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“I’m actually dead,” says Kirk Brandon. “I’m speaking to you from inside my coffin.”

In May 2023, Brandon was in Nottingham fronting one of his two ground-breaking bands – in this case, Spear Of Destiny, not Theatre Of Hate – when, he says, “I just had a little heart attack.”

He ended up in Northampton General Hospital for three and a half weeks. “But that’s easy,” he says. “I’ve done a four-month stretch before. That was hard.”

The ‘four-month stretch’ was the result of endocarditis (defined by the NHS as “a rare and potentially fatal infection of the inner lining of the heart”). While he was in, he says, they replaced his aortic valve with a titanium one.

He smiles: “It was a lotta laughs, y’know.”

And how is he now? “Honestly,” he says, “I’m fine. I’ll live forever.”

Kirk Brandon was – and still is – the beating titanium heart of post-punk bands Theatre Of Hate and Spear Of Destiny: singer, guitarist and chief songwriter. Inspired by punk, but looking for something more than “three chords and sloganeering”, he came up with something completely unique – although people didn’t always notice.

“When we first started,” he says, “people said, ‘Look at these young pretty boys. Aren’t they lovely? Let’s take them home’ and they pushed that aspect of it – or the media did. ‘Oh, look, they’re fluffy and harmless – wonderful!’ But that wasn’t really what we were doing.”

No shit. A stew of tribal beats, twanging Morricone guitars and searing saxophone, topped by Brandon’s withering, dramatic singing, Theatre Of Hate sounded like a band playing a dive bar on the Eastern Front in a Brecht play.

They did not sound fluffy, they sounded terrifying.

“I looked fluffy,” he says. “I didn’t always look like this. This is after the car crash.”

He was a good-looking guy, Kirk, still is. Big-eyed, blonde-haired, with cheekbones and a pout that could’ve put him on a million teenage walls, he could have been a pop star – and he was, briefly – if it wasn’t for the racket he made.

“Compared to the music of today,” he admits, “Theatre Of Hate is definitely avant garde.”

In June, Theatre Of Hate play the Forever Now festival at Milton Keynes Bowl, alongside Kraftwerk, Death Cult, PiL, The Damned, Johnny Marr, The The, Psychedelic Furs, Peter Murphy and a load more unique, eccentric and visionary musical weirdos borne out of that same period – an extraordinary explosion of music that becomes almost harder to explain the further away from it we get.

In 2025, it’s almost completely impossible to imagine any teenager or 20-something making music like Theatre Of Hate or Spear Of Destiny.

Where did that music come from?

In some ways, Kirk Brandon had a traditional introduction to music. At the age of 12, he saw John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers – the 1968 line-up, with future Rolling Stone Mick Taylor on guitar. A lot of people who saw the Bluesbreakers went on to play blues – to this day, a legion of boring white guys with Strats are playing homage to that kind of music. Not Kirk Brandon.

Maybe it was the influence of the stuff teenage Kirk was exposed to, like Van der Graaff Generator (“strange stuff, absolutely incredible, but weird as hell”), another band with a high-pitched and theatrical singer.

And then there was his dad. A working-class bloke from Westminster who’d fought in World War II, Brandon Sr. was in love with opera and would sing around the house. (Could he have been a performer? “I don’t think so,” says Kirk. “He was never going to be an Enrico Caruso, you know, discovered on the streets of Naples, and turned into a superstar. Instead, they put a uniform on him and sent him out there to kill people.”)

Did opera influence his own singing style? “I don’t really think so. It must be in there but I just made it up as I went along. No one told me what to do, I just did it. It’s self-exploration.”

Brandon taught himself to play guitar, “making up chords” until it sounded like music. “Clueless, really, but it kind of worked in a funny, weird, kind of way,” he says. “Again, self-exploratory. I used to think that’s what music was – that it was meant to be exploratory. It wasn’t about learning somebody’s back catalogue and writing your own songs based around that. Then along came punk rock.”

Like many of his generation, he thought punk was exciting and inspirational, but it quickly seemed formulaic: “Three chords, four chords, and grown men shouting slogans, based around V-C [verse-chorus], V-C, V-C or V-C, V-C, C-out.

“To me, that’s boring,” he says. “I don’t want to do that. There’s a ton of minor chords and discord in Theatre Of Hate. Which is interesting, I think. Even today, it’s interesting.”

Theatre Of Hate toured with The Clash in 1981. The Clash themselves had just released the sprawling triple album Sandinista!, an album full of dub, funk, jazz and the occasional bit of rock’n’roll. It was a time for experimentation.

“People expected you to do something different,” says Kirk. “I think people were just curious. ‘What is this?’ Y’know, we had a saxophone, but it wasn’t used in the traditional way – it wasn’t playing hokey old jazz riffs and scales, y’know? It was strange. But at the time, there was room for self-exploration. It hadn’t become completely and utterly corporate.”

When Theatre Of Hate burned out prematurely, after one Mick Jones-produced album, Brandon and bassist Stan Stammers went straight into Spear Of Destiny. Agumented again by sax and keyboards, SoD developed into something slightly more commercial. With soulful backing vocals, elegiac pianos, and barn-burning sax, they were intense, politically-minded and anthemic – like the E-Street Band fronted by John Lydon.

It was a peak time for alternative music, just as it was Peak Monoculture. Now That’s What I Call Music, Top Of The Pops, Radio 1, the charts – that was how most people got their music. And then there was the underground – several of them, really – backed by independent record labels, the music press, DJ John Peel, left-field music shows like The Tube: post-punk, goth, psychobilly, thrash metal, skate punk, indie and a million other scenes bubbled away.

“You always felt you were at odds with the mainstream,” he says, “and in the background was always the shadow of George Orwell [“The papers talk about Orwell, almost every day,” goes Spear song World Service] and the wartime function of the Ministry of Propaganda.

“I felt that we were outsiders, to be honest. Ultimately, there was never going to be room in the mainstream for someone like us. So if you got a brief window of going on The Tube or even Top of the Pops, as we did, you took it because it wasn’t going to come again.”

Around that same time, in Soho, a scene was developing around the Blitz club, where DJ Rusty Egan was anticipating a Krautrock-and-Bowie-inspired future of frictionless beats and synthetic bass, and a load of artists – Visage, Ultravox, Gary Numan et al – were in a technological arms-race to get the latest keyboard sounds and beats into the charts.

Brandon was around that scene but not of it. In fact, he went in exactly the opposite direction: Something much more organic and analogue, with saxophones, pianos, and guitars and live drummers. He wanted friction.

“That’s the either the beauty – or the ugliness – of me,” he says. “I went in the opposite direction to whatever would help.

“I went to the Blitz club quite a lot, and Hell, and all them other ones. It was interesting. It was genuinely funny and fun and silly. Some people inside it took themselves incredibly seriously. Incredibly.

“I was there the night David Bowie turned up,” he says. “He went straight to see Rusty Egan. Bowie was wearing a suit with flares, a 1970s suit that he probably bought in the 70s. It was like an anti-Blitz fashion statement, this awful flared suit.”

Rock’n’roll is like Italian operetta. Everybody dies and loses. Women get raped. They sing beautifully, but it all goes wrong. It doesn’t all come wrapped in cellophane with ribbons.

If anything, Spear Of Destiny felt like an alternative E-Street Band: the drama, the social commentary, the musicality, the pianos and the sax. “I love Nebraska,” he says. “To me, that’s his greatest album. I would say that, wouldn’t I? It’s like [Tom Waits’] Swordfishtrombones: it’s all sort of ‘left side of the pitch’. More obscure, uncommercialised.

“But I was very aware of that Phil Spector-type way of doing things, that Springsteen used a lot. I was aware of that – and the Roy Orbison way – and I suppose sometimes in the arrangements, you would flip through ways of doing things and think, ‘That’s not a million miles from the E-Street band.’

“Somewhere in all of this, there’s rock’n’roll,” he says. “And that’s hard to divest yourself of. Eddie, Elvis, Gene, Fats – rock’n’roll is there, y’know?

I’m not gonna say it’s religion but it’s a religion, and we kind of buy into it, don’t we? We buy into the myth, the mythos.

“A lot of that stuff is like Italian operetta. And like a lot of opera, everybody dies and loses. Women get raped. That’s Italian opera. They sing beautifully, but it all goes wrong. So that’s in there too. It doesn’t all come wrapped in cellophane with ribbons.”

His greatest album, 1984’s One Eyed Jacks, leaned into that drama. Full of ghostly pianos, crisp guitars and soaring sax, Jacks wore its musicality on its sleeve, but still sounded powerful and authentic.

From the opening seconds of Rainmaker to closer These Days Are Gone, Kirk’s voice – a savage howl one minute, ridiculously soft and tender the next – provides a raw counterpoint to the band’s slick musicianship, piccolos and all. Lyrics like Playground Of The Rich, meanwhile, are more relevant now than they’ve ever been.

The money shots were Prisoner Of Love, a funky attempt at a crossover hit which grated at the time but makes more sense now, and Liberator – a raucous indie disco floor filler.

(What’s Liberator about? I ask him. Who’s being liberated? “You know,” he says. “I’ve forgotten. I used to have a conscience, but I’m better now. I can’t even remember.” Is it about freeing yourself from the tyranny of the mainstream? “Yeah,” he says. “That’ll do.”)

While the Blitz Kids ruled the charts, Spear of Destiny had more in common with another scene at the time. By 1984, the ‘Big Music’ was everywhere: Big Country’s The Crossing took Lizzy’s Róisín Dubh deep into the Scottish glens, Under A Blood Red Sky turned U2 into post-punk Springsteens, and – while The Clash were being overpowered by funk – The Alarm grasped the rebel rock baton and ran with it on their debut, Deliverance.

Spear Of Destiny were London’s answer to all this Celtic chestbeating. “The Barra boys from London, is that it?” says Kirk. “I don’t know. They were doing their own thing. I love Big Country. They had it right from day one. Stuart Adamson was a fantastic songwriter.”

Big Country’s career was sabotaged by record company politics and unsympathetic producers – Spear of Destiny had similar woes. Brandon says he didn’t like any of the band’s producers (“apart from Alan Shacklock and Zeus B. Held”), while “record companies just want the flagship hit single,” he says. “They want pretty-looking stars and they want hit singles.” In 1987, he gave them one: Never Take Me Alive went to no.14 in the UK singles charts.

Their manager Terry Razor (“a Scottish gangster,” says Kirk) and the record company couldn’t agree on what the single should be, so they turned to Kirk. “I said, Never Take Me Alive. They all looked at me like, ‘That’s suicide.’ I thought, ‘I’d rather it was suicide and a good song’. Luckily for everybody, it was a hit.”

Did his audience see this success as selling-out? “I don’t think Never Take Me Alive is a ‘sell out song,’” he says. “I tried selling out, failed miserably – but I’m open to offers.

“Never Take Me Alive was a good song. I nicked all this stuff from Beethoven’s Mass For The Dead and [Ants guitarist] Marco Pirroni came and played guitar on it.” Marco added one chord to it, he says, but it made all the difference.

Adam and The Ants and Theatre Of Hate had come up around the same time and had a similar MO: the outlaw chic, the twanging guitars, the tribal drums. The Blitz kids were trying to get people dancing and Theatre Of Hate…

“We were making dance music for people in asylums,” he says. “And we succeeded.”

Spear Of Destiny are on tour now. Theatre Of Hate are on tour from June and appear at the Forever Now festival at Milton Keynes Bowl on 22 June. For more info and tickets visit Kirk Brandon’s website or Forever Now

Scott is the Content Director of Music at Future plc, responsible for the editorial strategy of online and print brands like Louder, Classic Rock, Metal Hammer, Prog, Guitarist, Guitar World, Guitar Player, Total Guitar etc. He was Editor in Chief of Classic Rock magazine for 10 years and Editor of Total Guitar for 4 years and has contributed to The Big Issue, Esquire and more. Scott wrote chapters for two of legendary sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson‘s books (For The Love Of Vinyl, 2009, and Gathering Storm, 2015). He regularly appears on Classic Rock’s podcast, The 20 Million Club, and was the writer/researcher on 2017’s Mick Ronson documentary Beside Bowie. 

A.A. Williams has revealed details of a 28-date UK and European tour for 2026.

London’s dark post-rock queen will hit the road in January, kicking off her tour at Nottingham Bodega on January 29, and travelling throughout the UK and Europe before closing out the trek with her first ever show in Turkey, scheduled for March 7, at Istanbul’s Blind club.

A.A. Williams UK and European tour, 2026

Jan 29: Nottingham Bodega, UK
Jan 30: Manchester Deaf Institute, UK
Jan 31: Glasgow G2, UK

Feb 01: Leeds Brudenell Social Club, UK
Feb 03: Birmingham Hare & Hounds, UK
Feb 04: Bristol Strange Brew, UK
Feb 05: London Bush Hall, UK
Feb 06: Southampton Papillon, UK
Feb 07: Diksmuide 4AD, Belgium
Feb 08: Paris Nouveau Casino, France
Feb 10: Toulouse Le Rex, France
Feb 11: Barcelona La Nau, Spain
Feb 12: Madrid Villanos, Spain
Feb 13: Lisbon Musicbox, Portugal
Feb 14: Porto Mouco, Portugal
Feb 15: Donosti Dabadaba, Spain
Feb 17: Grenoble l’Ampérage, France
Feb 18: Milan Legend Club, Italy
Feb 19: Aarau KiFF, Switzerland
Feb 20: Munich Live / Evil, Germany
Feb 21: Vienna Chelsea, Austria
Feb 22: Prague SUBZERO, Czech Republic
Feb 24: Warsaw VooDoo, Poland
Feb 25: Berlin Neue Zukunft, Germany
Feb 26: Cologne Gebäude 9, Germany
Feb 27: Eindhoven Effenaar, Holland
Feb 28: Utrecht Tivoli Cloud Nine, Holland

Mar 07: Istanbul Blind, Turkey

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Williams has also shared an Audiotree session that she recorded live on September 20, 2024 in Chicago.

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.

Ahead of their 45th anniversary, IQ are looking forwards with optimism. Vocalist and lyricist Peter Nicholls admits he’s in a more positive place than he was on 2019’s Resistance. He tells Prog how the work of poet Dylan Thomas and an online video ranking their releases informed their long-awaited 13th album, Dominion.

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“We never consciously take time off,” says IQ vocalist Peter Nicholls, when the subject of the near six-year gap between albums is raised. The band play at annual weekenders and have frequently appeared onstage over the last few years – but to many, it still feels like they’ve been missing in action.

Objectively though, their last two albums have contained a substantial amount of fresh material. “We don’t set a timetable of recording one album every five years,” Nicholls says. “I guess each album takes a couple of years to get through. With the last two, Road Of Bones and Resistance, they were either a double or there was a bonus disc, with twice the volume of work to get through.

“Sometimes when you get to the end of it all there’s that feeling of exhaustion. At the moment, though, I really think the situation with the band is that we feel this is a renaissance for IQ.”

Latest album Dominion is another fine recording that continues their recent trend of creating lavish and inspired records. They’ve also pinpointed a methodology of working that’s aided the writing process – far removed from their occasionally embattled earlier creative sessions.

“The music comes from [guitarist] Mike Holmes, a astonishingly prolific and prodigious talent,” Nicholls says. “He just thinks of music all day long, so there’s never a shortage of potential new tracks. Mike essentially produces demos for everybody to listen to and we then have our input. Obviously, my contribution is to handle the vocals, but Mike will put a guide vocal idea down and I’ll use that as a basis.

“Once the lyrics are in place, the vocal tune will sometimes be amended to sit more comfortably within the music. But essentially, at the minute, Mike is responsible for coming up with the music.

“In the olden days we’d get together in a damp and dingy rehearsal room and trade licks. We’d just be improvising, and that would lead to arguments – you know, ‘My idea’s better than yours!’ Thankfully, it’s a far smoother process now.”

Dominion is a relatively compact recording, with the band eschewing the temptation to cram the maximum amount of music onto a single disc. Nicholls says it was a deliberate ploy that was inspired by the random discovery of an online video which ranked IQ’s albums.

I had always thought that the more songs there are, surely that’s a great thing – but it’s not necessarily so

“These guys were putting them in order of preference,” he recalls. “One guy made the comment that he didn’t like Resistance because he thought it was too long. That was a revelation to me – it hadn’t occurred to me that somebody might think there was too much to absorb.

“On reflection, I thought it was fair comment. Not everybody has two hours to listen to one album. I had always thought that if someone likes the band, then the more the merrier. The more songs there are, surely that’s a great thing – but it’s not necessarily so. I think it’s definitely the right thing to do a single album this time around.”

IQ have always retained a welcoming, recognisable sound. Yet they’ve also managed to ensure that each release demonstrates progress compared to its predecessor, and Dominion possesses a distinctly contemporary edginess. Nicholls recognises that assessment, citing an overt desire to continually add the unexpected.

“The aim with any album is to surprise people. But you also can’t completely divorce yourself from your own personal history. There’s an IQ sound, with certain trademark elements, that we’ve worked for many years to establish. We’re not going to dispense with that. When I listen to a new album by a favourite artist, I want to hear them sounding the way I like them, but I also want them to show me something new – what haven’t I heard before from this person?

“The challenge is to come up with a new twist on what we do. We don’t want it to sound like we’re treading water. I’m also very aware that you’re only as good as your last album: if we were to put a clunker out, we’d do ourselves a lot of damage; but thankfully, we’ve never done that.”

Although Nicholls admits he attempts to disguise his most personal lyrics, he reveals there was a central darkness that infused the themes of Resistance, which has that’s been rectified for this current release. “The last album was happening at a difficult time in my life,” he says carefully. “Let’s just say I was climbing some existential mountains. My feeling about that album now is that it has quite a dark heart. For me, it was quite a hard album to connect with.

Death will get us in the end, but it’s not the master. We’re the masters of our worlds

“But where we are now with Dominion, I’m in a much more positive place, and that informs the lyrics. They’re never autobiographical as such; if I feel they’re getting too personal, I kind of put them behind a sheet of glass just to not give too much away.

“I approached this album with a more optimistic viewpoint, and it just seemed to me that coincidentally the music Mike was coming up with had a more melodic, optimistic feel as well. There was also a feeling that what people should do is make the best use of the time that we have. I was thinking in terms of the world that we create for ourselves, the personal world we live in. Our domain, if you like.”

There was also the influence of Dylan Thomas, with Nicholls reading the poem And Death Shall Have No Dominion, which neatly fed into his mindset of maximising the time we have on Earth. “My perception is that he’s saying death will not be the ultimate power that controls us. Obviously it’ll get us in the end, but it’s not the master. We’re the masters of our worlds, our destinies.

“From that I took the idea that the dominion is the world that we make for ourselves. And not just for ourselves, but for other people. The phrase ‘living your best life’ is very much prevalent in my mind. All of that, compounded with Mike’s melodic music, informed the mood of the album. It felt like a more positive experience – the result is I want to go back and do it again now!”

The contemplative nature of the lyrics and IQ’s upcoming 45th anniversary understandably causes a pause for reflection on their legacy. The singer has mixed thoughts, unjustifiably focusing on his own self-perceived shortcomings as a vocalist, but also remaining content over the quality of their music.

I know it sounds immodest, but I think there’s brilliant stuff on everything that we’ve done

“My views of the albums are always clouded by my dislike of the vocals – I think they all sound crap,” he says. “With the early albums, like Tales From The Lush Attic and The Wake, I was recording the live performance; it’s very different from the studio performance you want.

“Genuinely, I listen to the early stuff and I shudder when I hear the vocals. But a lot of singers are uncomfortable with the sound of their own voice. I now feel that on albums, the voice needs to be something that you believe in. It needs to convey the lyrics convincingly and credibly.

“Around the time of [2009’s] Frequency, I approached the vocals quite differently. This album is probably how I thought I’d sound then. So, 44 years later, I’m starting to get the hang of it!

“All our albums have great merit; to my ears, it’s all been very strong and purposeful. I think we’ve always believed in what we do and that’s always been hugely important. I know it sounds immodest, but I think there’s brilliant stuff on everything that we’ve done.”

Crucially, there are no suggestions that IQ will be succumbing to retirement any time soon. They recorded a raft of material that wasn’t made available with the current album, and there are plans for their next release to appear in a time frame rather quicker than six years.

“I want to do the next one as soon as we can,” he says enthusiastically. “My preoccupation right now is time. That and health are our most important commodities. The band have both of those and we should make the best use of those.

“Everybody is playing well; the relationships within the band are also very strong. We’ve been good friends for nearly 50 years. There will come a point where the band will finish, but that’s not for a good few years yet. We might have another 10 years left – who knows? I really want to make sure that these are really strong years. IQ are in no danger of fizzling out.”

Queens of the Stone Age will screen their upcoming concert film, Alive in the Catacombs, in cinemas worldwide next month.

The film, shot in Paris last year, will premiere on June 5, but will have a limited cinema in 20 countries run ahead of its global release.

“If you’re ever going to be haunted, surrounded by several million dead people is the place. I’ve never felt so welcome in my life.”

Alive in the Catacombs global screening dates

Jun 03: MK2 Quai de Loire, Paris, France
Jun 03: The Royal, Toronto, Canada
Jun 03: Kino Konepaja, Helsinki, Finland

Jun 06: Spot Cinema Taipei, Taipei, Taiwan

Tickets for the screenings are on sale here.

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Queens of the Stone Age will play their first shows since summer 2024 next month.

Their US mini-tour kicks off with a pair of shows at the MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston, on June 10 and 11. The band will travel to Europe to play shows in July and August, including an August 20 gig in Dublin, Ireland at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, and a headline performance at the Rock N Roll Circus at Sheffield’s Don Valley Bowl in England on August 27.

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.

It’s April 15, 1977. Tonight Led Zeppelin play the ninth date of the second leg of their eleventh American tour. I’m on board Caesar’s Chariot, the band’s customised Boeing 707 jet. Named after the conquering emperor who was ultimately doomed by an addiction to his own glory, this gleaming, luxuriously appointed flying fortress now carries an invading force of a different kind.

Just hours earlier, Zeppelin had annihilated a sell-out audience of pagan revellers at the St Louis Blues Arena. Now we’re returning to Chicago where, for the next several weeks, the band have set up their base of operations for the tour.

On the previous two tours, in 1973 and 1975, they adopted a similar strategy – positioning themselves in one location and then flying out to concerts. It’s the brainchild of tour manager Richard Cole, Zep manager Peter Grant’s first lieutenant and long-time ‘fixer’.

“It [Led Zeppelin’s 1977 tour] wasn’t a lot different to me from the ’75 tour,” Cole says. “It was the same process of working, you know. We had our 707 jet, and I worked out what cities were in range of Chicago. It was easier to leave at three or four in the afternoon, go to our plane and fly straight into the city we were performing in, leave straight afterwards and go back to Chicago.”

That’s where we’re headed now. I’ve been ensconced in Chicago’s Ambassador East Hotel for 11 days; a week-and-a-half of unchecked excess and dark rumblings. The former balanced the latter. The plane, for instance, has been refitted to include a bar, two bedrooms, a 30-foot couch, and a Hammond organ. Luxury comes at an uncomfortable price – the aircraft costs $2,500 per day to lease. Is it worth it? Who cares? Not Led Zeppelin.

Still, amid this luxury you can’t help but notice how drummer John Bonham lumbers about the cabin, a bottle of something in his hand, greeting everyone he encounters with barely concealed contempt. He walks past me, and I don’t dare make eye contact – it is one of the many instructions I’ve been given for my stay with Led Zeppelin.

On the day I arrived, a limo had been sent to the airport to collect me. Janine Safer, the group’s publicist, accompanied me as we rode to the hotel. Along the way she laid down five rules that had to be strictly adhered to while caught up in this travelling circus.

Rule 1: Never talk to anyone in the band unless they first talk to you. Rule 2: Do not talk to Peter Grant or Richard Cole – for any reason. Rule 3: Keep your cassette recorder turned off at all times unless conducting an interview. Rule 4: Never ask questions about anything other than music. Rule 5: Most importantly, understand this – the band will read what is written about them. The band do not like the press.

Only a couple days earlier was I finally granted my first audience with Jimmy Page. I had begun to think that it was never going to happen. Then my room phone rang and a voice informed me that Jimmy would see me now.

As I was ushered (you never walked anywhere within the hotel without an escort) into his spectacular suite, it was impossible not to notice the busted telephone hole in the wall and a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s perched on his bedside table. The bottle was up-ended at regular intervals during our conversation, his speech becoming increasingly slurred and deliberate.

This was more than a guitarist getting drunk in the early afternoon – it’s 1977, Zeppelin’s eleventh US tour, and Page’s drinking habits have by now been well-documented. No, there’s more: an underlying current of anger in his every slowly muttered word, as if he’s in a constant posture of self-defence, or even paranoia. In fact, he’s ripped the telephone from the wall because he felt intruded upon and didn’t want spying ears listening in.

“I’ve got two different approaches,” Page explained, as he fiddled with the remnants of the broken telephone receiver. “I mean, on stage is totally different than the way I approach it in the studio. On Presence, I had control over all the contributing factors to that LP; the fact that it was done in three weeks, and all the rest of it, is so good for me. It was just good for everything, really, even though it was a very anxious point, and the anxiety shows group-wise, you know: ‘Is Robert [Plant] going to walk again from his auto accident in Greece?’ and all that sort of thing.”

Jimmy appears to be obviously still feeling the pain of that near-fatal accident. On August 4, 1975, Plant, his wife Maureen, Plant’s sister, their children and Page’s children were all in a rented car that skidded out of control. Robert suffered a broken ankle and elbow, and the children were severely bruised and traumatised.

And so the tour in 1977 kicked off under a black cloud. This is just a small taste of the underlying drama that seemed to envelop every aspect of the tour in a dark mist. No one realised it at the time, of course, but the ’77 jaunt would prove to be Led Zeppelin’s final fully-blown march across America – their swansong.

Upon boarding Caesar’s Chariot for the return from St Louis to Chicago, Janine Safer told me that the all-important follow-up interview with Jimmy may happen on tonight’s flight. You come to recognise, early on, that the Zeppelin machine is well-oiled and finely tuned. Schedules are maintained and rigidly enforced. If anything is going to happen, it’s because Zeppelin want it to – and when they want it to. They wield total control.

A short while later I am told that I can have 15 minutes with Jimmy (on a flight that lasts only 30). After reaching cruising altitude, I’m accompanied to the rear of the plane. Safer is on point, a monster of a security guard follows her, then me, and another security soldier brings up the rear. I greet Jimmy (it’s difficult to tell whether or not he recognises me), sit down, and we begin talking.

“When all the equipment came over here [to the US, for the tour], we had done our rehearsals, and we were really on top, really in tip-top form. Then Robert caught laryngitis and we had to postpone a lot of dates and reshuffle them, and I didn’t touch a guitar for five weeks. I got a bit panicky about that – after two years off the road, that’s a lot to think about. And I’m still only warming up; I still can’t co-ordinate a lot of the things I need to be doing. Getting by, but it’s not right; I don’t feel 100 per cent right yet.”

As I’m hunched over, trying to hear him above the din of the whirring white noise, from behind, a vice-like grip grabs my right shoulder. I’m thinking that was a fast 15 minutes, when I’m physically lifted from the seat and violently spun around. Standing before me is one seriously pissed-off John Paul Jones. And that’s when my world unravels.

“Rosen, you fucking cunt liar. I should fucking kill you.” The venom in his voice staggers me. I feel as if I’m having an out-of-body experience. But each time I shut my eyes and open them I’m still there, standing vulnerable on an aeroplane travelling at 600 miles an hour towards a destination I now don’t want to reach.

Two days ago it had been a different story. John Paul and I had spent some illuminating time together. No Jack Daniel’s, no busted phone, just a soft-spoken bass player telling me about how he met Page and got into this in the first place.

“I’d been doing sessions for three or four years, on and off,” he said. “I’d met Jimmy on sessions before; it was always Big Jim and Little Jim – Big Jim Sullivan [leading session guitarist] and Little Jim [Page] and myself and a drummer. Apart from group sessions where he’d play solos and stuff like that, Page always ended up on rhythm guitar because he couldn’t read [music] too well. He could read chord symbols and stuff, but he’d have to do anything they’d ask when he walked into a session. So I used to see a lot of him just sitting there with an acoustic guitar, sort of raking out chords.

“I always thought the bass player’s life was much more interesting in those days, because nobody knew how to write for bass, so they used to say: ‘We’ll give you the chord sheet, and get on with it.’ So even on the worst sessions you could have a little runaround…”

From there, Jones had got into working from home, arranging material for other people. “I joined Led Zeppelin, I suppose, after my missus said to me: ‘Will you stop moping around the house? Why don’t you join a band or something?’ And I said: ‘There’s no bands I want to join, what are you talking about?’ And she said: ‘Well, look, Jimmy Page is forming a group’; I think it was in Disc magazine. ‘Why don’t you give him a ring?’

“So I rang him up and said: ‘Jim, how you doing? Have you got a group yet?’ [He hadn’t.] And I said: ‘Well, if you want a bass player, give me a ring.’ And he said: ‘All right. I’m going up [to Birmingham] to see this singer that Terry Reid told me about, and he might know a drummer as well. I’ll call you when I’ve seen what they’re like.’

“He went up there, saw Robert Plant, and said: ‘This guy is really something.’ We started under the name the New Yardbirds, because nobody would book us under anything else. We rehearsed an act, an album and a tour in about three weeks, and it took off.

“The first time, we all met in this little room just to see if we could even stand each other,” Jones had recalled of the band’s early days. “It was wall-to-wall amplifiers. Jimmy said: ‘Do you know a number called Train Kept A-Rollin’?’ I told him: ‘No.’ And he said: ‘It’s easy, just G to A.’ He counted it in… and the room just exploded. We said: ‘Right, we’re on. This is it, this is going to work!’ And we just built it up from there. [And now] I wouldn’t be without Zeppelin for the world.”

You couldn’t help but believe Jones. Led Zeppelin was his life and passion and he was forever protecting it, as he told me, from those who would try to run it down. He was talking about critics, in the main, journalists who would tell him how much they admired the band and then turn around and write scathing reviews.

Confronting me now on board the band’s plane was all that passion turned poisonous. The bassist hurls curse after curse. Although I’ve never been in a fight in my life, his veiled threats don’t cause me too much alarm. Jones, I felt, was someone against whom I could probably hold my own. The guys behind him, on the other hand… They shoot me with looks that convey a pretty simple message: make even the slightest motion towards this man before you and you’ll regret it.

At that point I notice there, in his right hand, a copy of Rock Guitarist. Jones has rolled it up into a tube and smacks it repeatedly into his open left palm. On the cover of the book is a picture of Jeff Beck; inside is the Jeff Beck interview I’d written some years earlier. I had brought copies for him and Jimmy; Jones and Page both knew Beck, of course, and I thought the gesture would present me with a bit of street cred.

But it’s this story that has made Jones go crazy. It was my breakthrough as a fledgling writer. In effect, it – and nearly a year’s worth of phone calls to the Swan Song offices in New York – had got me to Led Zeppelin. And now, after getting this close, it suddenly looks like I am going to leave empty-handed. For it’s at that moment that it hits me: the realisation that I have sent Jones off the deep end because I’ve betrayed his trust.

Repeatedly I told him how honoured I was to be on the road with him, and he believed what I said – until he read what I’d written in the Beck piece. The very thing that has brought me here is going to bury me. I had been warned. I should have remembered the fifth rule (‘the band read everything written about them’). For in the intro to the Jeff Beck piece, written three years previously, was the following assessment of Page’s early work: ‘A contemporary of Beck, Jimmy Page has failed to recreate the magic he performed as guitarist for The Yardbirds. Led Zeppelin started off as nothing more than a grandiose reproduction of Beck’s past work…’ and so on. It was stupid and ridiculous, and I’m ashamed to this day for writing it.

John Paul Jones stands before me, demanding all my interview tapes from this spell with the band be returned. I oblige instantly.

The JPJ encounter would finally resolve itself. But in order to put things in proper perspective it’s essential to understand the juggernaut that Led Zeppelin were at that time. By 1977 the quartet had nothing left to prove and no one left to prove it to. On April 30 that year, the band had set a new world record for the largest paid attendance at a single-artist performance when they drew 76,229 people to a concert at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan. The show grossed a staggering $792,361 (also a new record), after having sold out in one – pre-internet, remember – day.

The previous year Led Zeppelin had swept the boards in Circus magazine’s readers’ poll, winning best band, guitarist, vocalist and songwriting team.

Also in 1976, the group released Presence, an album that revealed the band’s complex musical make-up (although it didn’t sell very well), followed later the same year by the soundtrack for The Song Remains The Same, the film revealing personality-through-indulgence. The hedonism it reflected would be carried to ridiculous extremes on Zeppelin’s ’77 tour.

Here was a band that lived life like superheroes. They were treated as kings, and couldn’t see – or refused to see – that they were being devoured by the very machine they had created. But when you were with them, you too became a part of their larger-than-life adventure.

“I’m sure we all felt a little invincible on this tour,” explained Gary Carnes, head of the lighting crew. “By being associated with Led Zeppelin, it seemed impossible not to have a false sense of power. I’m sure the band felt that way, and I know everyone on the road crew had a feeling of being invulnerable.”

I had arrived during the first leg of the tour, which began on April 1 in Dallas, Texas. Notwithstanding the record-breaking attendances and grosses that would come, everything seems filtered through a glass, darkly. No one is able to erase Plant’s near-disastrous car accident a couple years earlier, and now the 51-show, 30-city invasion kicks off a month late due to his contracting a throat infection. Additionally, Peter Grant has suffered through the ignominy, not to mention the emotional pain, of being dumped by his wife.

After only the second performance, in Chicago, Page is taken sick with what Jack Calmes describes as the “rockin’ pneumonia”. Calmes is head of Showco, the company that provided lights, sound, staging and logistics for the tour.

“There was an extraordinary amount of tension at the start of that ’77 tour,” Calmes recalled. “It just got off to a negative start. It was definitely much darker than any Zeppelin tour ever before that time [Calmes was involved in the 1973 and 1975 tours]. Zeppelin still had their moments of greatness, but some of the shows were grinding and not very inspired.”

Indeed, on the four or five performances I saw, the band felt as if they were merely playing by numbers. Although there was no opening act, and Zeppelin often played for more than three hours, the music seemed to have no life, no emotion. Many of the audiences grew unruly during the marathon performances, throwing firecrackers and various other objects at the stage; I saw more than one security man grab an offender and muscle them outside.

Gary Carnes, Showco’s lighting chief, had a bird’s eye view of every show. Sitting on stage about 10 feet in front of Page, he heard conversations, sotto voce, between the guitarist and singer.

“Quite often Robert would announce a song and Jimmy would go: ‘Robert, how does that song go?’ And Robert would sort of turn around and hum it to him. And Jimmy would go: ‘Oh yeah, oh yeah, I got it, I got it.’ Or Robert would announce a song and Jimmy would go into the wrong song. The times when Jimmy couldn’t remember how a song went were very, very rare, but it did happen.”

Besides these problems inside the arenas, there were almost nightly rituals of crazed Zeppelin fans outside engaging in minor scuffles with local police. Prior to the St Louis show, I witnessed ardent but non-ticketed fans attempting to break through barricades. Roaming packs of hard-core Zep devotees threw beer cans and engaged in low-key mayhem.

During one arrival, Peter Grant emerged from his limo and walked over to a group of policemen holding at bay a crowd of rowdy would-be gatecrashers. Though I couldn’t hear specifically what the burly manager was saying, his actions were startlingly clear. He pointed to several of his own security crew and motioned them in the direction of the battling cops. Grant made certain no one entered the concert without a ticket.

Peter Grant, former bouncer and wrestler, was, in many respects, the physical embodiment of a lead zeppelin. Standing over six feet tall and weighing over 300 pounds, he used his intimidating presence to maintain order and keep his charges safe and worry-free. He was highly protective, and by ’77 insanely so. He isolated the band members as much as possible – hence the private plane and the ritualised hierarchy of security, handlers and crew.

He brooked no insubordination from his own people, and with outsiders his brand of justice was swift. His raison d’être was simple: to protect his band and their finances. When a bootlegger or unauthorised photographer was identified, it was a lucky offender who was let off with merely a severe verbal reprimand and confiscation of unauthorised merchandise or film. I never saw an incident escalate beyond that, but I was told about one.

“I took the plans and everything over to the band in England before this tour happened,” Showco’s president, Jack Calmes, recalls. “They had their offices on King’s Road and spent most of the time down the street in the pub. But we had a big meeting upstairs in Peter Grant’s office and they said: ‘Okay, Calmes [purposely mispronouncing his name as Calm-us, instead of the correct Cal- mees], what have you got for this tour?’

“So I stood up and gave my presentation, and showed them all these cool lighting effects and lasers, and said the price will be $17,500 per show. The whole room went dead silent. They looked at the window, and Bonham went over and raised the window – like they were going to throw me out of it. And they might have done it. Then after this drama went on for what seemed like a long time, they all just started laughing, because I’m sure I looked like I was about to shit my pants.”

Zeppelin humour. Well, no one was laughing when John Paul Jones confiscated my tapes. I can understand Calmes’s apprehension because that flight back to Chicago seemed interminable.

On arrival, we returned to the Ambassador East, and I packed my bags for an early-morning flight back to Los Angeles. Menacing scowls from bouncers had told me I was no longer welcome, and I made a hasty exit.

Janine Safer, the group’s publicist, had encouraged me to go and talk to John Paul, to try to explain my side of the story. I went down to his hotel suite, knocked on the door, and as it swung open my mind went blank, and I stood there, once again, like an idiot. As a failsafe, I had written him a letter. I handed it to him. He took it, and shocked me by returning my tapes. He told me he thought I was a low-life piece of shit and that I was the worst writer he’d ever read, but that I did have a responsibility to the magazine.

My Led Zeppelin story appeared in the July 1977 issue of Guitar Player. One evening, about a month after the Zeppelin road trip, I’m at the Starwood club in West Hollywood. I’m sitting with my brother, Mick, watching Detective, the band Swan Song were signing to the label.

Mick tells me John Paul Jones is in the corner and he’s walking this way. I’d told him about the encounter, so I figure he’s just goofing with me. Then I turn around and see Jonesy standing in front of me. I expect some sort of abuse. Instead he extends his hand in friendship. He had read my letter and understood that what I’d written in that Jeff Beck story had come from an inexperienced journalist. He loved the story.

After playing LA, Zeppelin flew to Oakland, North California, for the final dates of the tour. And what happened there breathed new life into the legend of the Led Zeppelin curse. It was a terrible way to finish.

“I was standing right by the trailer when all this went down,” recalls Jack Calmes. “Peter Grant’s kid [Warren] was there, and he walked into a secure area and one of Bill Graham [the promoter]’s guards moved him aside; he didn’t hurt him or anything. The Bindon brothers [John Bindon was a British thief and thug turned actor and security man] and Peter grabbed this guy, took him into one of the trailers, and beat the crap out of him. I wasn’t in the trailer but I was right outside. This guy [Jim Matzorkis] was a pretty tough guy, and they were taking him apart in there.

“The Bindon brothers were thugs who were friends of Peter Grant’s and were on this whole tour as security guards. And they brought an element of darkness into this thing. The only thing I remember about John Bindon is that we were in The Roxy [in Los Angeles, prior to the Oakland shows] and he was in the back corner with Zeppelin, and he had his dick out, swinging it for a crowd of about 50 people that could see it [Bindon was famously well-endowed]. And John Bindon later stabbed this guy through the heart [he was acquitted of murder in ’79]; it sounds like something out of a blues song.”

Tour manager Richard Cole, another principal, takes up the story: “When the band came off the stage, Peter went after the guy with Johnny Bindon. I was outside the caravan with an iron bar, making sure no one could get in and get hold of them, because people were after Granty and Bindon then.

“The next day, the four of us got arrested. Fortunately, one of our security guys knew one of the guys on the SWAT. team, and said to them: ‘These guys aren’t dangerous, I’ve worked for them for years.’ So they asked Peter, John Bindon and John Bonham and myself to meet them. They handcuffed us, took us off to jail, and then they let us out after an hour or so and off we went.”

And if the saga of Led Zeppelin was being played out like an unfinished blues song, this wasn’t the final verse. The ’77 tour had taken a terrible toll on everyone – after Oakland, the band members separated: John Paul remained in California; Jimmy and Peter stayed in San Francisco; Bonham, Cole and Plant headed to New Orleans. Within hours of arriving at the Royal Orleans hotel, Robert received a call from his wife. The last verse was being written.

“The first phone call said his six-year-old son [Karac] was sick,” describes Cole. “The second phone call… Unfortunately Karac had died in that time.”

The song would never again remain the same. In 1979 Zeppelin played some warm-up dates at Denmark’s Falkonerteatret, and in August the two landmark UK shows at Knebworth. About a year later, on September 25, 1980, John Bonham was found dead.

“I will never forget the final words I heard Robert Plant say,” lighting director Gary Carnes sums up. “It would be my final show with them – my 59th. I was on stage at the second show at Knebworth. The band had just finished playing Stairway To Heaven. Robert stood there just looking out over a sea of screaming fans with cigarette lighters. It was a magical, mystical moment. He then walked to the edge of the stage with the microphone, and again just stood there looking. And then he said: ‘It is very, very hard to say… goodnight.’ It was an enchanting thing to witness. I will never forget that moment.”

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 84 (September 2005)

Steven Rosen has been writing about the denizens of rock ‘n’ roll for the past 25 years. During this period, his work has appeared in dozens of publications including Guitar Player, Guitar World, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Creem, Circus, Musician, and a host of others.

In one must have been one of the most daunting performances of recent times, Ghost frontman Tobias Forge has sung Queen‘s classic Bohemian Rhapsody for a star-studded audience at this year’s Polar Music Prize ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden.

Watching on as Forge performed were Queen members Brian May and Roger Taylor, in addition to current frontman Adam Lambert, and Sweden’s King Carl Gustaf. So it’s no surprise that Forge initially sounds a little shaky and looks nervous, even behind the mask.

Forge was joined onstage by Opeth guitarist Fredrik Åkesson, who played on Ghost’s recent Skeletá album, and the Eric Ericson Chamber Choir, who were originally founded in 1945.

The Polar Music Prize – described as the music world’s equivalent of the Nobel prize – is awarded every year to two or three musicians in contemporary and classical music, and Queen are one of this year’s recipients.

Receiving the award, Queen guitarist Brian May said, “In this special moment, I contemplate how that younger Brian May in 1974 would have felt if he knew that we would be living this kind of dream 50 years in the future.”

“When we started our band, we had ambitions, but never dreamed of the journey that was to follow,” said Roger Taylor. “We were fortunate in the fact that our four wildly different personalities came together to achieve a wonderful chemistry.”

Elsewhere during the ceremony, former Skid Row and current Michael Schenker singer Erik Grönwall performed Queen’s Stone Cold Crazy, while Adam Lambert sang Who Wants To Live Forever and Another One Bites The Dust.

Previous winners of the Polar Music Prize – set up by ABBA’s former manager Stig “Stikkan” Anderson in 1989 – include Paul McCartney, Elton John, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Metallica, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.

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.

The mysterious woman on the cover of Black Sabbath‘s debut album is raffling her autograph to raise money for a cat rescue project. Louisa Livingstone, whose identity was revealed five years ago after decades of speculation, will sign a hand-written letter to the raffle winner.

“Many Black Sabbath fans have asked me online for my autograph and to this day nobody has one – for a variety of reasons!” says Livingstone. “But I have now decided, at this epic time with Black Sabbath doing their last ever gig, to raffle my autograph. This way, everyone gets a chance, for a minimal outlay.”

Tickets for the raffle cost just $1, with fans able to make multiple purchases to increase their chances of winning. The draw will take place on July 20, two weeks after the Sabbath show.

“The only other autographs of mine already floating around are minimal, if they even still exist,” says Livingstone. “[The autographs were] given on very rare occasions after stage performances at the National Theatre in London decades ago when I was acting in various plays including Lark Rise and Candleford.“

The mysterious object in Livingstone’s hands on the cover of Black Sabbath has always been the source of debate, although photographer Keith Macmillan insists it was a black cat.

“I think it might just be the way my hands are there,” Livingstone told Rolling Stone in 2020. “I’m sure I could remember if it was a cat.”

Livingstone also releases her own music under the name Indebra, although anyone expecting doom-laden riffs will be disappointed by the synth-friendly new song Anthem to Truth – See More, Oh Yeah. Although, to be fair, it is kinda spooky.

“Black Sabbath is just not my kind of music,” she said in 2020. “I feel awful for saying it, because it’s probably not what people want to hear, but it isn’t particularly my kind of music. When I got the album, I gave it a listen and moved on.”

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.

Iron Maiden have played the first show of their 50th-Anniversary Run For Your Lives Tour. The band completed a 17-song set at the 12,500-capacity Papp László Sportaréna in Budapest, Hungary, and packed it with songs they haven’t played in years.

Maiden, with new drummer Simon Dawson behind the kit, opened with four songs from the Paul Di’Anno era in Murders In The Rue Morgue (which hasn’t been played since the Eddie Rips Up the World tour 20 years ago, Wrathchild, Killers (a song the band haven’t played this century) and Phantom Of The Opera.

Elsewhere, there was a return to the set for the much-loved epic Rime Of The Ancient Mariner for the first time in 15 years, while other returnees included The Clairvoyant, Powerslave, 2 Minutes To Midnight and Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son. Full setlist below.

Despite Iron Maiden urging fans to keep their phones in their pockets during the tour, fan-shot video from the first show is already online (below)

Maiden return to the Sportaréna in Budapest for a second show tomorrow tonight (May 29), before travelling to the Czech Republic and a booking at Prague’s Letnany Airport. Full dates below.

More Run For Your Lives dates outside of Europe are expected to be announced soon, with the tour set to extend into 2026. A 50th-anniversary Maiden documentary film will come out later this year.

Iron Maiden setlist: Papp László Sportaréna, Budapest, Hungary

Murders in the Rue Morgue
Wrathchild
Killers
Phantom of the Opera
The Number of the Beast
The Clairvoyant
Powerslave
2 Minutes to Midnight
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Run to the Hills
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
The Trooper
Hallowed Be Thy Name
Iron Maiden

Encore
Aces High
Fear of the Dark
Wasted Years

Iron Maiden: 2025 Run For Your Lives tour dates

May 28: Budapest Aréna, Hungary *
May 31: Prague Letnany Airport, Czech Republic *
Jun 01: Bratislava TIPOS Arena, Slovakia *
Jun 05: Trondheim Rocks, Norway ≠
Jun 07: Stavanger SR-Bank Arena, Norway *
Jun 09: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark *
Jun 12: Stockholm 3Arena, Sweden *
Jun 13: Stockholm 3Arena, Sweden *
Jun 16: Helsinki Olympic Stadium, Finland *
Jun 19: Dessel Graspop Metal Meeting, Belgium≠

Jun 21: Birmingham Utilita Arena, UK ^
Jun 22: Manchester Co-op Live, UK ^
Jun 25: Dublin Malahide Castle, Ireland *^
Jun 28: London Stadium, UK *^
Jun 30: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK ^

Jul 03: Belfort Eurockéennes, France ≠
Jul 05: Madrid Estadio Cívitas Metropolitano, Spain **
Jul 06: Lisbon MEO Arena, Portugal **
Jul 09: Zurich Hallenstadion, Switzerland **
Jul 11: Gelsenkirchen Veltins-Arena, Germany **
Jul 13: Padova Stadio Euganeo, Italy **
Jul 15: Bremen Bürgerweide, Germany **
Jul 17: Vienna Ernst Happel Stadium, Austria **
Jul 19: Paris Paris La Défense Arena, France **
Jul 20: Paris Paris La Défense Arena, France **
Jul 23: Arnhem GelreDome, Netherlands **
Jul 25: Frankfurt Deutsche Bank Park, Germany **
Jul 26: Stuttgart Cannstatter Wasen, Germany **
Jul 29: Berlin Waldbühne, Germany **
Jul 30: Berlin Waldbühne, Germany **
Aug 02: Warsaw PGE Narodowy, Poland **

* = Halestorm support
^ = The Raven Age support
** = Avatar support
≠ = Festival date

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.