Who’s gonna pay attention
To your dreams?
Yeah, who’s gonna plug their ears
When you scream?
The realization that love cannot save someone determined to destroy themselves is profoundly unsettling. The Cars understood this peculiar cruelty in Drive, a song that contemplates the limits of devotion with the weary tenderness of someone who has exhausted every argument and finally run out of reasons to stay. Benjamin Orr sings with an almost unbearable restraint, his voice suspended between affection, resignation, and the terrible knowledge that caring for someone cannot compensate for their inability to care for themselves. Beneath those elegant synthesizers lies one of adulthood’s cruelest revelations: sometimes the person you love must find their own way home.
Forty-two years after The Cars released their great electronic elegy for the emotionally exhausted, Phoenix, Arizona post-punk duo Black Tapestry have decided to take Drive out for another spin.
Comprised of longtime collaborators Sisi and Ian, Black Tapestry approach the 1984 classic with considerable affection for its original arrangement. The opening retains that familiar, almost narcotic electronic tenderness, allowing the melody and its uncomfortable questions to settle in. There is something terribly civilized about the way Drive delivers its accusations. Who’s going to pick you up when you fall? Who’s going to pay attention when you’ve finally exhausted everyone willing to help? Ric Ocasek wrote those questions with the precision of a man examining the wreckage of a relationship and finding that the insurance policy expired years ago.
Dreamy vocals and expansive synth pads place Black Tapestry’s version somewhere between a David Lynch film and the Drive soundtrack, bringing synthwave romance into uneasy communion with dream-kissed darkwave. The singing floats above the arrangement, lending a soft, almost sleepwalking intimacy to questions that become more troubling the longer one considers them. All that electronic beauty offers remarkably little reassurance, which is precisely what makes it so effective.
As the arrangement opens up, the synths deepen that cinematic atmosphere, surrounding the familiar melody with a luxurious sense of unease. There is something distinctly Lynchian about such tenderness accompanied by the suspicion that something has gone terribly wrong, as though the song were playing in an empty hotel lounge while a disastrous decision was being made upstairs. The steady electronic rhythm carries everything forward while the vocal seems suspended in the moment before someone finally says goodbye.
Black Tapestry preserves the original’s most uncomfortable truth, giving its affection and exhaustion room to inhabit the same beautiful, unsettling space. The dreamy delivery makes the limits of devotion sound almost inviting, until the meaning catches up with the melody.
If nobody’s coming to drive you home, there is still the peculiar consolation of a song that understands why you haven’t left.
Listen to Drive below:
Black Tapestry have accumulated considerable experience in the fine art of making personal and political anxiety sound entertaining. Having spent nearly two decades playing together across anarcho folk-punk, metal, and electronic projects, Sisi and Ian formally established the duo in late 2021. Their 2022 debut, Monsoon,subsequently received the self-remixed Monsoon Revamped treatment, while their second studio album, OUTSIDE, expanded their particular brand of electronic unease.
Their latest concept album, COMPARTMENTAL ILLNESS, explores fractured identity, surveillance culture, and psychological dissonance, subjects sufficiently unpleasant to suggest that Black Tapestry have little interest in writing cheerful songs about uncomplicated relationships.
The accompanying B-side, KC25, revisits one of their earliest compositions, offering another opportunity to examine their musical past through their present sensibilities.
Shotgun Messiah began as Kingpin before relocating to Hollywood and changing their name. With their flamboyant fusion of melodic rock and sleazy glam they sold almost half a million copies of 1989’s self-titled debut, then imploded two years later. Now, lead singer Zinny J Zan and guitarist Harry Cody are back with a new collaboration and an album, Beautiful ‘N Damned.
Zinny, why did you leave Shotgun Messiah in 1990? And Harry, how did the band break up three years later?
Zinny Zan: It wasn’t my choice to leave. There were differences back then, so I went back to Sweden and Harry and Tim [Sköld, bassist, who became the new frontman] carried on.
Harry Cody: Relativity put out [third album] Violent New Breed and then immediately dropped us. I still consider Violent New Breed as the best Shotgun Messiah album, so we felt completely dispirited.
Violent New Breed had a bold, industrial sound. There are still traces of that in Zan/Cody, but for the most part Beautiful ‘N Damned is a hard rock album.
Cody: It is, and that’s by design. It’s where we’ve made our bread and butter in the past, but also there’s cellos and choirs and all sorts of things all over it.
Frontiers Records often engineer seemingly unlikely reunions. Is this another example of that?
Zan: Not at all. We made the album on the hush-hush before seeking labels to put it out. There were a few that were interested. Frontiers was the best of them all.
When it came to making the album, how did it feel to be in a room together again?
Cody: In fact the entire album was made via the internet from separate parts of the globe. We didn’t actually meet again until I flew over for the Sweden Rock gig [June 2026], our first meeting since 1990.
Were there any issues to iron out?
Cody: Time had ironed out most of the issues. It was like seeing your long-lost brother again. After thirty-five years the spark was still there.
Why didn’t you bring in Tim Sköld and call the project Shotgun Messiah?
Cody: As an entity, Shotgun Messiah still exists. That is myself and Tim. We have most of an album recorded, but that’s on hold because Tim rejoined Marilyn Manson’s band as its bassist. We’ll have to see what happens there.
Do you hear any Shotgun Messiah in much contemporary music?
Cody: There’s a lot of validation. I wouldn’t have guessed it, but at Sweden Rock the guitarist from Clawfinger [Bård Torstensen] said he was a huge fan. I hear it in Hardcore Superstar. I hear it in Crashdїet. I’d like to think that we’ve helped shape that sound a little bit.
Tell us about that gig at Sweden Rock, thirty-six years after the last one.
Zan: Harry and I haven’t played together in Sweden since 1988, though I had done Sweden Rock with a couple of other bands.
Cody: It felt so natural. Stepping out on stage, it was a great feeling.
Will Zan/Cody play in the UK?
Zan: We would love to go there. Absolutely.
Cody: If any promoters feel like whipping out their big wallet, we’re all ears.
Beautiful ‘N Damned is out now via Frontiers Records.
Folk stylist, protest singer, poet, rocker, rebel prophet… There hasn’t been anyone else quite like Roy Harper. His sheer plurality, lashed to a bloody-minded refusal to tailor his music for the commercial market, has made him special, and also consigned him to a career of eternal cultdom. He’s an artist capable of writing the most delicate acoustic song one minute, a raging, emotive social critique the next. He’s a mercurial figure who, by his own admission, “divides opinion a lot”.
Harper has always had friends in high places. The journey from “impressionable little beatnik” of the 60s to the folk-rock titan of today has produced 21 studio albums and plus live recordings, peppered with appearances from the likes of David Gilmour, Kate Bush, John Paul Jones and, most prominently, his great friend Jimmy Page. Led Zeppelin included the tribute Hats Off To (Roy) Harper on their third album, while Pink Floyd brought him in to sing Have A Cigar on 1975’s Wish You Were Here.
Harper was born in Manchester in 1941. He survived a tortuous early life of homelessness, mental health issues, petty crime and prison (he was arrested after trying to climb the clock tower at London’s St Pancras station after escaping from a psychiatric hospital, where he’d been receiving electro-convulsive therapy).
He eventually found a home on the Soho folk scene of the early 60s. Never a folkie in the traditional sense, though, he laced his songs with a freewheeling sense of experimentation. His spate of scintillating albums in the 70s – from Flat Baroque And Berserk through to Bullinamingvase – have been hugely influential.
In the 80s Harper found himself stigmatised as part of the old guard that punk and new wave had supposedly swept away. He nonetheless recorded some fine records, among them 1985’s collaboration with Jimmy Page, Whatever Happened to Jugula. The following decade found him in exile in Ireland, where he still lives, quietly releasing albums of extraordinary power, chiefly Death Or Glory? and The Dream Society.
His last studio release was 2013’s critically acclaimed Man and Myth, which featured a guest appearance from The Who‘s Pete Townshend on Cloud Cuckooland. Now in his mid-80s, he remains an uncompromising talent, admired by everyone from Robert Plant and Ian Anderson to Johnny Marr and Joanna Newsom. His influence on the folk and rock fraternity is immense.
In 2025, Harper returned to the road, playing Glastonbury and completing a short run of UK dates billed as The Final Tour, but it appears he’s not quite ready to call it a day. “I’m approaching good health again,” he wrote on Facebook (Harper has long battled a genetic blood vessel disorder). “And I feel empowered to get back to writing and recording more songs.”
“Of the creative peaks I’ve had it’s definitely one of the mountains,” Harper says of this undisputed masterpiece. Complex, elliptical and fabulously expressive, Stormcock consists of four pieces that form a cogent song-suite.
He takes a broadsword to the judiciary system and rock critics alike on Hors D’Oeuvres, while the glorious The Same Old Rock – featuring a star turn from Jimmy Page under the guise of S. Flavius Mercurius – swings a paw at religious dogma. Pick of the bunch might just be the spirited eco anthem Me And My Woman. Stormcock was way too out-there for EMI, who greeted its lack of potential hit singles by not promoting it at all.
Harper’s mostly overtly rockist album is given real punch by a backing band comprising guitarist Chris Spedding, Dave Cochran (bass) and drummer Bill Bruford.
The two standout tracks are epic in every sense. David Gilmour and John Paul Jones are on hand for The Game, an eloquent discourse on what it is to be human; When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease is a near-perfect hymn to mortality and Englishness, given added poignancy by David Bedford’s arrangement and the brass of the Grimethorpe Colliery Band. In a more forgiving world this would have been the record to finally tip Harper into the mainstream.
The move from Liberty Records to EMI’s ‘underground’ imprint Harvest ushered in an era of intense creativity for Harper. This fourth album marked his first entry into the British album chart and remains his top seller.
Its centrepiece is the remarkable I Hate The White Man, a pungent slice of Harper polemic that attempts to assert everybody’s right to freedom and equality. The other standout is the pastoral Another Day. In a typically perverse move, closing tune Hells Angels is a raucous, ragged send-off co-starring Keith Emerson’s The Nice and designed to make you leap for the off switch.
Written after a congenital blood disorder had seriously threatened Harper’s life, this record was dominated by The Lord’s Prayer, a side-long treatise on the follies of man and the struggle between spirituality and technology. It was, in his own words, “my last will and testament”, with a little help from Jimmy Page on guitar.
Other notable tracks include South Africa, which equated a nation in the grip of apartheid to a prospective lover waiting to be freed, the terrific Highway Blues, and All Ireland, a plea for political and tribal tolerance. Some of the album’s songs were written for Made, the 1972 film that cast Harper alongside Carol White.
Harper’s last hurrah of the 70s is bookended by two glorious versions of One Of Those Days In England. The first is the wistful, almost carefree single version; the second a darker, labyrinthine study of the cultural sweep of his homeland.
Alongside the gorgeous Cherishing The Lonesome sits Watford Gap, an ode to the famous road-stop on the M1 motorway as hilarious as it is scathing. The singalong chorus – ‘The Watford Gap, the Watford Gap/A plate of grease and a load of crap’ – landed Harper in serious bother with the owner, who just happened to be a prominent board member on EMI, Harper’s label.
Perhaps Harper’s most emotionally racked album, written after the failure of his second marriage. “There was nowhere for me to hide,” he said later. The title track, One More Tomorrow and Waiting For Godot Part Zed are full of melancholy and despair, yet remain oddly luminous.
It wasn’t all self-absorption, though. Harper also tackled the Gulf conflict and its attendant media frenzy, the need for a global consciousness, and offered a eulogy to murdered Amazonian activist Chico Mendes. On the lighter side, there’s a warm tribute to hero Miles Davis, and a song written for Robert Plant’s daughter’s wedding.
This storming live double album, essentially an early ‘best of’, gives some indication as to the rambunctious nature of an early-70s Roy Harper show. There are inflamed takes on Me And My Woman, South Africa and One Man Rock And Roll Band, while a driven Highway Blues borders on the manic.
It’s notable for Kangaroo Blues and Home, and being partly recorded at Harper’s infamous Valentine’s Day bash at London’s Rainbow with Jimmy Page, John Bonham, Keith Moon and Ronnie Lane. The sleeve caused a rumpus too, with women workers at EMI’s factory refusing to handle it.
This back-to-roots affair finds Harper in acoustic mode, with extra shading from the Tea Party multi-instrumentalist Jeff Martin. The onset of Harper’s 60th year did little to dilute his bile, with The Monster in particular a withering attack on Tony Blair and New Labour.
Elsewhere, Rushing Camelot is an erudite hymn to Mother Earth in the face of scientific progress, All In All tips the wink to Aldous Huxley’s novel The Doors Of Perception, while the pagan-leaning title track manages to sound both ancient and modern. He wasn’t done with Blair either. Harper’s 2005 single The Death Of God is an impassioned, 15-minute rant against the invasion of Iraq.
Perhaps the best portal of entry for beginners, this is a double compilation covering 35 years of uncommon songcraft, cherry-picked by Harper himself. Much of what makes him special is here, including two songs with Jimmy Page on guitar (The Same Old Rock and Frozen Moment), and the very lovely You which features David Gilmour and long-time fan Kate Bush.
Blackpool, meanwhile, is the tune that first alerted the young Page to Harper’s talents back in the 60s. I Hate The White Man and When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease are among the choice moments, as is proto-hippie anthem You Don’t Need Money.
Harper admits that the early 80s were “the nadir of my life in music”. Cast aside by EMI and suddenly “completely out of fashion” in the post-punk age, he co-founded his own label to release Work Of Heart. The songs suffer from lack of focus or snap, while the whole shebang (with full backing band) sounds over-produced. Harper later released the superior demos of the album, which were infused with a rawness lacking in the finished product, as Born In Captivity.
Also to be avoided is the EP Burn The World. Written in 1983-4 but not released until 1990, it’s two versions of the 20-minute song of the same name, one live, one in the studio.
There was a time in New York City when beauty was considered a perfectly legitimate reason to make an absolute spectacle of yourself. The downtown avant-garde of the late 1970s and early ’80s understood the exquisite absurdity of existence, and answered it with painted faces, impossible clothes, experimental films, and people who looked as though they had escaped from an opera staged inside Salvador Dalí’s subconscious. Klaus Nomi sang arias dressed as an extraterrestrial Bauhaus school escapee. The Factory crowd treated ordinary life as an endless screen test. Leigh Bowery eventually carried this philosophy into even more outrageous territory. Beauty for beauty’s sake was practically a civic duty, and good taste was frequently its first casualty.
Synth-pop project Primitive Heart, the creation of multi-disciplinary artist Dani Mari, belongs to that grand tradition of making something beautiful simply because the alternative seems terribly dull.
Primitive Heart’s music shares that fascination with exquisite artificiality. Mari’s airy, expressive singing floats above economical electronic arrangements, where the romantic cool of Chromatics, the dreamy distance of Still Corners, and the darker elegance of Drab Majesty find agreeable company. On “Steady (Vile Remix),” Vile brings her electronic sensibilities into Mari’s peculiar universe, providing a musical companion to the video’s wonderfully eccentric parade of fashionable absurdity.
The video for Steady (Vile Remix), co-directed by frequent collaborators Alice Teeple and Matthew Deegan, offers a deliciously demented excursion into a private universe where three magnificently dressed eccentrics appear to have misplaced their invitation to reality.
Mari, Deegan, and New York-based artist Vile lounge around eating grapes, drinking bubbly in a bathtub, dancing, and generally conducting themselves with the splendid self-importance of aristocrats who have inherited a fortune and absolutely no responsibilities. The costumes, styled by Deegan, borrow from the extravagant theatricality of queer performance, high fashion, and the gloriously peculiar corners of twentieth-century cinema. Warhol’s early short films spring immediately to mind, especially their fascination with beautiful people doing wonderfully inconsequential things.
As for the video, Andy Warhol would probably have watched the entire affair from a sofa, said something marvelously unhelpful, and helped himself to another grape.
“I’ve always been fascinated by figures like Leigh Bowery and Klaus Nomi, Bob Fosse dancers, and vintage fashion shoots from the 1950s and ’60s with their impossibly aloof models,” says Teeple. “Fashion, to me, is at its most exciting when it’s pushed toward the bizarre and taken somewhere beyond our expectations. We wanted to channel that spirit through a series of avant-garde vignettes featuring three eccentric figures who seem to exist inside their own surreal bubble. In a world of oversaturation, overstimulation, and oversharing, there’s something far more intriguing about leaving behind a beautiful mystery.”
Primitive Heart’s sophomore album, Colours, co-produced by Rosana Cabán (Psychic Twin, Cosas Cosas), features remixes from Jorja Chalmers (Italians Do It Better) and Chasms (Felte). Out via GrindEthos, the record continues Mari’s fascination with the strange romance of electronic music.
Watch the video for Steady (Vile Remix) below:
Listen to Colours below and pre-order the album here.
On a glorious Sunday night on a beautiful October day, the11th to be exact, Switchfoot brought to a welcoming crowd, the Forever Now Tour. Anberlin would also join in as the evening’s direct and only opener.
I have to admit that this was my introduction to Anberlin. My fellow photog, Spence, told me before the show that their album, Never Take Friendship Personal is a must listen and in his opinion a perfect, no skip album. With Anberlin kicking things off, the evening was immediately charged with intensity. From what I witnessed the driving guitars, punchy rhythms, and Stephen Christian’s distinctive vocals, seem to be the bands trademark. The band delivered a powerful set filled with music from its nine album catalog, including Currency which is due to be released in November. Anberlin has a knack for balancing vulnerability with aggression. Its songs can move from introspective verses to explosive choruses in the blink of an eye, giving the performance a sense of urgency that translates beautifully to the live stage. The band was the perfect opener, unleashing a jolt of energy that set the Steelhouse crowd ablaze and kicked the night off at full throttle.
SETLIST Paper-thin Hymn – The Resistance – Never Take Friendship Personal- NEVERAFTER – Readyfuels – HIGHSTAKES – GRAVITY – Godspeed – The Feel Good Drag
Switchfoot Frontman Jon Foreman has long been one of alternative rock’s most compelling performers, pairing an unmistakable vocal delivery with lyrics that explore everything from personal struggles to hope, faith and the search for meaning. Backed by Tim Foreman on bass, Jerome Fontamillas on keyboards, Drew Shirley on guitar and Chad Butler on drums, Switchfoot has the musical firepower to make those themes hit with considerable force.
Sunday’s setlist drew from several chapters of the band’s catalog, including material from Nothing Is Sound, Oh! Gravity, Hello Hurricane, Vice Verses and the landmark The Beautiful Letdown.
The set opened with “Wake Up, Mr. Crow” before moving into “Stars” and “Oh! Gravity.” The sequence offered a taste of the band’s range, moving between atmospheric alternative rock and the heavier guitar-driven sound that has defined much of its career.
“Shake the Dust,” “YFWYA” and “The Shadow Proves the Sunshine” continued the set before the band delivered “Natural Causes” and “Beautiful Life.”
“Mess of Me” brought another dose of muscular rock energy, while “Afterlife” continued the journey through the band’s catalog. The encore included “Dark Horses” and ended with “Meant To Live”. As they took their bows the venues reaction was thunderous. If the fans were anything like me, when they got home, they created their own Switchfoot playlist.
SETLIST WAKE UP MR CROW- STARS – GRAVITY – YFWYA – THE SHADOW PROVES THE SUNSHINE – LOVE IS THE MOVEMENT – NATURAL CAUSES – BEAUTIFUL LIFE – MESS OF ME – ABSOLUTION – BELOVED – DARE – BUTTERFLY – WHERE I BELONG – DARK HORSES – MEANT TO LIVE
