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Trivium claim that their Poisoned Ascendancy shows are ending early thanks to their co-headliners, Bullet For My Valentine.

This year, the metalcore greats have trekked across Europe and North America, playing their respective 2005 albums Ascendancy and The Poison in full.

When the run was announced in February 2024, it was billed as a “world tour”. However, the closing American gigs, scheduled to take place this week, are now being promoted as the final dates.

During a TikTok livestream last week, Trivium bassist Paolo Gregoletto explained that the Poisoned Ascendancy trek was wrapping up earlier than originally planned because of Bullet For My Valentine singer/guitarist Matt Tuck.

He said (via Loudwire): “Matt Tuck didn’t want to do it, after we had planned it, after stuff was already in the works – don’t know why. I think it would have been amazing. I think The Poison is a great album. I think the two records pair very well together. And I think it would have been nice to give everyone around the world a chance to see the two together.”

A clip from the stream was uploaded to Reddit and stirred up the bands’ fanbases. Gregoletto responded in a video on the Trivium TikTok account, posting footage of himself throwing a thumbs up with the caption, “When you make your first TikTok live and piss off the other bands you are on tour with…”

He also included the hashtag #JusticeForSouthAmerica, seemingly referencing one of the markets allegedly taken off the Poisoned Ascendancy schedule.

In the comments section of the thumbs-up video, the official Trivium account threw more criticism towards Tuck, writing: “He’s the sole decision maker of the band and he has no respect for us or our crew”

Trivium guitarist Corey Beaulieu has also spoken out. In the comments section on one of his Instagram posts, he mentions that the Poisoned Ascendancy package was originally planned to make it to arenas in Australia, but now it won’t.

“we had a arena tour [sic] ready to go and when it got pulled it gave us no time to book anything with proper time,” he writes, “but next time we come to Australia we will play the album in full if you want haha”

Metal Hammer approached Bullet For My Valentine’s representatives regarding Trivium’s allegations and they declined to comment.

Also via social media, Trivium have been teasing fans with the notion of new music. A video featuring Gregoletto grimacing and putting his head into his hand has been posted to their official channels, with the caption reading, “POV: your manager talked you out of surprise releasing a new Trivium BANGER this morning…”

The Poisoned Ascendancy tour has four stops left – at the Coca-Cola Roxy in Atlanta, Welcome To Rockville festival in Daytona Beach, the Skyla Credit Union Amphitheatre in Charlotte and the Red Hat Amphitheater in Raleigh – before it wraps up. After that, Trivium will headline Bloodstock Open Air in Derbyshire, UK, in August.

Meanwhile, Bullet For My Valentine have multiple stops scheduled for the European festival season. See all their live plans via their website.

Founded in 1983, Metal Hammer is the global home of all things heavy. We have breaking news, exclusive interviews with the biggest bands and names in metal, rock, hardcore, grunge and beyond, expert reviews of the lastest releases and unrivalled insider access to metal’s most exciting new scenes and movements. No matter what you’re into – be it heavy metal, punk, hardcore, grunge, alternative, goth, industrial, djent or the stuff so bizarre it defies classification – you’ll find it all here, backed by the best writers in our game.

When Richie Kotzen was 12 years old, he had two baseball T-shirts that he would wear to school. One was a Black Sabbath shirt with an image of the Grim Reaper holding a crystal ball and the number 666 on the front, the other was an Iron Maiden The Number Of The Beast shirt.

“I was a Maiden fanatic,” he says, some 43 years later. “When I’d wake up for school, I’d put that record on and get dressed. It would be [solemnly intoning the intro to TNOTB’s title track] ‘Woe to you, oh earth and sea…’ echoing around the house. Luckily my parents were cool with it. So this whole thing with Adrian, sometimes I gotta smack myself around the back of the head to realise I’m not dreaming.”

Adrian is Adrian Smith, longtime Iron Maiden guitarist and one of Kotzen’s childhood heroes. For the past few years the two men have been partners in Smith/Kotzen. It’s a chance for the former to step outside the musical boundaries of the day job, and for both of them to show off their talent as singers as well as guitarists. Their second album, Black Light/White Noise, is a bluesy, soulful modern rock record with a charge of electricity running through it.

They’re not quite the Odd Couple, but they are an unlikely pairing. Smith is a 68-year-old Londoner, a veteran of one of the world’s biggest metal bands. Kotzen, 12 years younger, is a former teenage guitar prodigy who emerged in the late 80s as part of American label Shrapnel Records’ stable of shredders. Smith is friendly and modest, not afraid to talk about his insecurities as a musician. Kotzen is talkative and confident, with a brilliantly manic cackle. Smith is an avid angler, Kotzen is… well, not so much.

“I’ve watched Adrian fish from the shore, and I get the impression that Adrian does his best work alone. I don’t think he wants me sitting in the boat next to him, talking his ear off while he’s casting a line,” says Kotzen, the UN levels of diplomacy not quite disguising the suspicion that he’d rather gnaw off his own toes than step into a pair of waders.

But they have more in common than what separates them. Both men are crack guitarists, obviously, but both have great, soulful voices too: Smith’s smoky and restrained, Kotzen’s powerful and acrobatic. It’s a combination that works well, if Black Light/White Noise is anything to go by.

“Having two guitarists could go horribly wrong,” says Smith, “but it’s about chemistry and personality.”

They didn’t meet so much as stumble into each other’s orbit. Kotzen was hanging out at swanky Hollywood hotel the Sunset Marquis a decade or so ago when he was introduced to a woman who turned out to be Smith’s wife Nathalie, a sometime LA resident. Introductions were made, and Kotzen was invited to one of the get-togethers the Smiths would throw.

“Most of my friends are musicians,” says Smith. “The first party, there was Richie, Taylor Hawkins, and Rob Trujillo from Metallica, having a few drinks and talking. I said: ‘Come and have a look at my music room.’ So we went in there and just started playing – Bad Company, Stevie Ray Vaughan…”

Smith and Kotzen would jam whenever they could, but it came from Nathalie Smith.

“Adrian’s wife was the one,” says Kotzen. “She said: ‘You guys need to get together and try to write a few songs.’ And that’s what we did. And the people we played them for liked them. They said keep going. So we did.”

Many of those early songs were on the pair’s 2021 self-titled debut album and the subsequent four-track EP Better Days. Kotzen insists that there were no ambitions beyond just making music they like.

“Expectations are a bad thing,” he says. “When you do something with the attitude ‘I expect to get this out of it’, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. I wanted nothing from it, but now it exists, and I like the fact people get to hear it.”

Adrian Smith was surrounded by music long before he joined Iron Maiden. His mother played piano and his dad used to sing and play banjo and mouth organ. “We’d always have sing-songs,” he says. Like any kid growing up in the 60s, The Beatles soundtracked his childhood. “I had the Beatles wig,” he says. “I used to jump up on the table and pretend I was John Lennon.”

His young mind was rewired by the wave of heavy rock bands that emerged in the late 60s and early 70s. “I heard Deep Purple and Sabbath, and it was life-changing,” he says. But he didn’t pick up a guitar until his mid-teens, and even then it was to avoid having to follow his dad into the painting and decorating trade.

He joined his first band, eventually christened Urchin, alongside his friend and future Iron Maiden bandmate Dave Murray.

“I wanted to get in with Dave, so I said: ‘I’ll sing,’” he says now. “I had no idea if I could sing or not, but I did it, and I learned to play guitar as I went along. I was terrified when I first went on stage, but I thought: ‘If this is what you want to do, mate, you’d better get your arse up there.’”

Smith put in the legwork with Urchin, playing gigs to a handful of people and earning 25 quid a pop. They were hardworking but largely unsuccessful. Not that it mattered. “As long as we had money for beer and food we were happy,” he says.

Everything changed for Smith in 1980 when his old mate Dave Murray invited him to join Iron Maiden. Six thousand miles away, Richie Kotzen had heard about this exciting young British metal band, and was all over them.

“My first rock concert was Iron Maiden,” he says. “Number Of The Beast, Piece Of Mind, backtracking to Killers… I was a massive fan.”

Unlike the largely self-taught Smith, the American had his first guitar lesson when he was seven. But like his bandmate, Kotzen started out as a singer and a guitarist. “I was always someone who wrote music with vocals,” he says.

That changed when he signed to San Francisco-based shred-guitar label Shrapnel when he was 19. “I was this hotshot guitar kid from the Philadelphia/New Jersey area,” he recalls, “and I realised there was this label putting out guitar players, and every guitar player that ended up on the label was really celebrated. So I started writing and recording instrumental music to get a record deal with Shrapnel. After I made that first record [self-titled, in 1989] I realised: ‘Now I’m in the game, I don’t really like instrumental music much.’ So I went back to singing, and started taking that seriously.”

Vocals or not, Kotzen was part of a generation of young shred guitarists either revolutionising the instrument or simply wanking off in public (“Hey!” he says mock-indignantly at the suggestion it’s the latter). For Smith, the shredders represented something different.

“I found it intimidating,” he admits. “Guys like Richie and Tony MacAlpine and Blues Saraceno, they’re way beyond you technically. But I’ve always been like that. I remember Maiden’s manager sitting down with us in the mid-eighties and saying: ‘We’re going to tour Europe this year. Michael Schenker’s opening for us.’ I was like: [alarmed] ‘Jesus. Really? I’ve got to go on after Michael Schenker?!’ That caused me a few sleepless nights.”

Both Smith and Kotzen have subsequently taken very different but similarly winding paths to get to this point. Smith quit Maiden in 1989 to focus on his own band, Adrian Smith And Project (in which he once again took on the vocals) and, later, Psycho Motel, before rejoining Maiden at the end of the 90s. Kotzen did a two-year stretch in Poison in the early 90s, and replaced fellow Shrapnel refugee Paul Gilbert in hard rock survivors Mr. Big around the turn of the millennium. He’s released a steady stream of albums as both a solo artist and, more recently, frontman with hard rock supergroup The Winery Dogs.

A decade or so may separate them in age, but Smith and Kotzen are the product of the same pre-internet era. White Noise, the first single from the new album, is a blazing rocker that takes a dim view of certain aspects of modern technology. ‘Late in the evening, I’m watchin’ my feed, I’m fillin’ my eyes with nothin’ but greed,’ Smith howls. ‘The frequency cracking drives me out of my head, loosely distracted by all they said,’ roars Kotzen. It’s a great song, but they sound like a couple of grumpy Victorian gentlemen shaking their fists at a new-fangled motor car as it splutters past.

“It’s the modern way of life,” Smith says of the song’s subject. “People on their mobiles, people spending hours and hours on the internet, getting bombarded with this information. It’s kind of like brainwashing.”

That’s ironic, given that the internet has become home to the modern guitar hero. Where it used to be albums and live shows that gave musicians of Smith and Kotzen’s generation a platform to display their talents, these days Instagram is full of dazzling young hotshots doing things on guitar that their forebears could only dream of or couldn’t even imagine.

“They’re at a level that is far, far beyond where I was as a teenager,” says Kotzen. “It’s incredible to watch. Back in the old days, to learn a lick you had to listen to a record over and over, putting your finger on it and playing it back. Now I can watch George Benson play a lick a hundred times on YouTube and work out what he’s doing.”

Do you miss the romance of the way it used to be? He laughs loudly.

“The human nature is to romanticise the struggle,” he says. “My attitude is fuck the struggle, let me get there before anybody else.”

Technology’s relentless forward march can’t change everything. A live show is still a live show, even if Smith/Kotzen’s own debut run of shows, in 2022, gave at least one of them the fear.

“I had anxiety,” says Smith. “I hadn’t sung on stage for twenty years, since I had my solo projects in the 1990s. But I just had to get up there and do it. And at least I had someone to share vocals with. Carrying a whole show on your own is hard.”

Given their individual success – Smith as guitarist with Iron Maiden, Kotzen with various solo and band projects on the go at any one time – neither of them needs to do this. But they do it all the same.

“What makes this work is that it’s truly authentic,” says Kotzen. “There’s nothing here that’s forced or being done with any sort of agenda.”

“Hopefully this’ll grow and get out to more people,” Smith adds. “And if it doesn’t happen it’s not the end of the world. We’ll still do it because we enjoy it.”

Black Light, White Noise is out now via BMG.

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.

Singer-songwriter, drummer and Gizmo co-inventor Kevin Godley met his soon-to-be creative partner Lol Creme at art school in the 60s. They played in numerous bands together, including Hotlegs, which eventually became 10cc. They left in 1977, became Godley & Creme, and were soon elevated from pop stars to in-demand pop video directors.

Godley tells Prog about the, ahem, consequences of the duo’s creative career, the recently released 11-CD set Parts Of The Process – The Complete Godley & Creme, and that time he was mistaken for Paper Lace’s drummer.

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Art-school alumni, one-time prog pop star, songwriter, video and filmmaker, environmentalist: Kevin Godley has, for decades, confounded expectations in pursuit of what might be called his vision – though he’d probably baulk at the idea of being a visionary. At 79, he shows no signs of slowing down; he’s just completed work on an orchestral piece with American classical composer John Califra entitled America WTF? “It’s about the current political situation and divide in America,” he says. “It’s very dark.”

He’s also busy working on a musical, trying to finance two screenplays (both of which he had a hand in), and joining a video games company. “I’m not one of those people that will retire to the country and paint. I’m not that guy.”

We’re here to talk about the expansive new box set navigating Godley’s musical collaboration with former longtime writing partner Lol Creme. Parts Of The Process charts their musical arc post-10cc from the great triple disc/musical folly (argue among yourselves) Consequences – a concept piece that’s as much about divorce as it is meteorological disaster – to their final glimmering pop farewell, 1988’s Goodbye Blue Sky. However, our conversation touches on everything from his former band and writing with comedy giant Peter Cook to helping to pioneer the music video revolution and almost working with Bob Dylan.

Consequences reminds us of Zappa’s Jazz From Hell album. He was in thrall to making music with the Synclavier, while on Consequences you and Lol were intent on using the Gizmotron (Gizmo) device you invented. Would that be close to the truth?

Yes, we didn’t really get to use it very often in the context of the band. It just didn’t sit for whatever reason. We’d used it on one or two tracks. We kind of created this thing, conceived this thing and we thought, “Shit, what are we going to do with it?” I mean, we didn’t even know what it was capable of.

Not many musicians invent a piece of machinery in their downtime, let alone a Gizmo.

It was an actual piece of machinery, true. We’d always wanted to work with an orchestra in some capacity. But to actually do that you have to jump through a bunch of hoops, and they’re not cheap and they break for tea – stuff like that. There were Mellotrons around but we didn’t love them, and they kept breaking down.

On a good day the Gizmo sounded like an orchestra, and on a bad day it sounded like a chainsaw

We were looking at the guitar thinking, “This is a stringed instrument; why can it not be bowed in some way?” So, we sort of gaffer-taped Lol’s Stratocaster to the wall and. put an eraser on the end of an electric drill and held it against the guitar strings. A bit of a Leatherface vibe to it: it nearly sawed the thing in half! But for about four seconds there was a sound that was vaguely reminiscent of a violin. And we thought, “Ooh!”

So you made and marketed them.

Yep – John McConnell from the Manchester College of Science and Technology helped us develop the prototype. It was this bunch of wheels, sort of Da Vinci-ish, though not quite up there with the helicopter. It was John’s prototype that we made Consequences with. Then they were mass produced in the US by a company called Musitronics – but the timing was atrocious. It was the beginning of cheap synths, and it was very vulnerable to weather change and stuff like that. On a good day it sounded like an orchestra, and on a bad day it sounded like a chainsaw.

In 1976 – post How Dare You! – you and Lol took the Gizmo into 10cc’s Strawberry Studios to start work on Consequences. Were you still in 10cc at this point?

Yeah; it was the end of the album cycle and tour, but we were still in the band. We had some downtime – three weeks in Strawberry, as I recall – and the potential of working the Gizmo got us excited again.

Weren’t you excited by 10cc any more?

The problem with being in any band is everything becomes rote after a while. You lose the spark; it’s like, ‘Oh God, there’s another tour coming, there’s another album coming. We’ve got to write another bunch of songs.’ We were looking for something fresh. Our attention span was very short.

You were smoking your own body weight in dope and recording through the night. What was your mindset like at the time?

The label thought, ’We better get a responsible adult in to tame them.’ And the responsible adult was Peter Cook!

I suppose it was like – not a vanity project exactly, but something to test the capabilities of what we’d done. But there was no master plan. The first week or so was, “Let’s plug it in and see what comes out,” because we’d never really used it other than on Old Wild Men [from Sheet Music]. At one point, we created a tape loop – Phil Manzanera’s idea, as I recall. We put a bump in the tape and it sounded like a soprano opera singer. That was a revelation. But mainly, it was fun again. Then, as you know, it turned into a monster.

When did you both decide that you’d had enough of 10cc?

It wasn’t really one moment. There were a few meetings had because the label had been in touch. “It’s time for you to make a new album, boys.” Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman had started writing songs for it. And we just didn’t have a taste for it. We were too into this.

They played us something – it might have been The Things We Do For Love – and we just thought it was beige. We’d had this pre-production meeting about the next album, and it went something like, “We need one of your long, weird ones, a slushy one, and we need some humour.” I was, like, “Hang on a minute – we don’t work to order.”

Prior to that, it was all about spending a certain amount of time in the studio and doing what we were capable of doing. We’d been relatively successful by going in the opposite direction. That’s what I enjoyed more than anything else. It was becoming a day job: we were taking care of business, but we didn’t take care of each other. We might have gone away and decided to come back if we’d had the time to stretch out and do what we wanted for a while, but that wasn’t allowed to happen. Four blokes. Four albums. Four years. That was it.”

Going back to Consequences, you and Lol decamped to the residential Manor Studios for three months, with Peter Cook in tow to continue with the recording sessions. Of all the people…

I don’t think he was there for the full three, but we had a lot of fun. I have this suspicion that by then the record label was thinking, “What the hell are these two idiots up to? We’ve agreed to release a record, but they’re spending more than the value of our country on this project. So, we better get a responsible adult in to tame them.” And the responsible adult they chose was Peter Cook!

They didn’t know there was a live mic open. We heard: ’What the fuck was that?’ ’No fucking clue. Are we going to sell that?’

It was a fascinating time. There were maybe two or three hours in the day where we were in sync. We worked at night and Peter, obviously, worked in the day. His concept was the divorced couple in the story; we’d provide the music and react to what the other was doing, but we’d rise at lunchtime, and we’d have a few hours together before Peter would start drinking. We were enjoying every second – that’s not to say we had a clue about what we were doing.

And there was no outside influence or producer to help guide you, tap on the studio glass and ask what the hell you were doing?

We were those producers! I remember there was an instance very early on when we were still at Strawberry. The managers of 10cc at the time came to hear what we were up to, so we played them the first 15 minutes that we had. We left them to it and they were saying all the right things – “Wow, extraordinary, amazing!”

We went out to have a cigarette, and they carried on talking in the studio, but what they didn’t know was that there was a live mic open. And we heard: “What the fuck was that?” “No fucking clue. Are we going to sell that?” The complete opposite reaction – but very managerial!

Among the dialogue and storytelling tangents, there are songs like Five O’ Clock In The Morning, which would have fitted perfectly on any of the first four 10cc records.

It was part of who we were; it’s in our DNA, so when we decided to write some actual songs, it sounded like us.

That album and a lot of your 10cc work is very visual. Is that a part of how you’re built too?

I think everything we ever wrote was visual. The only tools we had were audio tools; we didn’t mix with film people. We didn’t have a way into film, but we were art school trained. So there was always something bubbling underneath, but we did it in sound. I think we even called Consequences an “ear movie” at the time.

We’d become audio hermits. We weren’t aware of what was stirring: punk rock, the Sex Pistols, the polar opposite of what we were doing

I remember going outside to record windscreen wipers on the car in the rain – I forget for which song, but we were dedicated to getting it right. I’m in my car and the windscreen wipers were going, and it’s pissing rain and we had this mic outside. And there’s the guy on the pavement just looking at me, and it’s night time, and eventually he plucks up the courage and taps on my window. I wind it down and he leans in and goes: “Excuse me, are you the drummer from Paper Lace?” We got that on tape!

Lol says you were personally heartbroken when the album died a commercial death. Is heartbroken too big a word?

No – I was, because something happened to me maybe about three-quarters of the way through making it. I was very aware that we’d become audio hermits. We weren’t remotely aware of the outside world, what was stirring: punk rock, the Sex Pistols, the exact polar opposite of what we were doing. And when things like that happen, you must be aware of them. You can’t just keep going blindly and deathly forward, because it doesn’t really make sense.

I learned a lesson from that, but we were too far into it to start from scratch – forget about it. Then we heard they were going to release it as a three-album box set, selling for the extortionate amount of £12 quid in 1977 [approximately £70 today]. It was so ill-conceived; it did us a huge amount of damage. It fucked us up. We both put a huge amount of work into it, and no one liked it. No one understood it , and that ain’t going to help a career. It got slated in the press. We were the audio version of the movie Heaven’s Gate.

Did it really cost a million pounds in today’s money?

I don’t know how much it cost. It couldn’t have been cheap. Everyone was in and there was no way out. Peter Cook – even just that cost them a pretty penny. That’s for damn sure.

Remarkably, a mere two years later, the label fronted you cash again for something that couldn’t be quantified at the time: a music video.

I know; we weren’t a touring band. We had a single coming out, we were always a bit of an anomaly for the label. They didn’t quite know what to do with us, particularly after Consequences. The album was Freeze Frame and the lead single was Englishman In New York, and we thought the only way to get seen or heard was to do a short film or something. So we came up with a storyboard and the label loved it. We didn’t know there was going to be such a thing as the video industry or indeed videos. Nobody did then.

They got us a director called Derek Burbidge [The Police, AC/DC] and his job was to make our vision, such as it was, come to life – which he did, admirably, and during that one day of shooting and the subsequent day of editing, a huge light bulb switched on above our heads. We thought, “Fuck, this is brilliant – we could do this!” I even liked being out front in my red shirt and my swish suit, Mr Cool. When I looked at myself I thought, “Fuck off!” but at least I was trying.

Then in 1980, Steve Strange and Visage approached you about making something for them for their Fade To Grey single.

Yeah, our albums were slowly ticking over, but we still weren’t touring; we weren’t doing anything. They wanted a video because they couldn’t get on Top Of The Pops or Whistle Test, so they made a film as a stopgap. People would play the film and liked what they were seeing, but there was no infrastructure in place; no video commissioners.

It was all word-of-mouth, musician to musician – a trust thing. So we were lucky. We were at the beginning of something; we’d never been in that place before. We filmed it, helped do the edit, learning all the time. Then we began to be the go-to people for a while. We had this reputation. And we got to do some really interesting things.

You must have had so much creative energy at that point. You did more than 50 music videos in the 80s for The Police, Duran Duran, George Harrison Lou Reed and others, and yet you were still making music.

Orson Welles was asked about how he’d made Citizen Kane. He said one of the most important ingredients was ignorance

I remember us putting out Under Your Thumb [from 1981’s Ismism], and we didn’t have any hope for it at all as a single. And we were shooting a video for Toyah Willcox [Thunder In The Mountains] on an airfield somewhere. A production guy came running up and said the single had just gone in the top 50. I was like, “Hang on a minute – how do we deploy the two things that we do?” But it was the same stuff. It just came out of two different taps. We turn this one on when we’re doing film. We turn this one on when we’re doing audio. It was just a natural thing, and those two things had somehow matured together.

You ended your creative partnership with Lol after arguably one of the best albums of your career, 1988’s Goodbye Blue Sky – which earned you an unlikely fan.

Dave Stewart got my wife and I in to see Bob Dylan at Hammersmith Apollo and we got to stand backstage and watch him. At the end of part one, after wowing everyone with Maggie’s Farm or something, he walked straight up to me and said, “You still making videos? Want to make one for me?” And then walked off. We met him at a hotel a few days later and he said, “You did a video where people were going through each other. Coming forward and going back,” and I couldn’t remember what he was talking about. It was A Little Piece of Heaven, which must have been on MTV all of two times – and he’d seen it! We never got to work together, but what a moment.

Did Cry – the haunting video and the equally haunting song – feel like the culmination of both of your creative taps?

Yes. People still want to talk about that video to me; it was a real moment in time. Elbow got me to recreate it for their Gentle Storm single – you know the crossfading faces? That was plan B; that was never meant to be the video. We wanted Torvill and Dean to skate to it, but they couldn’t do it when we needed them. We had to come up with something else sharpish, and that was what we came up with. Even after we’d shot it, we weren’t sure what we were going to do with it until we got into the edit suite. Then we started dissolving between faces and that’s when the penny dropped, and it got really interesting.

What’s the best 10cc album, and why is it Sheet Music?

Because we were a little bit more knowledgeable. It’s 1974; it’s our second album, so we’re a little bit more sophisticated – but we didn’t know it all then. Which from that point on we kind of did. We kind of knew who our audience was and what they might want.

Something that Orson Welles once said when he was asked about how he’d made Citizen Kane. He said one of the most important ingredients was ignorance: “I didn’t know how to do things, so I figured that anything I thought of would be possible.” Which he made happen. Not only by doing things like that, but thinking like that. That’s how you move a medium and the technology that drives it forward. If it’s too easy and too obvious, what’s the point?

Queens of the Stone Age have shared a trailer for Alive in the Catacombs, a film documenting their performance in the world-famous Catacombs of Paris, the final resting place for millions of French citizens, interred in the 1700s.

The Los Angeles band’s performance in the eerie tunnels beneath the French capital represented the fulfilment of a long-held dream for QOTSA frontman Josh Homme, who first visited the extraordinary location almost 20 years ago. No band had ever before been granted permission to play in the Catacombs, which made the group’s stripped-back set, augmented by a three-piece string section, genuinely historic.

A press statement for the film, which will be available to view from June 5, reads: “Every aesthetic decision, every choice of song, every configuration of instruments… absolutely everything was planned and played with deference to the Catacombs- from the acoustics and ambient sounds – dripping water, echoes and natural resonance – to the darkly atmospheric lighting tones that enhance the music. Far from the sound-insulated confines of the studio or the comfort of onstage monitors, Alive in the Catacombs sees the band not only rise to this challenge, but embrace it.”

Josh Homme says, “We’re so stripped down because that place is so stripped down, which makes the music so stripped down, which makes the words so stripped down… It would be ridiculous to try to rock there. All those decisions were made by that space. That space dictates everything, it’s in charge. You do what you’re told when you’re in there.”

He adds, “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.”

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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 Dublin gig 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 on August 27.

Cancelling shows last summer, the band released a statement saying, “QOTSA regret to announce the cancellation and/or postponement of all remaining 2024 shows. Josh has been given no choice but to prioritize his health and to receive essential medical care throughout the remainder of the year. Josh and the QOTSA family are so thankful for your support and the time we were able to spend together over the last year. Hope to see you all again in 2025.”

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.