“You wouldn’t have expected me to state Blur and Radiohead as influences. But I get bored and I sit around and play along to songs that I like”: Slipknot’s Jim Root on his unlikely guitar inspirations
“It’s the first long-form video – I can’t think of a band that would let their lead guitarist fall flat on his face in the opening scene”: Giles Martin on the enduring importance of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night
“By the end, you go ‘Oh my god, I love this guy’”: We speak to director Garth Jennings about capturing Pulp’s remarkable return in a new film
“I asked him ‘Can you play this lick on the sitar? And it took him 20 minutes or half an hour to get the lick down”: Hear an early version of The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood with an unfamiliar arrangement
“No one is quite sure how the acid got inside the synth”: Can using psychedelics make you a better musician or producer?
“It wouldn’t be a young generation, but I do believe that there are ways to do a new Big Four”: So who would be in Dave Mustaine’s new big four of thrash metal?
“It is in fact me who, like many other people, is living with cancer. We completely understand how the misunderstanding arose”: Gillian Gilbert reveals it’s her who is seriously ill, not Stephen Morris
Brian May on Freddie Mercury’s last days: “He said, ‘I’m not going to be here long. Just give me stuff to sing’”
“Her soloing is wild, well thought out, and performed with ease and abandon. It reminded me of playing with Jason Becker”: Marty Friedman’s 12 favorite guitar collaborations from his Japanese variety show channel
“John and Paul weren’t interested. The next day I was in a car with Eric Clapton and said, ‘Why don’t you come and play on this track?’” George Harrison on the Beatles classic saved by Slowhand
“I’ve used this guitar on 2,000 albums”: Fender recreates session legend Lee Sklar’s iconic P-Bass – used on records by James Taylor, Phil Collins and Jackson Browne
“It nearly didn’t happen. After I wrote the song, me and Diplo had a massive fight and I threw the hard drive at his head from the top floor”: How M.I.A. and producer Diplo broke the rules – and channelled Pink Floyd – on her mega hit Paper Planes
“We’ve never been a Strat band or a Marshall band. It feels a little too on-the-nose for what a rock sound should be”: Troy Van Leeuwen on turning his Custom Shop 12-string into a Squier signature, and channeling Robert Fripp for the new QOTSA record
“I reached out to Biggie. He came through. He sat in the studio and vibed, no paper, just listening to the music and rapping off the top of his head”: Jay-Z recalls his early days with The Notorious B.I.G. and the fatal beef between Biggie and Tupac
“His typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had been before”: Macklemore blames stadium owner, not Sheeran, for kicking him off tour
“He bought it on a trip with Noel Gallagher, a day or two after they first met. Johnny said, ‘Let’s go for a sandwich. Never buy guitars on an empty stomach”: Johnny Marr’s most iconic guitars, the stories behind them – and why he’s selling them now
“Engineers no longer need to lock themselves into proprietary plugin ecosystems”: Audient launches Horizon, a new line of Thunderbolt interfaces with sub-millisecond latency and no onboard DSP
“It was an absolute balls-up fiasco. It almost ruined me”: Hans Zimmer, Dr Who and the worst charity record of all time
“He didn’t tap a foot or move his head or anything. He listened to it all the way through and I thought he hated it”: When an Eagle, Heartbreaker, Roger Linn and an Oberheim OB-X combined forces for a pop masterpiece – the Boys Of Summer story
“He was very keen and a bit too excited… I didn’t like the idea of: ‘Now here’s another album'”: Tony Iommi on why he turned down the opportunity of one final Sabbath album with original line-up
“He spent all day programming a backing track then ripped the power cable out with his bloody foot and lost all the drum programming”: The New Order classic “stolen” from a Donna Summer B-side
