State Champ Radio Rock
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It is a mere 30 days until Oasis take the stage at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales to kick off their first tour in more than 16 years. The anticipation for the long-awaited reunion of formerly battling brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher has been slowly building as images of band members arriving for rehearsals have leaked out over the past week.
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And on Tuesday morning (June 3), singer Liam weighed in and gave a very positive assessment of how things are going. “We have LIFT OFF Rastas sounded f–king FILTHY,” he wrote on X. “I’ll tell thee that there for hardly anything.” When a fan asked if he was nervous to step to the mic, the singer brushed off the question, responding “Dont be ridiculous.”
When another commenter wondered “did you sound amazing?,” the cheeky vocalist said, “Cmon,” telling a different fan that rehearsing with the band again was “SPIRITUAL” and that rehearsals so far were “BIBLICAL.” Not one to get misty about much, Gallagher told an inquiring mind who wanted to know if it was “emotional playing with everyone” for the first time in 16 years, “no time to get emotional we have a lot of catching up to do.”
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By Wednesday morning (June 4), Gallagher was already seemingly getting a bit punchy, inexplicably posting “MOISTIFICATION for the NATION,” and replying to a question about his “greatest asset” with the blunt “My arse.” A follow-up query about how many songs the band rehearsed the day before got the answer “69.”
So far, the band is planning to spend most of July in the U.K. before jumping over to North America in August for shows in Toronto, Chicago, New Jersey, Pasadena and Mexico City, then hitting Asia and Australia in the fall and winding down with shows in Argentina, Chile and Brazil in November.
For now, there are no festival dates or non-headlining shows, but a persistent fan asked Liam if it’s possible that Oasis would make a triumphant return to the Knebworth Festival, where they played to more than 250,000 fans over two nights in 1996. “Let’s see how this tour goes if we still love each other after it,” Liam replied.
And while there is some trepidation that the internal strife that split the family band up in 2009 might rear its ugly head again, when a fan wondered if Tuesday’s rehearsal made it feel like the band had “never split up,” Gallagher affirmed, “Yeah like it never happened very spiritual.”
Some things never change, though. “How many hours do you rehearse every day,” one commenter wondered. “I do the set once then I scarper,” Liam said.
So far, longtime bassist Andy Bell has confirmed that he’s back in the band for the tour and a March report suggested that the Gallaghers could be joined by former guitarist Gem Archer, as well as Oasis co-founder and rhythm guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs and drummer Joey Waronker (Beck, R.E.M.). Liam rubbished the report, writing, “NME tell me who your source pots are that keep giving you info about OASIS and I’ll give you an exclusive interview about up n coming OASIS tour. You can have it all but how much do you want it.”
See Liam’s comment below.
We have LIFT OFF Rastas sounded fucking FILTHY I’ll tell thee that there for hardly anything LG x— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) June 3, 2025
MOISTIFICATION for the NATION— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) June 4, 2025
For parents and priests back in the ‘80s worried about subliminal, evil messages in heavy metal music, Cold Slither was their worst nightmare. Or at least the four-piece hard rock band would have been if they’d been flesh-and-blood instead of a cartoon band from the iconic animated series G.I. JOE: A Real American Hero. But at San Diego Comic-Con, Cold Slither – the villainous metal band whose music was laden with subliminal messages from terrorist organization Cobra – is coming to life for the first time.
On July 24 at San Diego’s Brick by Brick, Cold Slither will take the stage for a one-night-only show presented by Hasbro and Reigning Phoenix Music. The evil (but honestly kind of doltish) band of swamp mercenaries working for Cobra Commander will be brought to life by Gus Rios (vocals/bass, portraying Zartan), Ross Sewage (guitar, portraying Torch), Matt Harvey (guitar, portraying Ripper) and Andy Selway (drums, portraying Buzzer).
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The day after the concert, Friday, July 25, Cold Slither’s debut album will drop. It features the “Cold Slither” song that appeared in the Dec. 2, 1985, episode of the series that introduced the band, as well as nine additional tracks, including “Thunder Machine,” which debuts today. Pre-orders are available now.
Soldiers and mercenaries who swing by the Hasbro and Reigning Phoenix Music booths can pick up the “Zartan Chameleon Blue” and “Blood Moon Red” vinyl variants, respectively, both exclusive to San Diego Comic-Con. Fans can also pick up limited-edition action figures of the hard-rocking Dreadnoks at the event.
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“This isn’t just an album – it’s a sonic strike straight from Cobra Command!” the band says. “We’re back, louder, heavier and deadlier than ever. We can’t wait for G.I. JOE fans and metalheads to experience the raw power of our music, culminating in our live debut at San Diego Comic-Con. Prepare your ears for total domination… Let’s Rock and Cobra Roll!”
Check out the Cold Slither album tracklist below.
Cold Slither1. Welcome to the Swamp (Intro)2. Cold Slither3. Knock ‘Em Dread4. Thunder Machine 5. Zartan’s Revenge 6. Snakes on the Bayou7. Torched8. Under the Dreadnok’s Spell9. Master of Disguise10. The Ballad of Buzzer11. These Fluffies Are Fatal
Shane Hawkins set the record straight on which Foo Fighters song was his late dad Taylor Hawkins‘ favorite to play during a recent drum clinic at the Dead Famous cocktail bar in Newquay, England. “All right, this is another one of my dad’s that I like to play,” Hawkins, 18, told the crowd at the […]
The hunt is on for an iconic but missing artifact from Robert Zemeckis’ classic 1985 film Back to the Future.
Gibson Guitars and Universal Home Entertainment, in conjunction with filmmaker Doc Crotzer, have launched Lost to the Future, a search for the Gibson ES-345 Cherry Red guitar that Michael J. Fox, as Marty McFly, played in the beloved film. As fans well know, Fox picked up the guitar during the movie’s Enchantment Under the Sea high school dance, where he performed the Penguins’ “Earth Angel” and then shredded Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
The guitar, which was rented as a prop from Norm’s Rare Guitars in Tarzana, Calif., has been missing for several decades. Now Gibson and Crotzer (Road House, Shotgun Wedding, Glee) have begun a “true crime search” for the instrument, and the filmmaker is planning to make a documentary about the endeavor.
“Back to the Future made me want to make movies as a kid, and made me want to pick up a guitar,” Crotzer tells Billboard. “I’m a guitar player but I’m just a hobbyist; I went on with my (filmmaking) career, but I had always wondered what happened to that guitar. Over the last however many years so many props from the movie have surfaced…but (the guitar) had never surfaced.”
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Gibson’s director of brand experience Mark Agnesi, who previously worked at Norm’s Rare Guitars before joining Gibson, also cites the “Johnny B. Goode” scene as one of his inspirations to play. “I’ve been searching for this thing for 16 years now,” he says. “I started searching everywhere. Norm’s has this big warehouse of guitars and occasionally I’d go in and look for certain things, and every time I’m in there I was always looking around for (the Back to the Future guitar), but to no avail.”
They aren’t the only ones who were inspired by the scene, of course. When Fox joined Coldplay at last year’s Glastonbury Festival in England, frontman Chris Martin told the crowd that, “The main reason why we’re in a band is because of watching Back to the Future,” adding that Fox is “our hero forever and one of the most amazing people on Earth.” In a new video announcing the Lost to the Future project, John Mayer notes that the scene “was a big Rocky moment for a lot of kids,” while Jason Isbell explains “that’s the most iconic guitar from a movie. I don’t think anything else comes close…That was a huge deal for me. The world needs to see that guitar.”
Those with leads about the guitar’s whereabouts are asked to call 1-888-345-1955 or send a message via www.LostToTheFuture.com.
The trail for the guitar is indeed cold. It was apparently sold, then sold back to Norm’s and then presumably resold again. “Back then there was no digital record of that stuff; it was all hand-written receipts and stuff,” Gibson’s Agnesi says. “We know it was returned to Norm’s. At that time in the mid ‘80s there was a Japanese vintage guitar boom; charter buses of Japanese tourists were pulling up and buying everything in sight. So it could be someone has it in Japan. We don’t know. The possibilities of where it could be are endless.”
The guitar’s serial number is not known, but there is a unique tell that will allow it to be authenticated, according to Agnesi; the inlay on its 12th fret is solid, not split like the others on the neck, which was standard for the ES-345 at the time. “That anomaly is the smoking gun we’re looking for, thank God,” Agnesi says. “That will not be on any other guitar. Either someone custom-ordered it that way or it would be marked a factory second on the back of the head stock. That’s how we’ll know we’ve found the guitar we’re looking for.”
Filmmaker Crotzer adds that the tell is “the most amazing coincidence. I personally believe it’s like some higher power giving us the opportunity to find the thing.”
An irony is that while Back to the Future is set in 1955, the ES-345 was not yet in production in 1958, and not made in cherry red until the following year. “Norm has publicly said he knew that guitar was wrong for the era,” Agnesi notes, adding that in ’55 Berry was playing a Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster. But the filmmakers, he says, wanted something slimmer and more streamlined. “They wanted that Chuck Berry 345 look even though it wasn’t the right guitar for the time period,” Agnesi says. “They were willing to take some small liberties and have fun in the movie with it. If not for that guitar, the scene might not have been as impactful.”
It also dovetails with the fact that “Johnny B. Goode” wasn’t released until 1958 — adding to Marty McFly’s future prognostication that, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet, but your kids are gonna love it.”
Charles Berry says that his father was not bothered by those historical inaccuracies, however. “Dad was fairly laid back when it came to stuff like that,” he says, adding that the family didn’t know about the “Johnny B. Goode” scene “until maybe a month or two before. It’s just like (the 1987 documentary) Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll; he said, ‘Oh yeah, by the way, they want to make this movie about me.’ (Back to the Future) was the same type of thing; he comes to the house and says, ‘Yeah, there’s this movie coming out, in one of the scenes this kid’s playing ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ ‘Really?!”
Seeing the film, the younger Berry — who owns some of his father’s old guitars and administrates the loan or donation of others to museums — says, “We got a kick out of it. It’s a very good movie, a nice wholesome movie. Michael J. Fox did a really cool job. It may not be exactly the right guitar, but we’ll take it.”
The scene famously ends with one of the band members, ostensibly Berry’s cousin Marvin, calling the rock n’ roll pioneer and holding the phone up to hear what’s being played on stage. “Besides, ‘What’s it like to be Chuck Berry’s son?,’ after ’85 the most-asked question I get is, ‘Does your dad really have a cousin Marvin?’” says Charles Berry with a laugh. “No, it was just in the movie.”
The video announcing the search also features Back to the Future co-screenwriter Bob Gale, co-stars Lea Thompson and Christopher Lloyd, and Huey Lewis, who had an uncredited bit part and, with his band the News, scored a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit with “The Power of Love” from the soundtrack. “Back to the Future, it keeps growing; it’s like a Wizard of Oz for a new generation,” says Lewis, adding that, “it’s fascinating (the guitar) has not turned up. It’s a very distinctive one. Whoever has this guitar must not have heard that they’re searching for it yet. Once the word is out, if you’ve got a 345, you’re going to look and see if that’s the one.”
The search is part of a number of Gibson initiatives related to the film and the guitar’s legacy in it. An episode of Gibson TV: The Collection that premieres in October features Fox talking about his own history of guitar playing and his collection of 40-some instruments. The same month, Gibson and Epiphone will release new custom models of the ES-345 as well as Back to the Future-themed apparel, and Gibson Gives will announce a partnership with the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
“I just wanted to be a rock n’ roll guitarist,” Fox says in The Collection. “That’s all I wanted to do. I became an actor instead of a guitarist…It’s always been a passion of mine, rock n’ roll — especially the guitar.” He adds that the ES-345 in the film “was such a good guitar. It’s like Excalibur…. Being 23 years old and that scene, I was having the f–king best time. But I didn’t realize the influence it had on people. It’s just expressing my love for the guitar and all the great players.”
Crotzer says all of that will be part of the Lost to the Future documentary. A happy ending is hoped for, but Crotzer is also out to tell the greater story surrounding it.
“We’ve realized (the story) is bigger than we thought,” he says. “The through-line is the true crime search for this guitar, but the emotional core of it is tracking how it inspired a generation of kids, whether they went on to become Chris Martin or went off to do completely other things. There’s a collective experience here that we really want to capture.”
Faster Pussycat singer Taime Downe has opened up for the first time about the tragic death of fiancée Kimberly Burch, 56, who was presumed dead in March after what officials believe was a fall from a cruise ship. Speaking to Eddie Trunk on his SiriusXM Faction talk show on Friday, Downe, 60, said the past few months have been a “roller coaster.”
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According to Blabbermouth, Downe talked about missing Burch and attempting to heal on the band’s current U.S. tour. “I’m hanging in there. I’m just taking it a day at a time. And everybody thought going out on the road and doing what I do and being with my family in my band would be good for me,” he said. “So I’ve taken their advice and [I’m] doing this. We’re going out with some cool bands,” he added of support from Vain, the Supersuckers, The Rumours and The Lonely Ones.
“I think it’ll be therapeutic, and [I’ll] get to see a bunch of fans and a bunch of friends across the country,” Downe said. “So I think it’ll be helpful… this is just heavy s–t, and I’m just looking forward to playing shows and having fun.”
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Asked if he’d rather not talk about Burch’s death, Downe said it’s fine to ask him and “it’s good to talk about it with my friends, my close-knit friends. But I don’t really wanna talk about it with strangers, ’cause it doesn’t seem appropriate. It is what it is.”
Reacting to concerns that Burch’s tragic death might impact his sobriety, Downe said there’s no chance he’d start drinking again after suffering such a tragic loss. “What happened with Kimberly too, it was alcohol and prescription related,” he said. “So I blame alcohol and pills on it. There’s no way I’d touch booze. For me, that’s just completely disgusting in my brain, you know what I mean? So I’ve got some hatred for booze, ’cause I loved the hell out of Kimberly, and it was just hard to deal with. We spent basically nine years together.”
According to reports, Burch died after going overboard on the Royal Caribbean Explorer of the Seas on the first night of the 80s Cruise, which, in addition to 1980s glam rock stalwarts Faster Pussycat, featured sets from Warrant, Dokken, Firehouse, Squeeze, Adam Ant, Tiffany and Men at Work. Officials launched a search operation, but Burch’s body was never found. A U.S. Coast Guard spokesperson said the ship was around 20 miles from Freeport, Bahamas when the incident took place.
Shortly after the incident, The Hollywood Reporter reported that security footage appeared to show Burch jumping overboard, with Nassau police clearing Downe of any wrongdoing.
For a minute in the 1990s, Failure seemed destined for world domination. But the L.A. alt-rock band whose excesses superseded their successes and led to a crash out after less than a decade together will be re-born (again) in the upcoming documentary, Every Time You Lose Your Mind. The first trailer for the film that will premiere on Hulu/Disney+ on June 27 features testimonials from avowed superfan Paramore singer Hayley Williams, as well as Tool’s Maynard James Keenan and late producer/engineer Steve Albini.
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“Like a falling satellite blazing across the musical landscape, Failure flamed-out in the late ‘90s – their promising rise derailed by drug addiction and record company inertia,” reads a description of the doc, which was directed by singer/guitarist Ken Andrews. “But the pioneering trio left a profound imprint that transcended their affiliation with the LA alt-rock scene. Every Time You Lose Your Mind documents the origins, downfall and rebirth of a band that’s beloved by their peers and multiple generations of fans.”
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The shoegaze-y band formed in 1990 in L.A. by Andrews, bassist/keyboardist Greg Edwards and drummer Robert Gauss (who was replaced in 1993 by Kellii Scott) released their Albini-helmed debut album, Comfort, in 1992 and embarked on what would be the first of a series of tours opening up for Tool. Determined to find the sound they were looking for, Andrews and Edwards took over as producers for the trio’s second LP, 1994’s Magnified, which, like its predecessor, earned praise from peers, but failed to move the needle on radio or at MTV.
Tool’s Keenan recalls in the trailer that much of the music in Los Angeles during that early 1990s era was “formulaic, and Failure seemed to cut right up through the middle. They were just kind of their own unique presence.” Garbage drummer and Nirvana producer Butch Vig adds that Failure embraced “that darkness [and] dissonance,” while Paramore’s Williams notes that she’d “never really heard anything like that… it changed how I thought about music and it kind of just made me more than ever want to be in a band.”
The trio’s original run ended with 1996’s beloved album Fantastic Planet, which launched a modest Weezer-ish alt radio hit in “Stuck On You,” but again mostly fizzled on the charts. After a run on the final touring version of Lollapalooza — during which they did double duty when they got bumped from the second stage to main stage after Korn was forced to drop out, giving them both afternoon and evening slots — the band broke up in late 1997.
In the recent Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival oral history, Andrews talked about Tool getting the band on the tour and being nervous that so many other bands would come over to watch their sets. “Especially if you’re the low band on the totem pole and you haven’t really proven yourself with a lot of success or notoriety,” he said. Edwards admitted to being strung out at the time, saying, “I was flying through that period. I was heavily self-medicated, and Lollapalooza was the beginning of a steep slope to the bottom.”
“Our fans have connected with the themes of depression and addiction in our music,” Andrews said in a statement about the film. “The film crystallizes those connections and, ultimately, communicates hope. We’re a band that faced a specific set of challenges and somehow managed to survive and thrive. It’s a story about resilience, finding ways to cope, and not giving up.”
Andrews and Edwards went on to form a series of bands in the ensuing years and reunited in 2013 with Scott, once again hitting the road to open for Tool and release the 2014 album The Heart Is a Monster. They followed up in 2018 with the first in a series of EPs and the album In the Future Your Body Will Be the Furthest Thing From Your Mind and 2021’s Wild Type Droid.
In the trailer, Edwards describes being on a “steady routine of uppers and downers, spinning around this spine of the heroin addiction” in a nod to the drug issues that sped the demise of the group. The preview also features snippets of interviews with actress/comedian Margaret Cho, former drummer and A Perfect Circle member Troy Van Leeuwen and actor/musician Jason Schwartzman.
Failure will celebrate the movie’s release on June 26 at the Harmony Gold Theater in L.A. with an acoustic set before the screening. The band is also booked to play at the Louder Than Life festival in Louisville, KY on Sept. 20 and the Aftershock Festival in Sacramento on Oct. 3.
Watch the trailer for Every Time You Lose Your Mind below.
Linkin Park delivered a four-song set ahead of the UEFA Champions League final in Munich on Saturday night (June 1), continuing their return to the live stage with performances of “The Emptiness Machine,” “In the End,” “Numb,” and “Heavy Is the Crown.”
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Taking the stage at Munich Football Arena just before kickoff between Paris Saint-Germain and Inter Milan, the band’s appearance served as a high-profile preview of their upcoming world tour, which supports their latest album, From Zero, released last year.
The set marked another major step in the band’s evolution following the addition of vocalist Emily Armstrong, who officially joined the lineup last September. Armstrong’s debut sparked conversation online, including public commentary from the late Chester Bennington’s family and discussion around her past professional affiliations.
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From Zero is Linkin Park’s first studio album since 2017’s One More Light, released just months before Bennington’s death.
At the band’s first show with their new lineup last year, co-founder Mike Shinoda addressed the crowd, saying, “We are thrilled to be back out here. It is not about erasing the past. It is about starting this new chapter into the future and coming out here for each and every one of you.”
Shinoda expanded on that sentiment during a guest appearance on The Tonight Show, explaining, “I think the important thing for us is that we never set out to, like, ‘Let’s bring the band back’ or ‘Let’s find a singer.’ That was never our intention or our goal.”
The album debuted at No. 1 on all of the above charts last November, except for the Billboard 200 and Top Album Sales, where it arrived at No. 2. Following its deluxe reissue with additional tracks on May 16, From Zero recently returned to Top Album Sales (at No. 5), Top Hard Rock Albums (No. 4), Vinyl Albums (No. 8), Top Alternative Albums (No. 9), Top Rock Albums (No. 15), Top Rock & Alternative Albums (No. 17), Indie Store Album Sales (No. 17) and the Billboard 200 (No. 71) charts dated May 31.
The North American leg of Linkin Park’s upcoming tour is set to kick off July 29 at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. The run will include stops across the U.S. through August and September, including a major date at Dodger Stadium with Queens of the Stone Age, before it wraps Sept. 24 in Seattle.
Yungblud has enlisted Florence Pugh for an emotional music video for new single “Zombie.” The emotional ballad will feature on his upcoming fourth studio albums, Idols, out June 20. Pugh, who current stars in Marvel’s Thunderbolts has form for appearing in music videos. In 2023, she played the leading role in rising British indie star […]
Thom Yorke is speaking out for the first time about a confrontation with an audience member at one of his gigs in Australia last year that the Radiohead singer said left him emotionally distraught. In a lengthy Instagram post on Friday morning (May 30), Yorke described his feelings about “some guy shouting at me from the dark last year” as he was preparing to sing the final song at his solo show in Melbourne.
After a man in the audience shouted comments about “Israeli genocide in Gaza” during the gig at the Sidney Meyer Music Bowl in October, Yorke stopped the show and challenged the person to come on stage and say it to his face before walking off in seeming disgust. In his Instagram post, Yorke said that moment didn’t really seem like the best one to “discuss the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”
Afterwards, however, Yorke wrote that he “remained in shock that my supposed silence was somehow taken as complicity,” adding that he “struggled to find an adequate way to respond to this and to carry on with the rest of the shows on the tour. That silence, my attempt to show respect for all those who are suffering and those who have died, and to not trivialize it in a few words, has allowed other opportunistic groups to use intimidation and defamation to fill in the blanks, and I regret giving them this chance.”
While Yorke didn’t specify which comments he was referring to, he said not formally responding to the vitriol has “had a heavy toll on my mental health.”
The remainder of the eight-page post is a pointed broadside against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Yorke called out the last time Radiohead played in Israel, in July 2017. At that time, he wrote, “We’ve played in Israel for over 20 years through a succession of governments, some more liberal than others. As we have in America. We don’t endorse [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu any more than Trump, but we still play in America.”
The singer wrote on Instagram that he hoped that anyone who has ever listened to his or his band’s music, read the lyrics or seen their artwork would clearly understand that he could not “possibly support any form of extremism or dehumanization of others. All I see in a lifetime’s worth of work with my fellow musicians and artists is a pushing against such things, trying to create work that goes beyond what it means to be controlled, coerced, threatened, to suffer, to be intimidated .. and instead to encourage critical thinking beyond borders.”
If his message was not clear, Yorke made his feelings about Israel’s longest-serving PM even more so in the statement. “I think Netanyahu and his crew of extremists are totally out of control and need to be stopped,” he wrote. “And that the international community should put all the pressure it can on them to cease. Their excuse of self-defence has long since worn thin and has been replaced by a transparent desire to take control of Gaza and the West Band permanently.”
Netanyahu has overseen a nearly two-year war on Hamas in the wake of the extremist group’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, during which raiders killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and took 250 hostages. In the ensuing battles, Israeli forces have mercilessly pounded Gaza with bombs that have destroyed much of the region’s infrastructure, killing more than 53,000, according to Palestinian health officials. The daily attacks have also led to a humanitarian crisis and what experts warn is a potentially devastating famine due to the Netanyahu administration’s refusal to let sufficient food aid into the decimated region.
Yorke lambasted what he called Netanyahu’s “ultra-nationalist” administration, claiming that Harvard-educated Netanyahu and his hard-right peers have hidden behind a “terrified & grieving people and used them to deflect any criticism, using that fear and grief to further their ultra-nationalist agenda with terrible consequences, as we see now with the horrific blockage of aid to Gaza.”
Israel has begun allowing more food aid into Gaza in recent days, though the new distribution mechanism backed by the U.S. and Netanyahu has resulted in chaotic scenes in which tens of thousands of Palestinians reportedly on the verge of famine swarmed the sites to grab bags of food and flour. As talks for another temporary cease fire are under way, Israel has continued its daily bombing of Gaza, even as it has ordered serially displaced Palestinians to move to an area near the coast as the military attempts to empty out large areas where it says Hamas fighters remain.
“While our lives tick along as normal these endless thousands of innocent human souls are still being expelled from the earth… for what?” Yorke asked, pivoting to the issue of why the “unquestioning Free Palestine refrain” has not resulted in the return of what are believe to be the 58 remaining hostages. He also asked why Hamas undertook the “horrific” acts of Oct. 7, speculating that the militant group is choosing to “hide behind the suffering of its people, in an equally cynical fashion for their own purposes.”
Yorke ended by lashing out at “social media witch hunts” aimed at pressuring artists to make statements, efforts he said do little except exacerbate tensions, cause fear and over-simplify the situation. “This kind of deliberate polarization does not serve our fellow human beings and perpetuates a constant ‘us and them’ mentality,” Yorke wrote. “It destroys hope and maintains a sense of isolation, the very things that extremists use to maintain their position.”
The singer said he understands the push to “do something” when confronted with such suffering and loss, but cautioned against thinking that reposting “one or two line messages,” especially ones condemning others, is the answer. “It is shouting from the darkness,” he said. “It is not looking people in the eye when you speak. It is making dangerous assumptions. It is not debate and it is not critical thinking.”
Admittedly short on answers and aware that his note is unlikely to satisfy those looking to “target myself or those i work with,” Yorke ended by offering hope that his letter will allow him to join the many millions of others “praying for this suffering, isolation and death to stop.”
See Yorke’s full statement below.
For Bono, music has always been an immersive art form. “When I was a teenager and stereo came, it was everything,” the rock legend tells Billboard. “U2 immersed ourselves in our audience — I jumped into the audience, and then our shows were always immersive in their instincts.”
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So when he got an early look at the Apple Vision Pro, the mixed-reality headset that the company launched in the U.S. last year, Bono says that he “was honored to be a lab rat in in their unusual mix of art and science.” On Friday (May 30), Bono: Stories of Surrender, a new documentary that captures and expands upon his recent one-man stage show, will be released on Apple TV+ as both a standard 2D film and as an immersive experience on the Vision Pro — the first feature-length project to be released in the format.
U2 has a long history of partnering with Apple, and Bono says that he was happy to be the one to break new ground for the company. “A lot of companies, when they get to that scale, they stop innovating,” he says. “And here they are again, ready to do it.
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“And for the first time, I got to see myself onstage, and realized, ‘What a big arse!’” Bono adds with a laugh. “That has gotta go! And by the way, are those nose hairs? I’m like, ‘Wow!’”
Indeed, Stories of Surrender offers plenty of extreme close-ups of the rock star, as the documentary (directed by Andrew Dominik) adds new dimension to a 2023 performance of Stories of Surrender: An Evening of Words, Music and Some Mischief… The stage show itself was an extension of Bono’s 2022 memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, and mixed monologues detailing his upbringing, sparse visual props and stripped-down arrangements of some of U2’s biggest hits, all in a theater setting (the doc was filmed at the Beacon Theatre in New York City).
“I ended up in the stage play because I didn’t want to do a promotion tour for the book,” Bono notes, “and I thought I’d do something a bit more challenging and a bit more fun — for me, selfishly speaking, and perhaps for the audience.”
The 86-minute documentary flies by with heartfelt anecdotes about Bono’s relationship with his father, the earliest days of U2, run-ins with global celebrities and his legacy as an artist. Although the tasteful presentations of U2 songs like “Beautiful Day,” “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and “Vertigo” — by a trio of backing musicians, led by veteran producer Jacknife Lee — earn deservedly rousing reactions from the audience in the doc, Bono’s stories also received a reaction that startled him when the stage show launched.
“I went out onstage, and something happened to me that had never happened to me before onstage with U2, at least not in more than 30-seconds intervals: People started laughing!” Bono says. “And I started to [think], ‘Oh, is this funny? Wow, I like the sound of this.’
“And so I had the songs, and I’d found a different way of getting inside the songs to tell the story, and now I could be as silly and as serious as I wanted to be, and indeed, as I am,” he continues. “There’s a reason tragic comedy was a favorite of Shakespeare’s. People’s tears mean more after they’ve been laughing, or the other way around. And all our lives are these absurdities, aren’t they?”
Now that this extended look back — first with the memoir, then with the stage show, and now with the documentary — is wrapping up, Bono says that each project has made him feel closer to his father, Bob, who passed away in 2001. In the doc, Bono re-creates multiple conversations with his dad across time — playing both roles by turning his head from side to side, finding humor and heartache as the camera cuts between the sides of the discussion.
“It is a little opera that I was making, about … my father, and how his son had to go through various different stages before he’d fully appreciate his father,” says Bono. “And one of those stages was playing him onstage, with the turn of my head every night, and realizing that my father was funny. And not just that I loved him, but I started to like him, just by playing him.”
