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While Bury Tomorrow could already be proud of their consistent output, and the respected niche they’d carved for themselves in the British metal scene, 2023’s The Seventh Sun took them up to the next rung of the ladder.

Driven by the departure of co-founding guitarist/clean singer Jason Cameron, and the frustration over the pandemic robbing their sixth album, Cannibal, of momentum, its follow-up took the road to uncertainty by favouring heaviness over the more palatable approach they had been honing up to that point.

In many ways, Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience feels like the natural successor to Cannibal, fully owning that well-worn cliché of adding melody without sacrificing the bite. Reminiscent of metalcore milestones such as Bring Me The Horizon’s Sempiternal and Parkway Drive’s Ire, Will You Haunt Me… sounds unmistakably familiar, while pushing enough against the parameters to forge its own identity.

Jason Cameron’s rich, distinctive voice was something that set Bury Tomorrow apart from their peers, and given the more liberal deployment of clean vocals throughout the band’s eighth effort, it’s exciting to hear brilliant keyboardist/clean vocalist Tom Prendergast sound even better than on the last record. Changing a vocalist can be tricky for fans to adapt to, but not only does Tom deliver on the call-and-response of What If I Burn, and Found No Throne’s subdued longing, the extra layering of atmospheric synths and jarring beats demonstrate his enormous added value.

Wasteland delivers on all fronts, from early loud whispering to riffs destined to accompany jets of flame in a live setting, and a huge chorus boasting clean harmonies over the shimmering keys, that demands to be sung along to. But although there’s extra melodic finesse here, the rest of the album refuses to change down gears from The Seventh Sun.

From the urgent bounce and trademark riffs of opener To Dream, To Forget onwards, there are still snarling beasts snapping at the cages. Waiting offers no quarter, and Yōkai’s baleful tone and seismic grooves perfectly emphasise the sense of anxiety and disconnection from society that lies at the album’s lyrical centre.

Kristan Dawson’s understated but effective leads choose their moments wisely, and Adam Jackson’s kicks propel the likes of Let Go’s spattering attack. Meanwhile, Villain Arc’s grisly menace could cause many a deathcore band to look over their collective shoulder in admiration and worry.

Riding stabbing drops and synths at the end, Dani Winter-Bates channels a multitude of expressions, from his lowest growls to searing screams and a Dez Fafara-like scattergun approach. It’s just one of many commanding moments here that see the engaging frontman deliver a career-best display – so much so, that it feels like he could lead his bandmates through anything.

Finally, following a multitude of cathartic flashpoints, the poignant weight of Paradox brings the curtain down impeccably. More immediate moments may have permeated Bury Tomorrow’s previous releases, but Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience boasts a discernible balance of creativity, confidence and, above all, emotional impact for a band unafraid to nakedly wear their hearts on their sleeves. Ultimately, it has enough force to turn their niche into an indisputable crater.

Will You Haunt Me With That Same Patience is out May 16 via Music For Nations / Sony

Rugby, Sean Bean and power ballad superfan Adam has been writing for Hammer since 2007, and has a bad habit of constructing sentences longer than most Dream Theater songs. Can usually be found cowering at the back of gigs in Bristol and Cardiff. Bruce Dickinson once called him a ‘sad bastard’.

The full line-up for Olivia Rodrigo’s first headline performance at a UK festival has been announced.

The 22-year-old Californian alternative/pop-punk superstar is set to headline the opening night of this summer’s BST Hyde Park festivities on Friday, June 27, 48 hours before she has the honour of closing Glastonbury 2025 as the Sunday night headliner on the site’s iconic Pyramid Stage.

Other artists gracing the central London Royal Park on the day include Los Angeles-based bedroom pop duo Between Friends (brother and sister duo Brandon and Savannah Hudson), Brighton alt.pop star Caity Baser, and Scottish singer/songwriter Katie Gregson-Macleod.

Seek out tickets for the one-day event, and all this summer’s BST Hyde Park shows, are available here. Other headline acts at the festival include the legendary Stevie Wonder, Jeff Lynne’s ELO, Neil Young and The Chrome Hearts and pop superstar Sabrina Carpenter.

Previous headliners at BST Hyde Park include Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, Pink, Guns N’ Roses, Stevie Nicks, and Elton John.

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.

Slipknot guitarist Jim Root says the nu metal nine-piece wrote a host of material during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that it will never see the light of day.

Talking in an interview with Guitar Interactive, recorded before one of the band’s shows at London’s O2 Arena in December, Root admits (via The PRP), “There’s a bunch of music that was written during COVID that I’m not interested in.”

He adds: “And I think everybody else in the band gets it too, and I think they’re kind of, like, ‘OK, we need to just kind of, like, maybe sweep all that shit under a rug and start fresh.’”

The guitarist also claims that, since drummer Eloy Casagrande joined Slipknot in early 2024, the band have had no time to write for the follow-up to 2022’s The End, So Far. They spent much of last year touring to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their self-titled debut album, playing it in full at each concert.

“Honestly, we’ve been touring so much since Eloy joined the band that my inspiration is nearly zero,” says Root.

He goes on to say that he wants to “get touring behind us” and “have at least a month off just to shut my brain off” before plotting new music.

Following the O2 concerts, Slipknot took two months off, and they’re currently in the middle of another live break set to last from March until June. So, there’s a chance they may have drummed up new ideas in that time.

Despite the 2024 creative drought that Root alludes to, Slipknot still teased new music during that time. Early in the year, the band rented a California billboard and put out teasers featuring the phrase Long May You Die, later revealed to be the name of a single. However, at time of publication, the song is still yet to see the light of day.

All the while, the band continued to tease fans regarding the existence of their album Look Outside Your Window, which was recorded adjacent to 2008’s All Hope Is Gone. First announced in 2018 and described as having a mellower sound than the usual Slipknot fare, the release has been hinted at for years, yet continually postponed.

The latest update came from percussionist Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan in July, who said Look Outside Your Window has been mixed, mastered and given album art. All that was left was finding a decent slot to release it.

“The only reason why it’s not been out is because it’s a timeless album,” he added. “It can be released 10 years ago, 10 years from now, today, so on and so forth.”

Slipknot will hit the European festival circuit in June. See all their live plans now via their website.

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Metal Hammer and Prog, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, NME and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

Cradle Of Filth frontman Dani Filth used to be pen-pals with late Norwegian black metal mastermind Euronymous.

Talking exclusively to Metal Hammer, the Cradle singer reveals that he has “three or four letters” from the original guitarist of Mayhem, who was stabbed to death by his then-bandmate Varg Vikernes in 1993, aged 25.

He adds that Euronymous, real name Øystein Aarseth, expressed admiration for the notorious dictators Pol Pot and Nicolae Ceaușescu during one of their correspondences.

“I became pen-pals with Euronymous after sending our demo tape to him with loads of flyers and stuff,” Filth (real name Daniel Lloyd Davey) remembers. “He sent me a really nice little letter, nothing overtly weird.

“I think he mentioned in the second letter to me how much he admired Pol Pot and Nicolae Ceaușescu for the way they could control the populace, but that’s about as misanthropic as it got.”

Filth also says that he used to keep his Euronymous letters in an original pressing of Mayhem’s 1987 debut EP Deathcrush, until the EP was stolen by “a wily character that I thought was a friend”.

“I still have an original copy of the EP from 1987,” he continues, “but me and my friends just regarded it as a crappy thrash metal, death metal thing. Not once did we consider it black metal, other than it having a spiky logo with inverted crosses.”

The Norwegian black metal scene, which centred around Euronymous’ Oslo record store Helvete (Norwegian for “Hell”), committed numerous heinous, infamous acts in the early 1990s.

Mayhem vocalist Per “Dead” Ohlin committed suicide at the band’s cabin in 1991, and Euronymous photographed the corpse upon discovering it. One of the pictures he took became the cover of a Mayhem bootleg several years later.

Other musicians, including Vikernes and Emperor guitarist Tomas “Samoth” Haugen, burned churches down in anti-Christian acts of arson. In 1992, Emperor drummer Bård “Faust” Eithun murdered a gay man in Lillehammer.

In 1994, Haugen was sentenced to 16 months in prison for burning down Skjold church. The same year, Eithun was sentenced to 14 years in prison for murder and arson, and Vikernes was sentenced to 21 years (the maximum sentence in Norway at the time) for murder and arson.

Filth isn’t the only famed metal singer to have been pen-pals with Euronymous. In 2022, Soulfly, Cavalera Conspiracy and ex-Sepultura singer/guitarist Max Cavalera said that he exchanged letters with the controversial figure.

He wrote in his autobiography, My Bloody Roots: “[Euronymous] loved the Brazilian underground with us, Mutilator and Sarcófago. There was something about Brazilian black metal that felt different to him, I think. There was an element of danger. It was more fucked-up than European black metal because it had the Third World influence.”

Cradle released their new album, The Screaming Of The Valkyries, in March via Napalm. The band are currently touring North America and will hit the European festival circuit in June. They also have headline dates scheduled across the continent. See all details via their website.

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Metal Hammer and Prog, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, NME and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

In 2010, Heart released Red Velvet Car, their first album to hit the US Top 20 in two decades. To mark the album’s release, Classic Rock sat down with the band’s Ann and Nancy Wilson to discuss their path from classic rockers to multi-platinum, MTV-friendly goliaths and beyond.

It was boredom that started it. You’re in one of America’s biggest bands, your album is at No.1, the tour seems endless – night after night the same in nameless, faceless hotels…

“We were bored after a show one night,” chuckles Heart’s Ann Wilson with the benefit of more than two decades’ hindsight. “Our publicist at the time, who’s now the manager of Pearl Jam, well, the two of us broke into the hotel bar which was closed down for the night.

“We had a few drinks and then we plugged in the jukebox, turned it way up, just had a party in there. Real breaking and entering. And we could have really gotten in trouble big-time, because we were in some little town back east that was really pretty conventional and uptight. We left a lot of booze bottles around.”

Ann Wilson’s confession about her most ridiculous rock’n’roll moment doesn’t stop at that.

“We got escorted out of town the next day because things went on from there – the big lawnmower went into the swimming pool, filling the pool with oil. They were renovating the hotel and there were big rolls of brand-new carpeting which got shoved into the pool. Doors were knocked on and when people opened them they were sprayed with the fire extinguisher…”

It was the late 80s, and Heart (the band Wilson has led along with her guitarist younger sister Nancy since the mid-70s) were riding high on their reinvention from 70s folk rockers to polished, AOR megastars. Big ballads and even bigger hair was the order of the day. These Dreams and Alone were monster hits, the band’s videos were all over MTV. It all seemed a world away from their earlier success, driven by consummate acoustic-driven rock albums like 1976’s Dreamboat Annie and 77’s Little Queen.

But after that second massive success the band’s fortunes faltered. The big-hair bubble burst, and it seemed that Heart were over. The Wilsons retreated to their native Seattle.

For all that grunge has been held responsible for slaying the OTT-ballad brigade, somehow the sisters seemed to escape its flannel-shirted wrath. Conversely, grunge actually proved to be their saviour.

“It saved us emotionally at the time,” guitarist Nancy Wilson explains. “We came back out of the 80s with our tails between our legs. We were one of those hair bands that were so uncool overnight.

“I can’t tell you how relieved we were to find that out after the eighties and we came back to Seattle, because guys like [Alice In Chains guitarist] Jerry Cantrell were there going: ‘Oh my god, you’re such an influence.’ I still well up when I remember him asking me how the beginning of Mistral Wind went. We were playing guitars at Ann’s house and just trying to find our community again in Seattle, and there it was, larger than we ever expected it to be.”

“We were really pretty surprised when we came down off of that eighties thing and we were embraced by those guys,” Ann continues. “I just figured, oh my god, now we’ve done it. We’d gone out on a worldwide level, had a few number ones and made a shitload of money.”

“But we came back having made a Devil’s bargain, and in the grunge era that was the kiss of death – the notion of being inauthentic. Here in Seattle I think the musicians have a really hard time in that they’re saddled with their own idea about authenticity being the be-all and end-all. And we have it too – we have the Seattle musician curse as well as any of the other guys do…

“When we came back I was surprised that there were parties we got invited to, and everybody was like: ‘Come on, let’s jam.’ And all that eighties stuff that we were involved with just kinda melted away. Within a year we had The Lovemongers going [an acoustic-based band featuring Ann, Nancy and long-time friends Sue Ennis and Frank Cox], we’d taken off the corsets and the fingernails and the extensions and we were walking around in our own shoes again. It was amazing. A wonderful musical healing that took place.

It was this spiritual and musical regrouping that has led Heart to 2010 and to a brand new album in the shape of Red Velvet Car, their first studio release since 2004’s Jupiter’s Darling. While the latter saw the Wilsons moving away from their polished 80s sound, Red Velvet Car takes it a step further and continues that musical healing.

There are no massive ballads, no multi-layered keyboards, no vocal histrionics. Collaring producer Ben Mink – who worked with Ann on her solo album Hope & Glory, and has produced the likes of Barenaked Ladies and k.d. lang and worked with Rush – Red Velvet Car puts the acoustic guitar firmly back as the organic heart of Heart.

“It spurred us to go back to square one,” says Nancy, the woman who supplies said guitar. “We went back to clubs, we got back to a community and back to the idea of not posing. We’d been posing more and more intensely through the videos. People asked me if I really played the guitar or was it a prop? That was the ultimate insult of the 80s for me.”

“At our age, maybe it’s smarter to cover your ass and pretend,” shrugs Ann. “See, when you’re young you’re fearless and cool; but we’re not posing any more.”

The experience in the studio was also a different one for the Wilsons with this album. Heart (now a sextet, completed by Ben Smith on drums, Ric Markmann on bass, Debbie Shair on keyboards and Craig Bartock on guitar) recorded Red Velvet Car between studios and hotel rooms in Los Angeles and Seattle.

“It was much more relaxed in the studio,” says Ann. “So much fun. I would really look forward to going to work. And after all these years that’s quite a statement from me, because there have been different projects where it wasn’t that much fun, I didn’t like the studio. I had a few experiences with different producers in the eighties where I don’t know why necessarily that it had to be me that they were working with. They just wanted to mould me in a way where it could have been anyone. I never understood that a bit – why don’t you sing it yourself, asshole?!”

Ann wasn’t the only one who relished the different studio set-up. This time, the band played together in the same room – just like they used to.

“It’s a musical conversation between a group of people who are playing with one another at the same time, looking at each other,” explains Nancy, “doing a few takes and not over-thinking it. It’s great to get the dynamic of something before it’s beaten to death. One of our biggest intentions was to try to never go past the point where it was fresh. They say it’s the same with painting – you have to know when to stop.”

Although Red Velvet Car is the first Heart album of new material in a while, the band haven’t spent the intervening years at home with their feet up.

“We’ve continued working with music and with various other projects, not just albums but touring,” says Nancy. The band have traversed the US several times, helped largely by the resurgence of interest in their music, in part spurred by the rise of Guitar Hero, and the use of catalogue music in American TV shows. Heart’s music has been heard in everything from The Sopranos to Glee and American Idol.

“It’s an interesting time for bands – or heritage bands, as they call us now – because I think there’s a cultural craving for a sense of history in pop culture. Like, since there isn’t any,” Nancy laughs. “It’s so disposable now. America’s looking for its own character, and it’s sort of the teenage brat of the world: it’s got everything, it uses all the resources, it’s selfishly egotistical and shallow and hysterical. And all the good things about America too. But I think there’s such a lack of a sense of character and history that stuff like Guitar Hero and American Idol brings the family together. It’s like appointment television, living room game playing that brings America to itself.”

The last couple of years haven’t been without controversy for Heart, either. In the midst of US election fever, the Wilsons made the headlines for having spoken out against the Republican party after their song Barracuda was used to introduce vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

“That was funny,” Nancy smiles now. “It was great. We were watching the convention and there it was. I fired off a bunch of phone calls. I used the ‘F’ word and everything! And it was like, this is good, this is good for you guys – this is the kind of controversy that looks good on a resumé. And I’m like, alright, well, whether or not it’s good for us, it’s how we feel.”

It did result in some ugly scenes and threats though. “Some of the fans decided they didn’t like us and didn’t like our music anymore. At least for a while,” Nancy explains. “We were out on the road, and the next show that we played after that was somewhere in Florida – which is not where you wanna be if you’re a Democrat. We were kinda nervous, but we upped our security and kept a close watch on people walking in. But luckily – knock on wood – of all the crazies who have threatened to take us down, nobody so far has done that.”

‘Back to basics’ is an often-bandied expression, but with Red Velvet Car that’s exactly what Heart have done. “We’re not trying to impress by volume,” says Nancy. “I guess one of the most identifying things about Heart through the arc of our career history is that as writers we’re always tried to pull this poetic idea out of the lyric. We’re kinda old-fashioned enough to keep trying… It’s not what everybody’s doing anymore, but it’s where we come from so it’s a good idea to return to it.”

Ann concurs. “This last few years kinda remind me of the original few years when we were a club band and we were trying to get the thing off the ground, just being pretty single-minded and playing everywhere we possibly could. We haven’t been to England recently… But we’d love to come back.”

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock issue 149, published in September 2010.

Classic Rock editor Siân has worked on the magazine for longer than she cares to discuss, and prior to that was deputy editor of Total Guitar. During that time, she’s had the chance to interview artists such as Brian May, Slash, Jeff Beck, James Hetfield, Sammy Hagar, Alice Cooper, Manic Street Preachers and countless more. She has hosted The Classic Rock Magazine Show on both TotalRock and TeamRock radio, contributed to CR’s The 20 Million Club podcast and has also had bylines in Metal Hammer, Guitarist, Total Film, Cult TV and more. When not listening to, playing, thinking or writing about music, she can be found getting increasingly more depressed about the state of the Welsh national rugby team and her beloved Pittsburgh Steelers.

As Britain’s most venerable folk-rock veteran, Roy Harper was ready to bow out in 2013, before being called back onstage by international applause. That year – at the age of 71 – he told Prog about his new album (and most recent to date) Man & Myth, and what else he wanted to achieve.

It was a good theory: road-weary and happily settled in County Cork, Roy Harper had decided to retire. However, he hadn’t bargained on being championed by an army of admirers from Johnny Marr in Manchester via Joanna Newsom in California to Fleet Foxes in Washington, prompting his discovery by yet another generation of disciples, and his first studio album for 13 years.

We have all of them to thank for Man & Myth, the sonorous new entry in one of the great progressive singer-songwriter canons, recorded by the learned septuagenarian in Calfornia and Ireland. Late October brings three live shows to accompany the release. It nearly didn’t happen – but it’s hats off to Harper once again.

“I did go on what I thought was the last tour; I think it was 2007,” he says. “I’d come to the end of it. There were other things to do. All of the mess with Science Friction [the label he set up in 1993 years ago to reissue his catalogue] – it was such hard work getting all that together, because the records needed to be refurbished.

“Not only had they been ignored sound-wise and come from generation to next generation and lost quality, but they had no sleeve notes – nothing had travelled with them. All the photography lost, everything. You realise this is the way people die, because record companies do not care about that. Anyway, I got interested in doing that, and there were all kinds of other things that kept me busy.

“I started to build a garden here – it was good for my mind to do that. I diarised the tour and came off wanting to write a book. It’s a good book, but so far I’ve not got round to it. But that was the year that all the stuff with Joanna blew up.”

Newsom insisted on Harper guesting with her at the Royal Albert Hall in 2007. In 2011 he took to the Royal Festival Hall stage for a 70th birthday party, with onstage guests including his son Nick, Newsom, Jonathan Wilson (subsequently a co-producer on the new record) and Jimmy Page. Harper may have had other plans, but there was no stopping the renaissance.

“The older fans would have come back anyway, but of course each year the numbers thin,” he says. “Having a younger generation involved – a very much younger generation, like grandchildren almost – it probably alerted their parents to the fact that there was something going on.

“People like Johnny Marr are very vocal in support, and he’s a member of the generation in between, so it’s kind of been reseeded. There’s almost a certain amount of chagrin there, like, ‘Wait a minute, I’m retired!’ ‘No, you’re not!’ ‘Yes I am!’ It’s kind of like it was 40 years ago: being empowered by interest in you. You’re not playing to no one any more. You’ve been refuelled.”

Had he sensed the downward spiral before that? “Absolutely. That’s why I was just intent on saving the records. I knew some of them were really good and needed to be packaged in the right way for posterity. But I’ve been interrupted by myself again.”

It must be a nice problem. “It is; it’s very good. ‘What the hell? When’s my writing going to happen? Am I going to live into my 90s? No, I’m not!’ I’m very enthusiastic at the moment.”

Still, Harper has no qualms about saying goodbye to the road. “I desperately want to give up gigging – I really do,” he admits, “because it’s taking away from what I could write. Rehearsal is like a whole song and dance, literally. “I’m thinking now that I’ll do these dates I’ve got in the next year, and then I’m going to give it a break until I’m 75 or something, and see if I’m still up to it at that stage. If I am, I’ll have another go, maybe, but it’ll depend on a record. I think my heart’s in writing, really.”

That’s patently clear from the mellifluous and mystical Man & Myth, on which his driving melodic structures and unique lyrical mixture of the everyday and the transcendental is revitalised. “Jonathan Wilson was the trigger that started it,” says Harper. “I didn’t know him from Adam, but then I found out he’d been trying to get his American friends to record a Roy Harper song and make a tribute record in California. We’ve become good friends – we’re really alike; we have a lot in common.

“We only actually recorded at his studio for a very short time, but in that time a lot was done. I had to bring it back here to Ireland to get it finished. I recorded the whole of one side and another track from the other side here, and the other four tracks on the first side were started in California. So it’s really kind of a transatlantic record.”

Harper has rarely made his lyrics transparent – in fact, he has often constructed his work in a literary style to avoid it becoming too easily accessible. “The dichotomy is that you want things to be heard, and yet I never wanted to jump onto the commercial bandwagon,” he says.

“I avoided it scrupulously. I wrote even longer and more difficult things to encourage myself to concentrate, because I was a prime candidate to do what my friends had done. Marc Bolan, for instance: we used to take the piss out of each other relentlessly, he and I, because he was set on one course and I was set on another, and we both knew it.”

He recalls the occasions when he almost crossed into the mainstream with his rare ‘songs for crowds.’ There was an early one, the Shel Talmy production Life Goes By, then 1977’s Bullinamingvase album offered both the singalong Watford Gap and the bucolic One Of Those Days In England, of which then-manager Peter Jenner encouraged him to make a single edit. Capital Radio airplay followed in London, and Harper was close to securing a Top Of The Pops performance until the track missed its chart target.

All of which seems a long way from Harper’s customised metaphysical approach, historically influenced by Keats, Shelley, Burroughs and Kerouac, as much as by Lead Belly. “When I was 15 to 18 my heroes were all in their 50s and 60s, and some were in their 70s and 80s; they were legends in the true sense of the word. So you fed from those people.”

The individual song subjects of Man & Myth are always philosophical and often academic, informed by Harper’s keen eye on the world outside his window and on his computer screen. “At my sort of stage,” he muses, “you’re alarmed in some small way by the progress of the human beast. It’s there, ready and waiting in the ether – this great, multi-headed beast – and in some ways the album is influenced by that.

“The phrase ‘man and myth’ is something that’s perhaps been with me for at least 60 years. The internet creates mythology, and everybody has their own mythology. Even a baby! Humans, with their brains and tongues alike, create myth all the time, and the distance between man and myth, or woman and myth, is ethereal. You could describe all the songs as being part of man and myth.”

On Cloud Cuckooland, his attention turns to more prosaic themes. “It’s a song about today, really. It’s an everyday phrase in British-Irish life. For me, I see the whole damn thing as cloud cuckooland, right from The X Factor to the Olympics.

“It needed a commentary,” he adds, quoting his own lyrics. “‘The bankers slide their stethoscopes into the public purse/To track genetic foreclosure from coitus to delivery/From ovary to hearse.’ That goes on now every day: the lawyers trying to scrape around for people to come forward to claim for the last lot that went on.”

Lead guitar was later added, at Harper’s request, by Pete Townshend. “It’s kind of related to Won’t Get Fooled Again – that’s why I asked him to do it. It’s the other side of the coin. ‘We won’t get fooled again!’… Yes we will!’ This is Cloud Cuckooland. So they’re heads and tails of the same coin.”

Re-enthused, Harper can’t wait to see what happens next. “With the next record, I’m interested in what’s going to happen with my guitar and pen. Because there are things to work out, and the problems I’ve set myself that I’ve got to find the answers to. So I’ve got a whole vista, a whole panorama opening up to me of new ideas.”

Prog Magazine contributor Paul Sexton is a London-based journalist, broadcaster and author who started writing for the national UK music press while still at school in 1977. He has written for all of the British quality press, most regularly for The Times and Sunday Times, as well as for Radio Times, Billboard, Music Week and many others. Sexton has made countless documentaries and shows for BBC Radio 2 and inflight programming for such airlines as Virgin Atlantic and Cathay Pacific. He contributes to Universal’s uDiscoverMusic site and has compiled numerous sleeve notes for the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and other major artists. He is the author of Prince: A Portrait of the Artist in Memories & Memorabilia and, in rare moments away from music, supports his local Sutton United FC and, inexplicably, Crewe Alexandra FC.    

A retired corrections officer who spent $12,495 to be Kiss icon Gene Simmons’ roadie for a day says he will die happy.

In March, Simmons announced the pricey ‘Ultimate Gene Simmons Experience’ package for his current solo band tour. The deal allowed one fan to join Simmons’ road crew for a date on the tour.

And while some scoffed at the price tag, retired corrections sergeant Dwayne Rosado splashed out for the package for Simmons’ show on 5 May at the Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, New Jersey.

Rosado, who brought his son Zach along for the experience, says it was worth every penny.

He tells the New York Times: “You only live once, and I want to experience life. I’m not going to die with a lot of money. I’m going to die happy.”

The deal included a soundcheck with the band, a meal with Simmons, a roadie experience and hanging out in Simmons’ backstage dressing room.

The father and son were even introduced by the star to the audience. Watch the video of that moment below.

Rosado adds: “It felt awkward, because I have a whole crowd in front of me, and all I wanted to do is hug him. I didn’t care about anything else that was going on.

“Nothing can beat tonight. It’s cemented in Kisstory now, because it’s going to be on YouTube and everything else. So I’ll get to look back and see that moment forever.”

According to the NYT, Simmons praised Rosado for doing a great job as a parent and keeping his son away from illicit substances. Simmons also fielded some tough questions, including being asked to explain the price tag for the experience.

Simmons said: “There’s free market, supply and demand. People want to do it, you do it. You buy a Rolls because you want a Rolls, but a Volkswagen will get you there, too.”

Stef wrote close to 5,000 stories during his time as assistant online news editor and later as online news editor between 2014-2016. An accomplished reporter and journalist, Stef has written extensively for a number of UK newspapers and also played bass with UK rock favourites Logan. His favourite bands are Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Stef left the world of rock’n’roll news behind when he moved to his beloved Canada in 2016, but he started on his next 5000 stories in 2022.