The ‘South African’ British MRAP Alvis Built Under Licence To Patrol Bosnia After Sarajevo –  Hw

February 29th, 1996. Sarajevo. The longest siege in modern European history had ended 3 days earlier. The streets were quiet for the first time in nearly 4 years. And the British soldiers rolling into the city under the new IFOR mandate had a problem nobody in Whitehall had properly solved. The ground beneath them was full of mines.

Bosnia was, by United States State Department estimates, one of the five most heavily mined countries in the world, between 600,000 and 1 million anti-tank and anti-personnel mines lay scattered across 30,000 recorded minefields. Yugoslav pattern stocks dominated. TMA-3s, TMA-4s, TMA-5s, TM-57s, and worst of all, the TMRP-6, a shaped charge mine that fired a self-forging fragment upward through whatever rolled over it.

The British Army had nothing that could stop it. The Saxon armored personnel carrier was a Bedford truck with bolt-on steel plate, flat hull. No engineered mine protection at all. The Snatch Land Rover, designed in 1992 for Belfast brick and petrol bomb work, had composite armor over a flat floor and zero underbelly protection. The Warrior was tracked, heavy, and useless for liaison patrols on Bosnian mountain roads.

In 1994, a Saxon had already struck a TMA-3 at Rama Lake. The lesson was written in steel. Britain needed a mine protected vehicle. Britain did not have one. So, Britain went shopping. What they found was South African. To understand why a British defense procurement officer in 1996 was looking at Pretoria rather than Coventry, you have to go back 26 years.

On February 11th, 1970, the Chief of the South African Defense Force issued a directive. Develop a vehicle that could survive a land mine. The Border War along the Angolan and Southwest African frontiers was producing more than 1,000 anti-vehicle detonations per year on patrol roads. SWAPO and PLAN insurgents had effectively turned dirt tracks into kill zones.

South Africa, isolated by international arms embargoes, had to build the answer itself. Over the next two decades, engineers at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, at Mechem, and at a series of state and private firms, built one of the most distinctive engineering traditions of the late 20th century.

The Hyena prototype of the early 1970s, the Bosvark and Hippo of 1974, the Buffel of 1978, around 2,400 built on Mercedes-Benz Unimog drive lines, the Casspir of 1979, the first true monocoque V-hulled armored personnel carrier. The principles they nailed down are now MRAP doctrine worldwide. A V-shaped monocoque hull deflects blast outward along its angled faces instead of absorbing it through a flat floor.

High ground clearance increases stand-off distance, weakening the blast before it reaches the crew capsule. The drivetrain is bolted on externally and treated as sacrificial. Four-point harnesses keep occupants from breaking their necks against the roof during the upward impulse. The fuel cell is blast capped and external.

The lead engineer behind much of this work was Dr. Vernon Joynt of the CSIR and Mechem. National Public Radio in 2007 would call him the world’s foremost expert on anti-mine technology. His name appears on patents underlying the American Buffalo and Cougar MRAPs that came years later. His own analogy for V-hull geometry was nautical.

“Two boats,” he said, “a flat hull jumps the wave, a V-hull slices through it.” In 1990, the lineage produced the Mamba Mark I, a 4×2 patrol vehicle on a Toyota Dyna chassis. It worked, but it had limitations. In 1993, after a royalty dispute between Mechem and the Mark I producer, engineers at Mechem and Sandock Austral did something extraordinary.

They built the first Mamba Mark II prototype in 28 days by mating a Buffel’s Unimog 416-162 drive line with a redesigned Mark I hull. According to Kemp and Heitman’s reference work Surviving the Ride, the standard text on South African mine protected vehicle development, 582 Buffel drivelines were stripped, reconditioned, and reused this way.

It was workshop scale recycling that produced a new mine protected vehicle from existing parts. Total Mark 2 production ran to 653 vehicles between 1993 and 1997. The Mark 2 had teeth, two crew and nine troops, combat weight 6,800 kg. A Mercedes-Benz OM 352 six-cylinder naturally aspirated diesel producing 123 horsepower.

Top speed 102 km/h, range 900 km, ground clearance 410 mm. Mine protection rated against a single TM-57, roughly 7 kg of TNT under the hull center, and a double TM-57, roughly 14 kg under any wheel station. It was by some distance the best mine protected wheeled vehicle a Western-aligned army could buy in 1996. And here the British connection begins.

If you’re finding this useful so far, a quick subscribe genuinely helps the channel grow. It costs nothing, and it tells the algorithm we’re worth showing to people who care about this kind of detail. Right, back to the procurement story. In late 1993, Mechem and the South African firm Reumech OMC shipped two prototype vehicles to Alvis Vehicles in the United Kingdom under a partnership and license arrangement.

One was an Iron Eagle scout car. The other was the first 4×4 Mamba. Alvis used these prototypes to develop two model number derivatives at their Coventry armor facility. The same site that built the CVR(T) family and the Stormer. The long wheelbase variant became the Alvis 8. The short wheelbase variant developed at Ministry of Defence request after a 1994 Bosnia trial became the Alvis 4.

When the urgent operational requirement landed in 1996, the British Ministry of Defence did not commission a new build production run. According to a Hansard parliamentary answer from Adam Ingram, Minister of State for the Armed Forces dated July 25th, 2006, Britain bought just 14 second-hand South African Mambas across three batches.

Six vehicles in 1996 for approximately 1.2 million pounds, three vehicles in 1999 for about 1 million pounds, five vehicles in 1999 for around 2.3 million pounds. Total program cost roughly 4.5 million pounds. Alvis’s role was modification, not full production. The Coventry facility added a plique belly armor specifically engineered to defeat the TMRP-6 shaped charge mine.

They fitted stretcher lashing points for the casualty evacuation primary role. They integrated Clansman radio wiring and battery charging systems to NATO standards. The vehicles were repainted, recertified, and shipped to the Balkans. The mission profile was specialist. According to the same Hansard answer, the Mambas were issued not to infantry battalions or to military police, but to Royal Engineers Explosive Ordnance Disposal Teams for reconnaissance, rescue, and recovery of casualties from mine-struck vehicles, plus route proving

work. The total user community across the entire British service life was probably fewer than 50 trained operators drawn from rotating Royal Engineer squadrons supporting Multinational Division Southwest at Banja Luka. Three vehicles went to support operations in Macedonia in 1999. Five went into Kosovo for Operation Agricola the same year.

The original six remained in Bosnia. Now, here’s where the script gets honest, because honesty is what separates this channel from the recycled mythology you’ll find elsewhere. There is no documented British Mamba mine strike with named casualties or a celebrated V-hull saved my life survival story in the open record.

The Royal Engineers Roll of Honor for the Balkans names every RE death in theater between 1992 and 2007. And none is attributed to a Mamba mine strike. The vehicle’s V-hull pedigree was real. The wider Casspir family had a documented mine protection record across thousands of detonations, but specific British incidents are not in the public domain.

What is in the public domain is a different problem entirely. The Mamba in British service was undone not by the enemy, but by its own modifications. The applique armor Alvis fitted to defeat the TMRP-6 pushed the vehicle’s gross weight beyond what the Baffle derived Unimog driveline had been designed to carry. The drivetrain, engineered for African bush, struggled with icy mountain switchbacks in Central Bosnia.

Spares commonality across the three procurement batches was poor. In May 2001, the Ministry of Defense formally restricted Mamba use to operations with significant mine strike threat. According to Adam Ingram’s parliamentary statement, reliability and safety problems with the previous mine protected vehicle, Mamba, led the department to consider refurbishment and modification or replacement.

Think Defense’s procurement history captures the consensus diagnosis. The Alvis fours were a great success, but the harsh climate and terrain of the Balkans, combined with the extra weight imposed by additional armor and old-fashioned mechanicals, exposed a number of reliability and safety limitations. By 2003, the Mambas were withdrawn from operations.

In 2004, all 14 vehicles were disposed of. Adam Ingram corrected the Hansard record on October 31, 2006 to clarify that the original disposal proceeds were 448,000 pounds, not the 44,000 he had previously reported. Either figure represented a fraction of the 4.5 million original outlay. Nine vehicles went to Estonia.

Several of those Estonian Mambas would later deploy to Afghanistan, and at least seven were donated to Ukraine in 2022, where one was captured and mistakenly displayed by Russian forces in May 2024 as a South African armored personnel carrier. four vehicles went to a United States private security company identified by Think Defence as Blackwater for use in Iraq.

One vehicle went to a Singapore-based firm. The replacement program was Project Tempest, won in November 2001 by Supercat with a Force Protection Cougar 4×4 derivative. Eight vehicles for 2.7 million pounds, the first British Cougar variant to enter service. And this is where the story becomes frankly a tragedy.

Britain entered Iraq in 2003 with no general purpose mine protected patrol vehicle. None. The Snatch Land Rover with its flat floor and composite armor was the standard patrol vehicle. The Royal Engineers had been operating Mambas for 7 years by that point. British defense industry, through the Vickers acquisition of Reumech OMC in 1999 and the Alvis acquisition of Vickers in 2002, literally owned the Mamba and RG-31 intellectual property.

Every other major Western military with operations in mine and improvised explosive device environments adopted a V-hull mine protected vehicle between 2000 and 2007. Germany fielded the KMW Dingo from 2000. Australia fielded the Bushmaster from 2004. Switzerland fielded the Eagle IV from 2004. Canada bought RG-31s in 2005.

The United States Marine Corps adopted the Cougar in 2004 and launched the full MRAP program in 2007. The United Kingdom ordered Mastiff, the Cougar 6×6 variant integrated by NP Aerospace, only in August 2006. Deliveries began in February 2007. The Cougar 4×4 Ridgeback entered British service in 2009.

In the gap, soldiers died. At least 37 British service personnel were killed in Snatch Land Rovers in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2003 and 2014. Among them was Corporal Sarah Bryant, the first British female soldier killed in Afghanistan in 2008. Troops gave the snatch a nickname. They called it the mobile coffin. The Chilcot report published in 2016 explicitly criticized the delay in bringing into service alternative protected vehicles which could have saved lives.

The Ministry of Defense formally apologized in 2017. Lord Drayson, speaking in the House of Lords on June 12th, 2006, captured the institutional rationalization in a single sentence. According to the Lords Hansard, he said that the United Kingdom the 14 vehicles in Bosnia out of service some time ago due to difficulties with maintenance, that the department had looked at the RG-31 alongside alternatives, and that the size and profile did not meet British needs.

The reliability problems caused by the British applique fix, the very modification engineered to defeat the TMRP-6, had effectively delayed British MRAP adoption by half a decade. So, what was the Mamba in British service? It was not a triumph of British licensed mass production. The mass production was South African. 653 vehicles built in Pretoria.

14 sold second-hand to Britain. It was not a celebrated combat savior. The mine strike heroics belonged to its Casspir cousins and its RG-31 descendants, not to the British fleet. It was not the foundation of British protected mobility doctrine. That foundation had to be rebuilt painfully after snatch coffin started coming home.

What the Mamba was, precisely, was British procurement excellence in a narrow lane and a missed British learning opportunity at the level of the army as a whole. Alvis did exactly what a competent British defense integrator should do. They identified the best mine protected vehicle on the market, secured the license relationship, modified the buy to defeat a specific theater threat, and delivered it to the operators who needed it most.

The Royal Engineers got hands-on V-hull experience nearly a decade before British soldiers started dying in snatches in Basra, but the institutional learning never propagated. The 14 Mambas served their tiny Royal Engineers community, broke down under the weight of their own armor upgrades, were sold for less than 10% of their procurement cost, and the British Army went into Iraq in vehicles whose floor plate was, in engineering terms, a polite suggestion.

The Mamba’s V-hull is still out there. Estonian Mambas hunt mines in Ukraine. American MRAPs in storage trace their ancestry through Vernon Joynt’s patents back to a 1970 directive from the South African Defence Force. The Cougar family that Britain bought from 2006 onward, at scale and at far higher cost, was the same engineering paradigm Britain had first sampled with 14 second-hand vehicles in 1996, which leaves one question worth asking.

If the answer was sitting in Coventry from 1994 onward, and on Bosnian mountain roads from 1996 onward, why did it take Sarah Bryant’s death in 2008, the Chilcot Report in 2016, and a formal Ministry of Defence apology in 2017, for British soldiers to be issued vehicles built around a principle that South African engineers had nailed down before some of those soldiers were born? The technology worked.

The procurement worked in its narrow lane. The institution did not. That is the real story of the Alvis Mamba. Not strange, not feared, not the most anything. Just 14 second-hand vehicles, a quietly competent Coventry modification program, a Royal Engineers community that learned the right lesson, and a wider British Army that took the long way home.

British engineering in this case was the applique belly plate. The genius was South African. The lesson cost lives. We owe it to the dead to tell that part of the story straight.

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.