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Bob Weir is voting for Kamala Harris and her vice presidential pick, Tim Walz, in the upcoming election. The Grateful Dead rocker took to Instagram on Monday (Oct. 28) to share a photo of himself wearing a Dead-inspired Harris-Walz 2024 shirt, alongside a snap of Walz holding the tee and another with his wife, Natascha […]

Jeremy Allen White has already picked up two Emmys for playing a chef. Now, the buzzy actor is eyeing his first Oscar nod as he morphs into Bruce Springsteen. On Monday (Oct. 28), Disney’s 20th Century Studios shared the first look at The Bear actor as The Boss in Deliver Me From Nowhere, a new […]

More than half a century into his career, Bruce Springsteen is one of the biggest rock stars on the planet. But is he a billionaire? After Forbes magazine reported in July that the blue collar hero had an estimated fortune that it pegged as conservatively north of $1.1 billion, the New Jersey icon set the […]

The Harris campaign will continue to rock this week with another campaign event featuring prominent musical guests. According to an announcement for the When We Vote We Win event in Madison, WI on Wednesday (Oct. 30) evening, it will feature Democratic Presidential candidate current V.P. Kamala Harris, as well as appearances from Gracie Abrams, Remi […]

British indie band The Maccabees have announced that they will reunite for a live show in London next summer.
The band split in 2017 and released their last album, Marks To Prove It, in 2015, which landed at No.1 on the U.K. Official Album Charts. The Maccabees will perform their first live show in eight years at London’s All Points East festival in Victoria Park on August 24, 2025.

Tickets go on general sale at 10 a.m. GMT on October 31 from the festival’s official website. Special guests for the 50,000-capacity show will be announced in due course.

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Speaking of the reunion guitarist Felix White said in a statement: “In the intervening years we’ve been to All Points East a lot, separately. It’s become a bit of a landmark festival for us, always checking who’s on the line-up. I’d go and have a great time throughout the day, but there was always this pinch of regret watching headliners that we could’ve done it ourselves one day too. I thought that moment had passed, and it was something I was prepared to come to terms with that I was always going to miss. I think we’re all kind of shocked and excited that we get to do it together again.”

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His brother, guitarist Felix White, added that The Strokes‘ performance at the festival in 2023 was part of the motivation to get the band back together. “I could see that they were enjoying it, realizing how great what they had created together was. Being a band, you are usually in a mindset of, ‘We can do better’ and you’re always chasing something else,” Felix said.

“This is an opportunity to realize that whatever we had in that moment was pretty special and get to enjoy it again. It’s a chance to appreciate everything, and especially how it impacts other people and created a community.”

The band formed in London in 2004 and released four studio albums: Colour It In (2007), Wall Of Arms (2009), Given To The Wild (2012) and Marks To Prove It (2015). They split in 2017 and performed a farewell tour in the U.K., which included three nights at the capital’s 10,000-capacity Alexandra Palace.

Following the band’s split, frontman Orlando Weeks released a string of solo records, while brothers Felix and Hugo White formed 86TVs, which released its self-titled debut in August.

They are the first act to be announced for 2025’s All Points East festival. This year’s edition included headline sets from Kaytranada, Loyle Carner, Mitski, LCD Soundsystem and more.

We’re very excited to say we are getting back together to headline @allpointseastuk on Sunday, August 24th. Pre-sale is Wednesday 10am and general on sale Thursday 10am.Good luck. We’re looking forward to seeing you at Victoria Park. With love,The Maccabees x pic.twitter.com/tmrizZvJ0m— The Maccabees (@themaccabees) October 28, 2024

Phish remembered Phil Lesh during the opening concert of the group’s fall tour. Hours after Lesh’s death on Friday (Oct. 25), the jam band legends paid tribute to the late bassist with a cover of the Grateful Dead‘s “Box of Rain” at MVP Arena in Albany, N.Y. The performance marked the first time Phish has […]

Phil Lesh, founding member and longtime bassist for legendary rock outfit the Grateful Dead, died on Friday (Oct. 25). He was 84 years old.The news was announced on social media, with a statement that read, “Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of the Grateful Dead, passed peacefully this morning. He was surrounded by his family and full of love. Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love. We request that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.” No cause of death was given at the time of publication.
As one of the co-founders and longest-tenured members of the Grateful Dead, Lesh was an essential part of a group that became synonymous with touring and live performance in rock music. With their singular instrumental interplay, their trademark iconography, their strong sense of community and their association with the hippie lifestyle, they became the forefathers of the jam band movement — with a fanbase of “Deadheads” as singularly devoted as any other band of the 20th century, enduring well into the new millennium. 

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Born in Berkeley, California in 1940, Lesh grew up as a trumpet player and appreciator of avant-garde classical and free jazz. After short-lived studies at a variety of music schools, he met bluegrass banjo player Jerry Garcia in 1962 and was persuaded to join Garcia’s new rock band, The Warlocks, as their bassist — despite never playing the instrument before. The band, which also included Bob Weir as co-singer/guitarist with Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann as drummer and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan as keyboardist, was renamed Grateful Dead in 1965, after a phrase Garcia found in the dictionary.

Once he became proficient in the bass, Lesh’s playing style became heavily influenced by his musical interests in jazz and classical, giving his sound a melodic and improvisational quality rarely heard from the four-string in rock before. He came to be considered one of the instrumental innovators of his era, and his playing became as critical to (and identifiable within) the Grateful Dead’s sound as the group’s lead guitar. 
By the end of the ’60s, the Dead had become one of the leading lights of the psych-rock movement coming out of San Francisco, known for their gentle, folk-influenced jams, their sprawling, blissed-out live shows, and their affinity for psychedelic drugs like DMT and LSD. (“We found that while high we were able to go very far out musically but still come back to some kind of recognizable space or song structure,” Lesh wrote in his 2006 autobiography Searching For the Sound. “I knew instantly that this combination — acid and music — was the tool I’d been looking for.”)
Lesh was not a principal singer or songwriter in the band, but his tenor often contributed to the group’s three-part harmonies, and he did write and sing a handful of original Dead songs. The best-remembered of those was probably “Box of Rain,” opening track to their classic 1970 album American Beauty — co-penned with lyricist Robert Hunter about Lesh’s then-dying father — which ended up being the last song played at the group’s final concert with Garcia in 1995. 

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While the group sold steadily throughout the ’60s and ’70s — six of the group’s ’70s LPs reached the top 30 of the Billboard 200, with 1970’s Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty and 1972’s live triple album all being certified Platinum by the RIAA — they were a less-regular presence on the Billboard Hot 100, where they charted just four entries in their first decade, and none higher than the No. 64-peaking “Truckin’” in 1971. But the group’s live reputation kept them an essential part of the rock fabric well into the ’80s, and in 1987 they scored their lone pop hit with the catchy top 10 smash “Touch of Grey” — which along with its popular music video, featuring the band performing as skeletons, introduced them to a new generation of fans.
However in the late ’80s Garcia’s health began to falter, and in 1995 he passed away, with the band deciding to disband shortly after. Following the group’s dissolution, Lesh continued playing with offshoot The Other Ones (with original member Bob Weir, longtime percussionist Mickey Hart and keyboardist Bruce Hornsby), which gradually expanded its lineup to include more former Grateful Dead members and rebranded as The Dead in 2003. In addition, Lesh started Phil Lesh and Friends in 1999, with a rotating live and recording cast reinterpreting old songs by the Grateful Dead and some of their peers, and a decade later he created Furthur, another jam band co-founded with Weir. 

Despite remaining busy with these Grateful Dead offshoots — as well as a handfull of 50th anniversary stadium shows put on by the band’s surviving members as the Fare Thee Well celebration — Lesh largely refrained from writing or recording any original songs in later years, preferring to keep the focus on his live show. “What’s the point?” he remarked to Billboard in 2012. “Nobody makes money on recordings anymore — at least the likes of us don’t. And the longer I’m in music the less time I like the idea of freezing music in amber so that it’s the same every time you play it back. I want it to be different every time, so I’m just not into recording, particularly.”
In 2017, Bass Player magazine ranked Lesh as the 57th greatest bassist of all time. “More an improvising composer than mere bassist, Lesh elevated the Grateful Dead from hippie jam band to an artistic ensemble capable of reaching heights of interactive ecstasy,” the magazine wrote. “Balancing roots with bouncy, offbeat upper-register figures, he could spin long motivic statements sometimes lasting over a minute, often steering the band into daring new harmonic territory.”
Grateful Dead will be honored as the 2025 MusiCares Persons of the Year. The 34th annual Persons of the Year benefit gala will be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Friday, Jan. 31, 2025, two nights before the 67th annual Grammy Awards at Crypto.com Arena.

Hozier earns his fifth straight No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Airplay chart as “Nobody’s Soldier” lifts two spots to the top of the Nov. 2-dated survey.

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The song continues a streak that also includes “Eat Your Young” and “Francesca” in 2023 and “Too Sweet,” for 10 weeks beginning in May, plus his co-lead turn on Noah Kahan’s “Northern Attitude,” for five weeks starting in January.

With five rulers in a row, Hozier is one away from the chart’s all-time best run, held by U2, which strung together six from 2001’s “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” through 2005’s “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own.”

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In all, Hozier now boasts seven No. 1s on Adult Alternative Airplay, first reigning with “Take Me to Church” in 2014. He also led with “Nina Cried Power,” featuring Mavis Staples, in 2018.

Hozier is the first soloist to score three new Adult Alternative Airplay No. 1s in a single year, thanks to “Nobody’s Soldier,” “Too Sweet” and “Northern Attitude.” Only two groups previously achieved the feat, dating to the chart’s January 1996 launch: Coldplay with “Violet Hill,” “Viva La Vida” and “Lost!,” featuring Jay-Z, in 2008, and Dave Matthews Band with “I Did It,” “The Space Between” and “Everyday” in 2001.

Concurrently, “Nobody’s Soldier” ranks at No. 39 on Alternative Airplay, after reaching No. 37. On the all-rock-format, audience-based Rock & Alternative Airplay chart, it rises 23-22 with 1.4 million audience impressions, up 7%, in the week ending Oct. 24, according to Luminate.

“Nobody’s Soldier” debuted at its No. 16 best on the multimetric Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart dated Aug. 31 following its release on Hozier’s EP Unaired. The song has also been appended to the deluxe edition of his 2023 album Unreal Unearth, with the latest edition – Unreal Unearth: Unending – due Dec. 6 as a three-LP deluxe edition and a one-LP companion version.

All Billboard charts dated Nov. 2 will update on Billboard.com Tuesday, Oct. 29.

With Billboard Hot 100 hits like “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Union of the Snake,” “New Moon on Monday” and “A View to a Kill,” Duran Duran’s catalog is frighteningly fitting for spooky season. So in 2022, when the English quartet found itself playing a Halloween-night gig in Las Vegas ahead of its induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the band decided to don costumes, sprinkle in seasonally appropriate covers and embrace the darkness.
The show was successful enough to inspire the band’s 2023 album, Danse Macabre, a top 10 hit on the Top Album Sales chart. With an expanded version of the album out now, the veterans — who have grossed $118.6 million and sold 1.8 million tickets since 1987, according to Billboard Boxscore — are set to play a show at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Oct. 31 that keyboardist Nick Rhodes promises “will be entirely different than any other Duran Duran show you will ever see.”

Is Halloween as big in the United Kingdom?

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We don’t celebrate it in such grand style as you do in America. I remember the first time I came to America was over the Halloween period. I literally thought, “Wow, they’re so far ahead of us. Why don’t we have these giant blow-up things outside our houses? Why can’t bats be 20 feet wide?” I love the sense of fun, the absurdity and that everybody gets to be a villain for a day.

The deluxe Danse Macabre has “New Moon (Dark Phase),” a moodier take on one of your classics; a cover of ELO’s “Evil Woman”; and “Masque of the Pink Death,” which I’m guessing is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe.

I’ve always been a great admirer [of Poe]. We grew up in England in the ’70s, where Hammer horror movies on [TV on] a Friday night, whether it was a Dracula or a mummy movie, were the thing you looked forward to all week. Plus, [I love] Tim Burton’s great contribution to everyone who loves goth. Those things shape the way you feel about life and the possibilities creatively. That’s what makes artists unique — their influences and the different areas they take from, even if it’s subliminal.

The Madison Square Garden show will be your second Halloween-themed concert. Do you see this becoming a tradition?

I don’t know. It’s a lot of work for one show. But Madison Square Garden just happened to be available, and New York is such a good place to be for Halloween. It was irresistible. We are going to make it something unusual and special. It won’t be like a regular show at all. The fans in Europe have been writing in already saying, “When are you going to do one in Europe? This is the second one in America; that’s not fair.” I sympathize with that. We always like to try to balance things, so maybe [we’ll do] one in Europe next year.

You have several other U.S. shows this fall beyond MSG. Will Halloween elements work their way into those?

I suspect some of them will feature a few bits that we’re preparing for Halloween. We didn’t think we’d be back in America this year, but when we decided to do the Halloween one, we slotted some more in. I rather like that way of working. For many years, we haven’t been a band that announces big world tours and ends up on the road for 18 months. But we do seem to play a lot of shows. We just add them when we want to, and somehow the chaos is working.

This story appears in the Oct. 26, 2024, issue of Billboard.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” continues its recent dominance atop the TikTok Billboard Top 50 chart, reigning for a third straight week on the Oct. 26-dated tally.

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The TikTok Billboard Top 50 is a weekly ranking of the most popular songs on TikTok in the United States based on creations, video views and user engagement. The latest chart reflects activity from Oct. 14-20. Activity on TikTok is not included in Billboard charts except for the TikTok Billboard Top 50.

“Maps” – on the strength of two dominant TikTok trends, one a dance and the other using a filter to remove one’s facial features (more on that here) – and Alphaville’s “Forever Young” remain at Nos. 1 and 2; “Forever Young” is a previous No. 1 on the chart, having ruled the Oct. 5 survey, and the song hasn’t been below the top three since September.

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Despite the stagnant top two, there’s movement elsewhere in the top 10, paced by Akon’s “Akon’s Beautiful Day,” which zooms 8-3 in its second week on the chart.

Initially, the top clips using the song were from Akon himself, but the tune – released Oct. 4 after being teased on the platform previously – has since spread to hundreds of thousands of usages by other creators, ranging from sports-related videos, uploads about positivity and friendship, general-topic content and more.

Concurrently, “Akon’s Beautiful Day” debuts at No. 31 on Billboard’s Rhythmic Airplay chart. In the week ending Oct. 17, it earned 448,000 official U.S. streams, up 25%, according to Luminate.

It’s followed on the TikTok Billboard Top 50 by Aphex Twin’s “QKThr,” which completes a 19-week rise to the top 10 with an 11-4 bump. That’s the lengthiest amount of time from debut week to first time in the top 10 since the chart began in September 2023, eclipsing the 15 weeks Billie Eilish’s “Wildflower” took before hitting No. 7 last month.

“QKThr” debuted at No. 13 on the Feb. 10-dated list and bounced around the chart for five weeks before falling off, returning for its current run in July. Released in 2001 as part of Aphex Twin’s album Drukqs, its latest rise is tied to the “subtle foreshadowing” trend where users post clips of misfortune with what’s to come stitched in throughout the video.

FloyyMenor’s “Peligrosa” also reaches a new peak, moving 9-6. It’s his second top 10 on the chart, following the No. 5 peak of “Gata Only,” alongside Cris Mj, in April.

“Peligrosa,” which has risen as high as No. 19 on Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart earlier this month after being released in July, benefits from a dance trend alongside other high-performing uploads. It earned 2.8 million streams in the week ending Oct. 17.

The TikTok Billboard Top 50’s top 10 also sports a debut within its confines: Vines’ “Being Loved Isn’t the Same As Being Understood,” which bows at No. 8. Premiered in March, the song has exploded in popularity on TikTok due to a trend that’s usually presented as a photo collage meant to “sum up” the person represented, whether it’s themselves, a family member or a friend.

Though it’s not a 19-week trip like “QKThr,” Gigi Perez’s “Sailor Song” also completes a lengthy run to the top 10, jumping 24-10 in its ninth week on the chart. A variety of high-performing videos following loosely related trends, including one where people surprise their long-distance significant others in person.

“Sailor Song” rises to a new peak of No. 28 on the Billboard Hot 100, jumping 13% in streams to 13 million in the week ending Oct. 17.

See the full TikTok Billboard Top 50 here. You can also tune in each Friday to SiriusXM’s TikTok Radio (channel 4) to hear the premiere of the chart’s top 10 countdown at 3 p.m. ET, with reruns heard throughout the week.