Joan Armatrading refused to change her name, refused to sing covers and baffled session pros with her unique timing. Here, she tells the story of her uncompromising debut album.

Martin Barre MCNIDDER & GRACE

Thirty years after its release, Billy Corgan looks back at the making of The Smashing Pumpkins ’ era-defining big, bold, bombastic masterpiece Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness .

As part of my research for meeting Seong-Jin Cho, I learned that Korean names tend to have specific meanings. But I also found several variants (in translation, naturally) of his own moniker. One of m

He turned down Hendrix, butted heads with Lemmy, was saved from a bad trip by Pete Townshend, present at a thousand pop-culture flashpoints… Ten Years After bassist Leo Lyons explains why he’s like “the rock’n’roll Forrest Gump”.

With Joe Bonamassa having gathered the cream of the scene for the B.B. King’s Blues Summit 100 tribute album – and written the intro to this feature – we take an alphabetised look back at the blues legend’s classic tracks, hotel bombings, car crashes, conspiracy theories, towering infernos and more…