Enslaved – photo by Chantik Photography (written by Islander) I’ve been knocked askew by a bout of forgetfulness. Yesterday I forgot that I’d committed to join my spouse at an event that lasted all afternoon and into the evening. I also forgot another commitment I’d made for later this morning; I don’t always check my […]
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19th August 2026
Support: The Jesus and Mary Chain
Words & Photos: Tim Finch
The Utilita Arena Birmingham was packed for an evening built around rock royalty as Hollywood Vampires brought their theatrical, hard-hitting celebration of rock ‘n’ roll history to the city.
As gloom descended upon the arena, fog pumping from the dry ice machines, The Jesus and Mary Chain opened with ‘Jamcod’, immediately establishing an atmospheric mood. Jim Reid and the band moved through ‘April Skies’, ‘Head On’ and ‘All Things Must Pass’, balancing the abrasive edge of their sound with the melodic hooks that have made them such an influential band. ‘Some Candy Talking’ provided another standout moment before Simone Marie Butler joined them for ‘Venal Joy’, adding another dimension to the performance.
The set continued with ‘Blues From a Gun’, ‘In a Hole’, ‘Cracking Up’ and ‘Between Planets’, keeping the intensity despite the band’s characteristic cool detachment. Butler returned for ‘Sometimes Always’ and ‘Just Like Honey’, both of which were warmly received, before The Jesus and Mary Chain closed with ‘Reverence’.
Hollywood Vampires wasted no time making their presence felt, opening with ‘I Want My Now’ before launching into ‘Raise the Dead’. The band immediately demonstrated the chemistry between Alice Cooper, Joe Perry, Johnny Depp and Tommy Henriksen. ‘I’m Eighteen’ brought the first major classic of the evening, followed by ‘My Dead Drunk Friends’ and ‘The Boogieman Surprise’. Rather than simply playing a greatest-hits set, the Vampires continued to dig into their own catalogue along side fielding classic from across the genre.
The covers became increasingly prominent as the set developed, with ‘Venus in Furs’ and ‘People Who Died’ both featuring Johnny Depp on lead vocals. Depp’s contribution was particularly effective on these darker, more atmospheric numbers, while Joe Perry took the microphone for Johnny Thunders’ ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Round a Memory’. ‘Who’s Laughing Now’ then gave way to Aerosmith’s ‘Livin’ on the Edge’ and The Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’, keeping the audience, who are fans of their their respective bands, fully engaged. Perry returned to lead ‘Bright Light Fright’, while ‘Beck’s Bolero’ provided a powerful instrumental tribute to the late Jeff Beck.
The latter stages of the main set became a full-scale celebration of rock history. The Doors ‘Roadhouse Blues’ was followed by Killing Joke’s ‘The Death and Resurrection Show’, with Depp once again taking the lead vocal. David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ provided another emotional highlight, before Tommy Henriksen stepped forward for AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’.
Aerosmith’s ‘Walk This Way’ kept the momentum building, leading into a closing combination of ‘School’s Out’ and ‘Another Brick in the Wall’. It was loud, energetic and packed with songs that the Birmingham crowd knew inside out.
There was still time for an encore, with ‘The Train Kept A-Rollin’’ bringing the band back to the stage before they closed the night with ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’, along with a huge crowd sing along.
With Alice Cooper commanding the stage, Joe Perry delivering the guitar firepower and Depp and Henriksen stepping into the spotlight throughout the set, this was a celebration of rock history delivered with genuine energy and plenty of attitude.
Photo credits: Tim Finch
For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.
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19th August 2026
Support: The Jesus and Mary Chain
Photos: Tim Finch
We look back at the epic Hollywood Vampires show through the eyes of our photographer Tim Finch!
Photo credits: Tim Finch
For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.
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Frontiers Music [Release date : 28.08.26] Quintessential white middle class rock band from the past, Night Ranger continues to make great melodic rock music in the present. Meantime, this remastered, retrospective collection might satisfy the band’s fans and more. It … Continue reading
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Vanilla Fudge’s Carmine Appice can lay claim to being the father of hard rock drumming – just ask Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, Deep Purple’s Ian Paice or Black Sabbath’s Bill Ward, all of who cited him as an inspiration. Sure, The Who’s Keith Moon and Ginger Baker of Cream were both doing wild things on their instrument, but neither was the pure powerhouse the New Yorker was during his late 60s pomp.
His secret? “No PAs. That simple,” he tells Classic Rock in a new career-spanning interview, which covers everything from his time in Rod Stewart’s band to his unlikely link to mobster and Goodfellas inspiration Henry Hill. “I beat the hell out of the drums so I could be heard. The bass drum was so small, so I figured if I got a bigger bass drum it would be louder, and it was. So I made everything bigger, which was much louder. But you really had to hit them hard to get the sound out.”
But Appice says there’s one of his drumming contemporaries who deserves to be way better know than he is. Asked to rank Bonham, Baker, Moon and himself in order of greatness, he throws in another name entirely.
“We’re all so different,” he says. “Bonzo was great cos the band was great – they [Led Zeppelin] kept him up there. If he was in another band, I don’t know if he’d have stayed up there. Ginger Baker was there at the beginning of rock with that double bass drum. Keith Moon was just so unusual. I took what I did and made it really powerful. And I’d add Dino Danelli from The Rascals.”
Danelli was the drummer and co-founder of New York band The Rascals, originally known as The Young Rascals. Coming through on the same circuit as Vanilla Fudge, they notched up a run of hit US singles between 1965 and 1969, including three US No.1s. While they weren’t as heavy as Vanilla Fudge, Appice says that Danelli – who died in 2022 – should be better know.
“He started everything in rock drumming – the playing, the showmanship, the twirling,” he tells Classic Rock. “He was a monster player and never got credit.”
Appice, who still leads a modern incarnation of Vanilla Fudge, also recalls helping give Led Zeppelin their first break in the US when Zeppelin made their Stateside debut supporting Appice’s band in Denver, Colorado on December 26, 1968.
“We knew Jimmy Page from The Yardbirds, and we had the same attorney,’ the drummer remembers. “They sent us an acetate of the first album and we listened to it and went: ‘Whoah…’ I heard Bonzo on Good Times, Bad Times and went: “This guy’s really good.” So we were ready for them. We became great friends. I do remember walking down the street and telling Robert Plant he should move around more.”
However, Appice shoots down the rumour that he was in line to replace Bonham in Zeppelin after the drummer’s death in 1980.
“I heard that rumour,” he says. But I never got a call. Matter of fact I was with Rod [Stewart] at the time. He said: “Are you joining Led Zeppelin?” I said: “That’s what the rumours are, I haven’t heard nothing.” He said: “There’s rumours I’m going to retire. Keep the rumours going, we’ll sell more tickets that way.”
Read the full interview with Appice in the new issue of Classic Rock, on sale now. Order it here.
H.P. Lovecraft never hid his admiration for Edgar Allan Poe.
Long before Cthulhu rose from the depths of the South Pacific or ancient gods began haunting New England, Lovecraft was reading Poe. He praised him repeatedly in letters and essays, describing him as one of the greatest architects of modern horror. For Lovecraft, Poe was not merely an influence. He was a foundation.
The connection between the two writers runs deeper than atmosphere, ravens, crumbling mansions, or Gothic imagery.
Both authors understood that the most terrifying discoveries are not physical. They are intellectual. Their protagonists encounter truths that permanently alter their understanding of reality, and the result is often madness, isolation, or despair.
Yet an important difference separates them.
Poe explored the abyss within the human mind. Lovecraft expanded that abyss until it encompassed the entire universe. The transition from psychological horror to cosmic horror represents one of the most important developments in the history of Gothic literature.
To understand Lovecraft’s cosmic dread, we must first understand the lessons he learned from Poe.
How Poe Influenced H.P. Lovecraft
Modern readers often describe Poe as a master of psychological horror.
The description is accurate, but it can also be misleading. Poe’s greatest stories are not simply about madness. They are about what happens when a person learns something he cannot emotionally survive.
Consider The Tell-Tale Heart.
The narrator begins by insisting upon his sanity. He carefully explains the murder he has committed and congratulates himself on the precision of the crime. Yet the knowledge of what he has done gradually becomes unbearable. The sound of the dead man’s heart, whether real or imagined, destroys the illusion of control he desperately tries to maintain.
The horror does not come from a ghost.
It comes from knowledge.
The narrator knows the truth about himself, and that truth becomes impossible to escape.
The same pattern appears throughout Poe’s fiction. In The Black Cat, the protagonist’s violence exposes a darkness he refuses to acknowledge until it consumes him. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Roderick Usher possesses an almost supernatural awareness of his family’s decline and his own approaching destruction. The knowledge is accurate.
That accuracy offers no comfort.
Poe repeatedly presents understanding as a burden rather than a gift. His characters are rarely saved by discovering the truth. More often, they are destroyed by it.
Among all Poe’s works, The Fall of the House of Usher may have exerted the strongest influence on Lovecraft.
The story begins with a narrator approaching a decaying mansion whose appearance immediately produces a feeling of dread. Poe describes “vacant eye-like windows” and an atmosphere of inexplicable oppression. The house seems alive long before any supernatural event occurs.
What makes the story remarkable is that the physical decay of the mansion mirrors the psychological decay of its inhabitants. The building and the family become inseparable. As Roderick Usher’s mind deteriorates, the structure itself appears to weaken.
By the conclusion, both collapse together.
This idea fascinated Lovecraft. Throughout his own fiction, places frequently possess an unsettling psychological power. Ancient cities, abandoned settlements, forbidden houses, and forgotten landscapes often feel alive in ways that rational explanation cannot fully account for.
The influence is not merely stylistic.
Poe taught Lovecraft that horror becomes more effective when reality itself feels unstable. The reader begins questioning not only what is happening, but the nature of the world in which it happens.
The greatest difference between Poe and Lovecraft is not style.
It is scale.
Poe’s characters confront terrifying truths about themselves. Lovecraft’s characters confront terrifying truths about existence itself. The underlying mechanism remains remarkably similar, but the consequences become far more expansive.
In The Tell-Tale Heart, knowledge destroys an individual mind. The narrator cannot escape awareness of his own guilt. The horror remains intimate, personal, and psychological.
Lovecraft takes the same structure and enlarges it until it encompasses the cosmos.
His protagonists investigate strange events, discover hidden information, and gradually assemble fragments of a reality that human beings were never meant to understand. The more they learn, the less stable their world becomes.
Knowledge remains the source of terror.
The nature of that knowledge changes dramatically.
No story demonstrates Lovecraft’s debt to Poe more clearly than The Call of Cthulhu (1928).
The narrative unfolds through documents, testimonies, newspaper reports, and scattered clues. An investigator gradually pieces together evidence suggesting that ancient entities existed long before humanity and may one day return.
The structure would have felt familiar to Poe.
Like many of Poe’s narrators, Lovecraft’s protagonist becomes obsessed with discovering the truth. He follows one clue after another, believing that knowledge will bring clarity.
Instead, it brings despair.
The story’s most famous passage captures this idea perfectly:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
This sentence could almost serve as a manifesto for Lovecraftian horror.
Poe’s characters suffer because they know too much about themselves. Lovecraft’s characters suffer because they know too much about reality. The discovery does not empower them. It destroys the comforting illusions that once made existence understandable.
The terror emerges from revelation.
The truth itself becomes the monster.
If The Call of Cthulhu demonstrates Lovecraft’s method, At the Mountains of Madness reveals the full scope of his ambition.
The novella follows an Antarctic expedition that discovers the ruins of an impossibly ancient civilization. As the explorers move deeper into the city, they uncover evidence suggesting that humanity occupies a far less significant position in the universe than previously imagined.
The story echoes Poe in surprising ways.
Both writers use investigation as the engine of horror, and they place their protagonists inside decaying environments filled with hidden histories. Both reveal disturbing truths gradually rather than through sudden shocks.
Yet the emotional destination differs profoundly.
When Poe’s characters reach the truth, they discover something terrible about themselves. When Lovecraft’s explorers reach the truth, they discover something terrible about humanity.
The universe does not revolve around human beings.
It barely notices them.
This idea became the foundation of cosmic horror. The fear no longer originates from guilt, obsession, or madness alone. It arises from the possibility that reality itself may be indifferent to human hopes, values, and desires.
Lovecraft did not abandon Poe’s method.
He expanded it beyond anything Poe had attempted.
Influence is not only visible in plot structures and themes.
It also appears in atmosphere.
Both Poe and Lovecraft understood that horror becomes more effective when readers feel unease long before they encounter danger. Their stories rarely rush toward revelations. Instead, dread accumulates gradually through descriptions, hints, and psychological tension.
Consider the opening of The Fall of the House of Usher.
Before anything supernatural occurs, the narrator experiences a feeling of oppressive melancholy while approaching the mansion. The environment itself generates anxiety.
Lovecraft employs a similar technique repeatedly.
The isolated streets of Innsmouth, the Antarctic wastelands of At the Mountains of Madness, and the forgotten landscapes surrounding Arkham all create unease before the reader understands why. The setting becomes an active participant in the horror.
This approach traces directly back to Poe.
Both writers recognized that fear is often most effective when it arrives slowly. The imagination begins constructing possibilities long before the story reveals the truth.
By the time the revelation finally appears, readers have already entered the nightmare.
The relationship between Poe and Lovecraft becomes clearest when we compare the fears that define their fiction.
Poe looked inward.
Lovecraft looked outward.
The protagonists of Poe’s stories are often destroyed by forces already present within themselves. Guilt consumes the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart. Obsession drives the narrator of The Black Cat. Roderick Usher collapses beneath the weight of psychological and familial decay. The horror emerges from the realization that the human mind contains depths it cannot fully control.
Lovecraft accepts this lesson and pushes it further.
His characters still encounter terror through discovery, but the discoveries no longer concern hidden aspects of the self. They concern hidden aspects of reality. Ancient civilizations, cosmic entities, forbidden texts, and impossible histories reveal a universe that bears little resemblance to humanity’s comforting assumptions.
The mechanism remains fundamentally Poe’s.
A person uncovers knowledge.
That knowledge becomes unbearable.
The scale, however, changes dramatically. Poe’s abyss lies within the mind. Lovecraft’s abyss extends across space, time, and existence itself.
Another crucial connection between the two writers involves the limits of human understanding.
Poe repeatedly explored moments when reason begins to fail. His narrators often insist upon their sanity while simultaneously revealing evidence of instability. Readers witness intelligent individuals attempting to explain experiences that exceed their ability to comprehend.
Lovecraft transforms this tension into a philosophy.
Throughout his fiction, human beings confront realities so vast and alien that traditional concepts of logic, morality, and significance begin to collapse. The universe becomes frightening not because it is evil, but because it is indifferent.
This idea represented a radical evolution of Poe’s horror.
Poe questioned whether individuals truly understood themselves. Lovecraft questioned whether humanity truly understood anything at all.
The result was cosmic horror, a genre built upon the terrifying possibility that knowledge may reveal not meaning, but meaninglessness.
The influence of Poe on Lovecraft extends far beyond literary history.
It helped shape the future of horror itself.
Before Poe, Gothic fiction often relied upon external threats, family curses, supernatural apparitions, and melodramatic mysteries. Poe redirected attention toward psychological experience. Fear became internal. The mind itself became a source of terror.
Lovecraft inherited that innovation and expanded it into a new territory. Instead of focusing on hidden fears within the individual, he explored hidden truths about existence. The horror remained intellectual and psychological, but its scope became cosmic.
Modern horror continues drawing upon both traditions.
Psychological horror owes an enormous debt to Poe. Cosmic horror remains inseparable from Lovecraft. Together they established two of the most influential pathways in the genre’s evolution.
One writer revealed that the mind could become a prison.
The other revealed that the universe might be one.
Lovecraft admired many writers, but few shaped his imagination more profoundly than Edgar Allan Poe.
The influence was not limited to Gothic atmosphere, decaying architecture, or tales of madness. What Lovecraft inherited was a method of constructing fear through discovery. Poe understood that certain truths possess the power to destroy those who uncover them.
Lovecraft adopted that principle and transformed it.
In Poe’s fiction, forbidden knowledge exposes the darkness hidden within the human mind. In Lovecraft’s fiction, forbidden knowledge exposes humanity’s insignificance within an ancient and indifferent cosmos. The structure remains the same even as the scale changes.
This continuity explains why the connection between the two writers remains so important.
Poe laid the foundation.
Lovecraft built an entire universe upon it.
The result changed horror forever.
If How Poe Influenced H.P. Lovecraft speaks to your fascination with Gothic literature, cosmic horror, and dark imagination, explore the Edgar Allan Poets store. Our Gothic-inspired apparel celebrates Poe, Lovecraft, literature, mystery, and the strange beauty of the unknown.
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Yes. Lovecraft openly praised Poe in essays and correspondence, describing him as one of the greatest figures in horror literature and a foundational influence on his own work.
Poe demonstrated how fear could emerge through psychological discovery and forbidden knowledge. Lovecraft adopted this method and expanded it into cosmic horror.
Poe focused primarily on psychological horror and the instability of the human mind. Lovecraft extended those concerns to the universe itself, creating horror rooted in humanity’s insignificance.
Many scholars point to The Fall of the House of Usher because of its atmosphere, psychological intensity, and treatment of place as an active force within horror.
Poe helped establish psychological horror as a major literary form, influencing generations of writers including H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and countless contemporary authors.
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RISE’s .
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