Progressive Rock
Bob Catley has explained, in conversation with Dales Rock Interviews, why he decided to keep Magnum active after the death of Tony Clarkin, the band’s guitarist and songwriter. He says it wasn’t something that came from the heart, that he was pushed into it from the outside, and that for much of that year he lived with a void he didn’t know how to fill. The two of them had worked together for fifty years.
The person who got him back on stage was Tobias Sammet. Catley already had the summer Avantasia tour booked — the German musician’s project he’s been part of for years — and he clung to it rather than staying home: a run of major European festivals where he found the audience knew exactly who he was and what had happened to him. Singing someone else’s songs in front of that reaction, he says, convinced him he had to share it with Magnum’s own audience too, who don’t come to see him for an hour but for an hour and a half, and don’t come to see anyone else.
The unknown was the guitar, and it’s been resolved by Brendon Riley, Clarkin’s former guitar tech, who already knew the repertoire by heart and wasn’t an unfamiliar face to fans either. He’s been the guitarist for the 2025 and 2026 dates.
Magnum formed in Birmingham in the early seventies and went on to help define what Britain came to call pomp rock, with «Chase the Dragon» (1982), «On a Storyteller’s Night» (1985) and «Wings of Heaven» (1988), and Rodney Matthews’s cover art as their visual signature. Clarkin wrote practically everything. After splitting in 1995 and reuniting in 2001, they put out a record every two years right up to «Here Comes the Rain» (2024), which the guitarist finished before he died.
Text by Berta Sagristà