Web Rock News

Austin, Texas psych rock/Americana band Lord Buffalo have been forced to cancel their scheduled European tour at the 11th hour after their drummer was “forcibly removed” from their flight to Holland, and taken into custody by US Customs and Border Protection officers.

The band were set to begin their first-ever run through Holland, Germany, Denmark, Norway, and Finland this week with Swedish psych, kraut, post-rock and doom rockers Orsak:Oslo, beginning on May 15 at the Oefen Bunker club in Landgraaf, Holland, but have now had to abort the tour due to their drummer’s shock detention.

Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has introduced a number of immigration-related executive orders, to the alarm of civil liberties organisations and human rights lawyers. Last month, in a post on his website titled ‘Coming Back To America‘, Neil Young expressed his own concerns that freedoms are already being curtailed under Trump’s presidency.

Concluding their social media announcement, Lord Buffalo write: “In our absence, our touring partners Orsak:Oslo will continue to perform the tour. We urge everyone to go see this amazing band and support them over the next couple weeks.”

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.

Sleep Token look set to land their first number one album in the UK and US, with Even In Arcadia currently the biggest-selling new release on the mid-week charts in both territories.

The band’s fourth album, their first record for major label RCA. has received positive reviews across the media landscape, with Metal Hammer noting, “It might divide longtime fans, but it will almost certainly expose metal to its biggest audience yet.”

This sentiment appears to be borne out by early sales of the album, which was released last week, on May 9.

In the UK, the Official Charts Company reports that that sales of Even In Arcadia look set to out-strip sales of 2023’s Take Me Back To Eden: Sleep Token are out-selling all their competitors this week, with PinkPantheress at number two with Fancy That, The Kooks currently at number three with Never/Know, and media darlings Arcade Fire currently at number five on the chart with Pink Elephant. Tall Tales, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke’s collaboration with electronic musician Mark Pritchard also looks set to debut in the Top 10.

In the US, Hits Daily reports that the enigmatic English metallers are at number one mid-week on the Billboard 200 chart, with Kali Uchis’ Sincerely expected to debut at number 2, and SZA’s SOS retaining its number three spot on the chart.

Sleep Token are currently gracing the cover of Metal Hammer‘s 400th issue. In fact, they’re gracing two covers, one representing House Veridian, and one House Feathered Host.

The cover story lays bare their secret origin story, via those who were there. From their first producer, to publicists and promoters, we discover what Vessel was really like, and how his vision developed.

“The starting point was removing this idea of the music you listen to being related to the person making it,” says George Lever, Sleep Token’s producer from 2016 to 2021. “By being anonymous, the listener is forced to relate to what they’re actually hearing.”

At first, people didn’t know what to make of this mysterious masked band, who defied categorisation.

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.

Randy Blythe wants to make one thing clear. “I’m not Buddha,” says the Lamb Of God singer. “I get angry all the time. But are you just going to sit here and be angry forever? Or are you going to try and figure out a way to make things better?”

He’s talking the inspiration behind his new book, Just Beyond The Light: Making Peace With The Wars Inside Our Head, a collection of first-hand stories of survival and self-betterment, and the insight they’ve brought him.

“It’s just trying to understand myself and the world,” he says. “It’s just about navigating those thoughts.”

Do you think you could have written this book before you got sober?

“No fucking way. I couldn’t have written any book when I wasn’t sober. I used to write when I was younger. I did a couple of fanzines and stuff, I quite enjoyed it, but that was in my early 20s, and then sometime around then the drinking and drugging just became way more important than writing.

I did write lyrics, but writing a book is much harder than writing a song. It’s a much more sustained creative exertion. I didn’t have that sort of stamina when I was drinking. No way.”

There’s a lot of personal stuff in there: bereavement, mental health issues, fear, anger. Was it cathartic writing all that down and putting it out there?

“If you stuff something down, it will come back and fuck you up. I know it did with me. I lost a daughter, the only child I ever had [Randy’s newborn daughter died in 2000 of a heart defect], and I didn’t want to deal with that. I just stuffed it down behind alcohol and drugs and shit and just didn’t look at it, and it fucked me up years later. It’s absolutely imperative that you do let things out, it really is.”

And those perspectives are helpful to other people as well…

“I’m doing this book tour right now. There’s a Q&A and I will talk about my [late] grandmother a lot. Then after, when I do the signing, people will come up and it really moves them. It really does, because it makes them think about their grandmother or an elderly family member. If one thing comes out of the book, I hope that if people do have older people left, it encourages them to go visit their family.”

In the book, you make no secret of your disdain for social media and online culture.

“Because it’s fucking bullshit! Punk rock and metal have been warning against this for years. Look at Fear Factory! We’ve been talking about this, but we’ve been in the underground. Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, you guys are a bunch of dirtbag fucking idiots!’ Fuck you! The pattern was easy to see, and lo and behold, the idiocracy is upon us.”

There’s a lot in the book about what it means to be an artist. How important is that to you?

“I could go live in a fucking cave somewhere, I’m good with not much, but that is not taking advantage of what I view as my purpose in life: being an artist, which in my case requires expression, and expressing to people. I could write all the wonderful songs in the world, write 15 books, take a bunch of photos and never show them to anyone. They may be great, but what good is it if nobody gets to see them?”

So do punk and metal still have the power to change anything?

“Yes. I don’t think metal or punk or hardcore is ever going to drive a mass societal change, and that’s OK, because I think the only thing I can do in this crazy time is try and be an effective person individually. Punk and metal have the very real power to effect individual change, because they certainly did in my life.”

You talk in the book about the physical struggle of being in Lamb Of God. How long do you think you can continue with doing that?

“I think we can be in Lamb Of God till the day we die. I hope when I fucking croak, I croak as the singer of Lamb Of God, and at a ripe old age. We’re such good friends now, way better than when we were younger, because we shelved the egos and learned how to be a team more.

That being said, physically it is taxing. Man, my back hurts. It hurts bad. I have no idea how long we can keep it up at sort of the manic level that we do. But I don’t think we ever have to completely stop.”

You’re a musician, an author and a photographer. How do you satisfy all of those creative urges?

“It is frustrating for me in a way, because I love shooting photos, I love writing, I love being in a band, I do some acting every now and then… not very well! The frustrating thing is trying to find a balance between all those things, because since I got sober, my creativity is just like a fire hose. I have three or four books outlined that I want to write, then I need to do a photography book. All of these things are swirling around up here [taps head]. I want to do music of different sorts, not just with Lamb Of God.”

What other kinds of music are you talking about?

“Other wild side-projects. I will always do music as long as I can. When I get older, I think it will definitely be something a little more mellow. But I’m a physical performer. I won’t be able to restrain myself. To this day, I’m like, ‘I’m not going to jump off the drum riser, I hurt like shit.’ And then I’ll get onstage and it’s like, ‘Fuck this!’, and I’m flying through the air, because I can’t stop. It’s just too much power.”

It sounds like retirement isn’t on the cards any time soon.

“I’ll be doing it to the day I die. I will never retire. I don’t even understand the concept.”

Randy’s new book Just Beyond The Light: Making Peace With The Wars Inside Our Head is out now via Da Capo on in the UK and Grand Central Publishing in the US.

Since blagging his way onto the Hammer team a decade ago, Stephen has written countless features and reviews for the magazine, usually specialising in punk, hardcore and 90s metal, and still holds out the faint hope of one day getting his beloved U2 into the pages of the mag. He also regularly spouts his opinions on the Metal Hammer Podcast.

In 1975 Jethro Tull decamped to the French Riviera to record eighth studio album Minstrel In The Gallery. As the record celebrates its half-century, Ian Anderson recalls its creation between breaks in a lengthy touring cycle that would eventually lead to the departure of bassist Jeffrey Hammond – after having led Anderson himself to consider getting off the road for good.

---

In spring 1975, had you been in the vicinity of Radio Monte Carlo’s premises in Monaco, you might have seen Ian Anderson dismount his Ossa trials motorcycle and go inside. It was there, in a sprawling live room big enough to facilitate games of badminton between takes, that Jethro Tull recorded their eighth studio album, Minstrel In The Gallery, between May 15 and June 7.

While Renaissance made Scheherazade And Other Stories at London’s Abbey Road and Mike Oldfield tracked Ommadawn in rural Herefordshire, it was the first time Tull had recorded an LP outside the UK, and they’d shipped the Maison Rouge Mobile Studio out to Monaco along with Anderson’s bike. Now all he, guitarist Martin Barre, pianist John Evan, bassist Jeffrey Hammond and drummer Barriemore Barlow had to do was resist holiday resort temptations and knuckle down.

“In 1973, we’d tried to record an album [1974’s War Child] in the relatively famous residential studio Château d’Hérouville, just outside Paris,” says Anderson. “It was awful. That notion of removing yourself from everyday life and concentrating on the music often just meant people lounging by the pool wasting time and money. But for me, personally, Monte Carlo wasn’t much of a distraction. In fact it was the antithesis of the kind of place where I’d have said, ‘Ooh, let’s go there for a holiday!’ Then, as now, it was full of affluence and snobbery.”

Anderson was there under slight duress. Both Jethro Tull’s accountant and their manager Terry Ellis had recommended recording there to gain non-resident tax advantages – but this, says the band leader, made him feel uncomfortable. “And it turned out that there were no financial benefits anyway,” he adds. “I paid all of my UK taxes for that year, just as I have done all of my life. But we didn’t want to go back to Château d’Hérouville and Monaco was reasonably accessible. In the end we were pretty well-organised. I might have jokingly referred to my bandmates ‘goofing off’ because, unlike me, they had time to go for a drive down the coast. But the truth was I had a lot to do on my own anyway. It was a very productive time.”

Now at its 50th anniversary, Minstrel In The Gallery was a near- masterpiece. Melding Elizabethan classical elements with nuanced and complex folk music, it also saw Martin Lancelot Barre’s brawny electric guitar put the rock into baroque on the LP’s fine title track and wondrous, near-17-minute epic Baker St Muse. “We were trying to extend the boundaries – always pushing forward,” the guitarist told Louder in 2014. “We were also quite isolated from other influences, and that made us unique.”

Songwriting-wise, one might consider there are two Ian Andersons on Minstrel – there’s the starry-eyed balladeer of Requiem and Grace, then there’s the outsider figure and people-watcher who, on Baker St Muse, sketches the seedy underbelly of the northwest London locale he was living in when he wrote it. Vomiting drunks, Rubenesque prostitutes, furtive back-lane fumblings and a destitute old woman all figure; the song inhabits an earthy, almost Hogarthian world.

Minstrel was prog rock part-adjacent to Anderson’s famed codpiece and raincoat, then, not just the stuff of amour-gone-wrong or pastoral beauty; although there was plenty of that, too. Better yet, the intricacies of the musical arrangements kept pace with its extraordinary lyrical invention.

“Anything to do with Jethro Tull and Ian Anderson was automatically of a very high standard,” said Minstrel violinist and long-term collaborator Patrick Halling in 2012. And in February 1975, after the band had played five sold- out nights at the LA Forum, the world at large was hip to their ascendancy.

“Are they the world’s biggest band?” Melody Maker wondered. Difficult to imagine now, perhaps – but with Jethro Tull’s US concerts making pioneering use of giant video screens they playfully dubbed ‘Tullavision,’ their primacy, or near-primacy, had become very real.

The rather personal backdrop to Minstrel In The Gallery was Anderson’s divorce from first wife Jennie Franks the previous year. When she was a photography student, she’d co-written lyrics for the title track of 1971’s Aqualung. The imagery she’d used was reputedly inspired by photographs of homeless men she’d shot on a project with the Salvation Army in Victoria, London.

I was married to Jennie for a few years… There were no big fights or arguments. It just wasn’t going to work

Anderson’s break-up with Franks isn’t the easiest subject to broach when his wife of the last 48-odd years, Shona Learoyd, is sitting opposite him. But he explains, “I was married to Jennie for a few years before we very amicably split up. There were no big fights or arguments. It just wasn’t going to work.”

The divorce seems to be implicated in Minstrel’s gorgeous song of farewell, Requiem. Sentiment-wise, it’s akin to Whitesnake’s Here I Go Again, but there the similarity ends; Requiem is a more refined, tender and poetic thing. ‘Saw her face in the tear-drop black cab window / Fading in the traffic; watched her go’, sings Anderson wistfully. Was it about Franks?

“No,” he says. “I never really write about people I know. The characters in my songs are stereotypes, people I don’t know, or completely imaginary. I’ve always been against the idea of betraying any kind of confidence.”

And what of Requiem’s similarly classy companion piece One White Duck/0¹⁰ = Nothing At All, which is surely one of Anderson’s finest ballads? Some sources claim that it, too, was about his divorce. “No, not all,” he says calmly. “That’s wrong. Clearly the song is about the end of a relationship, but it wasn’t about the end of my then-relationship. The only personal aspect of it had to do with a childhood memory of mine. We had white plaster ducks on our living-room wall, and I can still see my mother sitting in a chair watching television with the ducks flying behind her. In the song those three ducks became one.”

The notion of not betraying confidences leads him to cite another instance: he says that, in 1972, he was approached to star alongside actress Carol White (best known for the famed 1966 BBC play Cathy Come Home) in the British drama film Made. “Basically, Carol White’s character enters into a relationship with a singer-songwriter, who then uses that relationship to write lyrics, which betray her intimacy,” Anderson says.

The film was that it involved getting naked in the bath with Carol White. I thought, ‘I’m not getting my kit off for the camera!’

“I turned it down saying, ‘Number one, I’m not an actor; and number two, it doesn’t suit my ethics.’ They said, ‘OK, that’s a shame – anyone else you can think of who might be suitable?’ I thought for about 10 seconds and said, ‘Yeah. Roy Harper!’”

Harper, the famed singer-songwriter behind such landmark prog folk albums as 1971’s Stormcock, was indeed cast in Made. And, for Anderson at least, what happened next was predictable. “Roy ends up having an affair with his co-star, of course! I remember him bringing Carol to my house, arriving late at night and asking if he could come in for a drink. After about half an hour of merriment I said, ‘Look, Roy. It’s getting late and I’m up early tomorrow – can we call it a night?’ He said, ‘No problem, Ian. I’ve just remembered Carol’s still outside in the Rolls-Royce!’

“Another reason I didn’t want to do the film was that it involved getting naked in the bath with Carol,” he adds. “I thought, ‘I’m not getting my kit off for the camera!’”

When Prog asks about Summerday Sands – a bonus track on later editions of Minstrel, and a brilliant story-song ornamented by Hammond’s exploratory bass and Barre’s Richard Thompson-like guitar fills – Anderson maintains that its lyric, too, were just a product of his imagination. Was it, though? It seems too perfect an evocation of a chance romantic encounter to be fiction, too rich in tell-tale clues (‘I gave her my raincoat…’). True, there’s no mention of the song’s protagonist seducing anyone via Bach’s flute sonata in E minor, but still…

“It’s just a nostalgic song, imagining some romantic liaison at some remote beach somewhere,” says Anderson. “It was recorded in Surrey, if I remember correctly, and Dee Palmer put some lovely strings on it at some point. It’s the kind of thing you could imagine Roy Harper doing, actually. Roy’s songwriting and guitar playing were quite an influence on me from about 1971 onwards.”

I said, ‘Look into my eyes while I ask you a question: Don’t you think I’d be the ugliest fucking woman you ever met in your life?!’

Remarkably, given their complexity and intricacy, several Minstrel tracks were first takes. That’s why you can hear Anderson counting in songs, and sometimes announcing their titles. Tull had done their homework, having rehearsed and finessed the material in the annexe of the Montreux Palace Hotel. “That was thanks to dear old Claude Nobs of Smoke On The Water fame,” says Anderson. “He’d been our promoter in Switzerland since 1969 and had pulled some strings.”

Anderson had completed the songwriting for Minstrel while renting a villa in “LA somewhere – one of the canyons,” ahead of an epic US tour. String arranger extraordinaire Dee Palmer, who’d soon become Tull’s full-time keyboardist, had visited Anderson to fine-tune arrangements. Although she left in 1980, the frontman still speaks of her with fondness and admiration.

“This was long before music notation software programs like Sibelius,” he explains. “It was fascinating for me as a non-academic musician to see how Dee worked so brilliantly with pencil and manuscript paper.”

Anderson wanders off-piste; but the story he relates demonstrates his loyalty to Palmer, who came out as transgender in 1998, and without whom Aqualung and Thick As A Brick would not be quite so special. “I’d come home from tour, a few months after that Italian fan club convention in 2001, and my wife told me the News Of The World were camped out near our farm, and that one of the journalists had come to our door demanding to speak to me. Shona had been very upset by the intrusion, so I immediately got in the car and went to confront them.”

The reporter had apparently had a tip-off that Anderson was transgender, had been wearing women’s clothing for years, and was changing his name to Dee. She was quite insistent and badgered him, repeatedly asking if he denied it. “I said, ‘I will not deny it, because that would sound disapproving, and I’m not disapproving.’”

Competing with Elton John to see who could do the most shows at Madison Square Garden never interested me

Finally, having had enough of the intrusion, he snapped. “I said, ‘Come closer. No, closer… Right, look into my eyes while I ask you a question: Don’t you think I’d be the ugliest fucking woman you ever met in your life?!’ At which point she scurried back to her colleagues and they all drove off!”

He guffaws at this, then continues: “About two miles down the road, I suddenly remembered that we sometimes called Palmer ‘Dee P.’ So I rang her on the spur of the moment and explained what had happened. She laughed and said, ‘How fortuitous that you’ve called, Ian. I’ve been meaning to get something off my increasingly ample chest…’ Apparently Dee had felt that way for many years, and when her wife died, that was the trigger for her to become Dee Palmer. Fair play to her.”

If there’s ultimately only so much Ian Anderson can remember about the making of Minstrel In The Gallery, it’s unsurprising. It was half a century ago; two weeks of relative serenity in an otherwise hectic year rammed with January-December live shows. Jethro Tull undertook two lengthy tours of North America and a similarly gruelling trek across Europe in 1975. Anderson appreciated the ravenous appetite for Tull’s music, but the massive arenas where the ‘Tullavison’ screens had become something of a necessity didn’t float his boat.

“I’m a theatre guy,” he says. “Maximum capacity is about 2000, the audience seated comfortably. That suits my style as a musician and performer. Competing with Elton John to see who could do the most shows at Madison Square Garden never interested me in the slightest.

Jeffrey was known for his elaborate, zebra-stripe suit… after that final show he set fire to it behind the venue in order to cleanse himself

“Even in 1972, by the end of a particularly arduous leg of the Thick As A Brick US tour, I was close to telling my then-manager Terry Ellis, ‘No more concerts, full-stop,’” Anderson adds. “Instead I said, ‘No more arenas, please!’ But then I relented, of course. There was a lot of pressure to meet the demand.”

Little wonder, then, that after the further touring demands of 1975, he felt like a minstrel in the gallery himself; a court jester, subject to forces and demands beyond his control. Indeed, Minstrel’s cover art – a tweaked version of an 1838 oil painting by Joseph Nash depicting minstrels performing before a raucous crowd/menagerie at Haddon Hall, Derbyshire – said as much.

“I felt we were in the public domain, but cut off, like entertainers,” Anderson told Classic Rock in 2020. “You were of a different caste; you were travelling salesmen, carnival people. The audience found you seductive and interesting, but you didn’t belong with them.”

As so often with bands on tour, this odd bubble of isolation bred mischief. At a 1975 show in Portland, Oregon, Tull brought a fake zebra onstage, whereupon bassist Jeffrey Hammond was seen to ‘extract’ two white balls from its rear end and make like a circus performer. “I bet you never thought you’d see us juggling zebra shit,” quipped Anderson.

Perhaps it was the striped beast’s ordure, or maybe it was just exhaustion, but after the final date of that tour –at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana on November 2 – Hammond quit the band and subsequently became a painter of landscapes.

“Jeffrey was known for his rather elaborate, zebra-stripe suit,” says Anderson, “and after that final show he set fire to it behind the venue in order to cleanse himself from his time in Jethro Tull. I thought he was just enjoying a theatrical moment and he’d come back to us after some proper rest. Sadly, he didn’t. None of us could persuade him to do so.”

But Tull were far from done, of course, and by November 19 they were back in Monte Carlo to work on 1976’s Too Old To Rock ’N’ Roll: Too Young To Die! on which John Glascock would play bass.

“Like I said,” says Anderson, “it was a very productive time.”

James McNair grew up in East Kilbride, Scotland, lived and worked in London for 30 years, and now resides in Whitley Bay, where life is less glamorous, but also cheaper and more breathable. He has written for Classic Rock, Prog, Mojo, Q, Planet Rock, The Independent, The Idler, The Times, and The Telegraph, among other outlets. His first foray into print was a review of Yum Yum Thai restaurant in Stoke Newington, and in many ways it’s been downhill ever since. His favourite Prog bands are Focus and Pavlov’s Dog and he only ever sits down to write atop a Persian rug gifted to him by a former ELP roadie. 

Somewhere in the south of France is a ski chalet called Chez Glycerine. It’s owned by producer Clive Langer, whose starry CV includes successful albums by Madness and Elvis Costello. But it was an entirely different band who inspired the name.

“He was losing it,” Bush singer and guitarist Gavin Rossdale says of the gaff in question. “Madness hadn’t put out a record for a minute and Elvis hadn’t written a hit since Shipbuilding.”

Salvation was at hand in the shape of Bush’s 1994 debut album, Sixteen Stone, produced and engineered by Langer and his studio partner Alan Winstanley. That record went on to sell six million copies in the US, helped in part by the success of its stripped-down fourth single, Glycerine. Happily for Langer, the money he got from it meant he could keep his chalet.

“It saved it,” says Rossdale. “So he named it Glycerine. Not that I’d know, because he’s never fucking invited me.”

Glycerine was a striking left-field grunge ballad. Centred on Rossdale’s voice and bare-bones guitar, and augmented perfectly by unobtrusive but stirring strings, it was a moment of stark calm amid the knotty noise of Sixteen Stone.

Bush were an unlikely success story. Rossdale spent the second half of the 1980s kicking around the London scene in a series of unsuccessful bands, none of which reflected his own “more primitive” musical tastes. There had been flickers of interest from labels for various of those endeavours, but it always came to nothing.

After his latest group fell apart towards the end of 1991, Rossdale spent four months crashing on sofas in Los Angeles in an attempt to shake himself out of the rut he was in. “When I came back I had a different lust for life,” he says.

On his return he formed a band named Future Primitive with guitarist Nigel Pulsford, who he had met at a gig. By the time Future Primitive changed their name to Bush, the line-up was completed by drummer Robin Goodridge and former Transvision Vamp bassist Dave Parsons.

The others had no interest in writing songs, so the job fell to Rossdale. He was living in a basement flat with four other people when he began writing Glycerine.

“The main thing I remember is standing at my dresser,” he says. “I put my cassette recorder on it and started that song. Sometimes you get songs that just fall out of you. There’s probably some esoteric way to explain it. I don’t know about that, but it’s really beautiful, just having this focus on your craft and getting out of the way of yourself.”

He found the process surprisingly easy. Suspiciously so, in fact. The first time he played it to the rest of the band was to check he hadn’t inadvertently ripped off a song by someone else.

“We were in this shitty rehearsal room, and I said: ‘Listen, I wrote this but I think it might be someone else’s song,’” he says. “So I began it, and halfway through I look up and no one’s listening. ‘Fuck’s sake, can you just listen for a second…’ And it was Nigel who said: ‘No, it sounds like yours.’”

Like the rest of Sixteen Stone, Glycerine was recorded at production duo Langer and Winstanley’s Westside Studios in Holland Park, London. At one point, Brian Eno was working in the next room.

“We had a few dinners with him,” says Rossdale. “He’d give the most brilliant lectures. You’d ask him one question and he’d be off talking about spheres or the element of chance in music.”

As Rossdale remembers it, the version of Glycerine that he recorded for the album wasn’t radically different to the one he’d written at home. There was talk of putting drums on it, but the idea was abandoned, leaving the frontman to play and sing without a rhythm to anchor him.

“It was weird, no drums, really tricky,” he says. “But I did it and it took two takes to finish it from top to bottom.”

The finished track wasn’t completely unadorned. Decorative but restrained strings were added to add a subtle emotional kick. “Nigel’s father had passed away during the making of that record,” Rossdale says. “It’s obviously difficult for anyone to lose a parent, but it happening in the middle of realising everything you’ve dedicated your life to is terrible. He wrote those beautiful strings for his father, and they really add to the authenticity of the song.”

What Glycerine is about isn’t immediately obvious. “I think my lyrics are like my thought processes,” he says. “There’s a degree of ‘scattered’ and ‘fragmented’ to them. I admire people who write chronological stories, but it doesn’t get the best out of me. But there’s no line in that song that doesn’t have truth or veracity to it.”

Still, lyrics such as ‘Everything gone white, everything’s grey/Now you’re here, now you’re away’ hint at a relationship that’s gone south. Rossdale said in 1996 that it was inspired by “a girlfriend of mine named Suze” (presumed to be Suze DiMarchi of the Australian band Baby Animals). Today he’s politely cagey about naming names.

“I had long term girlfriends, they all fucked me over in different ways,” he says with a smile. “Likewise, I haven’t always been… [tailing off]. We’ve all been very //human// to each other.”

Whatever its subject, Glycerine became Bush’s biggest US single yet when it was released in November 1995, reaching No.28. Sixteen Stone had already sailed passed five million sales by that point. Today, Glycerine is Bush’s most streamed track, the modern measure of a song’s success, and remains a fixture in the band’s set.

“I don’t have any qualms about playing it,” he says. “I’ve never once played it with any degree of anything other than ‘That song helped give me all this…’ I know there’s the whole Radiohead, Meeting People Is Easy thing [the 1999 documentary that found Thom Yorke and co. recoiling from stardom] but, fuck me, if you’ve experienced failure and rejection, how can you possibly be anything but elated?”

A vinyl reissue of Sixteen Stone is out now via Craft Recordings.

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.