Web Rock News

“What you people want?” “Just a couple more minutes of your time, about the same duration as the rest of your life.” The bar scene in Kathryn Bigelow’s cult 1987 neo-Western vampire classic, Near Dark, is one of horror’s most iconic sequences. It marks a point where brooding atmosphere explodes into brutal violence, and it does so with consummate style. Bill Paxton’s psychotic Severen exudes an air of deranged menace, but when he slices the bartender’s throat with a razor-edged spur, he looks cool doing it.

“Near Dark and The Lost Boys both came out in the same year, which is crazy,” says Creeper frontman Will Gould, whose band sank their teeth into a rich vein of vampire mythology on Sanguivore, Metal Hammer’s 2023 album of the year and a fully fledged concept album that sucked in all the right ways.

“We took a lot of visual cues from both of them, but especially Near Dark. Bill Paxton’s character had the leather jacket and the sunglasses on, he was covered in blood. We basically based the whole look around that.”

Creeper aren’t the first band to draw inspiration from the blood-drinkers of literature and film. Metal has had a long and fruitful love affair with the undead. The Witch and The Northman director Robert Eggers’ high-profile remake of classic 1922 vampire movie Nosferatu is in cinemas from January 3. Its be-fanged antagonist Count Orlok – a bestial, inhuman version of Dracula – has inspired countless bands over the years, from Saxon and 80s thrashers Dark Angel to Darkthrone, whose drummer Fenriz has said that the frostbitten atmosphere of their classic 1994 album, Transilvanian Hunger, was influenced by the original black and white movie.

“Vampires are the most enduring character trope to emerge from the legacy of gothic literature and culture, probably because they speak to a need people have for something that is transgressive, escapist and romantic,” says Joel Heyes, a writer, cultural commentator and goth musician who performs under the name Byronic Sex & Exile. “They are essentially powerful outsiders who embody the ideas of romanticism – eternity, power, terror, beauty and sadness.”

There’s a lot in there to appeal to numerous outsider groups, but particularly subcultures like goth and metal, which come with a built-in preoccupation with some of the darker elements of life and death.

“For me it’s the extremes, which give you dramatic things to sing about,” says Will Gould. “You go from the highest form of crushing obsession and love and lust – the ‘I have crossed oceans of time to find you’ sort of thing – and then you have the blood and beheadings. It’s gory and romantic and brutal and I think that’s what keeps people coming back again and again.”

---

The original vampires of European folklore were monstrous figures who inspired genuine fear in superstitious populaces. There was a widespread belief in these undead revenants, as indicated by numerous ‘vampire burial’ sites uncovered by archaeologists and containing corpses with staked hearts and decapitated skulls.

“I think vampires started out as spectacles of horror that seemed to provide explanations for things that we didn’t fully understand,” says Dr Helen Driscoll of the University of Sunderland, who has a background in evolutionary psychology and an interest in vampire mythology. “But they have now evolved beyond that horror aspect. Humans have an understanding of our own mortality but we also have a strong instinct to survive. In many ways, vampires transcend human limits and we want to be like them.”

The first major work of literature to bring vampires to a wider western audience was John Polidori’s 1819 short story The Vampyre (Polidori was Lord Byron’s physician and the tale sprang from a story-telling session that also saw Mary Shelley create Frankenstein). It was followed in 1872 by Sheridan Le Fanu’s groundbreaking novella Carmilla, centred around a female vampire, but it was Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic Dracula that really hypnotised the public.

“And the popularity of that really became the basis for what we see now, which is vampires being worth billions to the economy,” says Helen Driscoll. “If you look at all of the films, the books, the games and the music inspired by vampires, that is ultimately a result of Dracula.”

The character of Dracula was partly inspired by Vlad Tepes – aka Vlad The Impaler – a real life 15th century nobleman from Wallachia (now modern-day Romania), who had a penchant for skewering his enemies on stakes. His unquenchable bloodthirst has inspired songs by several extreme metal bands, from Marduk to Macabre and countless others. By contrast, Stoker’s Dracula was a more darkly romantic figure, and the book’s themes of sexual repression and deathless love are more suited to bands such as Cradle Of Filth, who have utilised vampiric themes and imagery on several songs, not least 2006’s Lovesick For Mina, which centres on one of Dracula’s female protagonists, Mina Harker.

“What I find appealing is the combination of polar opposites,” says Will Gould of the Victorian vampire. “Eternal love versus extreme violence and death. Love and death work against each other and it’s fun playing with those themes.”

While there was a romantic appeal to the vampires of Stoker, Le Fanu and Polidori, they were still very much portrayed as the Other; an antagonist to be defeated. It was Anne Rice’s 1976 book Interview With The Vampire that changed the game, painting the vampire – in the shape of main characters Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt – as sympathetic protagonists. The subsequent series of books (The Vampire Chronicles) and later film and TV adaptations fleshed out Rice’s original idea, introducing a wealth of undead characters wrestling with morality and immortality as they walked through the ages.

“With Interview With The Vampire we started to see the humanising of vampires,” says Helen Driscoll. “That was part of them moving from existing purely in the horror genre to being characters that we could relate to. We also started to see a moral aspect to vampires.”

Aesthetically and thematically, The Vampire Chronicles had a huge impact, not only on vampire lore and the horror genre but many areas of the metal scene. The presence of Lestat, Louis and their fellow vampires is in everything from the gothic sumptuousness of My Dying Bride’s A Kiss To Remember and Type O Negative’s mournful Suspended In Dusk to the flouncy shirts, facepaint and bombast of Powerwolf, who mix up their lycanthropy-themed songs with plenty of vampiric imagery.

Italy’s Theatres des Vampires have built a career on writing and singing about vampires. Founded as a black metal band in 1994 by vocalist Alessandro Nunziati before drifting towards goth metal territory, they took the name directly from Interview With The Vampire – specifically a coven of Parisian vampires who used theatre performances to kill in plain sight. Alessandro left Theatres des Vampires in 2004, and today releases solo albums under the name Lord Vampyr.

“In literature and film adaptations, they are cruel beings, but also very melancholic and profoundly lonely,” Lord Vampyr says. “But then the association is often made between vampires and evil or Satan, as in [1973 Hammer Horror movie] The Satanic Rites Of Dracula. It’s a versatile figure, so adapts to both gothic atmospheres and more extreme ones.”

---

The late 70s and early 80s saw cinematic portrayals of vampires turning increasingly more vicious and explicit. 1983’s The Hunger, starring David Bowie as an undead immortal, and featuring goth pioneers Bauhaus performing their classic single Bela Lugosi’s Dead, an homage to the 1931 Dracula movie and its Hungarian-born star, was an erotic arthouse classic, but it was an outlier. More typical were the likes of 1979 mini-series Salem’s Lot (claustrophobic smalltown dread and jump-scares, based on a Stephen King novel) and the aforementioned Near Dark (vampires as blood-drenched outlaw gang).

Musically, vampire-inspired songs were getting darker and more blood-splattered too, as evidenced by Venom’s Bloodlust and Slayer’s At Dawn They Sleep. The 1990s saw both the campy fun of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, with its alt rock soundtrack, and the more transgressive literary work of William Joseph Martin, who explored vampirism alongside sexuality and gender roles in 1992 novel Lost Souls (published under the name Poppy Z. Brite). The latter was a continuation of vampire literature’s exploration of queer themes, from the lesbian overtones of Carmilla to the homoerotic relationships between Lestat and Louis in Interview With The Vampire.

The latter book was turned into a blockbuster 1994 film, starring Tom Cruise as Lestat and Brad Pitt as Louis (and featuring Guns N’ Roses’ less-than-stellar cover of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil on the soundtrack). Despite the initial reservations of Anne Rice herself, it was a surprisingly effective adaptation of the book. The same couldn’t be said for 2002’s Queen Of The Damned, a mangled version of two more Rice novels, The Vampire Lestat and the eponymous Queen Of The Damned.

What the latter movie did have in its favour was a killer soundtrack, written by Korn’s Jonathan Davis and performed by artists including Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington and Disturbed’s David Draiman. The biggest vampire franchise of the 21st century was undoubtedly The Twilight Saga. While its metal credentials were tenuous, it did at least introduce a new generation to music’s dark(ish) side, with Linkin Park, Muse and Green Day all featuring on various soundtracks from the five films.

“That’s an example of vampires situated more in romantic fiction but the dark side is still there,” Helen Driscoll says. “In psychology, there’s something that we refer to as the dark triad of personality: narcissism, which is self-love; Machiavellianism, which is manipulative personality, and psychopathy, which is linked to a lack of empathy and guilt. We see those traits embodied in vampires but engaging with this kind of media gives us a chance to explore it in a safe way in a fictional scenario.”

That’s one of the reasons why tapping darker themes through music can be healthy. Which is just as well, because vampire mythology – and metal’s obsession with it – is as immortal as the characters it’s based on. Some of the more notable works of recent years include the post-apocalyptic vision of Justin Cronin’s novel The Passage, Jim Jarmusch’s 2013 arthouse movie Only Lovers Left Alive, comedy movie-turned-TV series What We Do In The Shadows and the Scandi-horror of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let The Right One In, turned into two different films.

“Let The Right One In was another big one for us because we wanted a more platonic take on love,” says Creeper’s Will Gould. “It was more about companionship and the idea of ancient vampires living through the years and wanting a connection with somebody. [Sanguivore protagonist] Mercy was based partly on Eli from Let The Right One In, but also Claudia from Interview With The Vampire, who is turned when she’s younger but is just as scary as the other two. We basically put a lot of classic vampire folklore and tales into a blender and came up with our own thing.”

Asked whether he’d accept if a real-life vampire invited him to step into the shadows, the Creeper frontman laughs. “Who’s to say I haven’t?” he replies. “But no, I’d like the power and the blood-drinking, but I’m not sure this is a world I’d want to live in forever. When you see me wearing sunglasses and covered in fake blood, it’s pure escapism.”

Sanguivore is out now via Spinefarm. Creeper play Bloodstock festival in August.

Paul Travers has spent the best part of three decades writing about punk rock, heavy metal, and every associated sub-genre for the UK’s biggest rock magazines, including Kerrang! and Metal Hammer. 

You can’t blame people for being a bit pessimistic nowadays. The world is boiling itself to death, the upper classes are hoarding more and more of humanity’s wealth, and Kanye West refuses to just go away forever. There is good news to come from all the terribleness, however: gothic music, able to soundtrack the ever-darkening prospects of the modern age, is undergoing a glorious renaissance.

You can feel that comeback in everything from The Cure’s recent return to Wednesday becoming a Netflix megahit, and it’s present in metal as well. Below, Metal Hammer’s listed nine up-and-coming goth metal bands ideal for these miserable times. The new wave of moody riffs starts right here…

Cemetery Skyline

Formed by members of Dark Tranquillity, Amorphis and more, Cemetery Skyline could have been the greatest melodeath supergroup since The Halo Effect. Instead, the Nordic collective changed lanes to much gloomier fare, indulging their love for Sisters Of Mercy and Type O Negative. Debut album Nordic Gothic, released last year, flaunted Mikael Stanne’s smooth singing voice, while crunching riffs were tempered by layers of sublime synth work. When more music will come remains unclear, but it bloody well better!

---

Crippling Alcoholism

If Nine Inch Nails and The Birthday Party had a fist-fight in a synthesiser shop, you’d get Crippling Alcoholism. Little is known about New England’s noise/goth enigmas, but latest album With Love From A Padded Room narrated the stories of inmates at a fictional prison and offered fucked-up music to match. Where such songs as Satan Is The One were ominous and darkly catchy, I’ll Pay More If You Let Me Watch saw the quintet drop into hellish discordance with zero notice.

---

Dool

Dool singer Raven van Dorst was born intersex, and through their lyrics they ask how they can fit into the world while being at peace with who they are. Reducing the Dutch five-piece to just ‘goth’ would be an insult, but van Dorst grew up a fan of Type O Negative and retains much of their darkness while experimenting with prog, doom and more. Check out last year’s The Shape Of Fluidity for their most mature and balanced work to date.

---

Hangman’s Chair

One of the most literal takes on ‘goth metal’ you’re likely to hear, Hangman’s Chair play melodies comparable to Sisters Of Mercy, but turn up the guitar distortion and fierceness of the drums when they do so. Their forceful music and sullen singalongs won the attention of Nuclear Blast Records (Sabaton, Nightwish, Machine Head), and after 2022’s A Loner, they toured with Amenra and Paradise Lost. This year’s Saddiction only doubled down on the might and majesty of their output.

---

Kælan Mikla

Endorsed by Alcest, Deftones and Ville Valo of Him, Kælan Mikla are the glum synth-punks that metal’s learnt to love. The Icelandic trio turn old-school goth on its head, entirely rejecting its guitars while emphasising its cinematic synths and bopping percussion. The result is a soundscape so beautifully versatile that the band haven’t just released tight anthems such as Sólstöður, but also lush, feature-length soundtracks. With single Stjörnuljós dropping late last year, hopefully more excellence looms on the horizon.

---

Messa

With a name that means ‘mass’ in their native Italian, Messa have played a shamanic and slow-paced take on doom metal since starting in 2014. However, as of 2025 single At Races, the band have broadened their reach, opening the track with a doleful, Cure-like riff before slowing into sparse musical expanses. Spoiler alert, but new album The Spin will continue that detour, adding not just tighter, 80s-indebted melodies, but ventures into jazz and synth-rock. Check it out on April 11.

---

Naut

Naut say they sound like “a bad trip on a dancefloor”. The Bristolians are goth at their core, but throw in several disruptors along the way. Their warm, danceable riffs are offset by the odd flicker of noise, not to mention the mechanical drum machine that pounds away underneath. Vocalist Gavin Laubscher has the same inviting baritone as Peter Steele and Carl McCoy, yet can bust out shrill, blackened screams as well. Hear 2023 album Hunt for the full, disorientating experience.

---

Remina

It’s goth… in spaaaaaaace! Self-described “cosmic doom” duo Remina play a spacy and progressive take on downbeat metal. The synths that so many goth bands use to frame songs of human drama get rocketed to the stars, their sparseness hitting like the soundtrack to a sci-fi B-movie. The guitars and drums are similarly slow, and with Heike Langhan’s arresting vocals on top it’s easy to feel like you’re suspended in a stunning, otherworldly place. Hear new EP Eremus for a concise but comprehensive introduction.

---

Unto Others

Arguably the leaders of gothic metal’s new school, Unto Others are equally literate in grim atmosphere and bullheaded riffing. On breakthrough album Strength and banger-stacked follow-up Never, Neverland, the Oregon band shout on top of Metallica-calibre thunder one minute, then croon over jangling guitars and bouncing drums the next. What unites it all, though, is tight-knit songwriting and undeniable darkness. As a result, they’ve played with everyone from Green Lung to Carcass and never once felt like an outlier.

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

The Becoming Led Zeppelin documentary has been criticised by some for its swift, wait-a-sec-what-happened-next conclusion, but there’s good reason for that. Ending as Led Zeppelin II is released, the timeline spares the filmmakers the onerous task of having to address the band’s Hammer Of The Gods years and all that entails, allowing them to focus on the music, which, as anyone who’s seen the film on a big screen can attest, sounds like it was beamed down from Olympus. And that’s why we’re here.

Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham formed Led Zeppelin in 1968, taking their name from a prediction from Keith Moon that their band was almost certain to go down like a ‘lead balloon’. Their manager Peter Grant’s lack of confidence in the record-buying public’s pronunciation skills, allied to an innate instinct to think big, translated The Loon’s withering sarcasm into ‘Led Zeppelin’. And before you could say ‘swiftly signed to Atlantic, relentlessly toured’, they were the World’s Biggest Band that, for some reason, nobody you knew had ever seen on television.

Inexplicable anonymity aside, Zeppelin’s vastness was preposterous, and as their fame ballooned, their artistic vision expanded to match. Ever more epic live shows were marked by extensive improvisations by four virtuosi whose inspired ensemble interplay seemed almost supernatural in origin. Audiences broke records, albums camped out at the top of charts and during their 12-year existence, Led Zeppelin casually conquered Earth.

You’ve clearly got all of the Led Zeppelin albums already, so here’s the order in which they appear if you rank them from least-best to most-best.

Sign up below to get the latest from Classic Rock, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!

Classic Rock’s Reviews Editor for the last 20 years, Ian stapled his first fanzine in 1977. Since misspending his youth by way of ‘research’ his work has also appeared in such publications as Metal Hammer, Prog, NME, Uncut, Kerrang!, VOX, The Face, The Guardian, Total Guitar, Guitarist, Electronic Sound, Record Collector and across the internet. Permanently buried under mountains of recorded media, ears ringing from a lifetime of gigs, he enjoys nothing more than recreationally throttling a guitar and following a baptism of punk fire has played in bands for 45 years, releasing recordings via Esoteric Antenna and Cleopatra Records.

Formed in 2001, The Mars Volta boldly took rock music where no band had gone before. Four years later, as they released their second album Frances The Mute, Classic Rock sat down with mainmen Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala and uncovered the secret history – including death, drugs and Drive-Ins – of these enigmatic mavericks.

---

With hindsight, it was obvious something was wrong. It was a night in February 2001, and the Astoria in London was sold out. Famous faces flitted through the audience: Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale smiling a millionaire’s smile, Kate Moss gliding barely noticed through the VIP area. The air was charged with a sense of occasion; a sense that if there was a place to be in London that night, it was here.

The source of the excitement was At The Drive-In, a young band from Texas who were reaching critical mass and about to go stratospheric. Their brutal cocktail of hardcore punk and angry metal had the music press in a lather and their album Relationship Of Command was earning them a rabid following worldwide. They looked amazing, too – that none-more-black muso chic that so many bands aim for and fall short of, that they wore with ease. Then there were the Afros; most of them had a feral shock of hair topping their diminutive, rock-god frames.

But amid the on-stage histrionics, all was not well. There was an awkward vibe up there. Singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala, a punked-up ball of energy, shrieked the rap-like vocals on One Armed Scissors and Invalid Litter Department. At one point he ran across the stage, leapt onto the drum riser and sprung off again with a reverse scissor kick. Then he shouted venomously at drummer Tony Hajjar, who returned fire. Later he turned on the audience to vent his spleen about something, but their oblivious roar and the acoustics of the room drowned him out.

Guitarist Jim Ward ranted like a petulant prefect at the moshpit, which frothed with limbs. Lead guitarist and musical lynchpin Omar Rodriguez-Lopez averted his gaze, turned back to his amp, fiddled with the settings and shook his head, defeated.

By the time they trooped offstage and the audience went ballistic, At The Drive-In seemed almost disconsolate. The air of being The Next Big Thing hung over them like a hex. The band split just weeks later. Some of the ex-members formed emo band Sparta.

Cedric and Omar are now two albums into their band The Mars Volta – an entirely different prospect altogether. Their 2002 debut EP Tremulant had pundits scrabbling for names such as Yes, King Crimson and Pink Floyd in a desperate attempt to categorise The Mars Volta’s singular sound. But such comparisons give a false idea of what The Mars Volta are achieving. Far from peddling ersatz prog, they are, in the genuine sense, a modern progressive rock band.

With a real-life tragedy humming at its core, their second album, Frances The Mute, is a bold and impressive musical statement. If there were a concept album check-list, it would tick all the boxes: it weighs in at 77 minutes is comprised of just five songs (a ‘five-song cycle’, if you will); two of the tracks (Cygnus… Vismund Cygnus and the centrepiece Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore) are almost a quarter of an hour-long apiece.

There’s a central conceit behind the lyrics and a continuous theme running throughout the music. By turns languid and frantic, the album succeeds in adhering to both a punk aesthetic and the more holistic approach of ‘album rock’. It’s a demanding listen.

“We don’t want to be background music,” Omar says. “We want it to be like a film, like the stuff we like: you turn it on, you shut up, and listen from beginning to end.”

Born in Puerto Rico, Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez met when their parents relocated to El Paso, Texas. By the late 80s, while their friends were into Jane’s Addiction, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Happy Mondays, they were skipping class in high school to rehearse in bands. They drew inspiration from the old-fashioned punk of The Germs, Black Flag and Circle Jerks, as well as the experimental sounds of Gong and Soft Machine. Their own ethnic identity also fed into the mix.

“What set us apart was our musical imagination,” Omar says, “and that comes partly from us being Hispanic kids growing up in the States. Traditional music is the centre of Hispanic culture, and as a kid I was into salsa and I was also into punk rock. True inspiration comes from the bastardisation of all this, of finding your place and just inventing things yourself to stay happy.”

Omar and Cedric’s obsession with music first bore fruit with the five-piece hardcore rock band At The Drive-In in 1994. With their raw talent and a strong work ethic, word of mouth spread their name fast. Their third album, Relationship Of Command, produced by nu-metal svengali Ross Robinson, was released on the hip Beastie Boys’ label Grand Royal, and both press and public stood up and took notice.

“We’d been together for six years before the media hooked on to us,” Omar says, “and by then all the usual tensions had come up in the band and been recycled. Relationship Of Command was seen from the outside as this big record, but to us it was a very small record. We were retreading ground from our second album, In/Casino/Out.”

Listening to Relationship Of Command now, with its esoteric song titles like Rolodex Propaganda and Arcarsenal, it’s a precocious, accomplished and somewhat brash alternative rock record, with Robinson having smoothed its rough edges. But the cross-pollination of musical styles that Omar refers to – the punk/salsa link so prominent in their musical DNA – is all but absent.

“By the time it came out, we were pulling in different directions,” Omar explains. “It was split between the three of them and the two of us. Cedric and I wanted to incorporate those different rhythms, different languages and concepts.”

“But instead of just doing it,” Cedric, adds, “we always had to have a meeting about doing it. It’s the difference between being with a girl who just gets you right away and one who overanalyses everything. When you have to say your intent out loud so many times, you end up feeling stupid.”

At The Drive-In came to a stop as the band toured the album through Europe in early 2001. Three weeks after that portentous gig at London’s Astoria, they found themselves playing The Vera in the Dutch city of Groningen.

“The Vera’s still one of our favourite places to play,” Cedric says. “It has such a history, and it’s an honour to play there. But that night we were playing like a bunch of sheep, like robots. It was the first time I turned to Omar and saw he was just catatonic. Everyone could see that. Even the audience noticed it. We needed a break.”

Citing nervous exhaustion, they nixed the rest of the tour and returned home to El Paso, intending to put At The Drive-In on hiatus for six months and then return to it refreshed. Cedric and Omar went straight back out on the road with their ‘mistress’ band, De Facto, a side project they had started up with their close childhood friend Jeremy Ward, playing a mellow, guitar-free fusion of Latin music and dub. But with pressure from the label, management and other members At The Drive-In to cut short the sabbatical and resume touring, Omar and Cedric quit that band.

Fuelled by the excitement of realising their musical vision unhindered Cedric and Omar moved to California’s Long Beach and put together The Mars Volta. Their friend and De Facto sound effects man Jeremy Ward was in, and they sought other like-minded musicians. “We came up against a lot of that LA mentality,” Cedric recalls. “Guys who could play but were more interested in the photo shoot, the interview, the money.

“But by the time we were preparing to record the first album we were bankrupt. The other At The Drive-In guys formed Sparta, got signed and got an advance straight away. We were rehearsing at home.”

The Mars Volta’s 2003 full-length debut album Deloused At The Comatorium (co-produced by Rick Rubin) was recorded over three months in the abandoned mansion in Laurel Canyon where the Red Hot Chilli Peppers made Blood Sugar Sex Magic 12 years previously. Chilis bassist Flea even played on the sessions.

Inspired by the suicide of artist Julio Venegas, the story of Deloused… unfolded inside the mind of its protagonist as he lay in a self-inflicted coma. Its multi-lingual narrative contained its own synthetic language. The band even wrote an illustrated book to accompany the story. The music’s dense, challenging blend of punk, psychedelic metal and Latin grooves indicated the daring but commercially dubious direction the band were taking.

The Mars Volta’s first concert was at an Anaheim club called Chain Reaction, a venue more in line with the Warp Records crowd and not a place At The Drive-In would have called home. They went on stage unannounced, did their thing, and remember the audience reacting – to steal a line from Bill Hicks – like a dog that’s just been shown a card trick.

But initial audience bemusement gradually changed to acceptance as the band supported the Chilli Peppers on their European tour.

“We were having a great time with the Chilli Peppers,” Omar enthuses. “We get along so well with those guys. Our band’s chemistry was really coming together. Halfway through the tour we found our current bass player, Juan Alderete, and everything started shining and this whole new world opened up to us and we were off drugs. And then Jeremy died.”

In March 2003, one month before the album was due to be released, Jeremy Ward, their buddy, the sound effects whiz who played off stage out of the limelight, was found dead in his LA home following a suspected drugs overdose.

“You’ve gotta understand,” Omar says, “when we talk about our childhood and all these things we’ve been through, there is a piece of the picture missing.”

With this he gestures, almost subconsciously, to the empty space between himself and Cedric. “Jeremy had rough copies of the record,” Cedric says, “but he didn’t get to see the record come out and hold it in his hands like we did, and he didn’t see the book come out. But he’s inside the grooves of our records; he’s inside the circuitry of our amps; he runs through our veins. His influence and spirit will always be there.”

Ward’s spirit certainly has had an influence on the shape of The Mars Volta’s second album, Frances The Mute, which takes its story from one of his most valued possessions. He had worked as a repo man, repossessing the cars of LA’s recalcitrant debtors. He thrived on the danger of the job – a bullet-proof vest was standard issue – and would come home with all sorts of treasures found in glove compartments and back seats: pictures of naked people partying, knives, drugs. Then one day he found a diary. It was the journal of a young adoptee, who had written in harrowing detail how desperate he was to find his natural parents. Ward brought the book to his bandmates.

“If you’re born with a broken heart, then you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to mend it,” Cedric offers. “If you look at a picture of Jeremy when he was 10 and then 27, he has the exact same look in his eyes. A haunted look. He related to the diarist’s loneliness, his disconnectedness.”

Frances The Mute sees them progress further down their own discrete path. It is an ambitious, self-produced work, rich in ideas and with a sweeping, cinematic scope. (Their love of film is pervasive: even their band name is a reference to Italian director Federico Fellini).

Within the five-song framework there are echoes of 70s prog, from the long guitar solos to the analogue tape effects and washes of ambient sound connecting the tracks. The lyrics are highly wrought, if quasi-intellectual, and some of them are in Spanish.

L’Via L’Viaquez revolves around 70s hard funk and dark, authentic salsa. Cassandra Gemini even breaks down into free jazz. Cedric’s dynamic vocal delivery is a whisper one moment, a scream the next. While there are elements of Can, Gong, occasionally even The Mahavishnu Orchestra, it sounds fresh, light on tricksy rhythm changes and awkward modulations, and spiked with the spirit of punk. Easy listening it ain’t, but it is an album you can really sink your teeth into.

“You should always challenge yourself as a musician,” Cedric says. “I don’t read reviews, don’t pay any attention to what goes around the music itself. Everything is secondary to the band, even the audience. When we play, the band is the audience. Sometimes it doesn’t connect, there’s no magic spark, and, well, you noodle. But when it does connect it’s fun.”

It sounds arrogant, and maybe it is. But their audience, swelling in size with the anticipation of new material, seems to understand. A world tour beckons, and once again Cedric and Omar find themselves in a hot-ticket band, but this time it’s on their terms.

“There’s definitely room for people to be disappointed,” Omar laughs, “because we’re completely selfish and we’re completely on our trip, and if the next album is purely instrumental and Cedric just wants to play keyboards, then that’s what were gonna do. None of the attention paid to us or the success of our records is going to stop us getting where we belong.”

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 79 (May 2005)

A music journalist for over 20 years, Grant writes regularly for titles including Prog, Classic Rock and Total Guitar, and his CV also includes stints as a radio producer/presenter and podcast host. His first book, ‘Big Big Train – Between The Lines’, is out now through Kingmaker Publishing.

Former Yes and King Crimson drummer Bill Bruford has spoken about the discontent that marked the former’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 2017.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Bruford is asked about his memories of the day, when the two incarnations of Yes in existence at the time – the Yes led by Steve Howe and Alan White, and Yes Featuring Jon Anderson, Trevor Rabin and Rick Wakeman – sat at adjacent tables but ignored each other.

“There was always a civil war happening, and that’s part of the reason you don’t want to spend too much time in these bands,” says Bruford. “Because there’s always something like that going on. I don’t recall much about it other than I just said, ‘Well, Alan can play the drums on this. I don’t want to play drums on this thing.’ But I was happy to attend and lend whatever enthusiasm I could to the event.

“But I think that Jon and Steve were getting on very badly. And to this day, it’s a very odd relationship between Jon and Steve. I don’t know what happened, but something happened. But as I say, I’m an outsider now.”

Bruford, who took to the stage when the band were inducted but didn’t perform with them onstage, is also asked why he didn’t make a speech during the ceremony.

“I could have said a few words if Rick Wakeman would have shut up,” says Bruford. “He gets the ball rolling and about 20 minutes later, people are saying, ‘Wind it up.’

“I felt actually really bad for Scotland Squire [widow of Chris Squire, late Yes bassist], who had her little daughter. I think Scotland wanted to say something on behalf of Chris and she would’ve gone before me and I think she was ready to do something. So I felt bad as Rick went on, but hey, that’s rock and roll for you.”

In the ceremony’s aftermath, Scotland Squire posted on the YesFans forum to say that she didn’t blame Wakeman for denying her the opportunity to speak.

“I had a very nice speech prepared to honour Chris, and Xilan [their daughter] and I wanted on Chris’ behalf to thank everyone, especially the fans (but mainly Xi and I wanted to honour Chris for the great musician he was.)

“I am not here to blame anyone for why we didn’t get to speak, but there are time constraints with these shows and the whole time Rick was talking there was a monitor flashing ‘wrap it up’.

“Also, for the record, I didn’t refuse to go up and talk. After Rick was done he handed me the award but everyone was just being ushered off stage. The whole thing was awkward.

“I know Rick’s heart and he didn’t do anything to diss me, Xilan or Chris. I think it was just not planned very well. I really should have gone and spoken before Rick… but how do you follow that act anyway? This is all written with love in my heart.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Bruford reveals that he’s never listened to Tales From Topographic Oceans, the album Yes made after he left the band in 1973, and expresses surprise when told that the double album features just four songs.

“Wow,” says Bruford. “That’s too much for me, probably.”

In 2017, Prog magazine spoke to the other Yes members about their tumultuous Hall Of Fame induction.

The super deluxe edition of Yes’s Close To The Edge is released on March 7. Bill Bruford’s current band, the Pete Roth Trio, play at The Verdict in Brighton this Friday and have UK and European dates lined up over the next few months.

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