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On November 5, 2021, Nita Strauss was in Las Vegas for a very special performance. The Los Angeles-born guitarist, who made her name in Alice Cooper’s band, had been booked to play World Boxing Organization (WBO) super featherweight world champion Mikaela Mayer to the ring for her title unification fight against IBF champion Maiva Hamadouche.

“I know that Mikaela-walking-on-stage face, and I can’t wait to see it up close in person again,” Strauss said in a press release promoting the fight at The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas. “It’s going to be a great, great feeling to look across a stage at her again.”

On the surface, this may have read like a stock quote talking up a corporate booking, but that wasn’t the case at all. Strauss first met Mayer in 2003, when the future world boxing champion was just 12-and-a-half. A fan of Black Sabbath, Tool and System of Down, Mayer had been playing bass in her bedroom for over a year and was seeking to join a band : Strauss, fellow guitarist Tina St. Claire, and drummer Kirsten Schluter had three-quarters of a group, but no bassist.

“They said: ‘We need a bass player, can you meet us at the mall?’,” Mayer told The Guardian‘s legendary boxing writer Donald McRae in 2022. “I was beyond my years and I looked the part in my black top with light brown hair and black tips and all my piercings. Even though they were older than me, they were like: ‘Okay, this girl likes our kind of music…'”

Mayer was in, and Lia-Fail, LA’s newest metal band, was born.

The quartet played their first show at the legendary Whisky A Go-Go in. Hollywood in September 2003. The following summer they embarked upon their first tour, with Mayer’s dad Mark acting as tour manager and unofficial chaperone for the teenagers. And then in 2005, the group entered a Battle Of The Bands contest in LA with a unique opportunity for the winning act.

“The prize was to play four or five shows on the Warped Tour,” Nita Strauss told Metal Hammer earlier this year. “So, in our infinite wisdom, we thought, ‘Well, we’re already borrowing a van and trailer – we should go on and do our own tour.’

So they did: 15 show across 13 states.

“It was rough,” Strauss recalled. “We made no money, we were hungry and thirsty and tired. Two of the girls were old enough to drive, so they took turns while the other two of us navigated. We had no crew members, it was just four girls slugging it out on the road. We were eating food from gas stations, cramming into hotel rooms, outrunning tornados…”

The headliners on 2005’s Warped Tour were Avenged Sevenfold, Fall Out Boy, Dropkick Murphy’s, and My Chemical Romance. Lia-Fail played one of the small side stages, as did an emerging emo-punk called Paramore.

“It was difficult,” Strauss recalled, “but it’s still the most fun experience I’ve ever had.”

“It takes a lot of balls for a group of kids, girls no less, to roll into a new town with people you’ve never met and go give the performance of your life, hungry and cold and tired every night, to people you’ve never seen before and are never going to see again,” Strauss told ESPN.

The tour would be the high point of Lia-Fail’s career: following their second US tour, Mayer quit… and went off the rails.

“One of my horrible first boyfriends was giving me problems about being away,” she explained to The Guardian, “such a stupid teenage thing. I broke up with him shortly after that, thank God. Then I had my party phase. From about 15½ to 17 I put my dad through hell, wouldn’t come home for weeks at a time… I was rebellious, like: ‘I’m going to my boyfriend’s house to hang out, smoke pot, do whatever I want.’ I got kicked out of my original high school and ended up in a school where all the bad kids go. That’s when I found boxing and had this epiphany: ‘I don’t want to continue on this pointless path. I want to be successful, I want to be good at something’,”

And she was. Mayer won a bronze medal at the 2012 World Championships and fought for the US at the 2016 Olympics. The following year she turned professional, and on Halloween night three years later, she became the WBO female super-featherweight world champion. Last year, she was was named Sports Illustrated‘s Female Fighter of the Year.

Not a bad second life for a failed rock star.

Tonight, August 29, WBA and WBC super welterweight world champion Mayer will fight Britain’s WBO super welterweight world champion Chantelle Cameron over 10 rounds in Birmingham, with all three world titles going to the winner. No prizes for guessing who Nita Strauss will be cheering on.

“This girl and I have been through the fire and in the trenches of DIY touring together,” Strauss said of her former bandmate in 2018. “I’m proud as hell of her continuing to kick ass!”

When David Bowie parted company with legendary long-standing guitarist Reeves Gabrels in 1999, he picked up the phone to ask Helmet‘s Page Hamilton to join his band for his Hours world tour.

In order to impress his new boss, guitar prodigy Hamilton practiced for 16 hours a day, learning 30 songs including Cracked Actor, Rebel Rebel and Changes. For that phone call meant more to the Portand-born musician than Bowie could possibly have known.

“Reeves, who’s been a friend of mine for many many years, was going through a very difficult time in his life and he and Bowie parted ways after 13 years,” Hamilton recalled in a 2016 interview with Louder. “Bowie knew Helmet – we had met two years earlier at a festival in Germany – I met him and he was like, ‘Helmet? I love Helmet!’ And I started laughing, like, Yeah… right. Right! And he says, ‘We go way back!’

“He was just a really gracious human being,” Hamilton continued. “Just so nice for a guy that has changed so many people’s lives and influenced so many musicians. In Germany, I tried to get him to talk about Ziggy Stardust when he jumped off speakers and broke his leg. He was wearing just his underwear as he was in the middle of a costume change, and I’m like, So what happened? What happened? And he smiled and said, ‘Oh God… I don’t remember much from back then.’

“He liked me, and when he later called, I had just left my wife. It was one of the worst times in my life. I was crashing on my manager’s couch and I had got back to the apartment at four in the afternoon. I’d met some chick, been to an after-hours Budweiser pool hall… it was pathetic. I was a pathetic mess.”

“And I’ve said this before, but he pulled me out of a real shitty time,” the guitarist admitted. “He might have saved my life. Because I would have continued – I’d gone out with my buddy Erik Sanko from Skeleton Key and Lounge Lizards who said, ‘We’ve been out for 38 nights in a row.’ And I was saying, Alright! Let’s make it 39! And I’m talking until after sunrise. So it’s amazing that in that state of mind I could have learned thirty David Bowie songs and gone out and played them.

“He didn’t know how I was living before I got the call, he didn’t know that I was going through a divorce. But Coco, the super-great lady who was with David said to me: ‘You know, David’s been very happy since he’s been sober.’ At the time he’d been sober for 12 years. I was like, Yeah… but I’m of Scottish, Irish, Welsh descent with German and Native American in me. I have all the drinking genes. It’s probably not happening for me. But my tribute to David Bowie would be to say: He’s not like you and me.”

On the day that they released a remixes album featuring ‘reimagined’ takes on songs from last summer’s Never Enough by artists as diverse as Elton John, jazz-influenced Mancunian electronic producer and DJ Floating Points, death metal stalwarts Dying Fetus and their O.G. Baltimore hardcore bros Angel Du$t, it feels entirely apposite that Turnstile are playing the closing weekend of London’s All Points East festival on an eclectic bill, headlined by the bold and brilliant Californian rapper Tyler, the Creator, leaning heavily into alt. hip-hop and EDM.

Given that they’ve spent a portion of their summer playing special guests to Deftones in mainland Europe, it would, presumably, have been an easy win for the quintet to have lobbied for a late evening slot at last weekend’s APE Presents Outbreak festival in this same park, instead of performing today alongside the likes of Clipse, Sexyy Red, BB Trickz and Ravyn Lenae. But Turnstile didn’t get to where they are today by staying in their lane, or adhering to tried and trusted industry templates. Know any other hardcore bands with the chutzpah, wit and humanity to walk onstage at a festival to the sound of Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers duetting on Islands In The Stream, and have their audience singing along in delight? No, no, you don’t.

With that said, if you saw Turnstile headlining Outbreak festival here last summer, you can probably guess with some confidence which songs made the cut when the quintet had to trim 2025’s 75 minute set-list down to tonight’s hour on stage, with choice cuts from Glow On and Never Enough – Blackout, Holiday, Mystery, Birds, Dull, I Care – given equal weighting. You might even have a feeling of déjà vu when, just like last summer, the roaming cameras onstage pick out a fan holding aloft a retro rotary telephone in the rain during Dull, as frontman Brendan Yates sings, “Deep in the night, I’m waiting for the call.” But the inclusion of a cover of The Stone Roses’ I Wanna Be Adored is another inspired little deviation from orthodoxy.

The truth is that, whatever they choose to do right now, Turnstile can do no wrong. And if tonight feels like a genuine victory lap in front of a partisan audience who cheer their every move, you can’t say that they haven’t earned it. At one point Yates talks about the UK feeling like“a second home” for the band, humbly adding“Thank you for always making it feel like home” to warm cheers. This sense of mutual respect makes for a wonderful feel good vibe throughout, and a genuine sense that the bouncing pit is a safe space for all.

After a joyous T.L.C. (Turnstile Love Connection), with their allotted hour complete, Turnstile exit the site’s West Stage with several thousand curious newcomers to the party now fully welcomed, integrated and converted. Gig by gig, year on year, this band are building not just a community, but a legacy, and it’s a wondrous experience to be part of. Thank You (Falettinus Be Arse Elves Agin).