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David Thomas, the howling lead singer of long-running Cleveland-bred post-punk rockers Pere Ubu has died at 71. The band announced the news on its Facebook page on Wednesday (April 23), revealing that the leader of the group — as well as their equally noisesome precursor, Rocket From the Tombs — had died after an unspecified “long illness.”
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The tribute added, “On Wednesday, April 23 2025, he died in his home town of Brighton & Hove [in the U.K.], with his wife and youngest step-daughter by his side. MC5 were playing on the radio. He will ultimately be returned to his home, the farm in Pennsylvania, where he insisted he was to be ‘thrown in the barn.’”
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The group noted that Thomas had been working on a new album with his band, aware that it would be his last. “We will endeavour to continue with mixing and finalising the new album so that his last music is available to all. Aside from that, he left instruction that the work should continue to catalog all the tapes from live shows via the official bandcamp page,” they said, adding that the singer’s autobiography was “nearly completed” and that they will finish it for him. They ended with a quote from Thomas, which they said, “sums up who he was better than we can”: “My name is David F–king Thomas… and I’m the lead singer of the best f–king rock n roll band in the world.”
David Lynn Thomas was born in Miami on June 14, 1953 and began his career in rock as the lead singer of the short-lived proto-punk Cleveland band Rocket From the Tombs after a stint writing for the Cleveland Scene alternative weekly newspaper under a variety of aliases, including Crocus Behemoth. Though they reveled in obscurity during their original one-year run from 1974-1975, and never released an album, the band’s distorted, frenzied sound — inspired by Detroit punk godfathers the MC5 and The Stooges — was a precursor to the worldwide punk revolution that exploded in the U.S. and U.K. in the mid-1970s.
After the band’s split, two members, guitarist Gene “Cheetah Chrome” O’Connor and drummer Johnny “Johnny Biltz” Madansky, went on to form legendarily shambolic Cleveland punk band the Dead Boys. Thomas and guitarist Peter Laughner teamed up to launch the artier, spikier Pere Ubu, whose name wast a riff on the outré 19th century French play Ubu Roi.
The avant garde group inspired by the sound collage techniques of musique concrète released its debut single, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” in late 1975 on Thomas’ indie label, Hearthan Records. After a handful of follow-up singles, their debut album, The Modern Dance, dropped in 1978, signaling a purposeful deep-dive into the noise pool from jump on album-opener “Non-Alignment Pact,” which begins with 20 seconds of ear-piercing tones. During a period when such soft rock air bubbles as Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun” and America’s “Tin Man” were topping the charts, Thomas’ unhinged howl and saxophone/keyboard player Allen Ravenstine’s free jazz strangulated stabs and otherworldly synth tones were an astringent antidote to mainstream AM radio fluff.
With a three-guitar attack combined with Thomas’ yelping vocals and his very un-punk like insistence on wearing suit jackets and a tie on stage, the band cranked out a series of influential, though little-heard-at-the-time albums over the next four years. The LPs included 1978’s classic, Dub Housing and 1979’s New Picnic Time, experimental, chalkboard-scratching noise bombs that helped inspire future acolytes from Sonic Youth to the Pixies and Gang of Four. With a constantly rotating group of players surrounding Thomas — co-founder Laugher left after the band’s first few singles and died in 1977 of pancreatic cancer — the band released three more albums, 1979’s New Picnic Time, 1980’s The Art of Walking and 1982’s Song of a Bailing Man before breaking up.
Thomas continued his experimental journey on a series of solo albums with his bands the Pedestrians and and Wooden Birds in the 1980s, before reforming Pere Ubu in 1987 for the recording of The Tenement Year, which leaned in a distinctly more pop direction (at least compared to the band’s earlier work), followed by 1989s’s Cloudland. Pere Ubu continued into the 1990s and early 2000s, releasing a string of albums including 1995’s Ray Gun Suitcase, 2002 St. Arkansas and their 19th, and final, studio effort, 2023’s Trouble on Big Beat Street.
In between Pere Ubu projects, Smith stayed busy with solo albums, Rocket From the Tombs reunions and experimental theater projects.
Check out some of Smith’s joyful noise below.
Sammy Hagar‘s guitar playing on his upcoming single “Encore. Thank You. Goodnight.” was divinely inspired. That is, if you are one of the many who believe that his late Van Halen bandmate Eddie Van Halen was our greatest six-string god.
“About two months ago, I had this dream and Eddie came. We were in a room like this, [with] a bunch of people around. It was just like he’d been gone. It was not like he was passed, but he had just been out of my life and we hadn’t seen each other for a while,” Hagar told Ultimate Classic Rock about the inspiration for the song back in 2022. “He’s going, ‘Man, let’s write some music!’ I said, ‘Yeah, f–k it, man. Here, let’s go!’”
Hagar described huddling in a corner of a room with Van Halen — who died in Oct. 2020 due to complications from throat cancer at age 65 — and watching the guitar guru play him a lick that sounded just like “the last lick that Eddie Van Halen showed me, when I went back for the [2004] reunion tour and when he was a mess. I said, ‘Eddie, show me your newest s–t,’ because every time I’d be around him I’d say, ‘Show me your newest s–t.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, check this out!’”
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In the dream, Hagar said Van Halen showed him “this harmonic thing… he slid up to a chord, like a slide guitar. We wrote a song with that lick.” The next morning, the veteran rock singer and guitarist said he got up and wrote the new song, which he titled, in part, “Thank You” because he’d used “the f–kin’ lick that he showed me in the song.”
And while the track came together too late to be included on Hagar’s 2022 Crazy Times album with his band the Circle, on Instagram earlier this week Hagar said he “can’t wait” for the world to finally hear his tribute to his late bandmate. Hagar took over as VH’s lead vocalist from 1985-1996 and again from 2003-2005, and like his predecessor, original VH singer David Lee Roth, had a sometimes contentious relationship with EVH. “I can’t wait for the world to hear this very special song Joe [Satriani] and I wrote as a long overdue thank you to Eddie Van Halen for the music, the good times, and the dream that inspired this track, ‘Encore, Thank You, Goodnight.’”
The post describes the song that also features Satriani, drummer Kenny Aronoff and former VH bassist Michael Anthony as “inspired by a dream and brought to reality through introspective lyrics, powerful chords and rhythmic guitar and drums.”
After years of health issues, Ozzy Osbourne, 76, is making sure that he’s in top shape when he suits up for what is being billed as Black Sabbath’s final-ever performance on July 5 in Villa Park in the band’s hometown of Birmingham, England.
In an interview this week with Billy Morrison on SiriusXM’s Ozzy’s Boneyard channel, Osbourne said he’s been in “heavy training” for the show that will see rock’s Prince of Darkness reunite with his bandmates for one last time on a bill that will also include Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax, Pantera, Lamb of God, Mastodon, Alice in Chains and many others.
“I haven’t done anything for, this will be seven years, and so I’ve been through all this surgery. It really is like starting from scratch,” said Osbourne, who has been dealing with a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis as well as a 2019 fall that aggravated a previous spinal injury and required multiple surgeries.
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Osbourne said his workouts include endurance training due to his long lay-off from performance. “The first thing to go when you’re laid up is your stamina, so believe it or so, I’m doing two sets of three-minute walks and weight training. I’m going and going you know,” he said. ” I’m waking up in my body, you know. I mean, three minutes to you, for instance, is nothing, but I’ve been laying on my back recovering from umpteen surgeries.”
Ozzy’s longtime collaborator guitarist Zakk Wylde recently teased that the metal legend could take flight during the Back to the Beginning all-day show on the throne that the will sit on during the show. “With Oz and his throne that just flies over the stadium or whatever, [where he] shoots out buckets of water and does everything like that,” Wylde said a recent interview. “So if Oz has a great time and it’s just, like, ‘I wanna go out on the road again,’ it’s just, like, ‘Good. Let’s do it again.’”
Wylde added that, “Ozzy was just sitting at the chair and he was singing ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home,’ and it sounded great. So hopefully we’ll just do this, and then Oz will go, ‘Let’s just fire up the machine again and we’ll do another tour.’”
Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello will be the musical director for the show that will mark Osbourne’s first time on stage since a brief 2022 set at the NFL Kickoff in Los Angeles; his last full show was in December 2018 at the Forum in L.A. as part of his No More Tours 2 outing. Other acts slated to perform at the final Sabbath blowout include: Halestorm, Gojira, as well as appearances by Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan, Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan and Slash, Wolfgang Van Halen, Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, Lzzy Hale, Disturbed’s David Draiman, Korn’s Jonathan Davis, Sammy Hagar and many more.
Listen to Ozzy talking about his training regimen below.
To this day, Bryan Adams takes a lesson he learned from Tina Turner more than 40 years ago with him whenever the iconic Canadian rocker goes on tour. A few years before the two recorded their sexy, gritty Grammy-nominated duet “It’s Only Love” in 1984, he went to see the legend in Vancouver at a club as she was mounting her comeback.
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A 21-year-old Adams and songwriting partner Jim Vallance had written a song for Turner called “Lock Up Your Sons Because Tina’s in Town.” “Terrible,” he says, with a laugh. He convinced the bouncer to let him go backstage after the show and he saw a visibly ill, bundled up Turner. “I realized at that point she had the flu, and she had just put on this incredible show. I thought, ‘Wow! Nobody knew she was sick. She just went out there and gave everything she got.’ From that moment on, I never complained, ever, about being a little under the weather if I had to go on because I’ll just go out and do it. She’s at the forefront of my mind whenever that happens.”
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Adam will kick off an eight-week North American tour Sept. 11 in Kamloops, British Columbia at Sandman Centre. The ticket presale starts April 29 and general onsale begins May 2 at BryanAdams.com.
The outing, named the Roll with the Punches tour, has already kicked off internationally and Adams is calling as he’s headed to Reykjavik for a concert.
The So Happy It Hurts tour, named after his 2022 album, ended in Australia and New Zealand in February.
“I don’t actually have a beginning or and end” to touring, Adams says. “It all sort of melds into one.”
The Roll with the Punches Tour takes its name from the forthcoming album Adams will release on his own label, Bad Records, later this year.
Bryan Adams
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“I’ve got my own sort of schedule and how we roll things out,” Adams says. The title track and another song are already available, and he expects to put out a few more songs before the album is released in August and pepper them into his shows.
Adams started Bad Records a number of years ago as a home for his catalog, much of which has reverted back to him from Universal (which bought PolyGram, which had purchased his original label home, A&M).
All the mergers made Adams feel like “a chair in the lobby,” he says. “I could have probably rolled [my contract] over and kept it there. But there was something about being independent that I liked and, after much back and forth, finally I was free,” Adams says. “I’ve been signed to a label pretty much on and off since I was 16 years old, so the feeling of and the understanding of being able to be an independent artist is actually quite liberating.”
Among the projects he has released on his own label are two box sets from his 2022 and 2024 Royal Albert Hall residencies, as well as re-records of past albums. For Record Store Day earlier this month, his label put out a previously unreleased version of “It’s Only Love” featuring just his and Turner’s vocals and a keyboard. “It shows you the power of her voice like never before,” he says.
Adams has found the hands-on aspect of running a label inspiring. “I even went to the record manufacturing company in Poland where we were putting things together,” he says. “It was a Sunday, and I just expected one person to be there to say hello and shake my hand. The entire company showed up because they don’t get artists saying hello, and it was just fascinating.”
The Royal Albert albums and videos show the superstar’s command over his audience, especially when he plays the opening chords of one of his many hits like “Summer of ’69,” and the crowd instantly goes wild. “You just hope the microphone’s working,” he jokes when a song gets such a rabid response. “That’s one of the great things about having so many songs. I look down my set list and I’m always pleased to know what the next song is. I know it’s gonna be fun to play,” he says. “It wasn’t like there was any plan. It was just every couple of years I would put out the best songs I’d written and occasionally, some of them stuck.”
The North American tour encompasses 39 dates, averaging around five shows a week. The longtime vegan jokes his stamina is “powered by lentils.” He adds: “I do the best I can. There’s nothing you can do if you get a cold or a flu. You just have got to soldier on,” as Turner taught him. (Adams speaks lovingly of the late Turner, for whom he produced her 1986 album, Break Every Rule and even sang at her wedding, saying his greatest memory of Turner is when he introduced her to his daughters. “It makes me a bit weepy thinking about it, to be honest, because she was just super, super kind to me. She loved the fact that I was having children.”)
Playing his native Canada is always special for Adams, “especially now that we’ve been sort of, I don’t know, skewered by your president,” he says of Donald Trump. “It’s really unified the country in a way. And so, it’s exciting.” Popular Canadian rock band The Sheepdogs will open the Canadian dates.
Pat Benatar and Neil Geraldo will open the U.S. leg. Surprisingly, Adams has never met the husband-and-wife duo but does have a connection that goes back more than 40 years when in 1981 he wrote a song called “Lonely Nights” for Benatar. “She didn’t do it, but it ended up being the first song off my second album that really opened the door for me in America,” the rocker says. “I may have to add that during the set because it’s kind of a good story to tell. I just really love her voice so it’s great that she’s gonna be out with us.”
From the start of his career, Adams has focused on spanning the globe and in the ‘80s and ‘90s was one of the first Western artists to play in India, Pakistan, Vietnam and many of the former Eastern Bloc countries. After Reykjavik he will continue through Europe, ending in Helsinki, Finland in mid-August.
“For me, it was just a wanderlust to be able to see the world,” he says of touring so widely in the early days. “You know, ‘Here’s an opportunity. I wonder if we can do a gig there.’ And when you start to investigate these places, you find out that, yes, there is a chance you could do it,” he says. “I recently inquired whether I could get to do a show in Iran, and, unfortunately, it’s still not the time to do that. I would love to be one of the people that could break down that sort of cultural boycott that’s happening. There are also parts of North Africa that I’d like to go to.”
Adams, a well-regarded professional photographer who has released retrospectives of his photography and autographed notable figures including the late Queen Elizabeth, does not spend days off between gigs exploring with his camera. Instead, he is understandably “probably resting” or working,” he says. His days on the road “are really organized. There’s no randomness about it. I enjoy finding things and exploring, but usually if you’re in the middle of a tour, that’s the last thing you want to do. You want to rest because you’ve got work to do.”
Adams, who has also written songs Kiss, Roger Daltrey, Motley Crue and Loverboy, in addition to his multiple hits, still owns his estimable publishing catalog even though his writing partner Vallance sold his to Round Hill in 2021. “I’ve been asked by loads of people [to sell]. I’m not interested,” he says. “Maybe somewhere in the future. It’s definitely not on my radar now.”
‘ROLL WITH THE PUNCHES’ NORTH AMERICA TOUR DATES:
Thu Sep 11 – Kamloops, BC – Sandman Centre
Fri Sep 12 – Vancouver, BC – Rogers Arena
Sat Sep 13 – Victoria, BC – Save On Foods Memorial Centre
Tue Sep 23 – Prince George, BC – CN Centre
Wed Sep 24 – Kelowna, BC – Prospera Place
Fri Sep 26 – Calgary, AB – Scotiabank Saddledome
Sat Sep 27 – Edmonton, AB – Rogers Place
Sun Sep 28 – Regina, SK – Brandt Centre
Mon Sep 29 – Winnipeg, MB – Canada Life Centre
Thu Oct 2 – St. Catharines, ON – Meridian Centre
Fri Oct 3 – Toronto, ON – Scotiabank Arena
Sat Oct 4 – Ottawa, ON – Canadian Tire Centre
Tue Oct 7 – Peterborough, ON – Peterborough Memorial Centre
Wed Oct 8 – Montreal, QC – Bell Centre
Thu Oct 9 – Quebec City, QC – Videotron Centre
Sat Oct 11 – Moncton, NB – Avenir Centre
Sun Oct 12 – Halifax, NS – Scotiabank Centre
Wed Oct 15 – St. John’s, NL – Mary Brown’s Centre
Sat Oct 25 – Uncasville, CT – Mohegan Sun Arena^
Sun Oct 26 – Boston, MA – TD Garden^
Wed Oct 29 – Philadelphia, PA – Wells Fargo Center^
Thu Oct 30 – New York, NY – Madison Square Garden^
Sat Nov 1 – Cleveland, OH – Rocket Arena^
Sun Nov 2 – Pittsburgh, PA – PPG Paints Arena^
Mon Nov 3 – Rosemont, IL – Allstate Arena^
Wed Nov 5 – Raleigh, NC – Lenovo Center^
Thu Nov 6 – Duluth, GA – Gas South Arena^
Fri Nov 7 – Nashville, TN – Bridgestone Arena^
Sun Nov 9 – Hollywood, FL – Hard Rock Live^
Mon Nov 10 – Tampa, FL – Amalie Arena^
Thu Nov 13 – Dallas, TX – American Airlines Center^
Sat Nov 15 – Phoenix, AZ – PHX Arena^
Sun Nov 16 – San Diego, CA – Viejas Arena^
Tue Nov 18 – Los Angeles, CA – The Kia Forum^
Wed Nov 19 – San Jose, CA – SAP Center^
Fri Nov 21 – Seattle, WA – Climate Pledge Arena^
Sat Nov 22 – Portland, OR – Moda Center^
Mon Nov 24 – Denver, CO – Ball Arena^
Wed Nov 26 – Minneapolis, MN – Target Center^
*With The Sheepdogs
^With Pat Benatar & Neil Giraldo
+With Amanda Marshall
Carlos Santana postponed a planned show in San Antonio, TX on Tuesday night (April 22) after being rushed to a local hospital. Santana, 77, was booked to play the Majestic Theatre in the Texas town, but reportedly fell ill during soundcheck as a result of dehydration. According to a statement from the venue, manager Michael […]
Roy Thomas Baker — the producer behind some of rock’s biggest hits, including Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” — has died at age 78, his family announced Tuesday (April 22).
Baker died at his home in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, on April 12. No cause of death has been revealed.
The producer’s credits feature a who’s who of rock stars over the past half-century, including Journey, Yes, Foreigner, The Cars, Alice Cooper, Cheap Trick, Devo, Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses and Smashing Pumpkins. Baker worked with Queen on five of the band’s 1970s albums, including on their bombastic A Night at the Opera lead single “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which is reportedly the most-streamed song recorded in the 20th century. The 1975 single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1976 but didn’t hit its No. 2 peak on the chart until its inclusion in the film Wayne’s World in 1992.
Born in Hampstead, London, in 1946, Baker’s career began as second engineer to Gus Dudgeon and Tony Visconti at London’s Decca Records. He graduated to chief engineer in the ’70s and moved to Trident Studios to begin working with the then-unknown Queen. Columbia Records later asked him to relocate to the U.S. to work with Journey and others.
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“We did [1978 album] Infinity with the infamous Roy Thomas Baker,” recalled Journey’s Neal Schon, “and we did so many different things on that record that I’d never tried, or even thought about doing. I learned a lot from Roy.”
Elektra Records, Queen’s U.S. label, connected Baker with Lindsey Buckingham, Dokken and The Cars — for whom he produced their first four albums, from 1978 to 1981.
Baker is survived by his wife, Tere Livrano Baker, and his brother, Alan Baker.
Dream Into It is Billy Idol‘s first new album in 11 years — but hardly his first new music during that period. Since 2014’s Kings & Queens of the Underground, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominee has released a pair of EPs (The Roadside in 2021 and the following year’s The Cage). So why did Idol take the plunge this time?
“I realized I have to do the same amount of press for the EPs as an album, so I thought, ‘F-ck this. Come on, let’s make an album!’” he tells Billboard via Zoom from his Los Angeles home, with the same smirk that was as much a trademark in his ‘80s videos as his leather vest and fingerless gloves.
Dream Into It, which comes out April 25, is not just an album but a concept album — about Idol. Its nine tracks, divided into two halves (“Dying to Love” and “I’m Reborn”), rock hard while also documenting his life and times, from the youthful aspirations expressed in the title track to remembrances of his early days in England’s nascent punk rock scene (“77” with Avril Lavigne), his misadventures with substances and other self-destructive behaviors (“Wildside” with Joan Jett and “Too Much Fun”) and his shortcomings as a mate and father (“People I Love”). It all leads up to self-awareness and corrections (he’s been sober since 2010) that leave Idol defiantly, joyfully “Still Dancing” by the end of the album.
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“We’ve been making a documentary since ’19,” Idol says of a new film project, Billy Idol Should Be Dead. “It kept getting interrupted by the coronavirus and everything. Writing (songs), I was bouncing off the documentary. I was running into a lot of thoughts about the past — and today and the future, one part of me in the past, one in today and one part me looking forward. That’s very much what the album’s about.
“A song like ’77,’ it’s about everything that was going on then in England during that punk rock era with the politics and the division and people turning to violence…and I just wonder if it’s not so different today in America, you know? (The album) covers a lot of ground.”
Steve Stevens, Idol’s guitarist and main collaborator since 1981 and co-writer of all but one track on Dream Into It, wasn’t entirely surprised to see his partner take that narrative approach. “I’d seen Billy spending a lot more time with his grandkids and stuff, so he was in a bit more reflective headspace, I think, and wanted to reflect that on the album,” Stevens says. “There’s a lot of shared experiences for both of us. Our parents are no longer there, and we’d reminisce about a lot of that crazy stuff we had experienced and seen and felt. There was a lot of good juice to work with.”
Dream Into It does present Idol as he is today — particularly as a dedicated family man in songs such as “Gimme the Weight” and “I’m Your Hero” — but he acknowledges that the deep immersion into his life gave him valuable perspective. And regrets.
“My drug addiction and stuff affected the sort of relationships I had with people, and even sort of the job I did,” says Idol, a Billboard Hot 100-topping artist and three-time Grammy nominee. “You wish you hadn’t got caught up in all that, ’cause it took a long time to overcome them — 15 to 20 years to really get control of yourself to where today I don’t really even drink. And you’re gonna let down the people you love. You’re gonna hurt them — even my parents couldn’t understand me…and I know they were worried.”
But 48 years after the first Generation X single, Idol makes no apologies for making music his life’s pursuit.
“I didn’t want to follow in my father’s footsteps,” the man born William Broad explains. “That’s what we were looking for in music. That’s what rock n’ roll was giving us at the time, a sense of freedom. That’s what music did for me in a lot of ways, and that’s what I’m singing about on the album. And then you have the life now, with grandchildren…It makes you feel like you’re reborn in a way. You’re seeing life anew, through them.”
Dream Into Life was produced by The Cage collaborator Tommy English, who, along with Nick Long, also co-wrote the songs. (“John Wayne,” featuring Alison Mosshart of the Kills and the Dead Weather, was previously released on a 2008 compilation.) It’s a rocking set, to be sure, recorded in Los Angeles primarily with Stevens, current AC/DC bassist Chris Chaney and Josh Freese on drums. “We’ve got a band-sounding album, that’s what it sounds like to me — which is something I’ve always gone for with my music,” Idol says. “With me and Steve, the idea’s always, ‘Yeah, it’s a solo artist, but really we’re looking for a band feel,’ like me with a three-piece, just old school. I don’t think I’ve really been with just a three-piece since Generation X. We very much got that on this record.”
Idol says having duets on Dream Into It was “kind of fantastic. I’ve never really done that before. It gave an extra dimension to the songs because the (singers) could sort of answer what I’m singing about. Joan and Alison and Avril are really dealing with a similar thing to me, a lifestyle, the rock n’ roll lifestyle, that’s not completely normal ’cause we’re not completely normal people to be doing it in the first place.” Jett — who will be supporting him on tour this year — goes back a long way with Idol and, he notes, shared the “Wildside” that they sing about on the album.
“I’ve known Joan since, what…1978 maybe,” Idol recalls. “We used to hang out at the Whisky (a Go Go) and all those places. She could sing (as) the female that felt the same way — they have a wild side, too. We all do.”
Idol plans to make Dream Into It a significant part of his sets for the It’s A Nice Day To…Tour Again! outing, which begins on April 30 in Phoenix, wraps up Sept. 25 in Los Angeles and includes Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. “The great thing about it is I think we’ve done an uptempo, youthful sounding album; even the ballads aren’t necessarily slow, so (the songs) are gonna be fun to do,” he says. “We’ll intersperse the new stuff with the old stuff, I think, so at first maybe five songs and then we’ll see what the reaction to the album is and as time goes by maybe we’ll put more songs in. And I’m touring with Joan, so it’s likely we’ll do ‘Wildside’ on the tour.”
As for Billy Idol Should Be Dead, which premieres at Tribeca Festival in Manhattan on June 10, the rocker says he “didn’t want it to be just a glorified Behind the Music. I wanted it to be a little better than that, so we’ve worked really hard on it. I’m hoping the album and documentary will bounce off each other. You should get the full picture of my life with all that.”
And, Idol acknowledges, he won’t at all mind if a Rock Hall induction becomes a capstone for the story later in the year.
“That’d be an incredible thing,” says Idol, who participated in last October’s induction for Ozzy Osbourne and has ranked consistently in top five of the fan voting, which closed on April 21. “Ozzy’s induction was really good fun. It was a great night. I ran into so many people I knew, and then I met a load of people, too. It’d be fantastic to be inducted, yeah.”
Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen says he’s still dealing with the fall-out from a 2023 incident in which a 19-year-old man rushed at him and knocked him to the ground outside a Florida hotel. In a recent interview on SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation with Eddie Trunk, the veteran rocker said that he has eased back on […]
Liam Gallagher has confirmed that he and brother Noel spent Easter Sunday together, marking a rare public show of unity just months before Oasis reunite onstage.
On Sunday (April 20), Liam Gallagher took to X (formerly Twitter) to share a surprising family moment: he spent Easter Sunday with his brother Noel and Noel’s two sons, Donovan and Sonny.
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“So we had a BIBLICAL Easter Sunday,” Liam wrote. “Noel, Donavan and Sonny popped over to ours for a cup of tea. It was absolutely incredible to meet the young guvs. I obviously blew their minds coz I’m cool as f—. You heard it here 1st.”
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The casual tea catch-up arrives just months before the first Oasis shows since the band’s 2009 split. The iconic Britpop group is due to kick off its global reunion tour this July, having announced 41 dates so far.
The shows will kick off with the first of two shows at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, before criss-crossing the U.K. in advance of a North American run beginning August 24 in Toronto; the tour will then move on to Mexico City, South Korea, Japan, Australia and South America.
The new tour follows decades of tension between the brothers, who last performed together during Oasis’ 2009 tour before an infamous backstage blow-up in Paris led to the band’s split. Since then, both Gallaghers have pursued solo careers — Liam releasing multiple solo albums and Noel fronting the High Flying Birds.
In January, Liam responded to a fan’s dream setlist, telling them “it’s not far off,” when they asked if the unsolicited rundown was “official.” The list included band’s past setlists, including such live staples as: “Acquiesce,” “Some Might Say,” “Lyla,” “Shakermaker,” “The Hindu Times,” “Cast No Shadow,” “Slide Away,” “Supersonic,” “Morning Glory,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” “Cigarettes & Alcohol,” “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” “Live Forever” and “Champagne Supernova.”
Last month, the band announced that a film documenting the Oasis Live ’25 tour would be created and produced by BAFTA- and Oscar-nominated writer/producer/director Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders, Spencer, Dirty Pretty Things) and directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace (Meet Me in the Bathroom, Shut Up and Play the Hits). No release date has been announced as of yet.
Fifty-one years ago, after trying out Zorro, Superman and gorilla costumes, Angus Young took a suggestion from his sister, borrowed her son’s school uniform and wore it onstage. Since then, like his band AC/DC, the lead guitarist’s live persona has been insanely consistent — he once told Billboard that he packs 12 schoolboy costumes for tours.
“We’ve never tried to do something we’re not or looked around to see what the other bands were doing,” Angus said in a 1996 interview. “An audience can tell when you’re phony or you don’t want to be onstage.”
High Voltage, AC/DC’s debut album, set the band’s consistent musical template in 1975 when the record arrived in the group’s home country of Australia. Twelve months later, it reached the United States and, after a few years, established the act as international rock stars.
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Every AC/DC album since, from classics such as 1980’s Back in Black to lesser-known gems like 1995’s Ballbreaker, has exemplified what Billboard declared in a 2014 review of the Rock or Bust album: “Neither trends, age nor the passing of many decades has altered the basic blueprint the band laid out on its 1975 debut, High Voltage.”
“Some people might say that you guys have made the same record over and over 10 times,” an interviewer once suggested to Angus.
“That’s a dirty lie!” he responded. “We’ve made the same record over and over 11 times!”
Of AC/DC’s 19 studio albums, seven have hit the top 10 of the Billboard 200, including two No. 1s, 1981’s For Those About To Rock (We Salute You) and 2008’s Black Ice.
Phillip Rudd, Angus Young, Mark Evans, Malcolm Young, and Bon Scott of AC/DC pose for an Atlantic Records publicity still in front of a graffiti-covered wall circa 1977.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Imag
Ten of the band’s tracks have earned more than 177 million streams, beginning with “Thunderstruck” at 1 billion, according to Luminate. AC/DC’s touring power has been similarly steady, from 1978, when it opened for Aerosmith for multiple sold-out arena dates, to 2010, when its four best-selling concerts ever grossed $11.7 million, $12.8 million, $24.6 million and $27 million, all in Australian stadiums, according to Billboard Boxscore.
Despite the loss of Angus’ brother, founding member and rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young, to dementia in 2017, AC/DC rocks on. The band opened its global Power Up tour on April 10 at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis.
CAA books AC/DC, with agency veterans Rob Light, Chris Dalston and Allison McGregor overseeing dates. The tour takes its name from the 2020 Power Up album. (The band’s repertoire is released by Columbia Records in the United States and by Sony worldwide.) Alvin Handwerker of Prager Metis handles management.
On record, AC/DC began its loud and mighty run 50 years ago, with the release of High Voltage. The album was created in “a very economical two weeks,” as Jeff Apter writes in the 2018 biography High Voltage: The Life of Angus Young. The second week focused on Angus’ guitar solos and the controlled night-prowler shrieks of frontman Bon Scott, who died in 1980.
Angus has said of Alberts, the band’s Sydney studio, “I would have liked to have taken the f–king walls with me and kept them. A guitar just came to life in there. It was a little downtrodden, but it had a great vibe, this energy to it.”
The group’s pathway through the music business began with Sydney publisher Ted Albert, who lived in a mansion called Boomerang and sailed with his father on a yacht of the same name. His company, Albert Productions, had signed Australian rock’n’roll band The Easybeats in 1965, putting out classics such as “Friday on My Mind” and “St. Louis” before it broke up four years later. That act’s rhythm guitarist, George Young, turned out to have talented younger brothers, Malcolm and Angus, and the Albert connection led to AC/DC signing with the company in 1974. George and bandmate Harry Vanda, who served as High Voltage’s co-producers, had a knack for drawing the screechy rock rawness out of Angus and Malcolm.
“That was our first real album,” Angus told Guitar Player in 2003, “and it was the one that defined our style.”
The album’s opening track, “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll),” began as a “jam,” Angus recalled in a 1992 interview, published many years later in Classic Rock. “We were just playing away, and my brother George left the tape rolling. After we finished, he was jumping up and down in the studio going, ‘Great, great, this is magic!’ And you’re thinking, ‘What’s he on about?’ And he played it back and there it was. It had that magic atmosphere.”
Although AC/DC became known for its lascivious vocals full of not-so-disguised euphemisms, “It’s a Long Way to the Top” is almost a folk ballad, lamenting endless hard work and “getting old, getting gray, getting ripped off, underpaid.” Country, folk and Americana singers including Lucinda Williams and Cody Jinks have covered it.
The droning track required a droning instrument — bagpipes — as its crucial final touch, the producers’ idea.
“Bagpipes!” exclaimed Steve Leeds, head of album promotion for AC/DC’s longtime U.S. label, Atlantic Records, as reported in Jesse Fink’s 2013 book The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC. “There are no bagpipes on the radio, even today. George and Harry were f–king geniuses. They figured it out. Conventional wisdom says, ‘You guys are crazy.’ ”
George knew how to communicate with musicians, and he recognized that the band’s imperfect quality in the studio could lead to spontaneous excitement on its recordings. At one point, while recording the title track, drummer Phil Rudd thought he had “messed up” during a fill, Angus recalled in 1992. “And George is signaling: ‘Keep going. Keep going.’ And we finish that take and we come in and go, ‘OK, we better try again.’ And he goes, ‘No. That was the take.’ And that was the one we used.” The track wound up closing the album.
From Australia to the United States, where it was released in 1976, High Voltage received almost no attention — other than negative attention. Critics were merciless. Rolling Stone’s infamous pan called the band “Australian gross-out champions,” declared hard rock “has unquestionably hit its all-time low,” referred to its rhythm section as “goose-stepping” and concluded the whole operation added up to “calculated stupidity.” A short feature two years later — written by Ira Kaplan, later frontman of Yo La Tengo — concluded, “There’s nothing new going on musically, but AC/DC attacks the old clichés with overwhelming exuberance.”
Many critics back then blooped over Malcolm’s steel-beam rhythms and Angus’ devotional reinterpretations of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry and stripped-down arrangements that distilled The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith and The Stooges into riffs that gained power with repetition.
“At that time, Rolling Stone was really into the punk genre and were matching up everything to what was the current flavor of the day,” Angus told Vulture in 2020. “What we did was rock’n’roll and we weren’t going to change anything.”
Malcolm Young, Bon Scott, and Angus Young of AC/DC performing at The Nashville Rooms on April 26, 1976 in London.
Dick Barnatt/Redferns
The vision paid off — eventually. Angus would criticize “really soft” Australian radio for being overobsessed with Air Supply and worse. But in the United States, programmers for a small San Antonio rock station picked up High Voltage and aired it immediately. This led to a show at Austin’s 1,500-capacity Armadillo World Headquarters and, later, airplay in the Bay Area and Boston.
“Up until that point, all we had really done was a lot of touring around Australia, so it was great to get into a studio and really hear how we sounded,” Angus recalled in 2003. “What was impressive about that album was that it sold on word-of-mouth alone.”
The band also played at CBGB, the New York punk fixture where the Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie and Talking Heads first became famous. When Atlantic co-founder Ahmet Ertegun saw that gig, he agreed to sign AC/DC, steering the band at first to the label’s Atco imprint. “I’m not sure I would have signed them when I first heard them,” the late Ertegun told Billboard in 1998. “They were very modern; they were pushing the envelope. They were very young-looking then and very ratty-looking. A lot of those bands had disdain for anything that resembled authority.”
Angus responded, sort of. In a 2020 interview with Billboard, he said, “Some people would say, ‘Well, you have a very juvenile approach to what you’re singing.’ But good rock’n’roll is juvenile, in a sense.”
At first, High Voltage was hardly a blockbuster, neither in its native Australia nor the United States. Not even “T.N.T.” charted on the Billboard Hot 100. But it since has become one of the band’s most beloved tracks, with 436 million U.S. streams, as well as 826 million Spotify plays internationally.
AC/DC’s first track to hit the Hot 100 was “Highway to Hell,” in October 1979, at a modest No. 47. And its debut album didn’t crack the Billboard 200 until 1981, long after Highway to Hell broke into the top 20 and Back in Black followed by reaching No. 4. Album-oriented rock, indeed. High Voltage took five years to go gold in the United States in 1981, according to the RIAA, and hit quadruple-platinum in July 2024.
As it turns out, consistency is exactly half of AC/DC’s formula for commercial success. The other half is a combination of songs that sound perfect no matter how many times they’re played on the radio and onstage. Like the song goes, “If you think it’s easy doing one-night stands/Try playing in a rock-roll band.”
James Hetfield of Metallica put it a different way, describing the live Angus experience to Billboard in 2016: “That guy sweats so much every night. I can’t believe his head is still on his body.”
This story appears in the April 19, 2025, issue of Billboard.