Did John Lennon and Paul McCartney last meet in 1978 over a pizza in New York City? “I recall Paul asking John, ‘Are you making any music these days?’”
“Snake Sabo is the master of the riff. I’ll never forget when he played me 18 and Life for the first time… We had no formula”: Skid Row’s Rachel Bolan on going solo, his ’70s inspirations, and the band’s continuing search for a new singer
“He said, ‘The thing was made wrong in the first place!’ I joked, ‘Let me see you build a vibrato contraption that works!’” How Merle Travis pushed Paul Bigsby to one-up Gibson with his iconic vibrato
“He fired the whole band at the end of that tour, and I managed to survive”: Albert Lee on his time as Eric Clapton’s sideman
“I saw this big security-guard-looking dude staring at me. When I put the bass down, he grabbed me and said, ‘Come with me’”: When Robert ‘Bubby’ Lewis mistook Andrew Gouché for a security guard – and ended up landing the gig with Snoop Dogg
How Positive Grid reinvented the digital guitar amp: “People began to see that amp as a companion when the rest of the music scene shut down”
“If James Burton recorded that song one more time, it would not have sounded the same. They caught lightning in a bottle”: An all-star guitar panel choose their Telecaster Mount Rushmore – its greatest players, their greatest tracks
“In ’70s post-Vietnam America there was no album that better captured the fall from Eden, the long slow afterburn of the ’60s”: Singer-songwriter Jackson Browne’s golden years – by Bruce Springsteen and Browne himself
How did The Last Dinner Party become one of the UK’s biggest bands? Bassist Georgia Davies reflects on their sudden success and whirlwind tours: “Suddenly we were getting emails from managers, labels… and, weirdly, lawyers”
“I just wacked it off from the very beginning to the very end, but it turned out that the tape operator hadn’t pressed the ‘record’ button”: Elliott Randall on his blistering Steely Dan solo – and what Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were really like
“There’s no barrier to capturing a performance that’s happening on any instrument in any part of the space”: Inside Hot Chip’s London studio
“I said, ‘Dad, what you did with The Beatles was kind of amazing, wasn’t it?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Not as amazing as Brian Wilson’”: Giles Martin on the overwhelming talent of Brian Wilson
“She was a bit nervous at first. She just sat down and she sang. I directed her. I wanted her to improvise”: How Lana Del Rey collaborated with movie maker Baz Luhrmann to create one of her most hauntingly beautiful songs
“I guess it’s a real summer song – as soon as you play it, you know it’s going to kick off”: Ash’s Tim Wheeler tells us about the making of their most beloved song
“She entranced audiences and inspired untold numbers of blues-loving players from across the pond, like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards”: Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s epochal performance at an English train station paved the way for the blues-rock revolution
“I did have a couple of people saying, ‘You’re being so obsessive.’ But it had lost the magic, and so he said, ‘Do you know what to do?’ And I said ‘I do’”: How going back to her Korg M1 demo helped Donna Lewis to create one of the biggest US hits of 1996
“Analogue is better than digital, Behringer gear is garbage and your cheap-ass monitors are ruining your mixes”: 10 of the most enduring music tech myths busted
The Smiths held their label to ransom until Johnny Marr got this guitar: “As soon as I got that back to the hotel, I wrote Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now in about 10 minutes”
