Good morning Radicals! Let’s see what’s happening today in rock and roll…
The Foo Fighters classic “Times Like These” will be the focus of a new charity single organized by England’s BBC.
Artists including Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Bastille, Yungblud, Royal Blood, Dua Lipa and Hailee Steinfeld are among 23 musicians uniting to perform a cover of the 2002 hit to raise money for charity. An accompanying video will world premiere during BBC One’s three-hour fundraising event, The Big Night In, this Thursday (April 23rd).
The BBC will also release the song as a single, with U.K. net profits combined with any funds raised by The Big Night In and split equally between BBC Children in Need and Comic Relief. Meanwhile, international net profits from the single will go towards the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.
The single will be recorded and filmed by the artists at home, with acts like Rita Ora, 5 Seconds Of Summer, Biffy Clyro, Ellie Goulding, Sean Paul, Grace Carter and more also participating.
The BBC’s Big Night In will take place just days after Global Citizen’s virtual concert, One World: Together at Home, raised $128 million for health care workers and coronavirus relief.
Toni Cornell, daughter of late Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell, unveiled a cover of Temple Of The Dog‘s “Hunger Strike” for coronavirus relief during LiveXLive’s Music Lives digital music festival on Sunday (April 19th).
Toni said in introducing the song, “I’m gonna sing one of my favorite songs for you guys. I love you, Daddy, and I hope I do this some justice.” Toni’s father, along with other members of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, recorded the track in 1991 as the supergroup Temple Of The Dog.
The 15-year-old wrote on Instagram, “Sitting in my dad’s home studio during this crazy time makes me miss him even more. Music is the greatest healer and the most powerful way to bring people together especially during tragedy. If my dad were here, I know he would have been the first to donate his time and effort.”
Toni also revealed she and her family are donating $50,000 to MusiCares COVID-19 relief efforts on behalf of the Chris and Vicky Cornell Foundation.
Danish/American rockers Volbeat have revived their long-running “Official Bootleg” series with the release of a live video for “Leviathan.” The track is the latest single off the band’s seventh studio album, Rewind, Replay, Rebound. The clip was recorded last year at the Barclaycard Arena in Hamburg, Germany.
Frontman Michael Poulsen told us a while back that he always likes playing new songs live: [“We’ve always done that, you know. We like the idea of trying certain new stuff out live just to have the full production on it, to hear the sound of it, and also, you know, to see and hear the reaction from the fans. So it is something that we always do, and I really like the idea, you know, trying new stuff out live and in soundchecks. That’s where I get an idea if it’s gonna work.”] SOUNDCUE (:21 OC: . . . it’s gonna work.)
Poulsen told Billboard that in composing the lyrics for “Leviathan,” he was writing from the imagination of a young boy looking out of his bedroom window.
He explained, “He already has a feeling that the world can be an evil place, full of bad people. He wants as a youngster to try to clean up the whole world, but he knows that he can’t do that. But he believes that he can contact Leviathan, the sea monster, and together they could clean up all the bad things.”
Volbeat announced in March that it was rescheduling its spring U.S. tour, which was scheduled to start earlier this month, to September and October. Dates and details are still being finalized.
#INFEST20 pic.twitter.com/D0m9r6qVrt
— Papa Roach (@paparoach) April 18, 2020
Papa Roach will host an “In Conversation” session about its 2000 album Infest to commemorate the LP’s 20th anniversary. The event will take place this Saturday (April 25th), on the exact date of the record’s release.
The band hasn’t yet revealed what exactly this online chat will entail, but have teased it with a 17-second video soundtracked by the opening riff to one of the LP’s singles, “Between Angels And Insects.”
Infest was Papa Roach’s second full-length record and first major label release. The disc peaked at Number Five on the Billboard 200 chart and has been certified triple platinum for sales of more than three million copies in the U.S. It featured the massive hit “Last Resort.”
Papa Roach bassist Tobin Esperance told us a while back that many people thought of the group for a long time as a one-hit wonder: “A lot of people, they just know us from the ‘Last Resort’ song, you know, and they think that’s it, you know. I hear all the time people saying, ‘You know what? I heard that one song, I thought it was a good song. I was just sick of f**king hearing it.’ And then they come see us live, and they see how raw and just straight up we are, and the energy’s there and the intensity’s there and we just don’t give a f**k, and we just bring it, you know?”
This past February, singer Jacoby Shaddix hinted at recording, documentary and live plans to mark the LP’s two-decade milestone, although the pandemic has put much of that on hold for now.
Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong has been doing a selection of covers while he has been in isolation, and on Monday he has shared his rendition of “That Thing You Do!” in tribute to the late Adam Schlesinger. A member of Fountains Of Wayne and an award-winning songwriter for film and television, Schlesinger passed away earlier this month from COVID-19. He was 52 years old. Schlesinger composed “That Thing You Do!” for the 1996 film of the same name starring Tom Hanks.
