AC/DC (Hell Ain’t a Bad Place To Be), Black Sabbath (Symptom of the Universe), Lou Reed, The Doors (Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre), Guns N’ Roses and Lemmy. He lives in England.

Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock is a very different event from Monterey; almost a black light version of it. Like a lot of things – including Altamont – it hadn’t started out that way.

In fact, his appearance was almost an accident. After the breakup of the Experience the previous spring, he was up in Shokan, New York, putting together his second band and inventing a new extraplanetary sound. Shokan was only 50 miles from Bethel, where Woodstock was held, so it was a convenient – if risky – place to try out his new material and his new band, but then Hendrix was always a high-wire performer who fed on live current.

He was also a true believer in the hippie cloud-nine handbook. He’d named his new band Gypsy Sun And Rainbows, and thought of their sound as Electric Church Music. His opening number at Woodstock, Message To Love, is inspirational, almost a hippie gospel hymn, and he had intended to close his performance with the equally new and prophetic Valleys Of Neptune, switching to Hey Joe at the last minute. He intended his performance to be an optimistic message to his flock, with a few old favourites thrown in.

His so-called big band ensemble – really just the addition of a rhythm guitar player and two percussionists – don’t appreciably affect his sound, neither does his tuning down his guitar a half a step to E flat so he could bend the strings more pliably, but probably makes it a little harder on his new rhythm guitarist, Larry Lee, and bassist Billy Cox. Even breaking the high E string on Red House was barely noticeable – but then who are we talking about?

He jams, noodles, improvises, plays snippets of tunes he’s been rehearsing in Shokan, as well as his iconic songs: Red House, Purple Haze, Voodoo Child, Foxy Lady. But as leisurely as his approach at Woodstock is, he frequently sounds manic and shrill, and even on Spanish Castle Magic his guitar moans and screams as if trying to deliver some terrible message through that torrential rain of notes.

Psychedelic music had once symbolised a transcendent, cosmic vision, but by Woodstock it has become an expression of the national nervous breakdown manifested in Hendrix’s manic,
erratic guitar playing. His virtuoso performances – Fire, for example, played at windtunnel speed – now verge on tonal schizophrenia, perhaps reflecting his own conflicted situation.

Of all Hendrix’s performances at Woodstock, The Star-Spangled Banner, a short interlude in a medley, has come to be seen as emblematic of his entire appearance there: a State of The Freak Nation address, with his guitar like some highly sensitive receiver tuning in to the jangled frequencies in the culture, and ventriloquising the truly terrifying voice of a psychotic Republic.

Long shrill wails, crashing bombs, shrieking, screams, automatic weapons. Its precise hysterical outcry resembles Picasso’s Guernica in the sense of how much you can express on an electric guitar. The Vietnam War, burning ghettos, the Manson murders (which had taken place barely a week and a half earlier) are, by implication, invoked with devastating emotional impact, and the horror, despair and lethal irony isn’t lost on the crowd.

Hendrix’s music always had a foreboding quality to it, that spooky crossroads element inherent in the blues, and though he wanted to bring on the Age of Aquarius, Woodstock was the end of something rather than the beginning. His performance turned out to be more of a eulogy for what might have been than what was to come. But who better to sprinkle gris-gris dust on the utopian dream of the 60s than our own shaman of the blues.

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 217, published in December 2015.

David Dalton was a New York Times bestselling author, a founding editor of Rolling Stone, recipient of the Columbia School of Journalism Award, and winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Best Rock Book of the Year award for Faithfull. He was the author of twenty-four books, including biographies of James Dean, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Sid Vicious, the Rolling Stones, and, in 2010 (with Tony Scherman), a critically acclaimed biography of Andy Warhol, Pop. Dalton was the co-author (with Jonathon Cott) of Get Back, the only book ever commissioned by the Beatles. David died in July 2022.

Former Judas Priest drummer Les Binks has died at the age of 73. According to online reports, Binks passed away last month, but news of his death has only just been officially announced.

In a statement released on social media, Judas Priest write, “We are deeply saddened about the passing of Les and send our love to his family, friends and fans.

“The acclaimed drumming he provided was first class – demonstrating his unique techniques, flair, style and precision. Thank you Les – your acclaim will live on.”

Binks was born in Portadown, Northern Ireland, in 1951, and joined Judas Priest in 1977, following stints with Eric Burdon & War and US pop group Francy. He also appeared on Deep Purple bassist Roger Glover’s solo project The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast.

He would play on Priest’s Stained Class and Killing Machine albums – both released in 1978 – and the classic live album Unleashed In The East – but left the band before the US leg of their Killing Machine tour.

“We were happy with Les,” bassist Ian Hill told Classic Rock. “Simon Phillips [session drummer] played on [third album] Sin After Sin but he couldn’t do the tour. He had a prior commitment with Jack Bruce, of all people. Then Les came along. We were starting to get a direction. Suddenly we were a unit.”

“We were embracing the double bass drum for the first time in a more adventurous way,” said Rob Halford.. “It’s really vital to the overall texture of the record. Les was extremely technically proficient, a very clean drummer. You can really feel the separation, even on the fast tracks, and the definition of the beats…”

In later years, Binks played with a succession of lesser-known acts including Axis Point, Lionheart, Tytan, The Shakers and Raw Glory, before remerging into the spotlight in 2017 as Judas Priest were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. The same year, Binks took to the road in an early incarnation of KK’s Priest, playing Priest covers in the company of former band members K. K. Downing and Tim “Ripper” Owens..

“It’s with great sadness that I learned of the passing of the beloved Les Binks,” writes former Megadeth bassist David Ellefson. “I had the incredible honour of meeting and performing with him, along with K.K. Downing and Tim “Ripper” Owens from the mighty Judas Priest legacy, during the unforgettable show at KK’s Steel Mill back in 2019.

“Playing alongside Les was truly a dream come true. His powerful and groundbreaking drumming helped shape the very foundation of speed metal, with iconic performances on tracks like Exciter and so many others that set the standard for generations to come. My deepest condolences to his fans, friends, and family. You will be missed, my friend.”

No cause of death has been confirmed.

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 39 years in music industry, online for 26. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.