Former glam rock icon and convicted paedophile Gary Glitter has been charged with four historical sex offences.

According to London’s Metropolitan Police, the 82-year-old – real name Paul Gadd – has been accused of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under the age of 13, and three counts of indecent assault on a girl under the age of 14.

“We have worked closely with the Metropolitan Police as they have carried out their investigation into the allegations,” says the Crown Prosecution Service’s Bethan Davis. “The Crown Prosecution Service reminds everyone that proceedings are now active, and the defendant has the right to a fair trial.”

It is understood that the Police’s investigations into the case began in 2025, but relate to events that occurred while Glitter was residing in West London between 1978 and 1981. He is expected to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court next month.

Glitter has been convicted of a series of crimes related to the possession of underage pornography and sexual offences against minors. In 1999, he was sentenced to four months in prison after pleading guilty to possessing thousands of indecent images of children, and was placed on the UK’s sex offender register.

In 2008, he completed a three-year sentence in a prison in Vietnam after being found guilty of committing obscene acts with two girls aged 10 and 11. In early 2015, he was convicted of attempted rape, four counts of indecent assault, and one of having sex with a girl under the age of 13. He is currently serving 16 years in prison and was denied parole in 2025.

The novelist Peter Matthiesen once wrote, “Mountains have no meaning; they are the meaning.”

Joe Walsh might’ve been having similar awe-struck thoughts when he wrote his signature hit Rocky Mountain Way.

It was spring 1972, and the then 24-year old Walsh was in a period of transition. He’d just quit his band The James Gang, while simultaneously turning down an invitation from Steve Marriott to join Humble Pie, taking Peter Frampton’s place. Instead, Walsh upped stakes from Cleveland, moved out to the idyllic town of Boulder, and formed a new band called Barnstorm.

“I’d gone to Colorado because Bill Szymczyk [James Gang producer] was there and so were a whole bunch of other people I knew,” Walsh told Rolling Stone. Barnstorm’s self-titled debut, recorded at Caribou Ranch in the Rocky Mountains, was influenced by the acoustic sounds of Crosby, Stills & Nash and James Taylor. It made a moderate splash, but the band wasted no time recording the follow-up.

Walsh said, “We had the Smoker album pretty much done [The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get] except we had this one track that was an instrumental. I couldn’t think of any words and everybody was patiently waiting for me to come up with something.”

Inspiration arrived one day while Walsh was mowing his lawn. “I looked up, and there were the Rocky Mountains. It was summer but you could still see snow on the back range. It just hit me how beautiful it all was, 5,000 feet up. And that was it – the words came: Spent the last year Rocky Mountain way / Couldn’t get much higher. And the second verse is about my old management – Telling us this, telling us that, time to change the batter. I got all of that at once. And I ran inside to write it down before I forgot it.”

But in his haste to scratch down the lyrics, Walsh forgot to shut off the lawn mower. He said, “It kept moving and went into the neighbour’s yard and ate her rose bushes. Cleared a little path straight through. So those lyrics wound up costing me, I don’t know, maybe fifteen hundred bucks. But it was well worth it. The neighbour, though, she was pissed. I said to her, ‘You don’t understand! I got the words!’ But she just looked at me.”

Walsh had written and recorded the instrumental track for Rocky Mountain Way with bandmates Joe Vitale, Rocke Grace and Kenny Passarelli. Now with the lyric completed, he went back in the studio with Szymczyk to finish the song. After perfecting the vocal, Walsh layered on “six or seven” guitars, arriving at that wonderfully dense texture on the rhythm part. For lead, he played slide on the fills, and for the solo breakdown section, he tried out a new toy called the Talk Box.

Walsh had borrowed the contraption from acclaimed Nashville steel guitar player Pete Drake, who’d built it himself and used it on several country songs, as far back as his own hit, Forever, in 1961. Basically, a Talk Box redirects sound from an instrument into the player’s mouth via a plastic tube. The player can then shape that sound by vocalizing along with it into a microphone. In short, it looks like a beer bong and sounds like a robot.

But Walsh was frustrated by the lack of volume of Drake’s invention, and had sound engineer Bob Heil build a new, rock-friendly version of the Talk Box. Famously, Heil would soon give one of those prototypes to Peter Frampton, who made it part of his signature sound in the ’70s.

Rocky Mountain Way reached only #23 on the charts, but became a staple at FM radio, and has been a Walsh solo spotlight in Eagles‘ concerts for years. Because the lyrics mention “Casey’s at bat,” a reference to a famous baseball poem, the Colorado Rockies have used the song after every home win since 1995. That’s some steady royalty money for Walsh and his Barnstorm buddies. Meanwhile, the Denver Broncos football team use the song during their home games, though they prefer the cover version by Godsmack. Another prominent cover by Triumph became a hit in Canada in 1977.

Rocky Mountain inspiration aside, Walsh said the success of the song is more down-to- earth. “One of the the things that makes the song magic is it’s a bunch of guys playing together in a room. That’s a groove you can’t do with computer software.”

Charisma takes many forms, such as Lemmy’s gruff, Marlboro-tugging twinkle, or the kind that Justin Furstenfeld of Blue October has. Bounding on to our Zoom call, the Texan singer is the livest of livewires; a heavily inked puppy dog with a voice from Saturday morning cartoons, who barely needs prompting to spark a 40-minute screed pinballing from his kicked cocaine habit to London’s high-end perfume circuit (“Penhaligon’s is the best!”).

Furstenfeld’s almost indecent quotient of X-factor is just one reason why his modest but obsessed pocket of UK fans cheered Blue October’s return last month. The other is that the band played their classic Foiled album front-to-back – which they never managed to do here back in 2006 – for its 20th anniversary.

The story doesn’t start in London, although Furstenfeld clearly wishes it did. When it’s suggested to him that a young Houston band setting out circa 1995 might have cut their teeth on the blues, he pulls a ‘vomit’ face. “Urgh. No. If you stick your head into UK music as a child, you’ll never leave. I’m sorry, but UK music hands-down kills American rock’n’roll. I was listening to The Smiths, The Cure, Cocteau Twins, Peter Gabriel… I’ve visited everywhere that Joy Division ever went, sat outside and smoked a cigarette. I’ve got the British flag tattooed right here [slaps chest].”

Identifying with the oddballs of indie and alt, Furstenfeld was wary of the major-label deal that led to Foiled.

“I remember telling the people at Universal that I never wanted to be signed to them,” he says. “I wanted to be signed to 4AD/ Elektra, which was Cocteau Twins, Red House Painters, Pixies, This Mortal Coil – the weird shit, y’know? But I was like: ‘Well, if y’all want to put a million dollars into this shit, then okay, that’s your bad.’ Like: ‘Hey, I know how fucked up I am in the head. And you’re putting a million bucks behind it? You’re crazy as shit!’”

Those Universal dollars paid for album sessions in LA. It was a time of boundless creativity, Furstenfeld remembers, where for once he was left alone by the suits.

“On one album, I remember turning to this producer and going: ‘Have you even fucking listened to the demo?’ He was like: ‘You don’t talk to me that way.’ And I was like: ‘Fuck you. I don’t care who you are. You’re fired.’ But on Foiled I had this freedom to write whatever I wanted to. About spirituality and being godless. About loneliness.

“There’s a hidden track called It’s Just Me, and it destroys me when I listen to it, because you can tell I’m trying to figure out the world,” he continues. “I never thought I’d make commercial music. But I sure am happy that it was commercialised about depression, suicide prevention, drug addiction, real things like that.”

Furstenfeld knew his subjects. Foiled’s standouts hint at the headspace of an artist who was by then “not a happy boy”. Angst anthem Hate Me was inspired by a “sweet” former girlfriend “who should probably get away from me because I’m not a good seed, I’m an egomaniac and a piece of shit”. Into The Ocean is “about this dude jumping off a ship to kill himself, thinking it’s the most beautiful thing in the world”.

During the Foiled sessions, the singer managed to contain his issues (“I was definitely addicted to a lot of drugs, flirting with a lot of danger. That’s why I never left the studio, because LA’s crazy and I didn’t want to get arrested”). The album made it over the line and sold brilliantly.

“At that time, all I wanted to do was beat that band Bright Eyes,” he admits. “They were the cool thing, and I wanted to smash them in record sales. And we crushed ’em!”

Furstenfeld’s new profile made him a talisman for the dispossessed (today his fan base is so fervent that many book him to officiate their weddings).

“People looking up to me,” he considers, sounding a little awkward for the first time, “I’m not even gonna go there, because musicians who feed into that end up having their ego destroy them. I’m just as confused and insecure as any other person in this whole world. I see rock stars thinking that what they write on social media matters. It fucking doesn’t, bro. You still piss, you still bleed, you still eat a burger.”

Rock stars break too. In October 2009, news reports spoke of Furstenfeld suffering a public anxiety attack. He gapes, and for a moment it feels like he’s about to tick us off for dredging up one of the darkest chapters of his personal life. But no, he feels our terminology doesn’t adequately reflect his mania that day.

“Anxiety attack? Shit, man, I blew up in an airport. Talkin’ about killing things and stuff. And you can’t lose it in an airport in America, because then it becomes a federal thing. Oh my god. I would call it a little more than an anxiety attack. I was not coherent. All I kept saying to the police was: ‘Call my dad, he’s a cop.’ And they just said okay, we’ll help this kid. So they took me the mental hospital. And it was good that they did that. Because it was at the height of my addiction, and the height of a very toxic marriage, and a very hard time of not being able to see my daughter. It was destroying me.”

Unlike most artists, Furstenfeld is happy to disown whole stretches of his back catalogue from that troubled period. “If I play Any Man In America [2011], I’m like: ‘Urgh’. And Approaching Normal [2009] is the worst album Blue October ever made. I was all wild and crazy and the songs weren’t there. It’s like: ‘Holy shit, I’ve got nothing to write about, except for the sadness!’”

Fortunately, he says, releasing the honest and often excellent material of the band’s subsequent seven albums was worth far more than clinging to the A-list (“Once you start thinking you got to sell millions of records to make everyone happy, you’re so fucked as an artist”).

Now, he says, beaming, he’s relishing the prospect of taking the Foiled songs on the road and basking in the success that his demons ruined first time around.

“I should have enjoyed it more back then, because Foiled was such a good album. But I made it so dramatic. Everything was about me. And these days I’m like: ‘Life is so good.’ Like: ‘What was wrong with you?’ So I’ll be more proud of the songs this time. I won’t just be regurgitating the pain. I’ll be like: ‘These are special songs. And they’re the reasons I am who I am.’”

The US leg of the Foiled World Tour begins in Abilene, TX, on October 22. For full dates and ticket links, check the Blue October website.

There is no clearer sign that Neil Young is a man who likes to get things done than the fact that there was little over a week between him deciding he wanted to make a record with Pearl Jam and the moment he rocked up in Seattle with nothing but a guitar and an amp. It was early 1995 and Young was already long-established as rock royalty but for the purposes of the album that would become Mirror Ball, he left his status at the city limits. Young wanted the collaborative record with the grunge rockers to tap into the sound that had made Eddie Vedder’s crew one of the biggest bands of the 90s. He didn’t even bring a roadie.

“I decided rather than adding the complexity of using my own producer, I’d use theirs,” Young explained in the career-spanning opus Pearl Jam Twenty. “We got rid of everything individual on my side and all of my trappings, so it was just me going in there by myself… The whole idea was to do it as fast and fresh as possible. I didn’t want it to drag on.”

Well, clearly. The year had only just begun, and making a record with Neil Young had probably not been on Pearl Jam’s list of resolutions. The two artists had already crossed paths on a few occasions, with Young seemingly very keen to act as mentor and help guide them through to the other side of meteoric success.

Pearl Jam weren’t just big fans who’d already incorporated Young’s classic Rockin’ In The Free World into their live set – including a performance with Young at the MTV Awards in 1993 – they were inexperienced newbies trying to work out how to transition from a band selling shitloads of records in the here and now to a band who would still be going decades later. Young, who’d been there, done it, and done it again, was the man they looked to.

Mirror Ball had its roots at a Voters For Choice benefit gig in Washington, DC, in mid-January, 1995. Pearl Jam were also on the bill, and having played a version of new song Act Of Love with his band Crazy Horse and been displeased with the results, Young asked Pearl Jam to step in and see if they could elevate it. The result was so good that Young became convinced they should record it together. “We really smoked it,” he said at the time. “We got two days in the studio and did it about a week or so later.”

The band and Young got down to work at Seattle’s Bad Animals Studios, the recording facility owned by Heart sisters Nancy and Ann Wilson, and what began as an idea to record two tracks – Act Of Love and the swaying, sea shanty-ish Song X – quickly blossomed into something bigger. “Neil had his boat up in Seattle – he went back to his boat every night for four or five nights and wrote two songs,” recalled Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament.

The collective put down seven songs over two days, with Vedder, dealing with a stalking problem at the time, missing from the sessions. “Neil is the only one that would be a big fan of the band and then get rid of Eddie,” guitarist Stone Gossard said.

The album was finished with another batch of recording in mid-Feb, with Vedder making an appearance and co-writing the expansive rock cut Peace And Love, as well as leading the charge on two songs that would later feature on the Pearl Jam sister EP Merkin Ball.

For Ament, it was a coming together that taught the Ten stars to lighten up a little. Everything had got a bit heavy. “He showed us you could write good and different songs in a really short period of time,” he remembered. “It couldn’t have come at a better time for us. We were feeling the pressure of being a big rock band at the time and, in some ways, we probably put that pressure on ourselves. He made us realise it wasn’t that important. It’s not life-or-death stuff – it’s just music.”

It was a heartening, instructive record for Pearl Jam, one that came at a crucial point in their career and probably cast a big shadow over the decision to switch things up on 1996’s experimental No Code, but they did come out of Mirror Ball with one regret. To save drawn-out back-and-forths between their respective record labels, the two camps had agreed beforehand that Pearl Jam’s name would be absent. Vedder later wished they hadn’t.

“We just wanted to avoid having a bunch of label negotiations and it turns out that not having Pearl Jam mentioned was a decision we kind of regret,” he lamented, “because it really was the coming together of both bands.”

Well, here’s an idea: why don’t they make a follow-up and correct the error? In the meantime, here’s the song that kicked it all off.

Rush have released an official t-shirt to raise money for victims of last month’s Venezuelan earthquakes.

The t-shirt is being produced in conjunction with Fantoons, the illustration and animation company who’ve worked with Rush on a series of comic books. The series was created by David Calcano, a Venezuelan national, who reached out to the band and asked for help. They responded with a new design featuring Rush’s iconic first album logo and the 2112 starman, which is available to pre-order now.

Money raised from the sales will be donated to Hogar Bambi, a non-profit organisation who advocate for institutions dedicated to the care of children at risk in Venezuela. The earthquakes that hit the country on June 24 have left more than 11,000 injured, with the current death toll confirmed at 2,295.

The news comes in a week when Rush were forced to postpone two shows at the Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, TX, after frontman Geddy Lee was diagnosed with laryngitis and bronchitis. The two shows – on June 30 and July 2 – have been postponed until Jul 11 and 13. Full dates below.

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2026

Jul 11: Fort Worth Dickies Arena, TX
Jul 13: Fort Worth Dickies Arena, TX
Jul 16: Chicago United Center, IL
Jul 18: Chicago United Center, IL
Jul 20: Chicago United Center, IL
Jul 22: Chicago United Center, IL
Jul 28: New York Madison Square Garden, NY
Jul 30: New York Madison Square Garden, NY
Aug 01: New York Madison Square Garden, NY
Aug 03: New York Madison Square Garden, NY
Aug 07: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 09: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 11: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 13: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 21: Philadelphia Xfinity Mobile Arena, PA
Aug 23: Philadelphia Xfinity Mobile Arena, PA
Aug 26: Detroit Little Caesars Arena, MI
Aug 28: Detroit Little Caesars Arena, MI
Sep 02: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 04: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 12: Boston TD Garden, MA
Sep 14: Boston TD Garden, MA
Sep 17: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 19: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 23: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Sep 25: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Oct 05: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 07: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 10: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 12: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 15: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 17: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 25: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 27: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 30: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 01: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 05: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 07: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 09: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 11: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 20: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 22: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 25: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Nov 27: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Dec 01: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 03: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 10: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 12: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 15: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC
Dec 17: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2027

Jan 15: Buenos Aires Movistar Arena, Argentina
Jan 22: Curitiba Arena da Baixada, Brazil
Jan 24: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 26: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 30: Rio de Janeiro Estádio Olímpico Nilton Santos. Brazil
Feb 01: Belo Horizonte Estádio Mineirão, Brazil
Feb 04: Brasília Arena BRB Mané Garrincha, Brazil

Feb 19: Paris La Défense Arena, France
Feb 21: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Feb 23: Amstersam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Feb 25: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Feb 28: Cologne Lanxess Arena, Germany
Mar 02: Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
Mar 04: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
Mar 08: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 10: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 12: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 14: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 16: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 18: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 21: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 27: Kraków Arena Kraków, Poland
Mar 30: Milan Unipol Dome, Italy
Apr 01: Basel St. Jakobshalle Basel, Switzerland
Apr 04: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Apr 06: Oslo Unity Arena, Norway
Apr 08: Stockholm Avicii Arena, Sweden
Apr 10: Helsinki Veikkaus Arena, Finland

Find Rush tickets.