FEATURE: You Are My Sister: Anthony and The Johnsons’ I Am a Bird Now at Twenty

FEATURE:

 

 

You Are My Sister

Anthony and The Johnsons’ I Am a Bird Now at Twenty

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MAYBE this album…

will pass some people by. The twentieth anniversary of one of the best albums of the 2000s (the first decade of this century). Anthony of the Johnsons (now ANOHNI and The Johnsons) is an American collective led by ANOHNI. Her amazing collaborators. ANOHNI (Anohni Hegarty, formerly Anthony Hegarty) is a West Sussex-born artist who began her musical career performing with an ensemble of New York musicians as Antony and the Johnsons. The group’s self-titled debut was released in 2000. The amazing follow-up, I Am a Bird Now, was released on 1st February, 2005. I want to celebrate its twentieth anniversary. It rightfully and deservedly won the Mercury Prize in 2005. In 2016, ANOHNI became the first openly transgender performer nominated for an Academy Award. Her most recent studio album, 2023’s My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, was hugely acclaimed. I Am a Bird Now features guest appearances by, among others, Rufus Wainwright, Devendra Banhart, Joan Wasser and Boy George. To mark twenty years of this phenomenal album that won awards and the heart of critics, I am going to bring in some reviews. I cannot see any features published where we get background to the album and its creation. I will instead bring in three reviews for an astonishing work. Technically it should be I Am a Bird Now by ANOHNI and The Johnsons but, as the album was released in 2005 and the group was Anthony and The Johnsons, I am referring to it as that.

The first review I want to bring in is from Pitchfork. Published when the album was released, it mesmerised and blew away critics and listeners alike. Twenty years later and the songs still sound so moving and effecting. It is a singular work that is truly mesmeric. I do hope it gets some renewed appreciation ahead of its twentieth anniversary:

“The 1974 photo of Andy Warhol superstar Candy Darling on the cover of Antony and the Johnsons' second full length, I Am a Bird Now, is the perfect complement to the ghostly hymnals that flit and sigh behind its black and white shadows. A melancholy but arrestingly beautiful image, it depicts Darling on her deathbed; bright flowers float behind her upturned arm like a cluster of soft, pale moons radiating light onto the bleached sea of sheets in which she's drowning.

Besides being a tight aesthetic move, the image also links Antony to the early fabulousness of downtown New York, reminding the informed viewer not only of Darling's too-early death from leukemia, but the AIDS-related passing of the photographer himself, Peter Hujar in 1987 (the same year Warhol died, following routine gall bladder surgery). Klaus Nomi was already buried by then, and the Downtown scene was getting too close to saying goodbye to Cookie Mueller, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, and Antony's sometime doppelganger Leigh Bowery (the subject of Boy George's musical Taboo), among others-- all victims of the AIDS virus.

This visual meditation on death and radical history smoothly conjures the family tree upon which pale, angelic Antony perches. The vocalist/pianist moved from California to NYC after seeing the documentary Mondo New York, lured by the 1980s cabaret scene it depicted. Quite fittingly, his first performance came with a musical troupe called Blacklips at the famed Downtown venue, the Pyramid. Jump now to 2003, when Antony opened for Lou Reed and sang the Velvet Underground classic "Candy Says" (yes, for Candy Darling) as an encore after most performances. Knowing all of this-- the very important history in that cover-- helps to understand the melancholy, sense of loss, and rapturous joy in these 10 tracks.

But however aesthetically intriguing and complex that history may be, the ultimate draw is Antony's voice, and within the first two seconds of the album, it should be very clear to even the most unaware newbies that Antony has an amazing Nina Simone/Brian Ferry/Jimmy Scott vibrato, a multi-octave siren that would sound painfully lovely no matter what he was saying. Lucky for us, he fills that promise with worthy syllables. The greatness of this downcast crooner is the melding of that otherworldly trill with a dark, powerful aesthetic. Looking past his sad eye make-up and kewpie-doll features are these mesmerizing songs about loving dead boys, plaintive letters from hermaphroditic children, the fear of dark lonesome purgatories, breast amputation, the fluidity of gender. The first words of "Hope There's Someone" and of the album "Hope there's someone who'll take care of me/ When I die" feel more lonesome than just about anything and then there's the rapturous promise of "For Today I Am A Boy"' that "One day I'll grow up and be a beautiful woman/ One day I'll grow up and be a beautiful girl".

I Am a Bird Now's majesty didn't come easily: Antony's self-titled debut was released five years ago on David Tibet's Durtro label, but only now has he found the perfect mix between style and substance. More stripped down than earlier offerings-- most of the focus is on piano and voice, although violin, viola, cello, sax, and flute are also heard-- there's no missing Antony's thoughtful words.

There are a number of guest vocal spots-- Devendra Banhart (gypsy incantations in the beginning of "Spiralling"), Boy George ("You Are My Sister"), Rufus Wainwright ("What Can I Do?"). All of these powerful singers are overshadowed by Antony's angelic chops, though Boy George ends up turning in a surprisingly moving performance. His duet with Antony explores private memory, brotherhood/sisterhood (regardless of gender), relationships, empowerment ("I was so afraid of the night/ You seem to move to places/ That I feared"), and wish fulfillment. (Really, grab the hankies.)”.

As Tiny Mix Tapes begin – and as many reviewers and fans have also expressed -, I Am a Bird Now is an overwhelming album. Maybe there have been albums as powerful since, though in 2005, I don’t think we had heard anything quite like it for many years. A hugely deserving victor at the 2005 Mercury Prize ceremony:

“I'm completely overwhelmed by this record. I Am a Bird Now is beyond any semi-confectionary aesthetic distance that you might bring to discussing your average album. This music grabs a hold of you and doesn't let go. It feels timeless and gorgeous and bigger than life. It may not be "soul" in the strict, music appreciation 101 sense, but it could make even the most jaded atheist approach a metaphysical regard. It is assured, seering and majestic SOUL to the utmost. I'd put on my critic's cap and dive into scrutiny, but I am too enraptured by this artist's music.

For some reason my CD of I Am a Bird Now is skipping and every skip is like a dagger in the heart. The pure unadulterated emotion on display decries such tedious interruptions. I never thought I could appreciate Boy George till I heard him singing with Antony on the impossibly touching "You Are My Sister." And there is no point in dwelling on the gender bending (I didn't even want to acknowledge it, to tell you the truth) aspects of the artist because his songs are so 'universally' moving. Whereas Antony and The Johnsons was a stark, chilling affair that was arresting and perhaps a little disconcerting, this album is a shining beacon of hope and healing amidst ceaseless pangs of heartache and loss. The gospel-tinged "Fistful of Love" brings in a horn section and Lou Reed for a particularly uplifting experience that bridges the middle of the album splendidly.

I have to see Antony perform these songs. It's not a question of the recorded material not being enough, but I could see the breathtaking sweep of these songs taking on a whole new power in a live setting. I'm reminded of the scene in Mulholland Dr. where the two principal characters are in the theater listening to Rebecca Del Rio's heart-rending solo version of Roy Orbisons "Crying." I love this scene so much; how incredibly heavy it feels. I understood completely why they cried, and probably did a little myself. What's interesting is the one thing that kept the whole thing from utter hokeyness was that the song was sung in Spanish.

In this sense, I Am a Bird Now is authentic and moving because it hits you in ways that are both recognizable and foreign. Like Nina Simone, Antony has this uncanny ability to take your standard blues progression and give it authority that skips whatever reservations and preconceptions the audience might lean toward and aims directly for their empathy and, ultimately, their belief in the innate, transcendent force music can contain”.

The third and final review I am bringing in is from The Observer. I Am a Bird Now does not get enough airplay and attention now. As ANOHNI has her own solo career, I don’t know how she feels about a former incarnation. A very different artist in 2005, I do hope she has fond memories of that experience and album. It is clear I Am a Bird Now has changed people’s lives:

“It hit me in the most prosaic of circumstances, alone at the kitchen table, late on a Friday night, in semi-darkness, I Am a Bird Now flooding from the speakers, the family asleep upstairs; but it hit me nonetheless and I felt a bit like the dead Thomas Chatterton in Henry Wallis's famous Pre-Raphaelite painting, which is not a particularly familiar sensation: I was in love with Antony and perhaps also the Johnsons.

As far as confessionals go, this isn't particularly troublesome - the group may feature guests such as Rufus Wainwright and Boy George, as well as Lou Reed and Devendra Banhart, and the record includes a song titled after a line from a poem by Marc Almond ('Fistful of Love'), but if my fandom suggests some hitherto unsuspected personal proclivities, well, so what? But the revelation was unexpected - such a strange, moving and glorious record, and one I suspect with fantastic appeal to a wider audience, which is still not something that can often be said of recordings by sometime performance artists with more than a shade of the Leigh Bowerys about them, particularly by someone with no prior keen interest in issues of gender identity.

Born in London, Antony was relocated to California at the age of 10, before settling in New York as a young man in 1990, with an ambition to become 'a transvestite chanteuse at 3am nightclubs bathed in blue light, like Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet', and this is as helpful an archetype as any; perhaps also Scott Walker, or Nina Simone, or Bryan Ferry or mid-Seventies Bowie, or Sam Cooke or Jimmy Scott or a medieval chorister, because Antony sounds like all of the above, but always himself.

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It is his vibrato and multi-octave voice (often double-tracked) that stuns you from the first few bars on in, putting the washing-up on permanent hold. He is obviously the most original vocalist we've heard since Bjork, and never less than wholly affecting as he goes about eclipsing the impressive contributions of his guests.

The mood is predominantly mournful, but in its dulcet softness, luxuriously so. Cellos, violins, violas and flutes are used to frame Antony's voice and piano, and torch songs such as 'My Lady Story' feel exquisitely sad. Even then, it's only after several listens that attention is directed to the words, which in this instance seem to tell of transsexual woe: 'My lady's story is one of annihilation,' it begins. 'My lady's story is one of breast -amputation.'

But there's also an uplifting quality to what might be the highlight of the album, 'For Today I Am a Boy', which has much in common with black gospel music, both in style and in its sense of a quest for redemption. 'One day I'll grow up and be a beautiful woman...,' Antony sings with assured and powerful conviction, 'but for today I am a child, for today I am a boy.

'One day I'll grow up and feel the power within me, one day I'll grow up, of this I'm sure.'

Presumably, the song is at some level autobiographical, and as such is deeply moving. But possibly, it might also be read as a more general invocation of the feminine spirit, and that's some measure of Antony's facility as a songwriter as well as performer.

Likewise 'Fistful of Love', driven on by horns straight out of a Muscle Shoals soul classic, which could be the stuff of a bad Julian Clary joke, but really emerges, like this rest of this remarkable album, as a Valentine to the world at large”.

Released on 1st February, 2005 in the U.S., a Deluxe Pressing was released in the U.K. on 7th February. Whatever format you have it on, make sure you spend some time with I Am a Bird Now. Everyone will have their favourite songs from the album. Perhaps You Are My Sister is top of my list, though I also really like My Lady Story. An overwhelming and sense-changing listening experience, it is hard to believe I Am a Bird Now is twenty. It has not dated and doesn’t suffer the fate of many other albums from 2005. The production or lyrics seeming dated. I Am a Bird Now is a beautiful thing that continues to…

SOAR proudly and freely.

FEATURE: Down By the Water: PJ Harvey’s To Bring You My Love at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Down By the Water

PJ Harvey’s To Bring You My Love at Thirty

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RELEASED on 27th February, 1995…

IN THIS PHOTO: PJ Harvey in the studio in 1995/PHOTO CREDIT: Simon Fowler

PJ Harvey’s third studio album, To Bring You My Love, is almost thirty. Because of that, I thought it was worth writing about an album that stands tall with the very best of the '90s. It was recorded after the dissolution of the PJ Harvey trio; many consider this to be her first solo album. I guess it is. Important because of that at the very least. Co-produced with John Parish and Flood, there are some great guest musicians playing alongside Harvey and Parish. To Bring You My Love (Demos) came out in 2020 and is well worth investigating. I want to get to a few features/reviews about To Bring You My Love. I am starting out with The Quietus. Reviewing the album in 2020 to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary, this piece works from the perspective that PJ Harvey was as much an actor as she was musician. So much drama and cinema through To Bring You My Love:

“By 1995, Harvey had spent a depressing amount of time debunking the assumption that her music was autobiographical. Many had figured that the brutal imagery of her 1992 debut, Dry, must have stemmed solely from real-life experience; the truth was that if you’d cut her open, she’d have probably bled greasepaint. It could be violent and disturbing, but she also played for murky laughs by deliberately sending up tired virgin-whore tropes, pivoting from a licentious other woman’s leer on ‘Oh My Lover’ to an ingenue’s clumsy breathlessness on ‘Dress’. And while her nervous breakdown gave Rid Of Me a bleak backstory, that album wasn’t a confessional outpouring either. As Judy Berman’s terrific reappraisal explains, its songs were about performances – the parts people were forced to play, or tried to challenge – as well as being stellar performances themselves. Sometimes Harvey became other characters, like Tarzan’s fed-up other half, or Eve venting her spleen at the serpent. Sometimes she adopted a terrifying alter-ego: her delivery on ‘50 Ft Queenie’ was, she said, inspired by the braggadocio of hip hop, a literally monstrous way of bigging herself up.

Harvey knew she had to throw herself fully into her ideas to pull them off. "If you write words like that and sing it in the wrong way, it’s a complete disaster," she told Rolling Stone. Her voice may have sounded like a force of nature, but focusing on its elemental power sold short her judicious precision, the way she manipulated it to do her bidding. When she told the LA Times her favourite singer was Elvis, they assumed she meant Costello because of their shared sense of musical ambition; she was actually talking about Presley, another artist who, like her, knew exactly how to use their primal talent. “I love his singing, the passion, the depth in his vocals,” she enthused. 

But on To Bring You My Love, Harvey is less like either Elvis and more Marlon Brando: an actor with intense, chameleonic charisma, as tough, scary, heartbreaking or unnerving as each role demands, bringing the record’s desperate souls to life with her full-blooded, full-bodied portrayals. “I’ve lain with the devil, cursed God above,” she seethes over the title track’s sinister, serpentine guitar and eerie organ, full of such bitter longing that her voice shakes and trembles and sounds inhuman; when she rasps “I was born in the desert, I’ve been down for years”, she sounds like a hungrier, lustier incarnation of the rough beast from WB Yeats’ The Second Coming. On an album that explores how anyone can be unhinged by the all-consuming craving for sex, love, spiritual salvation and human connection, it’s the perfect transformation: a spurned admirer turned into an unearthly creature, dragging herself across the sand and bringing the apocalsypse with her.

Next, she brings a similarly demonic energy to ‘Meet Ze Monsta’ (which, like several songs, referenced another of Harvey’s idols, Captain Beefheart) and its netherworld stomp of sludgy, grungy riffs – only this time she adopts the tough-talking swagger of a larger-than-life prizefighter, like she’s looking the devil in the eye and refusing to back down from a scrap. “I see it coming at my head,” she taunts in a deep, defiant bark. “I’m not running, I’m not scared.” Then, for the uneasy chug of ‘Working For The Man’, she changes again, turning into a hushed, lonely figure driving down a dark highway in pursuit of love. “God is here being my wheel,” she murmurs, channelling the conviction of a zealot steeling herself for something awful.

Those first three songs alone have the range of a character actor’s showreel: three stories, three protagonists, three entirely different performances. As Harvey explained to the LA Times that year, she’d spent a lot of time honing her craft. “When I was young, I wrote plays,” she said. “And performed all the different characters when my parents’ friends would come over.” She approached records like To Bring You My Love with the same spirit, giving each character their own tale of rejection or ruinous obsession, and their own way of telling it. On the beautiful, bittersweet strum of ‘C’mon Billy’ she’s the personification of anguish, her wounded pleas catching in her throat as she begs her partner to return to their son. And then she spins that vulnerability completely on its head by playing another mother on the edge, only this time with a terrible secret.

‘Down By The Water’ still unfolds with the dramatic tension of a chilling one-woman play, the kind that makes your face blanch and stomach drop. Harvey’s narrator reels you in by hollering for her drowned daughter, although the the grubby, buzzing organ suggests something fouler at hand. Then comes the sucker-punch: the growing dread as you realise what she’s done, the sharp stab of cruel strings, her disturbingly fervid tone as she half-confesses, half-justifies her crime: “I had to lose her, to do her harm!” And when it finally ends, it’s not with a bang but a dreadful whisper: “Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water/ Come back here man, gimme my daughter.” Harvey’s delivery has the creepy cadence of a twisted nursery-rhyme, recited by a person so broken they’ve been driven to madness, or who thinks they can fix everything by chanting an incantation.

There were, Harvey wryly observed, some blinkered people who heard it and really believed she’d committed filicide. As she revealed to Rolling Stone, the reality was less gruesome: she knew how to use her own experiences for emotional fodder like a seasoned thespian, and also found it easy to imagine how other people must feel when they were suffering, too. Her interest in visual mediums like film – ‘50 Ft Queenie’, of course, owed a debt to the 1958 monster movie Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman – added to her work’s cinematic splendour. She wrote ‘Teclo’ after hearing Ennio Morricone’s ‘Teclo’s Death’, from his 1968 Guns For San Sebastián score. Her composition throbs with melodic instrumentation, and Harvey casts herself not as the titular Teclo but one of his mourners. “Just let me ride on his grace for a while,” she croons, summoning the doomy grandeur of someone singing a lonely elegy out in the moonlit plains – a finale worthy of any epic spaghetti western. 

Then again, it’s easy to imagine most of these songs thudding out of cinema speakers, especially the rockier, rougher ones (and especially in 1995, when alternative bands were favourites on big-screen soundtracks: The Cure on Judge Dredd, Hole, Belly and more on Tank Girl, Juliette Lewis covering Harvey for Strange Days). The blistering, unholy din of ‘Long Snake Moan’ has the dank aesthetic of an underground action flick, with filthy riffs and blasts of noise that detonate like bombs, while Harvey snarls about drowning, ritual and resurrection like a mythical warrior queen on a power-and-pleasure trip. “It’s my voodoo working!” she crows at the end, as the ground cracks beneath her feet and the walls cave in.

Listening now, it can seem like Harvey would rather play anyone than herself on To Bring You My Love, and its cast of pointedly exaggerated, often abandoned female archetypes must have vexed anyone looking for real-life tidbits. Yet her supposedly autobiographical albums aren’t always much more revealing than the elaborate fantasies. Her 2000 LP Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea was tangibly rooted in her experiences in New York, London and Dorset. That title, though, also hinted at the way personal experience can be romanticised into narrative – at old memories being recast with the same extravagant gloss as Harvey’s lush melodies – and tracks like ‘You Said Something’ are both intimate and elliptical: it dances around a charged conversation between two people, capturing their shared electricity without ever divulging the discussion itself. Her ostensibly truest-to-life work, meanwhile, is 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, on which she documented trips to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington but felt curiously absent as a narrator, preferring to report what she saw rather than reflect on how it made her feel”.

Prior to getting to the third and final feature, I want to quote from this article from last year. They heralded a great reinvention from PJ Harvey. An album that is timeless and ageless. Perhaps she hit a peak here. In spite of all the brilliance that has followed from her, many consider To Bring You My Love to be her crowning achievement:

“In its fearlessness and imagination, To Bring You My Love was proof that PJ Harvey was built to last. Comparisons to giants like Patti Smith and her much-admired Captain Beefheart, were apt. Moreover, she’d split with her band at the end of 1993, and was now a solo artist. “I just wanted the experience of playing with different people, and didn’t want to feel tied in any way,” she explained in an interview on French TV.

The most significant benefit of going solo was being in charge of all creative decision-making. While U2 producer Flood might have helmed the recording sessions, the buck stopped with Harvey. One of her decisions was to open the album with the growling title track, whose first line, “I was born in the desert,” happened to be identical to the first line on Beefheart’s debut album.

A quarter of a century later, To Bring You My Love hasn’t aged, because its themes are ageless. Religion, sin, and nature are the touchstones; Jesus is called upon, and the devil often replies. The mothers, lovers, and voodoo priestesses in the songs would fit into any century. If any element ties the production to the 90s, it’s “Teclo,” a minor-chord creeper that could have come from the Twin Peaks soundtrack, but that’s a one-off.

Harvey’s innate theatricality was ramped up on To Bring You My Love, helped by the infusion of fresh blood – consisting of John Parish, an old pal from her first band Automatic Dlamini, and Nick Cave collaborator Mick Harvey – that helped steer the album in a more experimental direction.

While the album is pretty heavygoing at times, Harvey engineered in some light relief, too. There’s a moment in the swamp-rocking “Meet Ze Monsta” when she bellows in faux-fear at the approaching “big black monsoon.” It’s even funnier in the demo – released with other previously unheard versions as a separate album – because rather than bellow she emits a campy shriek. On the spaghetti-Western-inspired closing track, “The Dancer,” her used-and-abandoned character tries to entice her man back by squealing “Ah! AH! Aaah!”

In a way, she never hit such wild heights again, but she’d already proved herself and didn’t need to”.

To end, I am heading back to 2015. Stereogum marked twenty years of To Bring You My Love. PJ Harvey would follow this album with the remarkable Is This Desire? in 1998. Still recording to this day, there is no doubt Harvey is one of our most important and consistent artists. Someone who has released so many influential and pioneering albums:

“Sonically, To Bring You My Love is a full about-face from Rid Of Me. Where that album had clanged and scraped, To Bring You My Love floated and sighed. Harvey had assembled a supporting cast that included Bad Seed Mick Harvey (no relation) and John Parish, the childhood friend who would become her musical consigliere in the years after. Where she’d once recorded with Steve Albini, she went with his aesthetic opposite here: Arena-goth guru Flood, who’d helped teach U2 to move and Nine Inch Nails to project. The album’s sound was as spare, in its way, as what Harvey had done on Rid Of Me. But this time she went for ominous throb, not punishing crunch.

To this day, I don’t know whether the buzzing groove on “Down By The Water” came from a synth pretending to be a guitar or a guitar pretending to be a synth. The sounds just blurred into each other that way. Everything was ornamental: Spanish guitar flourishes on “The Dancer,” sustained string-drones on “C’Mon Billy,” those Dead Can Dance plinks on “Down By The Water.” When Harvey needed to make hard rock, she absolutely could; “Meet Ze Monsta” and especially “Long Snake Moan” are absolute crushers, closer to Zeppelin than the Jesus Lizard or whatever. But she was more interested in taking blues sounds and ideas and pushing them deep into the uncanny — riding the guitar figure on the title track until it turned into a hypnotic mantra, or straight-up smothering every last sound on “I Think I’m A Mother” (even her own voice) until it sounded like it was about to suffocate.

All that arrangement and production served to highlight Harvey’s voice, which has never sounded better, before or since. Harvey is one of the all-time great rock singers because she brought all-conquering strength and soul-ripping vulnerability at the same damn time. She was a feminist icon simply by virtue of existing, and she tore men’s souls to shreds with her teeth on Rid Of Me. On To Bring You My Love, she’s singing about transcending — about moving beyond physical concerns, finding the place where love and desire turn mystical. There are moments where the you can feel the physical impact of her full-blooded wail on her voice: the avenging-angel roars on “Long Snake Moan,” the sex-yelps on “The Dancer.” More often, though, she sounds like a being out of time. That title track, which opens the album, starts out with silence, its rotating guitar figure emerging and getting louder and louder. Harvey sings the same words again and again, first in a monotonal mutter and building to a fevered howl: “I’ve lain with the devil / Cursed God above / Forsaken heaven / To bring you my love.” Every lyric on the album comes with that same mythic weight. And she doesn’t just sing those words. She makes you believe them. 

Then and now, the song that crushes me the hardest is “Send His Love To Me,” with its camel-galloping-through-the-desert acoustic guitar thrum and Harvey’s searching desperation escalating eternally: “How long must I suffer / Dear God, I’ve served my time / This love becomes my torture / This love, my only crime.” It’s not a song about romantic love — or, at least, 15-year-old me didn’t hear it that way. It’s a song about longing, about needing something else, about that feeling where you simply cannot go on with your life as you’re living it right now. Harvey’s unnamed lover might be the conduit for those feelings, but they’re bigger than one man. When things were bad at home back then — and, without getting too personal, things at home were really bad right then — I’d retreat into my room in the basement, playing that song over and over, staring off into nothing. I don’t know if that song saved me, but it sure helped.

This is usually the point in these Anniversary pieces where I talk about an album’s enduring influence, about the impact that it left on the music that came after. I can’t do that here. Can you name a single album that built on the foundation of To Bring You My Love? A subgenre that it helped will into being? A culture that it reshaped? I can’t. It was a blip on the radar. It came and it went. This makes sense. When an album is channeling those sorts of energies, how can any other artist expect to step in and do anything even remotely comparable? Even Harvey never did again. She retreated further into the foggy ether on Is This Desire?, her next album, and then it was on to the next one, her restless spirit never staying long with one sound or persona. There might be a few echoes of the album’s darkness in something like EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints, but I honestly cannot think of another example of an album that does similar things”.

On 27th February, it will be thirty years since PJ Harvey released her third studio album. Perhaps her very best releases, I know there will be new inspection and discussion about To Bring You My Love. All these years later, it still sounds breathtaking. It just goes to show that, when it comes to PJ Harvey, there are…

NO artists quite like her.

FEATURE: Sounds of Love: Love, Passion, Desire and Loss in Kate Bush’s Music

FEATURE:

 

 

Sounds of Love

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

Love, Passion, Desire and Loss in Kate Bush’s Music

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BECAUSE it is…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional photo for 2011’s Director’s Cut

Valentine’s Day, I wanted to spend some time thinking about Kate Bush’s music. In the sense of the passion and love that she weaves through some of her absolute best moments. I am going to end with a playlist of Kate Bush songs that are about love, loss or desire. It is interesting how Bush addressed attraction and love through her career. When she released The Kick Inside in 1978 she was still a teenager. One might think that the songs would be typical of a teenage artist. Quite cliché and juvenile in their way. Maybe the odd wise thought, though for the most part the lyrics quite ordinary and predictable. Looking out at the Pop landscape and there is more depth and originality in that regard - though that perhaps wasn’t the case in 1978. Instead, there are these remarkably original and mature songs. We can see Wuthering Heights, her debut single, as a sort of love song. Albeit tragic. The ghost of Catherine Earnshaw trying to come for Heathcliff. For the debut single, it was remarkably bold! There is something of literature and classic film in her music. Bush writing about love more with older eyes. Rather than it being contemporary and teenage, The Kick Inside’s songs of passion, love and sex splice in something classic. Maybe an exception is The Man with the Child in His Eyes. This fictional or imagined man, even this song is quite heightened and epic. Not what you might associate with a teenage artist coming through in 1978. Other songs on the album are quite direct and frank, mixed with fiction, fantasy and flights of fancy. If L’Amour Looks Something Like You’s chorus is lustful and has that crackling energy of desire, its verses are more, well…poetic? “My eyes were shining/On the wine, and your aura/All in order, we move into the boudoir/But too soon the morning has resumed”. There is fun and frivolity but it is also serious. Bush not appearing naïve or aiming for something commercial and vacuous. The sentiments expressed on Feel It: “Nobody else can share this/Here comes one and one makes one/The glorious union/Well it could be love/Or it could be just lust/But it will be fun/It will be wonderful”. The title track for The Kick Inside. Tragic and hugely original.

There has always been that mix of the personal and fictional. Bush never truly putting her heart out there on the first few albums. I don’t think it was until maybe Hounds of Love in 1985 where we got something raw and truly honest from Bush. In terms of the way love can affect people. The bravery needed. However, the songs of love and desire on her first four albums are exceptional and come from this distinct voice. If The Kick Inside is one of the most female albums ever and there is this exploration of sex, desire, love and a woman’s body, then Lionheart was perhaps (consciously) a decision to be less personal. There are still songs of love. Kashka from Baghdad about two gay lovers. There are two examples of Bush’s distinct style focusing more inward – Symphony in Blue and In the Warm Room. The latter seeming fit for inclusion on The Kick Inside. The former is this newly-written song. One passage strikes my eye: “I associate love with red/The colour of my heart when she's dead/Red in my mind when the jealousy flies/Red in my eyes from emotional ties/Manipulation, the danger signs/The more I think about sex, the better it gets/Here we have a purpose in life/Good for the blood circulation/Good for releasing the tension/The root of our reincarnations”. So many emotions and ideas crammed in. Spiritual, theological at times but direct and open. Perhaps The Kick Inside is one of Bush’s most overtly sexual albums. Not in an explicit or crude way. I mean the way the songs explore her desires and curiosities. I think about 1980’s Never for Ever. Bush, only in her early-twenties, changing her lyrical direction and narrative.

Sure, relationships are examined on the album. However, Babooshka (the second single from the album) is about trust and deceit. A woman testing her husband’s devotion and faith by dressing as another woman and enticing him with a letter. The Infant Kiss was inspired by the gothic horror movie, The Innocents - which in turn was inspired by Henry James’ novel, The Turn of the Screw. The tale is about a governess who believes the ghost of her predecessor’s dead lover is trying to possess the bodies of the children she is looking after. If not especially personal, it is complex, original and deep. Whereas fellow artists might bleed their hearts out and release soppy songs or be too personal most of the time, Bush could examine love and attraction through different lenses. Think about The Wedding List. If there is jealousy, deceit and mistrust through Babooshka, The Wedding List is about revenge. Again, Bush inspired more from a filmic or literature source rather than her personal experiences. This is what Kate Bush said to Kris Needs in 1980 when discussing The Wedding List: “Revenge is so powerful and futile in the situation in the song. Instead of just one person being killed, it’s three: her husband, the guy who did it – who was right on top of the wedding list with the silver plates – and her, because when she’s done it, there’s nothing left. All her ambition and purpose has all gone into that one guy. She’s dead, there’s nothing there”. We would see a notable change in the way Bush discussed love and passion from The Sensual World onwards. The Dreaming may be the only Kate Bush album where physical attraction, relationships and love is practically absent. All the Love is earnest and honest. Bush writing about how we can be surrounded by family and friends but we feel lonely. She wanted to write a song about loneliness, but also thinking about love. How we do not say it or say it when it is too late. It is no surprise The Dreaming focuses on other subjects as it is her least commercial album. More a push for artistic credibility. More experimentation with the sound and lyrics.

I am going to talk more about Hounds of Love’s title track for an anniversary feature very soon. By 1985, new emotions finding their way into music. If there was something of the innocent and moon-eyed about earlier songs of love and passion, there is are more dimensions around caution and fear. Quite natural when you get older. Bush was twenty-seven when Hounds of Love (the album) was released. In a newsletter from 1985, this is what Bush wrote about the majestic title track: “[‘Hounds Of Love’] is really about someone who is afraid of being caught by the hounds that are chasing him. I wonder if everyone is perhaps ruled by fear, and afraid of getting into relationships on some level or another. They can involve pain, confusion and responsibilities, and I think a lot of people are particularly scared of responsibility. Maybe the being involved isn’t as horrific as your imagination can build it up to being – perhaps these baying hounds are really friendly”. Hounds of Love might suggest an album filled with personal tales of love. Dissections on personal travails and passions. However, it is an album where passion is channelled into survival, wonder and other desires. The desire for men and women to swap places to better understand one another (as in Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Bush grateful to have reached dry land to tell her family she loves them. The Morning Fog, the final song on the album, ends The Ninth Wave (a suite where Bush/a woman is lost at sea and is rescued). One might see The Ninth Wave as a metaphor for love and relationships. An allegory on the complexity of love. There is definitely love for family. That absence one feels when they are apart. However, Bush would write in a more personal and direct way soon enough. Her passion and desires more to the fore.

It is credit to Bush, as I have noted in a previous feature, how she never attacked or shamed men in her songs. One of the only artists in history whose songs of love and relationships were not negative. Even if, when she was dating Del Palmer during the 1970 and 1980s, there would have been conflict and arguments, she never dragged him through the mud. Always using her music to be one of positivity. Even when their relationship ended, Bush was singing about loss and sadness rather than putting the boot in. The Sensual World, released in 1989, has some direct examples of Bush’s addressing love and relationship complexities. If This Woman’s Work is more about a father having to grow up and take responsibility when his wife’s birth goes wrong and she and the baby are in trouble, you can feel something personal on a song like Love and Anger. A song that is not really angry at all: “Tell you what I'm feeling/But I don't know if I'm ready yet/You come walking into this room/Like you're walking into my arms/What would I do without you?”. If Bush’s viewpoint on love and sex was about new bloom and desire when she was a teenager and in her twenties, albums such as The Sensual World are more about loss and separation. Never Be Mine is an example: “I want you as the dream,/Not the reality/That clumsy goodbye-kiss could fool me,/But I’m looking back over my shoulder/At you, happy without me”. Like Hounds of Love, Bush reserved the most extraordinary and powerful moment for the title track. The Sensual World is one of the most tremulous, sensual and passionate songs. Bush wanted to get access to words from James Joyce’s Ulysses and recreate the soliloquy from Molly Bloom (she did for 2011’s Director’s Cut). She was frustrated she was denied permission. However, what was left was perhaps even more remarkable. This is what Bush said in 1989: “A lot of people have said it’s sexy. That’s nice. The original piece was sexy, too; it had an incredible sensuality which I’d like to think this track has as well. I suppose it is walking the thin line a bit, but it’s about the sensuality of the world and how it is so incredibly pleasurable to our senses if we open up to it. You know, just simple things, like sitting in the sun, just contact with nature. It’s like, for most people, their holidays are the only time they get a real burst of the planet!”.

How do you look at 2005’s Aerial and 2011’s 50 Words for Snow and talk about love and passion? How does Bush represent these subjects. I guess Aerial is the love for her son, Bertie (born in 1998). Family and home more at the fore. A nod to her late mother on A Coral Room. Passion and love less directed at a lover and more towards her son and family. A Sky of Honey is about a summer’s day and there is plenty of passionate moments to be found. Though less about sex and more passion for the world around her. Nocturn and Aerial crackle with energy and electricity. 50 Words for Snow, Bush’s most recent album, has a few examples of love and passion. Snowed in At Wheeler Street about lovers divided through various periods of time. Misty about a woman’s tryst with a snowman. One that melts in the morning. It is understandable the tone and viewpoint of love and passion would change as Bush ages. She would not write songs like she did when she was a teenager. However, this hugely original voice still remains. Bush not shying away from passion and attraction. One of the most complex albums, in terms of Bush’s views on love, is 1993’s The Red Shoes. Aside from The Kick Inside, I think The Red Shoes very much puts love, relationships and passion at the front. Eat the Music uses fruit as metaphors. This imagery of fruit being devoured and opened. “Let's split him open like a pomegranate/Insides out, all is revealed/Not only women bleed/You take the stone out of the mango/Put it in your mouth and pull a plum out”. If some see The Red Shoes’ lyrics as being conventional and cliché at times, there is no denying the fact that it is one of her most personal album. Giving the fact her relationship with Del Palmer was ending and she started a new one (she and Dan McIntosh would eventually marry), it is no surprise.

You’re the One offers these lines: “It's alright, I'll come 'round when you're not in/And I'll pick up all my things/Everything I have, I bought with you”. A cocktail of letting go but also exploring new possibilities. Why Should I Love You? provides these words: “The "L" of the lips are open/To the "O" of the host/The "V" of the velvet/The "E" of my eye/The eye in wonder/The eye that sees/The "I" that loves you”. Intrigue and something almost mysterious in Big Stripey Lie: “Don't want to hurt you baby/I only want to help you/I could be good for you”. Moments of Pleasure being less about love and sex. Life’s pleasurable moments. However, there is heartache to be found. “Just being alive/It can really hurt”. Being thankful for the moments we have. These lines among the most standout and striking Bush ever wrote: “To give these moments back/To those we love/To those who will survive/And I can hear my mother saying/“Every old sock meets an old shoe”/Isn’t that a great saying?”. That is a bit of a race through Kate Bush’s discography. A look at how love, passion, sex and relationships are assessed. From the more lustful and explorative The Kick Inside, through to more oblique or less personal moments, through to the way family, new responsibility or the loss of a long-term relationship were written about. One might not feel Bush is very personal when it comes to love but, if you take a deep dive, you can find plenty of examples of her being very honest and open. However, as someone raised on great literature, films and music, there is more nuance and layers. Bush writing about women’s experiences – whether mothers or lover – and writing in a way none of her contemporaries were. As it is Valentine’ day today, I wanted to address love and passion through Kate Bush’s music. Alongside hurt, revelation, wonder, desire, pain and detachment, there are plenty of…

MOMENTS of pleasure.

FEATURE: (Nice Dream): Radiohead’s The Bends at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

(Nice Dream)

Radiohead’s The Bends at Thirty

_________

ALTHOUGH the anniversary…

IN THIS PHOTO: Radiohead in 1995/PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Willsher

is not until 13th March, I wanted to look ahead as it is one of my all-time favourite albums. I will ask whether we’ll get a thirtieth anniversary release of a classic. This particular classic reached number four in the U.K. upon its release. I am interested in the phenomenon of a band or artist releasing a promising but flawed debut album and then vastly surpassing expectations with the sophomore realise. One can see the leap from Nirvana between 1989’s Bleach and 1991’s Nevermind. People might have their own examples. I think one of the most extreme rates of progression between a debut and sophomore album came from Radiohead. Their 1993 debut, Pablo Honey, had a few good songs but was defined by its biggest hit: the sensational Creep. Few expected such a remarkable follow-up album. The Bends arrived in 1995. It is a masterpiece album from a band who made a gigantic creative leap. They would do it again on 1997’s OK Computer. Because The Bends turns thirty on 13th March, I wanted to think about a possible thirtieth anniversary reissue. Produced by John Leckie, with extra production by Radiohead, Nigel Godrich and Jim Warren, there was a switch from Pablo Honey. More complex songs and a broader palette, the mixture of ballads and more introspective songs together with heavier numbers did make an impact. The start of the album was fraught with pressure. Starting out at RAK Studios in February 1994, there was expectation from Parlophone that Radiohead would or should produce another single as massive as Creep. Following an international tour in May and June 1994, work recommenced at Abbey Road Studios. They also recorded at The Manor in Oxfordshire. With Nigel Godrich adding valuable production support, he would produce for Radiohead going forward.

I am going to get to some reviews for The Bends. Upon its release in 1995, it did divide critics. Not sounding like anything around it, maybe at the height of Britpop, critics were not ready for something genuinely different or unconcerned with trends and ‘fitting in’. Years later, retrospective reviews have been glowing. People realising how important The Bends is. In 2015, marking twenty years of The Bends, Billboard provided their thoughts:

“Had Radiohead vanished after its first album, 1993’s Pablo Honey, the quintet from Oxford, England, would be remembered as a decent grunge band with one novelty hit. That song, of course, is “Creep,” a crushing outsider’s anthem that might’ve played like a post-Nirvana alt-rock parody had singer Thom Yorke not actually been such a creepy weirdo who didn’t belong on pop radio.

With “Creep,” Yorke was up front about his non-rock-star qualities, but when he moaned, “I wish I was special,” well, he was just being modest. Beginning with its second album, The Bends — released 20 years ago today in the U.K. and three weeks later in America — Radiohead proved it wasn’t just a bunch of smarty-pants Brits aping the Pixies or the Seattle sound.

On these dozen songs, Yorke comes into his own as a troubled, enigmatic lyricist and howler of haunted melodies. The band — and especially guitarist Jonny Greenwood— also advances the plot, riding a psychedelic tailwind beyond the borders of Alternative Nation. 
More than simply a successful skirting of the sophomore slump, The Bends is an early taste of the avant-garde flavor capsule Radiohead would serve up via android waiter two years later on OK Computer, the group’s real artistic leap forward.

If The Bends is less staggeringly different from Pablo Honey than some subsequent Radiohead albums would be from their immediate predecessors (see: OK Computer into 2000’s glitchy, guitar-lacking Kid A), the progression is unmistakable. The guitars don’t simply go from quiet to loud and back again; there are layers upon layers of jangle, shimmer, shudder, and crunch.

The sound is bold and confident, and it didn’t come easy. Reeling from the pressure of sudden fame, Radiohead faltered during its initial sessions at London’s RAK Studios in early 1994. It took a second go-round at Richard Branson’s Manor complex to wrap many of the tracks. Manning the boards both times was producer John Leckie, whose credits include the self-titled debut by the Stone Roses, a Radiohead favorite.

While drummer Phil Selway told Consumable in May 1995 that Leckie taught the band “how to use the studio in different ways and how to get the best out of our material,” Radiohead’s bosses at EMI weren’t totally sold. The label handed the master tapes to Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie, the producers behind Pablo Honey, and they set about giving the record a more American-style mix.

From a chart standpoint, they failed. The Bends peaked at No. 88 on the Billboard 200, and none of its singles managed to crack the Top 10 on even the Alternative Songs chart. But the album was a critical hit, and at the end of 1995 — after which time Radiohead had rocked arenas as tour support for R.E.M. — The Bends made many critics’ year-end best-of lists.

Two decades on, The Bends is seen as the jumping-off point for a group that’s been jumping around ever since. It’s experimental, but it also rocks, and if there were a Radiohead album everyone could agree on, this might be it”.

I am going to wrap things up soon. I want to highlight Pitchfork’s review of the Pablo Honey: Collector's Edition/OK Computer: Collector's Edition/The Bends: Collector's Edition in 2009. I am going to be interested to see how people approach The Bends ahead of its thirtieth anniversary. It is a magnificent album that has lost none of its power and impact:

“I distinctly remember then the first time someone suggested The Bends was a great record. Not being one of the million-plus Pablo Honey owners at the time, I was content to hear "Creep" on the radio over and over and expected I'd soon spend about as much about time with Radiohead's catalog as one would with, say, Hum or Ned's Atomic Dustbin or School of Fish. The My Iron Lung EP had beaten The Bends to U.S. record shelves by a few months, and the "High and Dry" / "Planet Telex" single was out a few weeks prior as well, but few noticed. Anyone who had explored those two earlier singles, however, would have been excited for the LP.

A reaction to the success of "Creep", "My Iron Lung" found Radiohead still exploring the loud/soft dynamic, but guitarist Jonny Greenwood was also locating his own identity and Yorke, inspired by Jeff Buckley, was using a wider vocal range, including some falsetto. Balancing a slightly artier sense of musical self-destruction with a sinewy guitar line, on "Lung" Radiohead found new ways to pick apart and re-construct the typical alt-rock template. Elsewhere on the EP, the five B-sides demonstrated a band whose collective heads seemed to crack open and spill out new ideas, moving the group away from the dour dead-end of grunge signifiers: With more loose-limbed and nimble guitar work ("The Trickster"), hints of art-rock ("Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong"), the valuing of texture over riffs ("Permanent Daygliht"), offers of emotional nourishment ("Lozenge of Love" and "You Never Wash Up After Yourself") and tension and apprehension about workaday life ("Lewis [Mistreated]"), and themes of misanthropy (um, most of the five songs), these tracks pointed the way toward what was to come.

The band's next release, the "High and Dry" / "Planet Telex" single, announced that they'd arrived. "Planet Telex", an early exploration with loops and studio enhancements for the group, is their first song that could have fit on any of their albums, regardless of how experimental they grew; "High and Dry", meanwhile, is the blueprint for the big-hearted balladry that spawned the careers of imitators Travis, Starsailor, Elbow, and Coldplay (who, let's face it, wound up perfecting this sort of huggable, swelling arena rock).

The Bends was essentially split between these poles: warmth and tension; riffs and texture; rock and post-rock. The tricks employed by "Planet Telex" were rarely bested on it-- only arguably by "Just"-- while the "High & Dry" version of the band was topped at every turn here, especially on "Street Spirit (Fade Out") and "Fake Plastic Trees". Even B-sides such "Bishop's Robes" and "Talk Show Host" come close to matching "High".

To many fans, this more approachable and loveable version of the band is its peak. I can't agree, but the record is still a marvel. It feels, with hindsight, like a welcome retreat from the incessant back-patting and 60s worship of prime-period Britpop and a blueprint for the more feminine, emotionally engaging music that would emerge in the UK a few years later-- led by OK Computer. Alongside late 1996 or 1997 releases by Verve, Spiritualized, Belle and Sebastian, Cornershop, Mogwai, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Primal Scream, Super Furry Animals, the Beta Band, Mansun, and even Britpop stars Blur, Radiohead's OK Computer led the push back against knuckle-dragging Oasis clones who segregated their Boomer rock leanings from the fertile explorations of dance, classic indie, hip-hop, and art-school sensibilities going on throughout the rest of the UK. But once again, the press chose what they knew over the new, and despite the plaudits for 2000's Kid A, by the time of 2001's Amnesiac, people wanted another The Bends”.

I am going to end with this feature from Consequence from 2020. Marking twenty-five years of The Bends, they offered their review and take. They celebrated a restless album with ambitions to create and explore. Radiohead stepping things up and showing why you could not write them off or define them after Pablo Honey. I think I first heard The Bends in the 1990s and it was a real revelation. Still my favourite Radiohead album:

“It’s easy to look back on Radiohead’s discography and see the scope of their achievements as inevitable. In retrospect, the band have had a near-perfect career: initially gaining widespread attention with the much-loved and much-maligned “Creep” and a hit-or-miss debut album largely indebted to grunge and ’80s American indie rock bands like R.E.M. and Pixies and then becoming critical darlings, challenging themselves to stretch their sound to encompass new musical ideas. Many see their output up to 2000’s Kid A as the musical-career equivalent of a mind-expansion meme. The Bends was the album that forced critics and listeners alike to take them seriously — in a sense, it was the beginning of Radiohead as we know them today. However, as inevitable as it may seem in retrospect, it was anything but at the time.

One of my favorite anecdotes about the creation of The Bends highlights the important fact that at this point in their careers, Radiohead were twentysomethings, one-hit wonders who didn’t know what they were doing. It’s actually the story behind the now-iconic album cover, the first one Stanley Donwood, who’s been involved in all things Radiohead ever since, did for the band.

Thom Yorke and Donwood met at the University of Exeter, both of them studying art and literature. Donwood first collaborated with Radiohead on the cover for the 1994 single “My Iron Lung”, which would later appear on The Bends. Inspired by that single, Yorke and Donwood, two kids with an old-school video camera, went to a hospital to get footage of an iron lung, which, according to Donwood, turned out to be “not very interesting to look at.” They found a more interesting subject in the form of a CPR mannequin. After recording the footage, they played it on a television and photographed the screen, creating the grainy, shimmering variations in color you see on the cover.

I like this story because it shows a side of Radiohead that undercuts the mystique generated over the years by the band’s critical adulation, far-reaching influence, and exploration of increasingly insular, experimental sounds on later releases. The Bends shows us a group of young artists who are very much still figuring it out, jaded early on by unexpected fame, throwing ideas against the wall to see what works. We see this process of creation-as-discovery in the story behind the album artwork as well as in the record itself.

This need to experiment stemmed just as much from youth and inexperience as it did from desperation. The success of “Creep” took a toll on the band. Before they had a chance to discover who they were for themselves, countless listeners had already put them in a box: they were derivative, they were a one-hit wonder, defined by a single song at the start of their career. After a cancelled set, Thom Yorke told NME, “Physically, I’m completely fucked, and mentally I’ve had enough,” and the band’s record label hit them with an ultimatum. Though many have come to admire Radiohead for their consistency, in the lead-up to The Bends, it was becoming increasingly unclear whether the band had a future at all.

When opening track “Planet Telex” was released as a split single with “High and Dry”, it pointed toward the future, but no one, perhaps not even Radiohead, knew it yet. The loops, the keyboards, the studio flourishes, the shimmering tone, and the abstract lyrics — all, in retrospect, point to the band’s future. It’s difficult to listen to “Planet Telex”, and much of The Bends in general, without thinking of where the band would go from there, without hearing the feedback of OK Computer and the synthetic frigidness of Kid A. That opening single sounds nothing like Pablo Honey. It’s easy to see the band Radiohead were becoming in it, but the creative process was certainly not as clear as it seems now. There was a haphazardness to the way this song came together. Story goes, the band laid that record down in one night, after a night of drinking. Thom Yorke was lying on the floor as he recorded the vocals (in one take). And they were going to call the song “Planet Xerox” before they realized it was trademarked. They were still young, unaccustomed to fame, but they had something to prove, and they were spitballing, following their impulses and inspirations to truly exciting results.

One thing they were sure of was that they didn’t want to create a second Pablo Honey. Although The Bends still bears the influence of grunge and ’80s indie rock, musically it was a massive leap. The guitar playing became more complex and mercurial, oscillating between placid strums and frenetic freak-outs. We see this duality in a song like “Nice Dream” starting with chords and lyrics by Yorke before being expanded and complicated by Johnny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien. You can hear this tendency to fuck up (in a good way) a would-be straightforward song across the record, particularly in tracks like “My Iron Lung”, which purposefully flouts the constraints of a song like “Creep”.

Greenwood’s influence (particularly his string arrangements, which are incidentally all over the band’s most recent album, A Moon Shaped Pool) became more pronounced. And The Bends saw the entrance of Nigel Godrich, the band’s longtime producer and de facto sixth member, who did engineering for the record and produced “Black Star”, which could have been a more straightforward song if it weren’t imbued with such menace and restless energy. This restless energy permeates the record.

On The Bends, Radiohead were not content — to be another Britpop band, to be a one-hit wonder, to be what they were last year, last month, last minute. That restlessness has ironically been a major factor in the band’s consistency over the years — an unwillingness to settle, to continue making the music they’ve always made. Their constant reinvention has given the illusion of consistency and inevitability, but it was the band’s frantic desire for discovery, for trying new things, that have made them the band they are today. As Thom Yorke said shortly after the release of Kid A, “The best things are often those that go somewhere you weren’t expecting”.

Ahead of 13th March and the thirtieth anniversary of Radiohead’s The Bends, I am wondering if there will be a reissue. Extras, possible demos and outtakes. It would be fascinating to think there is something coming. If not, there will definitely be new reviews and insights from critics and fans alike. One of my favourite albums, it is a pleasure to revisit it for this feature. If you have not heard The Bends for a while then listen to it now. 1993’s debut album, Pablo Honey, had the odd promising moment but was underwhelming. The Bends changed everything. It was certainly a…

GIGANTIC leap forward.

FEATURE: A New Year with The Trouble Club: Upcoming Events I Am Looking Forward To

FEATURE:

 

 

A New Year with The Trouble Club

Upcoming Events I Am Looking Forward To

_________

I am returning my thoughts…

IN THIS PHOTO: The Trouble Club’s CEO and owner Ellie Newton with recent guest Carol Vorderman

to The Trouble Club once more. Rather than look back at events I have attended in the past few months, I am looking ahead to what is to come. Urge people who have not joined yet to investigate. You can join here. Check out The Trouble Club and you can see what is coming up. As I write this (14th January), there are some exciting dates on the schedule already. On 27th January, I am attending How to Trust and Be Trusted, with Rachel Botsman. Taking place at The Conduit in Covent Garden, it is going to be a terrific event. This is an event run by Conduit who have asked The Trouble Club members to attend. As an example of the sort of events Trouble Club members attend, this gives you a good guide and insight:

“Rachel Botsman, in conversation with Helen Barrett, FT columnist, explores how trust shapes behaviour, culture, and connection.

In a world that feels more uncertain every day, trust is what keeps people, communities, and societies working together. Rachel Botsman, renowned thought leader on trust and author of How to Trust and Be Trusted, joins us at The Conduit for an illuminating conversation moderated by Helen Barrett, Financial Times columnist and expert on workplace dynamics.

Together, Rachel and Helen will delve into why trust is so essential—how it changes behavior, shapes cultures, and fosters open communication to solve problems. Drawing on real-world examples, they will unpack the dynamics of trust: how it is built, broken, and repaired, and why it is a cornerstone of strong connections and meaningful progress.

Rachel Botsman is a leading expert on trust in the modern world. She is the author of twocritically acclaimed books, What’s Mine is Yours and Who Can You Trust?, that have beentranslated into 14 languages. Her writings on trust have been widely published in the Guardian,Financial Times, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and Wired. Through herpopular newsletter, Rethink with Rachel, she engages with a community of over 85,000subscribers every week. On top of this, Rachel is an experienced broadcaster hosting the BBC series Money, Money, Money as well as her own podcast called Rethink Moments in which she challenges different cultural ideas and events with the help of experts in the specific field.

Helen Barrett is a London-based writer and editor specialising in art, design, architecture, fashion, and culture. A former Financial Times journalist and editor of the House &Home section, she now writes for the FT, The Telegraph, The Spectator, and more. Her work includes in-depth features on topics like London’s invented place names and Sydney Modern’s architects, as well as sharp reviews of books and music. An experienced interviewer, Helen has spoken with cultural figures such as Norman Foster, Es Devlin, and Peter Saville. She is also a director of the London Modern festival”.

Another event – which will be held on 30th January - at Conduit in Covent Garden is Diane Abbott: A Woman Like Me. This is going to be an historic night! The Trouble Club hosts a variety of inspiring and brilliant women across various fields. From the arts to politics, so many iconic women have enthralled and moved Trouble Club members. Diane Abbott is going to be one of the all-time great guests. You can buy her book here:

“Diane Abbott is a history-maker. From challenging expectations as a bright and restless child of the Windrush generation to becoming the first elected Black female MP in the UK.

We are incredibly honoured to be welcoming Diane, the mother of the House (the longest uninterrupted female MP) to The Trouble Club to discuss her outstanding life of service.

Ever since the day she first walked through the House of Commons as the first Black woman MP, she has been a fearless and vocal champion for the causes that have made Britain what it is today, whether it’s increasing access to education for Black children and speaking out against the Iraq war or advocating tirelessly for refugees and immigrants.

A unique figure in British public life, Diane has often had nothing but the courage of her convictions to carry her through incredibly hostile environments, from torrential abuse in the mainstream media and on social media, to being shunned by the political establishment, including by her own party.

Join us for an intimate evening with one of the most influential politicians in British history”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Adriana Brownlee is a Trouble Club guest on 11th February

The owner and CEO of The Trouble Club, Ellie Newton holds virtual coffee mornings for new members. For anyone about to join, this is a great opportunity to meet new members. I have been a member for nearly two years, though it is always a pleasure hearing from new Trouble Club members and networking. Even though I live in London so can’t afford to see events there, The Trouble Club also exists in Manchester. Great events held there. Boxer and lawyer Selma Masood will be hosted by The Trouble Club on 4th February. I am going to round up this feature writing why I love being a Trouble Club member and why it is important to keep writing about them in the hope people see it and join. I cannot emphasise enough the variety and quality of the guests. On 11th February, at the beautiful Kindred at Hammersmith, there is an event I am really looking forward to. 14 Peaks with Adriana Brownlee is going to be amazing:

“Adriana Brownlee just made history as the youngest ever female climber to summit the world’s tallest mountains (let’s hope she hasn’t peaked…….we’re here all night.)

On the 9th of October she summited the last of the fourteen peaks over 8000m, a feat only 64 people in the world have officially achieved. She is also only the second ever British climber to accomplish this.

Adriana will join us at Trouble to discuss her adventures, the highs and lows (both literally and emotionally) of being a world-renowned mountaineer and the incredible female mountaineers that have inspired her throughout her journey”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Caitlin Moran will appear for The Trouble Club at the Manchester Central Exchange Auditorium on 15th February

There are five more events I will highlight before closing up. I know that new events will be announced very soon. One of the biggest and most anticipated events in Trouble Club history is Caitlin Moran: For the Love of Women. On 15th February, at the Manchester Central Exchange Auditorium, there will be a packed crowd to welcome Caitlin Moran but also hear the incredible Lois Shearing. I am not attending the event in-person, though I am seeing it virtually. I am really pumped for this, as I am a fan and admirer of Caitlin Moran:

“CAITLIN MORAN PEOPLE, CAITLIN MORAN! Wow are we fans of this woman, can you tell? At Trouble we've been devouring her books and articles for years and it's about time she graced the Trouble stage.

Caitlin has hilariously documented the pot-holed road of womanhood from teenage sweat to midlife reinvention. She'll join us at The Trouble Club in Manchester to discuss how she's so brilliantly chronicled the journey and kept us laughing along the way.

We'll also dive into Caitlin's icons from the celebs she adored in her early years to the personal mentors who have shaped her incredible writing career. We'll discuss what kind of support we owe to the next generation and how her icons have changed as the years have progressed. There will also be lots of time for Q&A, so get your questions ready!

Caitlin Moran is an award-winning columnist for the Times and the author of multi-award-winning bestseller How to Be a Woman which has been published in 28 countries, and won the British Book Awards’ Book of the Year 2011. Her two volumes of collected journalism, Moranthology and Moranifesto, were Sunday Times bestsellers, and her novel, How to Build a Girl, debuted at Number One.

Our second speaker of the day is the incredible Lois Shearing who will join us to discuss the significant roles women are starting to play in far-right movements. From tradwives to femtrolls Lois will talk us through how and why women join these movements.

This will be our biggest event to date and it's taking place in Manchester, the home of our second Trouble location. Don't worry London members, the event will take place in the afternoon so that you can be back to London on the same day. Or stay, and enjoy the delights of the city”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Emily Austen is a very special Trouble Club guest on 19th February

I think I will wrap up with three selected events. On 19th February, at the stunning Allbright in Mayfair is  Work Smarter with Emily Austen. What I love about the events is that they can be practical and useful in all kinds of ways. Whether it how to cope with bereavement or businesswomen speaking; networking coaches or authors discussing how they got where they were. Although a lot of fun is had at The Trouble Club, every event is designed so that you take something away:

“Busyness has become a status symbol. The 'more is more' philosophy still prevails, running us into the dirt and out of natural energy. We jostle for our position balancing work, family life, fertility, misogyny and mental health, and we have been told that working late, over-caffeinating, being the first in and last out, sacrificing our personal lives, and eating on the go, are conducive to succeeding long-term. But instead, we are burnt-out and less motivated than ever.

Join us as we meet Emily Austen, entrepreneur, bestselling author and founder of Emerge London to learn about her SMARTER method. We’ll reframe previous systems that our brains predict, switch our mindset from one of scarcity to one of abundance, join the 8am club (not the 5am club), conduct a busyness detox, define what success means to us, track our energy not your time, identify and set healthy boundaries, time block, habit pair and switch to mono tasking, and so much more.

This is not for the bare minimum Mondays or the take it easy Tuesdays. It's an evening for those who strive for success; for ambitious women wanting to do it all, those who understand that you have to make a deposit to be able to make a withdrawal”.

Jumping to 5th March, that is when Trouble hosts Caroline Lucas: Another England. Her book that the event is based around is must-read. At a charged and divided time, this is going to be a compelling evening.

“One of our most requested speakers, Caroline Lucas, is coming to Trouble. For 14 years Caroline was the sole Green Party MP while also leading and co-leading the party. Having stepped down at the last election, Caroline is focussing on a different conversation, reclaiming Englishness from the far-right.

With the UK more divided than ever, England has re-emerged as a potent force in our culture and politics. But today the dominant story told about our country serves solely the interests of the right. The only people who dare speak of Englishness are cheerleaders for Brexit, exceptionalism and imperial nostalgia. Yet there are other stories, equally compelling, about who we are: about the English people’s radical inclusivity, their deep-rooted commitment to the natural world, their long struggle to win rights for all. These stories put the Chartists, the Diggers and the Suffragettes in their rightful place alongside Nelson and Churchill.

Join us as we meet Caroline Lucas, author of Another England and one of the most impactful politicians of the last decade”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Dr Haru Yamada

I am very interested in The Art of Listening with Dr Haru Yamada. Occurring on 11th March at Century Club in Soho, this is going to be one I would recommend to anyone who is thinking about joining The Trouble Club but is not sure yet. There is more information here. I am keen to get my hands on a copy of Haru Yamada’s Kiku: The Japanese Art of Good Listening which is released on 6th March. Another demonstration of the eclectic nature of events and speakers hosted by The Trouble Club. This year is going to be a rich and really brilliant one. It is wonderful being a member:

“Drawing on the Japanese concept of 'kiku', sociolinguist and listening expert Haru Yamada will join us at Trouble to share a transformation guide to becoming better listeners in our daily life. Kiku is a particular type of listening that goes beyond the superficial. It is a deep listening that brings us together.

Once you understand how hearing and listening work, you'll start noticing your own. You will gain a deeper understanding of the world. You'll read rooms better because you'll be reading more deeply between the lines of the people around you.

Dr Haru Yamada is a PhD sociolinguistics researcher, writer, and leading authority on the subject of listening. Her pioneering analyses of conversations has since led to international publications and journals used as staple textbooks in universities across the world, and her articles are regularly cited in academic work”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Selma Masood will be appearing at 100 Embankment Manchester on 4th February

Although this feature is less detailed than ones I have published previously, the objectives are still the same. Not only highlighting the incredible events The Trouble Club hosts at some wonderful venues – go and check each of them out to get an idea of the setting and location -, but they also emphasise how enriching it is. Not only is it fulfilling and a pleasure meeting fellow members and newcomers. Each speaker has an impact on me. I learn something every time. Think differently. Different emotions brought to the surface. I think I am made a more informed, conscientious and better person attending the events. That might sound weird or the wrong words. What I mean is that my mind and heart is opened in a way that it is not anywhere else. I am so thrilled and intrigued every time a new event is added to the schedule. I do think this year is going to e one of the most successful and best for The Trouble Club. In addition to events like the ones I have highlighted, there are social events, book clubs, member dinners and roundtable discussions. That social aspect that is brilliant is you are a new member. The very finest voices. These simply incredible women. I have had so many life-changing evenings at Trouble Club events. Moved profoundly. Evenings that were full of laughter. Others where members got up to share stories and open up to those around them. I am looking forward to seeing how the Trouble Club evolves, expands and moves in the coming year. Anyone who has heard of The Trouble Club but is not sure what to expect, I hope this feature has helped a bit. From the friendly and warm members to the beautiful venues and the wonderful guests, time and time again, I come away very fortunate being part of this phenomenal club. To those unsure or merely curious, when it comes to The Trouble Club, it is very much…

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WELL worth exploring.

FEATURE: In the Light: Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

In the Light

Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti at Fifty

_________

I am looking ahead…

IN THIS PHOTO: Led Zeppelin performing at Earl’s Court, London in 1975/PHOTO CREDIT: Ian Dickson

to 24th February, as that date marks fifty years since Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti was released. 24th February, 1975 was when it was released in the U.S. It came out four days later in the U.K. I want to spend time with a classic album from perhaps the best Rock group of them all. The album was a huge commercial success. It debuted at number one on the U.K. chart and three in the U.S. I am going to come to a very detailed and passionate review of Physical Graffiti from Youth (Martin Glover) soon. I would also recommend a documentary such as this, which delves into the making of Physical Graffiti. First, tied to a fortieth anniversary (2015) reissue of the album (that included unreleased tracks), Jimmy Page (the band’s guitarist and co-songwriter with their lead, Robert Plant) talked to The Independent about the background to the album - and what he considered Led Zeppelin’s legacy to be:

“So many myths have grown around Led Zeppelin, the British rock band that ruled the Seventies and continues to cast a long shadow over popular music, that their guitarist, producer and curator extraordinaire Jimmy Page has to see the funny side. The 71-year-old’s hair may be snow-white but his black-clad frame is as pencil-thin as it was in his prime. The years roll back while we converse in front of a roaring fire, in a plush Kensington hotel, a stone’s throw from the Royal Albert Hall, where Led Zeppelin triumphed in 1969 and 1970.

He is talking up the 40th-anniversary edition of the double studio set Physical Graffiti, the third tranche of a reissue campaign that kicked off last June. The addition of companion discs containing out-takes, alternative, and rough mixes has returned the group’s first five multi-million-selling albums to the charts, introducing them to yet another new generation of fans.

Page is debunking a story about what happened before the recording of Physical Graffiti started. “On this one, we’re really bouncing. We’ve been touring and we’re going in there and John Paul Jones has left his choir,” he quips, alluding to the rumour that, at the end of 1973, his multi-instrumentalist bandmate considered quitting the biggest group in the world to become a choirmaster at Winchester Cathedral. The truth is more prosaic. “John had a big family and he wasn’t there on the first few days. His holidays over-ran,” he says.

Back in 1973, since vocalist Robert Plant was also late arriving, Page and drummer John Bonham began rehearsing the epic “Kashmir”, the unstoppable, Panzer-like track which typified the ambition and scope of Physical Graffiti. “I had that riff on an acoustic piece I was working on and I also had those staccato parts that became the brass parts. The idea of using the orchestra over that riff goes back to classical music, things like Benjamin Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge and The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. I knew it was pretty radical. John Bonham understood what it was about. The whole band took to it. “Robert said, ‘oh, I’ve got some lyrics that I wrote before, in Morocco’. He tried them out and they worked really well,” says Page.

As he admits, there was no guarantee the Eastern-flavoured majesty of “Kashmir” was going to translate across to the general public. Yet it became another gem in the superlative Led Zeppelin catalogue, more sonically ambitious than the era-defining “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven”, and a milestone at the crossroads of world music and rap, recycled by Puff Daddy for “Come With Me” on the soundtrack to the Godzilla blockbuster in 1998. “People went, ‘oh, he shouldn’t have done that’, but you might as well say, ‘oh, he shouldn’t have dabbled in world music’. Of course, I should have. I was doing that as a teenager, so why in heaven’s name not? It’s all part of the big picture,” says Page.

Like many of his contemporaries, he followed up his interest in skiffle, rock’n’roll, folk and world music by delving into the blues. “We were doing the best research before the internet,” he recalls. “I’d include Arabic instruments like the oud and Indian ones like the sitar in that. It was all permeating into my playing, and that grew when I was in the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. But everyone in the band had their own influences.”

In the summer of 1968, Page and Jones considered vocalist Terry “Superlungs” Reid and Procol Harum drummer BJ Wilson but, once they teamed up with Plant and Bonham for that first rehearsal in Soho’s Gerrard Street and started jamming “Train Kept A-Rollin’”, they never looked back. Within weeks, Page and Jones had ditched the New Yardbirds moniker and come up with Led Zeppelin. The name was inspired by a comment made by Who drummer Keith Moon when they had jammed with the Yardbirds guitarist Jeff Beck and pianist Nicky Hopkins on “Beck’s Bolero” two years earlier. “This will go down like a lead balloon”, said Moon.

By the time they returned to the States in the spring of 1969, they were topping the bill and recording their second album on the hoof. As their popularity grew, they headlined stadiums, travelled by private plane and created mayhem wherever they went, with many a tale of groupie debauchery passing into rock lore.

They also became the most bootlegged band of all time. Peter Grant, their formidable manager, used to scour the audience for recording devices, and made the occasional baseball-bat-assisted intervention in record stores selling pirate recordings. Page has remained fiercely protective of their catalogue and amassed his own collection of bootlegs, which proved handy when he began considering the current, definitive, state-of-the-art, expanded reissues.

Unlike many of the groups they inspired, Led Zeppelin were a versatile, ever-changing outfit, with Page as likely to strum a mandolin or a 12-string acoustic as to attack a twin-necked guitar with a violin bow before plucking another killer riff from thin air

“I made it my business to see what was out there, especially with this project. This stuff hadn’t come out on bootleg because it had been so carefully guarded,” says Page. “Because I was the producer from day one of Led Zeppelin all the way through, I had more points of reference than anyone else... The prospect of being able to do a companion disc to each of the originals, to give the fans what they wanted and more, was so attractive. On Physical Graffiti, there’s an early stage version of “In the Light”, you’ve got the structure of it, and you can hear the additional work that went into it.”

This approach is commensurate with the fact that, back in the Seventies, Led Zeppelin didn’t release singles in the UK. Indeed, by 1974, they’d assumed even greater creative control with the launch of their own label, Swan Song Records. They hit the ground running with the eponymous debut by Bad Company and Silk Torpedo by the Pretty Things but, as Page proudly recalls, “Physical Graffiti was the first piece of Led Zeppelin product on our own label, the right album for the right time. We had material that was left over from the fourth album and needed to be heard. Other people had done double albums and I was really keen to do a double showing all that we were capable of, from the sensitive guitar instrumentals through to the density of something like “In the Light” and the urgency of something like “In My Time of Dying”. Every track has its own character.”

Indeed, many consider Physical Graffiti, with its lavish, fenestrated cover and breadth of styles, the pinnacle of Led Zeppelin’s output. They would not be as carefree again. After a car crash in Rhodes in the summer of 1975, Plant was in a wheelchair when they recorded Presence. Two years later, the singer’s first-born son Karac died of a stomach infection. The making of In Through the Out Door in 1978 was overshadowed by Bonham’s struggle with alcoholism and Page’s battle with drug addiction.

And then John Bonham died in September 1980, putting an end to the last chapter of their stellar career. Page, Plant and Jones have reunited three times since, for Live Aid in 1985, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Atlantic Records in 1988, and to pay tribute to Ahmet Ertegun in 2007, but these, as well as the two albums Page and Plant made in the Nineties, have been mere postscripts.

While Plant has forged on as a solo performer and the frontman of the Sensational Space Shifters, the guitarist has struggled to find partners on his wavelength, despite collaborations with Paul Rodgers, David Coverdale and the Black Crowes. He talks wistfully about doing his own thing “towards the end of the year. Not anything you’d imagine I’d ever do. I’m warming up on the touchline. I know what’s coming next, the fans do not and it’s nice to surprise them,” he muses, as much about the reissues as about his next venture. “It’s been fun. We didn’t repeat ourselves, we went over the horizon in every direction. There are so many tangents, so many facets to the Led Zeppelin music. We were not a one-trick pony.”

Unlike many of the groups they inspired, Led Zeppelin were a versatile, ever-changing outfit, with Page as likely to strum a mandolin or a 12-string acoustic as to attack a twin-necked guitar with a violin bow before plucking another killer riff from thin air.

How does he feel about their legacy? “Some bands have done terrible things, some bands have done really good things, playing in the spirit of Led Zeppelin. You’re only passing on the baton really. What does matter is that we’ve managed to make a difference and quite clearly Led Zeppelin’s music did”.

I am surprised there are not more anniversary features around Physical Graffiti. However, as the album turns fifty on 24th February, I think there might be more activity and engagement – as that is a properly big anniversary! Before finishing off with a review from AllMusic, here is Youth’s take on perhaps the greatest double album ever. Reviewing for Classic Rock, he explored a classic that contains some of the band’s finest material (including Kashmir and In My Time of Dying):

“Why is this possibly the greatest double album ever made? Why indeed. There’s a feral mystery to it even today, that still defies description, nevertheless we like the impossible. Let’s have a go, shall we?

Custard Pie lets us know what we’re in for. A menacing and salacious riff, dripping with intoxicating dirty blues lust opens the door to a Dionysian orgy, writhing with desire, revelling in its own relentless pursuit of pleasure. The unapologetic mutant funk rhythm section of Bonzo Bonham and John Paul Jones buffalos a path through the fray. Wha-wha clavinet snakes around your hips and spins you around. It’s primitive voodoo.

Razor-sharp guitars slash and burn, shredding and mangling your sensibilities. Robert Johnson, chicken blood and smoking valve amps are all invoked and teleported into leafy Barnes’ Olympic Studio 2 (amongst other locations). Inside, it’s aural carnage.

We get the beautiful Bron-Yr-Aur next, a gorgeous acoustic jig resuscitated from earlier sessions in 1970. It’s wistful and boasts a delicate beauty again reminiscent of Celtic/Vedic correspondence: its Raga-like open tuning, obviously pioneered and influenced by Davey Graham and Bert Jansch, but given a unique reinterpretation from Page within a strong melodic structure that strengthens the overall dynamics of the album.

The remastering, by Led Zeppelin veteran John Davies, is clearly apparent on this release. Remastering is important here. Though the band’s past CD releases saw some terrible mastering crimes committed against humanity the digital package I’m reviewing from here does sound great - warm and lush - on my home system. The vinyl sounds amazing and reveals that the mastering is certainly better than ever before, with more sub and lots of clarity. It’s also reassuringly heavy to hold.

Down By The Seaside, again a little light pop flavoured digression, is a little bit Beach Boys with Doo Wop backing vocals. Although its genesis was acoustic and influenced by Neil Young, it comes over more whimsical-Faces/Stones-like: the middle eight changes gear and it kicks off with some real verve. Page excels again. This really reminds me of waiting for school to finish during the long summer of ‘75.

When I listen to Ten Years Gone now it’s still spellbinding. Our astronaut alchemists nearing the end of their quest, heroin-soaked, cocaine-addled. Lost in the desert, wheels spinning in the sand. The struggle is beating them down, you can hear the weariness in the voice and beats, the end is near. It is prophetic, as nothing the band recorded subsequently would again match these heights.

Night Flight is another rescued outtake from ‘71 that, despite out of tune guitars, swaggers along like a maliciously strutting droog. These b-side ‘throw aways’ would be other bands’ lead tracks… staggering.

The Wanton Song is another anthem to female sexual promiscuity. A killer beat, arc welded to a filthy riff. Dirty, gravelly, soulful howls are exorcised from Plant, superb reversed guitars and a bridge that reminds me of Ace’s How Long, a great Lesley rotating speaker cabinet guitar overdub and a slick-wristed, psychedelic flowerpop solo. This is Zeppelin at their solstice zenith, and maybe their most influential track, but it’s all down hill from here.

Boogie With Stu is a lighthearted jam that evokes an image of the band on a day off in a New Orleans Bordello with the Stones’ Ian Stewart woogie-ing away at a 1920’s ragtime piano. It’s quite Bolan-esque really, but where it leads us is to the incredible Black Country Woman. “Shall we roll it, Jimmy?” asks a young Eddie Kramer as they’re captured recording al fresco in Mick Jagger’s Stargroves garden in ‘72. You can hear an airplane flying overhead.“Nah, leave it,” replies Page with a nonchalant chuckle. I love the way they leave that on, like a current hipster field recording. Its intimacy is prophetic. Bonham’s four-to-the-floor kick and twisted Beefheart break smashes this otherwise ordinary acoustic, country blues stomp.

Sick Again: “Through the circus of the LA queens”. Ten long years of on the road decadence and way too much impersonal sex with teenage groupies had taken its toll. They sound tired. Although I love the way Page generally mixed Plant’s vocals down into the mix, allowing the listener to investigate and get involved with the recording, to be able to work out, or even reinvent, what the lyric is. “Teenage dreams already old at 16”. This really is the end. Though fate prophetically points her finger to the new barbarians storming the rock citadel… Punk.

This is the last track on the album. The intro riff sounds spirited, like early Damned, but then the track kicks in and is ponderous and over-produced, too many overdubs. Halfway through there’s a shot of adrenaline administered and they all pick it up, but just a bit. Punk was something not even Zeppelin could have predicted or even withstood. (Punk’s zeitgeist within a year or two would make the band suddenly look and sound old, slow and cumbersome). Despite its failings (the demo is a lot more Beatles-like and lively) the track and album does end beautifully, on a solo reversed guitar dubbed up with echo and ominously, a prophetic Pistols-like pick scrape.

Just one year later, when I was 15 in 1976, the Job Centre in Fulham sent me to 484, King Road, Chelsea for an interview as a runner at Swansong, the band’s own record label. I couldn’t believe my luck… but it didn’t last long, as I made the fatal mistake of wearing a Zep vest and declaring my fanboy credentials to the receptionist. My interview was a cursory glance and grunt from Peter Grant and I was ushered unceremoniously out the door.

Skip to 1982, I am 21, a bona fide cult hero, a rock star with hit albums and a sizeable following, standing outside the very same Kings Road door (this area of Chelsea is ironically called World’s End) in a Biblical thunder and lightning rainstorm. Way too much Sorcerer’s Apprentice LSD and excessive touring has resulted in my own meltdown. My body is producing industrial strength DMT that is coursing through my blood… I am the walrus. I had gone from Sid Vicious to Syd Barrett in one quick amphetamine-fuelled, psychedelic dystopian summer. Everything had become cosmic and heavy. Like Joseph Campbell meeting Terence McKenna in a scene from The Omen.

Tired and emotional, I made the solitary shamanic pilgrimage back to where it started. “I know what you’re up too!” I screamed at the unanswered door, “It’s all black magic!”. I shouted feebly past the marble lions outside the door, which mockingly roared silent curses into my drug-fevered, abyss-like eye sockets. Ravens cawed above and the wind howled. Luckily, Mr Grant was in a kindly sympathetic mood that day. I was recognised and Peter rang my manager, Mr Fenwick at EG Management (another exclusive boutique management agency who also represented Killing Joke, Roxy Music, Eno and King Crimson and whose offices were only just a little further up the Kings Road).

“Come and get yer boy before we break his bones”. (Must have been some bizarre pirates’ honour of rock management etiquette and courtesy that dictated they didn’t break my bones before ringing EG up). Five minutes later and Mr Fenwick’s vintage Bentley purrs up alongside and gently but firmly, like at the end of the movie Performance, where James Fox is bundled off, I’m being whisked inside.

“That was close, Youth,” exclaims Mark Fenwick with a nervous chuckle (he still manages Roger Waters). “What were you thinking…? ” Love is the law”.

I am going to wrap up soon. In a year where there are some important anniversaries for a whole range of classic and beloved albums, I had to show some respect for Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. It is a double album that suffers few of the flaws many double albums do. Few filler tracks to be found in the pack in my opinion. Some prefer earlier Led Zeppelin albums where you got more focus and a leaner album. However, I like their later work. Epic tracks that sit alongside tight and funky tracks. It is an eclectic album that has stood the test of time and remains undetected. Here is what AllMusic wrote in their review:

“Led Zeppelin returned from a nearly two-year hiatus in 1975 with the double-album Physical Graffiti, their most sprawling and ambitious work. Where Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy integrated influences on each song, the majority of the tracks on Physical Graffiti are individual stylistic workouts. The highlights are when Zeppelin incorporate influences and stretch out into new stylistic territory, most notably on the tense, Eastern-influenced "Kashmir." "Trampled Underfoot," with John Paul Jones' galloping keyboard, is their best funk-metal workout, while "Houses of the Holy" is their best attempt at pop, and "Down by the Seaside" is the closest they've come to country.

Even the heavier blues -- the 11-minute "In My Time of Dying," the tightly wound "Custard Pie," and the monstrous epic "The Rover" -- are louder and more extended and textured than their previous work. Also, all of the heavy songs are on the first record, leaving the rest of the album to explore more adventurous territory, whether it's acoustic tracks or grandiose but quiet epics like the affecting "Ten Years Gone." The second half of Physical Graffiti feels like the group is cleaning the vaults out, issuing every little scrap of music they set to tape in the past few years. That means that the album is filled with songs that aren't quite filler, but don't quite match the peaks of the album, either. Still, even these songs have their merits -- "Sick Again" is the meanest, most decadent rocker they ever recorded, and the folky acoustic rock & roll of "Boogie with Stu" and "Black Country Woman" may be tossed off, but they have a relaxed, off-hand charm that Zeppelin never matched. It takes a while to sort out all of the music on the album, but Physical Graffiti captures the whole experience of Led Zeppelin at the top of their game better than any of their other albums”.

Released on 24th February, 1975 in the United States, it is no surprise Robert Plant calls the album his favourite Led Zeppelin release. Jimmy Page considers it a high watermark for the band and recalls fondly the jamming sessions where song structures were being worked out. Throw in the drumming prowess of John Bonham and the genius of John Paul Jones and this was a band at their absolute peak! An ambitious, eclectic and hugely impressive double album from the band, it still sound exhilarating and electrifying fifty years on. That is testament to an album that…

FEW have equalled.

FEATURE: Melt: Leftfield’s Leftism at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Melt

Leftfield’s Leftism at Thirty

_________

PERHAPS not placed…

IN THIS PHOTO: Neil Barnes, left, and Paul Daley of Leftfield/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Double/Camera Press (via The Guardian)

as highly as other classic albums from 1995 by critics, Leftfield’s amazing debut, Leftism, is still a hugely important release. An iconic Dance album, it contained collaborations with artists who were not connected with Dance – a left-field decision as it were! Among those collaborators was John Lydon  and Toni Halliday from Curve. Although it is a Progressive House album, Leftism is a multi-genre masterpiece. Leftism was hailed and heralded by critics in 1995. The album was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 1995 but lost to Portishead's Dummy. Reaching number six in the U.K. upon its release and seen as a landmark Dance album in years since, Leftism still sounds fresh thirty years later. Released on 30th January, 1995, it is a classic that takes risk but ones that pay off. The album was re-released in 2017. I will get to a review for Leftism 22. I want to start off with a 2020 feature from The Quietus:

“Since their fo:rmation in 1989, Leftfield had slowly but surely set up the template for much of what was to follow on the dancefloor over the next decade. Be it their own material in the shape of ‘More Than I Know’ and ‘Not Forgotten’ – tracks that arguably moved on British house music in huge leaps and bounds – through to still stunning remixes for the likes of Stereo MCs (‘Step It Up’), React 2 Rhythm (‘Intoxication’) and Inner City (‘Hallelujah’), as well as David Bowie’s ‘Jump They Say’ among many others – Leftfield were defining the next wave of dance music. And with Leftism, they’d caused a seismic shift.

Much like Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, Leftism was a long time coming and an album heralded by a stream of landmark single releases before its eventual arrival. Though released in the opening overs of 1995, Leftism took its first indelible step three years earlier with the release of ‘Release The Pressure’. Featuring reggae singer Earl Sixteen, the 12”-only release marked a departure from the sound Leftfield had become known for. The bpms were reduced to create a more intense groove, while the bassline – certainly on the single’s ‘Rough Dub’ flip – introduced Leftfield’s burgeoning reggae infatuation.

Not that they were alone. Primal Scream had deployed dub dynamics across Screamadelica while The Sabres Of Paradise were reaching new levels of dread, echo and space on Haunted Dancehall, as were The Aloof. And of course there was The Orb, whose epic soundscapes blended those 70s hinterlands of dub, ambient washes and electronica, while soon to follow were Renegade Soundwave with The Next Chapter Of Dub. Yet for all that, none of them quite blended the mix of dub and house music to the same degree as Leftfield did.

Witness the album version of ‘Song Of Life’ for evidence. Whereas the original 12” single from 1992 leapt pretty much into the heart of the action, Leftism’s reading builds slowly and methodically with at least half of the song relying on dub dynamics to create a sense of tension screaming out for release. Here, Leftfield are more concerned about the journey than they are about the destination, but it’s an approach that reaps rich rewards.

Indeed, to listen to Leftism at a remove of a quarter of a century is to reframe the album from its original perception. Though widely regarded as the pinnacle of progressive house, the album had actually moved away from the form Leftfield had helped create. And perhaps most striking now is how the album works best when it’s banging the least. The sensual grooves of ‘Original’ feel more aligned to the sounds that were emanating from Bristol at the time. Elsewhere, ‘Melt’’s shimmering haze still evokes the moment when the sun begins to greet the dawn, as do the gentle undulations of closer ‘21st Century Poem’.

Which isn’t to deny the album’s banging credentials. Though ‘Space Shanty’ is undeniable straight-ahead fun, it pales next to the joy at the heart of ‘Afro-Left’, a heady and potent blend of African rhythms and driving beats and ‘Open Up’, featuring John Lydon – a man with serious form when comes to being in the right place at the right time – is easily a career highlight for both parties (there’s a good reason why PiL regularly include it in their live sets) But whereas the Full Vocal Mix of the original single is a full-on raver, here it takes an off-road detour into the space-dub explorations that beat at the heart of Leftism.

It’s not difficult to see why. Having revolutionised the dancefloor through a stream of infectious singles and remixes, with Leftism, Leftfield were already looking ahead. Their next area of conquest would be the live arena and that campaign would need an overhaul in sound and delivery. Along with Underworld, Orbital and The Prodigy, Leftfield were taking the party out of the clubs and into festivals. Forget the retrospective chat about Britpop in the mid-90s; it’s worth bearing in mind that the new generation of dance music held considerably more sway. The evidence is there in those Tribal Gathering line-ups and the rise of professionally organised dance events designed to circumnavigate the Criminal Justice Bill of 1994. Crucially, the proof is also there in live performances of staggering dimensions. No longer would electronic music face accusations of anonymity or a lack of personality.

Finally catching up with the live Leftfield experience during a particularly rain sodden Homelands festival at the Winchester Bowl in 2000 made up for missing them four years previously. The memory still lingers of several thousand damp ravers crammed into the Home Arena visibly taken aback when the bowel-quaking bass dropped from a colossal height. Those dub reggae influences had been tweaked, refined and ramped up to near absurd levels. But there was no denying that the effect on the gathered masses was genuinely profound. There was no way anybody was going to be standing still. And it all started with the alteration in sound and dynamics on Leftism, an album that’s far more diverse in identity and influence than was initially perceived”.

I want to bring in a review from The Student Playlist. A towering album from 1995 that has lived on and has this important legacy today, I know there will be a lot of new celebration for Leftism ahead of its thirtieth anniversary (30th January). I think I only heard the album a few years ago. Maybe the odd song connected with me in 1995, but I heard the entire album fairly recently. It definitely moved me:

“Avoiding the traps of many contemporaneous dance records of the mid-Nineties, which tended to suffer from a lack of variation and the imagined necessity for immediacy, Barnes and Daley decided to take a more subtle approach for much of their debut full-length statement, opting for explorations of texture over bursts of hedonism and novelty. If there’s a comparator or an equivalent to Leftism, it’s the try-everything experimentation of a band like The Clash circa London Calling, rather than anything in the immediate sphere of dance music. Not for nothing is Leftism’s front cover an image of a speaker cone framed by a jawbone.

There are guest vocalists on Leftism, something that would become a fixture of dance albums that sought a crossover audience (see The Chemical Brothers), but they don’t overpopulate the album and they dovetail into the needs of the music, subservient to it instead of using it as a platform for their own personalities. Singer Neil Cole, credited as ‘Djum-Djum’, delivers a rapid-fire string of vaguely African-sounding gibberish (apparently his own invented language) that serves to enhance the adrenaline rush of ‘Afro-Left’. The ribcage-shaking bass of ‘Original’, a soulful and trip-hop-influenced gem of a track that has a cinematic, worldly quality that other dance artists rarely achieved in the Nineties, is capped off with the gorgeous vocals of Curve’s Toni Halliday. The brilliance of Lydon’s contribution to the aforementioned ‘Open Up’ hardly needs to be stated, the wide-eyed malevolence of his “burn, Hollywood, burn… take down Tinseltown” incantations matching perfectly with the incendiary, skull-crushing house that Barnes and Daley conjure up.

Instead, by and large, the real core of Leftism is to be found in its instrumental deep cuts, where Barnes and Daley use huge sonic canvasses to explore emotion by way of texture. From the opening tones of first track ‘Release The Pressure’, whose notes dissolve blissfully and sound like a new dawn, the emphasis is primarily on vibes, not easy hooks or the more immediate gratification of high bpms. The hazy aura of ‘Melt’, whose vaporous horns sound the like the sonic equivalent of a mirage on the desert horizon, and the stunningly atmospheric ‘Song Of Life’, with its cavernous troughs of dub and general demeanour ofdark, druggy spookiness, are the most seductive of these.

It’s not until half an hour into the record, with the arrival of ‘Black Flute’, that the bpm is raised considerably, at least to the point where it could be considered anything like conventional ‘house’. Following the monumental epic ‘Space Shanty’, one of the undisputed high points of the decade in British dance music, Leftfield decide to lay off the onslaught and explore a rumbling hybrid of dub reggae and house with ‘Inspection (Check One)’, showing that unexpected flourishes of invention are just as impactful as keeping the tempo up. In this way, Leftfield continually play with their audience’s expectations throughout this seminal debut. They decide to end things on a low-key note, with the dignified anger of Mancunian poet Lemn Sissay set to a percussion-free, ambient piece on ‘21st Century Poem’.

The reception that greeted Leftism was little short of rapturous. Essentially, Leftism marked the point at which British dance music found a mainstream audience in its pure form. Sure, the likes of Screamadelica and Pills, Thrills And Bellyaches had been embraced by indie fans, but those albums were the works of predominantly guitar-based acts building bridges with dance culture, not the other way around. Q magazine, traditionally a pretty straight-down-the-middle rock publication, hailed it as “the first truly complete album experience to be created by house musicians and the first quintessentially British one”.  It was nominated for the 1995 Mercury Music Prize, narrowly losing out to another groundbreaking British dance record in the shape of Portishead’s Dummy. To date, it has sold well over half a million copies in the UK”.

The penultimate review I want to highlight is this one from 2017. Leftism definitely made an impression in 1995 but, in a year that sported classic albums from the likes of Oasis, Garbage, Alanis Morissette, Radiohead, Björk, PJ Harvey, Pulp and Supergrass, people do not really rank Leftfield’s debut alongside them. It is one of the first true greats of 1995 to mark its thirtieth anniversary. If you have not heard the album before then please do so:

“Leftism was, in many ways, the absolute centrepoint of the 1990s, and represented the breaking of dance culture's second wave of mainstreaming. The first had come early in the decade with the likes of LFO, Altern-8, The Orb, Orbital and The Future Sound Of London proving that '90s electronic music was an album- and festival-friendly genre. In 1994, though, Underworld's Dubnobasswithmyheadman and The Prodigy's Music For The Jilted Generation went further. Rather than being electronic or rave records that crossed over, they were crossover records in themselves, built with big, generalist festival crowds in mind. In '95, Leftism sealed the deal: even amidst the backwards-looking guitar conservationism of Britpop, it was becoming normal for dance producers to sit at the mainstream music industry's top table. It was perfect timing for Leftfield. They'd built a huge store of goodwill for themselves at the start of the decade with bona fide club smashers that, for better or worse, set the template for progressive house. Tracks like "Not Forgotten" and "More Than I Know"—and their remixes for React 2 Rhythm, Inner City, Ultra Naté, Stereo MCs—laid down that steady pile-up of simple riffs that felt like a safety net beneath the ever-accelerating mania of hardcore. Prog would eventually become grossly overblown, but until late '92 it was all good fun. Leftfield didn't go that way, thankfully: through "Release The Pressure," "Song Of Life" and "Open Up" they kept what was charming about their original sound, and added drama without locking into the lazy formula others did. Leftism, then, really was bang in the middle of everything. And if that suggests "middle of the road," well, there was that, too.

It became the default soundtrack of every student-shared house, every between-bands bit of Glastonbury, and, increasingly, every dinner party. Listening back now, it still pumps. But it's a palatable pump, with enough hooks and vocals to work as well over pasta as in a field at 4 AM. Funnily enough, the tracks that have aged best are the ones that pump least: the sensual Orb-like ripples of "Melt" and "21st Century Poem," the trip-hop lope of "Original," the endearingly ham-fisted attempt to fuse jungle and trance on "Storm 3000," and the wonderfully mature peace-and-unity cheese of "Release The Pressure." The 4/4 tracks that make up the skeleton of the album sound more dated, but they were never bleeding edge anyway. The album sounds as much like a raver's comfort blanket as it ever did. For Leftism's remixes, Leftfield have done a smart thing in keeping the album's running order, remixing the whole experience of the album as much as the individual tracks. It starts out well. Adrian Sherwood is a genius pick for "Release The Pressure," scrambling an overfamiliar song with all his dub utensils. Likewise, Peverelist and Hodge couldn't be better for "Afro-Left": they retain all the deft parts and dubwise quality but turn its predictable '90s plod into a razor-sharp groove. Adesse Versions uses a deep understanding of older dance track tonality to subvert any sense of retroism, turning "Original" into a shuffling house beauty that keeps the original's spirit entirely intact. Though other remixes in the middle section update the production techniques, they don't really advance on the festival-pleasing 4/4 or big beat predictability of the originals. Skream and Zomby, rounding off the album, haven't turned in their best work. Zomby's contribution is more subdued than, say, his recent Hyperdub album, Ultra. Skream's take on "Open Up" is a shameless crowdpleaser. The remixed album, as a coherent listen, doesn't work as Leftism does. Though there's an uncanny excitement in hearing familiar motifs in new forms, the constant shift between production styles stymies the flow. It's a fascinating experiment in rewiring something so plugged into the collective unconscious, and there are some truly brilliant bits in it. But while Leftfield managed to be all things to all people almost by default, the remix album seems to be trying a little too hard to pull off the same trick”.

I am going to end with The Line of Best Fit. They provided their take on Leftism 22. An expanded edition of a golden album from 1995, we got to see Leftism in a new light. I will be interested to see what perspective people offer when Leftism gets its round of thirtieth anniversary kudos. It will introduce the album to more people and a whole new generation:

“Dance acts transferring their ability to thrill beyond one off 12”s to the long playing format was a relatively new thing, and a trick not yet mastered by many; only Underworld’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman, Orbital’s Brown Album, The Prodigy’s Music For The Jilted Generation and Fluke’s Techno Rose of Blighty had really pulled it off at the time, though each now enjoys 'classic album' status. While many played up the rock-y angle of Underworld, the soundtrack geekery of Orbital and nu-punk of The Prodigy, Leftfield proved to be the most purist of these acts, and Dubnobass... aside, this is the album that has aged best out of those it was lumped in with at the time.

Leftfield's live performances from that era now hold the same legendary status as those of My Bloody Valentine - volume was key, and as such it's no surprise that it's on the more aggressive tracks that Leftism excels. A tune such as "Afro-Left" still sounds like a year zero for electronic music; fusing African rhythms with trance riffs and a pounding techno beat had probably never been done prior to Leftism, and it still bangs with punk vigour. The furious futurism of "Space Shanty" will still manage to make you frantically gurn against your will, while the jungle-influenced beats of "Storm 3000" still prove a thrill even after all this time. The dubby beats and chillonic intro of "Song For Life" could only come from the 90s, plus it remains a mystery that the more dancefloor ready "Cut For Life" - only released on the vinyl version originally - isn't promoted to this reissue, as it’s a real highlight of the record. The slow paced dub-hop of the Toni Halliday (Curve)-featuring "Original" remains deep and menacing, and of course there's "Open Up" featuring John Lydon, the track which brought Leftfield their commercial cross over. It remains one of the weirdest ever top 20 hits and is absolutely the best song either party has ever been involved with.

Of course there are tunes here that do date the record, but they remain relevant for showing a different, subtler side to the band beyond their bang bang, club-based material. The spatial ambience of "Melt" gives the LP a much needed moment of moody soundtrackism, a route many went down when wanting to show off a mellower side, while "Inspection One"'s big beats evoke memories of stoned late night sessions playing Wipeout 2097 on PlayStation One.

Being such a similarly important part of British dance music history, you would have expected Leftism 22 to beafforded a similarly deluxe reissue package to the one Dubnobass... received. That album’s comprehensive reissue in the form of an exhaustive four CD set is not replicated here, thus making the package much more precise; you get the album, then you get the album remixed by current artists. Of those remixes, Maafi impressively taps into the dancehall elements of "Inspection One", Adrian Sherwood does that Adrian Sherwood thing to "Release The Pressure", fans of harder dance music will find much to love with Ben Sims techno retouch of "Black Flute" (which proves to be much more maximal than his usual material), Bodyjack twists "Song of Life" into big room minimal-tech which utilises the euphoric breakdown of the original to great effect, and Skream continues his journey into tuff tech-house with his impressive jacking touch up of "Open Up".

Let’s be frank here, every single copy of Leftism that was bought at the time is totally wrecked for a multitude of reasons, so a reissue of it is very much welcome. Once re-acquainting yourself with the album, those hazy memories attached to it trickle back, while the reasons why you loved it in the first place will smack you in the face as soon as that glorious first note of "Release The Pressure" booms from the speaker. It’s a wonderful thing, and its standing as one of the best albums of the 90’s remains undiminished”.

The stunning Leftism turns thirty on 30th January. A winter treat from the duo of Neil Barnes and Paul Daley, they would follow Leftism with another phenomenal album: 1999’s Rhythm and Stealth. I think their debut is their finest release. Regarded by some as one of the first Dance albums released, it definitely inspired so many other acts. Take some time to play Leftism and let it…

OVERWHELM the senses.

FEATURE: Behind the Scenes: Kate Bush’s Road into Music Video Directing

FEATURE:

Behind the Scenes

Kate Bush’s Road into Music Video Directing

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YOU can always tell…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush and an extra during the shoot/rehearsals for the There Goes a Tenner video in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

that Kate Bush had a deep interest in music videos. For many artists, music videos are an obligation but not something they enjoy. Kate Bush seemed to enjoy music videos as much as recording music. Bush didn’t direct her first music video until Hounds of Love’s title track was released in 1986. However, she assisted videos and was very much involved in the process. That was the case from the very first video: Wuthering Heights in 1978. The choreography was devised by Robin Kovac. Bush very much putting herself full into the video. Two were actually shot. One where she wears a white dress and another in a red dress. I think the first album, where she was having more say and building that fascination is 1980’s Never for Ever. For Wow from Lionheart, maybe there was still that sense of her being directed rather than directing. Her association with Keith MacMillan (Keef) – who is ninety and still with us – was intrusive and educational, though perhaps not always happy. Whilst she adored some of his videos, especially for Army Dreamers (from Never for Ever), there perhaps was not the collaborative ease and connection she had with other directors. I am not sure of the details of their relationship. You could tell Bush was fascinated and loved the videos produced with Keef, though there was perhaps a desire to work with other directors.

Through The Dreaming, although the singles the videos were attached to were not overly-successful, I love the cinematography and look of them. Bush definitely more hands-on with videos for Sat in Your Lap, The Dreaming and even There Goes a Tenner. If the directors of those videos might have felt at time there were two directors on set and she might have been trying to take over, this was a young woman who was a born visionary, director and visual thinker. It is only natural that she wanted to know about how videos worked and the art behind them. As these were her songs, Bush would already have visual ideas and storyboards in her head. It was not her trying to muscle into the space of experienced directors. Instead, Bush wanted to be more than the product. Put her own ideas into the mix. It would see her direct solo soon enough. Paul Henry directed the videos for The Dreaming and There Goes a Tenner. The former video was not that well-received. Bush very much wanted there to be wide shots and it to look like a film rather than a typical music video. I covered this recently, but the video for There Goes a Tenner saw EMI ask Paul Henry and Kate Bush to reign it in. I had quite a big budget though the video had to be more conventional and commercial. I don’t think Bush liked this compromise and direction. Her mindset was less in a commercial direction. She and Paul Henry would part ways soon. I don’t think Kate Bush was a difficult customer. She knew that she wanted but perhaps felt that the video treatments coming in were too simple, predictable or commercial. For the video for Suspended in Gaffa, she worked with director Brian Wiseman. Maybe going more in the direction that she wanted.

It was not until the videos for Hounds of Love and after that Bush became truly satisfied as a video director. Whereas previously she was more behind the scenes where it came to the decisions, you can very much feel her presence through the video for Hounds of Love. Especially true for Cloudbusting’s video. The second single from the album, I have said before how Bush personally tracked down Donald Sutherland to appear in the video. Going back a bit, and the video for Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), directed by David Garfath, saw Bush very much pulling strings behind the scenes. Bush was a huge fan of Terry Gilliam. Perhaps having him in mind for that video, she tempted him to direct Cloudbusting, though he was not used. Bush loved Time Bandits and you can see some of that influence in the video for Cloudbusting. She also loved Monty Python, so you can understand why she was determined to have him direct her. For Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), Gillian recommended David Garfath. Bush occasionally rang Gilliam’s office in Covent Garden to wax lyrical about his work and ask him to direct. Gilliam would recommend people. Maybe he was wary of his ability and skill at that time, rather than him trying to avoid Kate Bush. Bush was very strong-willed when it came to her videos. She kept this close-knit group of collaborators. So respected and loved was Kate Bush that people would move mountains and fulfil her requests. Again, this was her music being projected onto the screen so she wanted to work with the best crew, camerapeople and directors. David Garfath observed a very nice woman who was fine taking directions and a joy to work with. She was also definitive in what she wanted. The two met up for tea a chat. A different concept for Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) was decide originally but not used. The iconic video we see now was more of a compromise and unity of Kate Bush and David Garfath. The scenes where cut-out images of Kate Bush and Michael Hervieu’s faces – Hervieu danced with Bush in the video – were placed on an army of dancers was the result of discussion between Bush and Garfath.

Even if Patrick Troughton was suggested first for Cloudbusting, you cannot imagine anyone but Donald Sutherland in that part! Sutherland was in the U.K. to work on the film, Revolution. He was unhappy on that shoot. He declined the original invite to appear in the video, so Bush arranged a dinner meet-up. He was charmed and won over by Bush! The fact that the video would be cinematic attracted him. It was not a typical, silly Pop video. Kate Bush was definitely pushing that direction. Bush and Sutherland got on famously and there was this close bond. From the two meeting at the Savoy Hotel to discuss the video, to him leaving the set, there was this love between them. Sutherland was also interested as the song was inspired by Peter Reich's 1973 memoir, A Book of Dreams. Sutherland was familiar with Reich and agreed to appear in the video for free because he was unable to get a work visa in time. One reason why I wanted to write this feature is because I was again inspired by Graeme Thomson’s book, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. How Bush was constantly being instructed and talked to by the crew. Many artists would not interact with crew. Bush was getting tips and was learning how videos came together. Not only was Bush learning – on the set of Cloudbusting – from a masterful actor, Donald Sutherland; she was being told about the shots. How to get the best results. Bush would soon direct herself. In 1985 came Hounds of Love. 1986’s The Big Sky. She would direct the videos for Experiment IV (1987) and Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time) (1991); she co-directed videos on The Sensual World and would direct for 1993’s The Red Shoes and solo-direct the 1993 film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. Even though Bush got a lot of practical assistance from people around her, it was clear she had a distinct style.

Many might scoff at the idea of Bush being a genuine ‘director’. Although she was getting assistance on her earliest videos (where she directed solo) and everything from the editing to camerawork would see men around her provide tips and help, Bush was definitely the one driving the shots. Browns, greens and purples. Heavy stylised and cinematic videos that nodded to directors like Alfred Hitchcock. Bush’s fascination with films from the Thirties and Forties – the noir and comedy capers – blends into the videos. As Graeme Thomson writes, we find “operatic grand gesture: there’s a lot of clenched fists, enveloping hugs and long stares into the mid-distance”. If self-indulgent at times, Bush was definitely a cinephile. She had a collection of films at home from classic directors. If her initial plans to make Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave into a film did not come to fruition, she was always working her way up to do something fuller and more extensive than a single video – which came to pass with The Line, the Cross and the Curve. There are great articles that explore the cinema of Kate Bush’s work. I love the period from 1980 onwards, when she was becoming more involved in her videos. I guess 1982 was the first year where she  was providing a lot of input on set. From 1985 through to 2011, Bush directed quite a few of her own videos. I did recently write about Bush being this visual auteur. I think her blossoming career as a video director is fascinating and worthy of further discussion. Bush is still directing now. Last year, she directed the animated video for Little Shrew (Snowflake). It is amazing to chart the progress from Bush being in front of the camera and being fully directed, to her offering suggestions, assisting with videos and then directing on her own (there were a couple of directing collaborations along the way). Bush using her knowledge and love of cinema and utilising it for these…

TIMELESS music videos.

FEATURE: “Is There Gas in the Car…?” Steely Dan’s Katy Lied, The Legacy of the Band and Future Donald Fagen Material

FEATURE:

 

 

“Is There Gas in the Car…?”

IN THIS PHOTO: Steely Dan's Walter Becker (L) and Donald Fagen, pictured here in 2009, ahead of a North American tour/PHOTO CREDIT: CJ Gunther for USA TODAY

Steely Dan’s Katy Lied, The Legacy of the Band and Future Donald Fagen Material

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I do like to post Steely Dan features…

as I feel it is important to keep their name alive. Not to say they are obscure, though there are still no artists out there that you can compare to Steely Dan. Or that are especially influenced by them. I always wonder why. I was re-reading Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. Written by Alex Pappademas with artwork from Joan LeMay, it is a fascinating read. I would advise any Steely Dan fan to read it! Even if you are not aware of them, it is a beautiful read that is wonderfully written. There has been a reissuance for Steely Dan in recent years. More people discussing their music. The fact there have been studio album reissues means that more people are connecting with their music. Alex Pappademas argues that people might be picking up on Steely Dan because they are realising how good a band they are. Even though one half of the core members, Walter Becker, died in 2017, there is much more love and appreciation for them now than ever. Maybe because the themes addressed in the songs seem more relevant today. The slow-motion apocalypse as Pappademas writes, together with the self-destructive escapism is very apt now. Revivalism today means that so many older acts are coming into fashion. Through memes, online discussion and the music being easier to share than it was when Steely Dan started life (the 1970s), one cannot say they are obscure. However, there have been no new documentaries or many podcasts about them. Even if they are dissolved, their catalogue remains relatively un-adapted and untouched. No animated music videos created for songs. Album reissues coming about but not a lot in the way of extras, outtakes and demos. I shall come to that in a minute.

Since 2019, there has been much more in the way of discussion and discourse around Steely Dan. However, has this translated into wider culture. Maybe it is a case of the gatekeepers refusing access, yet the lack of documentaries or any new celebration of the band is telling. Artists not covering their songs much and there not being this 2020s version of Steely Dan. I wonder what is holding artists back. I myself have been inspired to write an album, American Grammar, very much in the mould of Steely Dan. Lyrics, song ideas and concepts flow to the mind. The desire to record it at Electric Lady Studios in New York City. Having great musicians playing on these rich, cynical and Dan-esque tracks. An eye-catching and striking album cover. However, this is just a dream as I am not a musician or songwriting – though I can write lyrics and ‘hear’ the tunes. My point is that I wonder what is responsible for a lack of modern-day Steely Dan acolytes. I can’t think of anyone in modern music that ‘follows’ them. Donald Fagen, who founded the group with Walter Becker, is still making solo music. His brilliant latest studio album, Sunken Condos, came out in 2012. I know there was talk he was working on new ideas. His wife Libby Titus died last year, so that might have put any imminent album plans on the backburner. I have been musing about older artists. Donald Fagen turned seventy-seven earlier this month. I do hope there is another studio album coming soon, as I know there is a definite void and desire. Artists like Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan much more in my heart and mind than new artists. There is something about the music made by artists in their seventies and eighties that seems more affecting and powerful. Also, these legends will not be around forever. It is that desire to hang onto them!

Album reissues are a good way for an act to reach new people. In the case of Steely Dan, there is a new reissue for their 1975 album, Katy Lied. Their fourth studio album turns fifty later this year. It is one of their best releases. Out on 31st January, here is some more information:

“You can see it in their eyes, but is it really any surprise to learn that we are finally getting the much-anticipated 200g 45rpm 2LP UHQR edition of Steely Dan’s rightly acclaimed March 1975 album Katy Lied on January 31, 2025?

Once again, the fine folks at Analogue Productions do right by the SD catalog, just as they’ve done with the five previous releases in the UHQR Series for Can’t Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstasy, Pretzel Logic, Aja, and Gaucho. (Click on each title to read our reviews.)

The UHQR Katy Lied has been mastered directly from the original master tape by engineer nonpareil Bernie Grundman and has been pressed on 200g Clarity Vinyl at Quality Record Pressings (QRP). The going freight for this 2LP 45rpm edition is the expected, typical UQHR Series SRP of $150, and it can be preordered from Acoustic Sounds here, and/or from Music Direct here, and/or via the MD link graphic below ahead of the tracklisting section.

As per usual, the premium UHQR packaging for Katy Lied features tip-on, old-style, gold-foil, individually numbered, double-pocket gatefold jackets with film lamination by Stoughton Printing, as housed in a black slipcase with wooden dowel spine. The Katy Lied UHQR is limited to 20,000 numbered copies.

A companion 180g 33⅓rpm 1LP edition of Katy Lied (seen below) will be released via Geffen/UMe as well on January 31, 2025 — but that version has instead been remastered by Joe Nino-Hernes at Sterling Sound from hi-res digital files, and is being pressed at Precision. This edition goes for $29.99, and it can be preordered here. Naturally, AP will be reviewing both new versions of Katy Lied as close to the release date as possible.

Originally released on ABC and later reissued via MCA, Katy Lied is the first “post-touring” Steely Dan album following the departure of guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and drummer Jim Hodder, and it reinforces chief SD duo Walter Becker and Donald Fagen’s penchant for utilizing top-shelf studio musicians as their core recording partners.

SD’s fourth LP, Katy Lied also features the notable debuts of Michael McDonald on background vocals (“Bad sneakers and a piña colada my friend,” indeed!) and then-21-year-old Jeff Porcaro on drums for the balance of the album. Needless to say, we here at AP can’t wait to get the Katy Lied UHQR in hand to spin and spin and spin — and review for you, of course! Stay tuned. . .“

I do hope we see some further exploration of Steely Dan this year. I have not really seen recent films or T.V. shows where their music has been used. I don’t think Donald Fagen would refuse every request. A film maybe based around their music or a period film where you get a representation of Steely Dan. I don’t think we would ever get a Steely Dan biopic, though I would be intrigued to see Donald Fagen and Walter Becker represented by modern-day actors! Rather than it being exploitative, it is giving credit and respect to a band whose influence has definitely spreads. To new fans. However, in music terms, there remains that question as to why you cannot hear their influence more. I still hold hope we will get at least one more Donald Fagen album. He still tours under the Steely Dan name. I would love to see him perform live very soon. I kind of wish I was an artist so that I could bring some Steely Dan-inflected songs to life. I know the session musicians would cost a fair bit, but, when you consider the results and what would come, it would be worth it! I don’t think it is cost prohibiting artists. Maybe not seeing how effective and wonderful that sound is. The richness of the compositions. The characters they (Steely Dan) weave through their songs. A gulf in the modern day scene that definitely needs to be properly addressed. I do think there is a love for Steely Dan still burning bright. To quote The Royal Scam’s (1976) Kid Charlemagne: “Is there gas in the car…?

“YES there’s gas in the car”!

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Natalie Imbruglia at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Natalie Imbruglia at Fifty

_________

PERHAPS one of the more…

IN THIS PHOTO: Natalie Imbruglia in 1999/PHOTO CREDIT: Polly Borland

underrated artists of her generation, I wanted to celebrate and spotlight the music of Natalie Imbruglia. As she turns fifty on 4th February, this is an opportunity to compile a mixtape featuring some of her biggest songs and some deep cuts. From her debut album, 1997’s Left of the Middle, to her most recent, 2021’s Firebird, she has had this amazingly successful career. As of 2021, Imbruglia has sold more than ten million copies worldwide. She has won multiple awards, including eight ARIA Awards, two Brit Awards, one Billboard Music Award, one Silver Clef Award. She also has three Grammy nominations. Before getting to a playlist, here is some biographic detail about a wonderful and much-loved artist:

“A singer and actor with a crystalline voice and empathic persona, Natalie Imbruglia became an international star with her smash hit "Torn'' and helped set the tone for adult alternative rock for years to come. Her 1997 cover of the Ednaswap song -- as well as that year's debut album, the equally successful Left of the Middle -- had a sensibility that was somewhat left of center, but its pretty execution resonated with the mainstream. Sometimes she favored an edgier approach, as on 2001's White Lilies Island, and sometimes a more straightforward one, as on 2005's Counting Down the Days, but she continued to have hits into the mid-2000s in Europe and her native Australia. She also pursued work in film and on television, including appearing as a judge for two seasons on the Australian version of The X Factor. When she returned to music with 2015's Male, a collection of covers of songs by male singer/songwriters, and 2021's Firebird, her first collection of original material in over a decade, her commitment to making creative yet broadly appealing pop was renewed.

Born in Sydney, Australia on February 4, 1975, Natalie Imbruglia first studied dance as a teenager, but she soon turned toward acting, appearing in commercials for Coca-Cola and Twisties before she turned 16. She landed her starring role on Neighbours in 1992 and she stayed with the show until 1994, after which she relocated to London with the intention of pursuing a singing career. After recording a four-song demo at the behest of her manager that included an early version of "Torn," RCA/BMG signed Imbruglia in 1996. The label released "Torn" in November 1997 and it became an immediate hit in the U.K., peaking at two and selling over a million copies. The song soon turned into an international sensation, reaching the Top Ten throughout Europe and Australia; although it only reached 42 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S. (partially due to the lack of a CD single being released in the States), it topped the Billboard Airplay chart and stayed on that chart for weeks. Over the years, "Torn" remained a radio staple worldwide, breaking records in Australia and the U.K. in particular. The later singles "Big Mistake" reached the Top Ten in both the U.K. and Australia, while "Wishing I Was There" reached 19 and 24 in the U.K. and Australia, respectively.

Driven by the success of "Torn," Imbruglia's November 1997 full-length debut Left of the Middle was also hugely popular, topping the chart in Australia and becoming a Top 10 hit in the U.K. (where it was certified platinum) and the U.S. (where it was certified double platinum). Selling over seven million copies worldwide, it became the best-selling debut album from a female Australian singer. Imbruglia won several ARIA awards, including Best Female Artist, while "Torn" won the Single of the Year award and Left of the Middle won Best Pop Release. She also won the Brit Awards for International Newcomer and International Female Solo Artist, and earned Grammy nominations for Best New Artist, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for "Torn," and Best New Artist.

After recording a cover of INXS' "Never Tear Us Apart" with Tom Jones for his 1999 album Reload, Imbruglia returned with her second album, White Lilies Island, in November 2001. Named for the singer's home in Windsor, it featured her as a co-writer on every track and offered a slightly moodier style than Left of the Middle. Supported by the singles "That Day" (a top 20 hit in the U.K.) and "Wrong Impression" (a top 10 hit in the U.K. and the U.S.), White Lilies Island was certified gold in Australia and the U.K., it was a commercial disappointment in the U.S. Imbruglia recorded a third album for BMG in 2003 but the label chose not to release it. After she appeared in the film Johnny English, Imbruglia and BMG parted ways in 2004. She then signed with Brightside Recordings, which released Counting Down the Days in April 2005. A more traditional pop album than its predecessor, it featured production and songwriting contributions from Gary Clark, Eg White, Ben Hillier, Ash Howes, and Daniel Johns. The album topped the U.K. Albums Chart and was certified gold, while its first single, "Shiver," was a number eight hit there, becoming her biggest single in the U.K. since "Torn."

The compilation Glorious: The Singles 97-07 followed in 2007 and was another U.K. hit, debuting at number five. Imbruglia then separated from Brightside, signing with Island for the October 2009 album Come to Life. With contributions from Coldplay's Chris Martin, Brian Eno, and Daniel Johns, it was a splashy, ambitious affair but its commercial performance was poor, and Imbruglia took a break from music. In 2010, Imbruglia joined the Australian version of The X Factor as a judge; she also appeared in the U.K. version in a guest capacity. She performed in several films, including 2013's Underdogs and the following year's Among Ravens. Also in 2014, she appeared in a U.K. production of the Alan Ayckbourn play Things We Do for Love.

Imbruglia returned to music in July 2015 with Male. Her first album in six years and her first to be released in the U.S. since White Lilies Island, it was a collection of covers by male singer/songwriters that marked her first album for Sony Masterworks. The album reached number 20 in the U.K. and number 25 in Australia, and Imbruglia supported Male with tours in 2017 and 2018. During this time, she appeared on the television shows First Contact and Who Do You Think You Are?, and in 2019 she gave birth to her son. That year, she signed with her original label BMG and headed to the studio with collaborators including the Strokes' Albert Hammond, Jr. and the band's frequent producer Gus Oberg, as well as Romeo Stodart, KT Tunstall, and White. Arriving in September 2021, Firebird was an eclectic set that featured the optimistic single "Build It Better”.

To mark Natalie Imbruglia’s upcoming fiftieth birthday (on 4th February), I have compiled a selection of her great music. Let’s hope there are many more albums from her! Someone whose music I have loved since the 1990s, I was keen to pay tribute to her. This salute to Natalie Imbruglia was…

A real pleasure.

FEATURE: The Song of Solomon: Kate Bush and the Simplicity of Her Work

FEATURE:

 

 

The Song of Solomon

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during the video for And So Is Love (released as a single from 1993’s The Red Shoes)

Kate Bush and the Simplicity of Her Work

_________

THIS feature…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2011 for a promotional image for Director’s Cut/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

is going to be given over to Kate Bush’s music. More specifically, the simplicity of it. One might think that Bush’s music is layered and complicated. Granted, some albums are. She is someone who definitely puts a huge amount of effort in to make her songs stand out. Some of the albums are definitely a lot more layered than they are simple. However, there were points in her career when simplicity was required. When Bush began writing for The Red Shoes, she wanted to return to a more “rooted way of working”. Perhaps feeling that her previous couple of albums – 1989’s The Sensual World and 1985’s Hounds of Love – took too long or there was tussle in the studio, this was going to be easier. Bush went back to the piano and worked her songs over and over. If technology and the limits of the studio had been previously used to an extreme extent, this was not going to happen here. In fact, as I shall mention later, this approach was also used for 2005’s Aerial. Bush did voice her concerns that she feels her music was too complicated for people to take in. That they really had to work hard to understand it. She wanted the listening experience to be an easy one. Because of that, the dynamic and working routine for The Red Shoes would be different. As Graeme Thomson suggests in his book, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush, this was not just a commercial aspiration. Kate Bush was worried she wasn’t communicating as directly as she would have liked. This thing that she overloaded songs and stretched them. Could she do simply effectively? That was a conundrum that lay at her feet. Think about what we actually got on The Red Shoes.

If that album does lack the warmth and richness of her previously albums, the songwriting and sound is simpler than The Sensual World or Hounds of Love. Bush was seeking to have direct human connection. At a time when people around her were going through some hard times – her mother was ill and died in 1992 -, that negative energy needed to be transformed. Bush talked about the idea of being comfortable being the observed rather than the observer. At a fan convention in 1990, Bush told fans that she hoped – if things go well – that the songs she was working on for a new album would be toured. Even though that never happened, she did at least want to get out and see people. The ambition of her albums prior to The Red Shoes achieved what they needed to. Even if Bush’s aim was to be simple and direct with her music on The Red Shoes, there were there own issues. Songs that didn’t know when to stop. Why Should I Love You? overloaded and too packed. And So Is Love maybe too mainstream and stale. Perhaps accessible to listeners, was it possible for Kate Bush to keep things simple but also be remarkable?! If personal circumstances were different and life around her was happier and more settled then that experiment and ambition would have been realised more successfully. However, with personal loss and change – she broke from long-term boyfriend Del Palmer -, that was not to be. If her first five or six albums were Kate Bush displaying this girl-like innocence and wonder, The Red Shoes was this album from a woman. One trying to hang on to that innocence. However, as Bush said, when you lose your mother you are no longer a girl. I don’t think that the unhappiness round The Red Shoes led Bush to reverse her opinions.

Think about her albums since 1993. I do think Bush was genuinely tired of being in the studio too much. She could write quickly but the recording would take so long. Maybe things were not as rosy in the 1990s to allow an album that was easy for listeners to understand but also distinct. Cliches coming into her lyrics. The production sound being a little tinny and lacking soul. Graeme Thomson writes how there is a forced quality. Bush trying to achieve direct communication but everything being overstated. Not a writer who had the conversational gifts as, say, Joni Mitchell. Bush had a gift of suggesting an idea or vision that the listener then could imagine. The Red Shoes the first time she had to spell things out. However, I feel this is an album that marked a transition. The results more successfully captured for Aerial in 2005 and 50 Words for Snow in 2011. Look at those albums and one might jump to the view they are complex and a retreat to her previous mindset. When Bush spoke with John Wilson in 2005, he noted how there is a simplicity to the work. Though Bush stated that many of the compositions took so long to finish and it was frustrating, there is a directness to the music. Especially on the first disc/album, A Sea of Honey. Whether that is a paen to her son (Bertie) or the number-listing π (Pi), things were different. The writing more extraordinary and back to her best. The production sound different. Kate Bush definitely meant it when she said she wanted her music to be direct. A worry the listener was being alienated or had to work too hard to find the meaning in a song.

One can argue that Bush’s latter albums are the most successful and brilliant of her entire career. She has struck this balance. The songs sound epic and ambitious though they are not as layered or intangible as some of previous albums. It is a shame that she never toured in the 1990s, though she suffered loss so wasn’t able to do that. At a point in her career when things were getting too much. Yet I listen to an album like The Red Shoes and I can at least identify this artist trying to make her music easier to understand for those hearing it. If the results were a little mixed, that did improve. Maybe the compositions on Aerial seem quite nuanced, layered and huge. The lyrics and Bush’s performances are very much designed not to obscure or create too much mystery. With her being a mother at this point and enjoying family life, you can understand why she was less concerned with pushing things to the limit or taking songs to extremes. The same with Director’s Cut in 2011. Reworking songs from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. If she though the latter was an unsuccessful album or The Sensual World packed too much in, this was an opportunity to dismantle and rework. Several songs from Director’s Cut were new versions of older songs. The rest saw some element replaced. It was an older vocal and new take. Hounds of Love was a massive success and this masterpiece, yet you feel the labour and time invested was too much. To achieve something remarkable Bush had to sacrifice so much.

I do love how 50 Words for Snow is almost a return to the debut album, 1978’s The Kick Inside. The piano very much at the heart of things. Not to say that the piano is symbolic of simplicity of directness. Kate Bush was at a point in her career and life where her working method had shifted. In terms of the hours she was spending working and in the studio. Still able to write and record in an ambitious and unique way, she had perfected the art of knowing what a song needed. There being this combination of the simple and almost otherworldly. Things being suggested rather than forced. A looseness that came through. I don’t think that Bush was compromising anything. I discussed this recently. Bush did want to start off the 1990s and see it as a blank page. Making her work easier to understand and the listener not feeling alienated. If The Red Shoes was perhaps dogged by issues many artists faced in the 1990s – the need to cram so much into a C.D.; a production sound that was digital and sounded unnatural -, into the new century, Bush could create music that was more direct and easy to appreciate but the quality was incredibly high. Aerial being this double album. John Wilson felt there was a simplicity to the music, though. A grand album that could be instantly loved and felt because it didn’t feel forced or was not pushing to be complex and ‘show off’ maybe. Bush never deliberately did that, though she was aware that she could take things too far. This was not to be the case for albums like Aerial or 50 Words for Snow. I suspect a new studio album will also follow these rules. Because of this, her albums sound and feel all…

THE better for it.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Lonely Hearts Club Band: Alternative Valentine’s Day Songs

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels

Lonely Hearts Club Band: Alternative Valentine’s Day Songs

_________

ALTHOUGH I am not…

PHOTO CREDIT: Helena Lopes/Pexels

someone who celebrates Valentine’s Day or feel it has any worth (perhaps partly because I am single), I still do think of 14th February as a day to celebrate the traditional love song and more alternative takes. One of the most common type of song, there have been many variations and evolutions through the decades. Modern-day artists expanding songs of love and taking them in new directions. Rather than a compilation a selection of classic love songs – that can veer into syrupy and slightly cheesy -, this is a mixtape of ‘alternative’ love songs. Not necessarily all cynical or anti-romance, instead, they are ones that are not discussed in the same conversation as the all-time classics. Ahead of Valentines Day, this is a spotlighting of the less traditional and sometimes less romantically-inclined ‘love song’. Whether you embrace 14th February or tend to treat it as a normal day, it is hard to get away from Valentine’s Day. Because of that, I thought I would get into the spirit…in a less-than-traditional route anyhow! This is a Valentine’s Day mixtape that mixes bleeding and broken hearts…

 PHOTO CREDIT: ATC Comm Photo

WITH the sexy and sensual.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: When I’m Sixty-Five: The Beatles’ Hits and Deep Cuts

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

When I’m Sixty-Five: The Beatles’ Hits and Deep Cuts

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THIS year is a very special one…

when it comes to The Beatles. As the legendary band formed in 1960, I wanted to mark sixty-five years since their formation. Although they did not release their debut album Please Please Me until 1963, the band formed years previously. It is amazing but not a surprise that they are still being talked about all these years later. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr changed culture and the music world! Their legacy is almost impossible to put into words. Before I get to a playlist featuring a lot of their best-known songs and some deeper cuts, here is some background about the band’s formation and earliest years:

“The Beatles were an English four-piece rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960.

The members of the band were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, with John and Ringo playing the guitar, Paul on bass guitar and Ringo on the drums.

In March 1956, John Lennon, aged 16, and a few of his friends from school played in a skiffle band called the Quarrymen. After meeting John in the July of that year, Paul McCartney joined the band as a rhythm guitarist and invited his friend George Harrison to watch the band perform. George then auditioned to be in the band, but John thought that he was too young, however, after several months of persistence, he performed lead guitar in a performance as was enlisted as their lead guitarist.

By January 1959, John’s friends from school had left, and he began studying at Liverpool College of Art. The three guitarists, John, Paul and George, were playing under the name Johnny and the Moondogs, and playing rock and roll whenever they could find a drummer.

Stuart Sutcliffe, an art college friend of John and band member, suggested that the band name should be Beatals, as a tribute to Buddy Holly and the Crickets. They used this name until May of 1959, where they went to the Silver Beetles, the Silver Beatles and then in August, shortened to simply The Beatles.

The Early 1960s

In August 1960, their unofficial manager Allan Williams had booked a residency for the band in Hamburg, but without a full-time drummer, they had to audition for a new band member. They auditioned and hired Pete Best in the same month. Six days after hiring Pete, they left for Hamburg for a 3 and a half month residency. The Beatles played in Hamburg in several different locations, but mainly in the red-light district.

Stuart Sutcliffe decided to leave the band early, in 1961, making Paul the bassist, and they were signed into another contract in Hamburg until June 1962. After their second residency, they became increasingly popular in Liverpool with the Merseybeat movement, but they were growing tired of playing the same clubs night after night.

During one of their performances at The Cavern Club, they met Brian Epstein – a local store owner and music columnist. He became their manager in 1962, after courting them for a couple of months. Brian eventually released the band from contractual obligations in Hamburg a month early in exchange for a recording session.

In April, the band was met with horrific news: Sutcliffe had died suddenly from a brain haemorrhage.

Three months later, Brian negotiated a deal with George Martin, the owner of EMI’s Parlophone label. Their first recording session with George Martin took place on 6th June 1962, at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios. Martin immediately complained about Best’s drumming ability, and suggested a session drummer in his place. The band was already considering dismissing Best, and therefore hired Ringo Starr in August 1962. Starr left his band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, to join them”.

To celebrate sixty-five years of The Beatles, I have compiled an ultimatum mixtape. From their debut single, Love Me Do (1962), through to their last-released track, Now and Then (2023), this is a salute to the greatest band of all time! This year also marks fifty-five years since they split. In their decade of existence, there is no denying the fact that The Beatles transformed the world and left an impression no other artist can match. Sixty-five years after they formed, they are still very much being discussed and dissected. Documentaries and books very much keep them relevant and adored. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr proud of the band’s legacy and occasionally performing together. Even though they split in 1970, The Beatles will influence and find new fans…

CENTURIES from now.

FEATURE: Spotlight: jasmine.4.t

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

jasmine.4.t

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BACK in July…

as this article explained, “Manchester-based trans-singer-songwriter jasmine.4.t, also known as Jasmine Cruickshank, has inked a deal with Saddest Factory Records”. I wanted to spend time with this amazing and distinct artist. I am going to come to some interviews with her from last year. One that was published a few weeks ago. Before that, Rolling Stone UK included jasmine.4.t in their Ones to Watch 2025 feature (The Guardian also marked her as one to watch too). This is an exciting talent who will be on the scene for years:

“The story of how Manchester-based artist jasmine.4.t signed to Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory label  reads like a dream, with Bridgers’ boygenius bandmate Lucy Dacus playing her the demos to debut album You Are the Morning in her car, and Bridgers being stunned. The finished album – recorded in LA with all of boygenius – is a striking statement of community and resilience from a special new voice, and, as she told us last year, “about love and community and joy in the face of all the shit”. (WR)”.

There are some great interviews with jasmine.4.t. Not only does she discuss her then-forthcoming album, You Are the Morning (released on 17th January); she also talks about coming out as trans and life as a role model in a country (the U.K.) where the trans community are not embraced as they should be. I am going to end with a review for You Are the Morning.

I am going to move to a couple of review. Let’s start out with a very recent chat with The Forty-Five. Talking about You Are the Morning; resilience, community and music as catharsis, it is a revealing and illuminating interview with an artist who has been tipped for big things this year:

“As the first UK artist to sign to Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory label, Manchester-based jasmine.4.t is already keeping top tier company; with her imminent debut album – this month’s raw and resilient ‘You Are The Morning’ – produced not only by Phoebs but the whole of boygenius, the singer has essentially earned herself the golden ticket in the indie lottery. Documenting the years following her transition with a deft and fragile touch that’s diaristic yet generous and empathetic, however, it’s easy to see why the trio have taken Jasmine to their hearts: these are songs that show their open wounds but find solace in community and chosen family, a lesson for us all to live by.

Having recorded in LA with Phoebe, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, Jasmine talks us through the turbulent process of reaching her debut and her hopes for inspiring and showing up for the next generation of trans people.

Is writing how you’ve always processed life?

When I was in the closet, I found it so hard to write. Being true to yourself and being connected to your emotions is so important, so when you’re pretending to be a different gender and trying to bottle up everything it’s obviously just impossible. My first EP was written from 2014 onwards and was all pre-transition stuff about the relationship that was to become my [ex-]marriage and some of the troubling behaviours that were already showing in that. There’s a song on my debut EP that we renamed ‘Shoes’ and then re-recorded a version of it as ‘New Shoes’ for this record. It was a lot.

Did you want to reclaim something by reworking that track?

When Lucy suggested re-recording it, I was immediately like, ‘No, it’ll be way too painful’. But it’s a song about starting a family and wanting to do that in spite of exhaustion and being broken, so singing it in this environment with my trans-femme bandmates who came to LA from Manchester with me, I thought it could be about chosen family. When we started recording it I was finding it so painful and I couldn’t stop crying for long enough to record a full vocal take. There’s one take where I got most of the way through that we used, and at the end of it you can hear Julien and Lucy and Phoebe all coming in to hold me and comfort me.

In the album, amongst the fear and the pain there’s a real highlighting of the positive and beautiful parts of being trans too – was that a balance you were aware of maintaining?

I feel a lot of responsibility now that I have landed on my feet in this way with my life and my career; I want to be a visible trans role model in music and also to show that things get better, because they do. That’s what ‘You Are The Morning’ means – it’s about the resilience of trans people, the incredible solidarity we have and how, if we all pull together, I think we’ll be a huge part of history and bringing about a brighter future. As trans people, we’ve gone through so much that we’re kind of like antennas to all the horrible shit going on and we want to do as much as we can to change things. We’re on the frontline and that’s fucking cool to see.

PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Grubb

Sonically, the record is just as raw and, as you’ve mentioned, has the unpolished, human bits left in. How did you approach that?

We didn’t have much time! We had 14 days to record the whole album. But on top of that, I just like music that’s very honest. I’m a big fan of Elliott Smith and Iron and Wine, and Phoebe is as well, so I think we both just wanted to make something raw and something that was real and emotionally connected to ourselves. The sounds are very different to how it would have ended up if I’d have just been doing it myself; I have no idea how Julien makes those guitar sounds. We just wanted to tell an honest story because we knew it would resonate with so many people.

You’ve toured with Lucy before and spoken about becoming proper friends. Does that mean that doing the record with boygenius felt normal or was there still a bit of ‘Oh shit!’ to it all?!

I mean, I wasn’t NOT like that! There were definitely moments where I’d be like, ‘What the fuck is my life?!’ They’re just so fucking funny – as individuals but especially as a group they’re just hilarious. They’re so loudly themselves and I love them all so much. There were definitely moments when I was driving them all to the studio when I’d be like… fuck. Primarily they’re my friends but also they are Gods to me.

Does it feel like the music industry in general is starting to feel like a more inclusive place?

We need more trans role models and I think it does come at a cost – we’re a long way from trans people being able to have a nice, comfortable experience in the music industry; touring especially is fucking terrifying. Venues need to have a safe place for artists to get changed and have to ourselves; I’ve had to get changed in a toilet so many times, which feels very unsafe. And also not tokenising us – it’s so common to be the one queer artist and if it’s a trans woman, she’ll probably not be having a great night. But I think it’s amazing how much more representation we’re getting. It’s not there but it’s definitely a step in the right direction”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Grubb

There are two more interviews that I will include. The first of the two is from Rolling Stone UK. jasmine.4.t reflected on her debut L.P. and how she builds a trans-led community. An album that tells stories of triumph and resilience. If this artist is not in your life then do make sure you correct that straight away:

“They were in the car together one day and Lucy played the track,” Jasmine remembers Dacus telling her. “I got a text from Lucy saying, ‘Oh my god Phoebe’s heard the tracks and she’s gonna sign you!’” In lightning-fast time, Bridgers then gushed over her love of the songs on a Zoom call and Jasmine.4.t became the first British artist signed to Saddest Factory.

Her debut album You Are the Morning, recorded in Los Angeles with boygenius, is a candid and beautiful indie rock record about life as a trans woman, and the communities forged against systemic hate and oppression. Lead single ‘Skin on Skin’ tells the story of Jasmine’s first trans love, and she performs live with a band made up entirely of trans women.

“I’m surrounded by so many creative people, and every single queer person in my circle is creative,” she says. “Everyone is so in love with each other’s art.”

What was happening in your life when you wrote the songs that end up on the album?

My first EP came out pre-transition, and then I got really sick during COVID and transitioned while having long COVID. I left an abusive marriage and was homeless for a period after I wasn’t accepted by my family. From there, I found this incredibly community up here in Manchester. My first show up here was a fundraiser for my friend’s top surgery, and I was going to DIY release my demos, but then it all happened…

What did writing songs do for you in this period?

It’s always been therapeutic for me. If people want me to sing in front of them then I will! Since transitioning and experiencing life as a trans woman, and [because of] how much the world sucks for trans women, it made me a lot more driven to put myself out there and represent us and be vocal about how shit things are for us in terms of systemic transphobia and street violence. I have a song about that on the record. 

Tell us about recording in Los Angeles with boygenius…

Everyone had such a shared goal in mind, and we were like bouncing ideas off each other and such an exciting and creative and respectful way. It was so fun and how I want to live my life forever, in this wonderful, creative space with these incredibly, incredibly talented musicians. The record ended up very different to how I would have done it, but I love it so much for what it is. I love the record, I listened to it in my car! It’s embarrassing!

What’s the overarching story of the album?

It’s about a new beginning. I don’t mean just my transition, but it’s wishing for a peaceful future for trans women. The record’s called You Are the Morning, and the title track is about queer friendships. It’s about love and community and joy in the face of all the shit.

Is visibility the most important part of what you want to represent as an artist?

Given how many talented trans women there are, there are so few that are publicly known and visible as artists. I take that quite seriously in terms of visibility, but also trying to trying to affect change using my platform. I think visibility without protection is a trap and it puts people in danger – if people are like, ‘Oh, look at this horrible trans woman’. We don’t have political action to try and protect us and to try and fight for our rights, because they’re going to be fighting against our rights. I’m fighting for trans visibility and antifascist action”.

Although it is a very long and detailed interview, I am not including everything from The Line of Best Fit. jasmine.4.t’s words about her debut album and its creation. She also discusses the trans community that healed her to working with boygenius in L.A. It is a terrific interview. This is someone with a big future in music that is going to inspire and give strength to so many people:

“It’s in this warm and blossoming world that much of jasmine.4.t’s debut album You Are The Morning exists, bathed in a glow of candy-coloured joy and catharsis. The brainchild of Bristol-born and Manchester-based trans artist Jasmine Cruickshank, it’s an album that looks for meaning first and foremost in love – love for her friends, love for her personal journey, and for an intimacy that had once felt so far out of reach.

When the other reality of being a trans woman in our increasingly radicalised society does intrude, it creeps in softly, makes its sober point, and fades into the wallpaper of You Are The Morning’s house of rosy devotion. That’s not to say that the stakes are low. In centering her own hangups – and her tender heartbreaks, too – Cruickshank counterweighs her multilayered reveries with a dose of kitchen sink realism (one is literally called “Kitchen”) that keeps them from drifting into the ether like castles in the air.

Look for jasmine.4.t on streaming platforms and you’ll find just a handful of songs predating You Are The Morning – mostly from her 2019 EP Worn Through – but there’s a lot more out there under various guises, including whole albums that we’ll likely never hear, recorded on the cheap and sold in Bristol coffee shops on self-burned CD-Rs. Few things are ever entirely lost, though; she was bemused by meeting someone recently who had a copy of an album of Daniel Johnston covers she recorded at 16. She’s twice that age now, and finally at peace with who she’d always yearned to be.

The first time Cruickshank tried to come out as trans, she was an academic teen about to leave Bristol to take up a bachelor’s degree in maths at Oxford University. “It… didn’t go very well,” she says. “Oxford fucking sucks and is super transphobic as well. I really hated it there.” Forced to squirm reluctantly back into the closet to survive, her mental and physical health collapsed from the stress. A severe case of myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome or ME, followed and she was left with no choice but to quit and go home, where she lived in the basement of her parents’ house while working as temp staff for the NHS. 

In 2016, she co-founded a punk, folk and indie label, the still-going-strong Breakfast Records, with friends Josh Jarman and Dan Anthony of west country Americana band Langkamer, through which she released Worn Through and other music with early bands Human Bones and The Gnarwhals. She got married, too, to someone she’d met while at Oxford, but the key in her chest still sat there, burning silently away. When the pandemic hit in 2020, she was knocked flat, ending up practically bedbound with long Covid (a close relative of ME) for almost half a year. It was there, during the long hours of unhappily staring at the ceiling, that she made the decision to try and transition again.

“It went just as badly as it did the first time,” she says with a hollow laugh, shaking her head of blue and bright pink hair. “My marriage fell apart. Then I tried to move back in with parents and that went terribly. I was very traumatised by the whole experience and had really bad PTSD symptoms.”

Shellshocked and broken, she left Bristol for Manchester, where kind friends offered sofas and long talks over steaming cups of tea. It’s to those friends, and the wider trans and queer communities of Manchester and beyond, that You Are The Morning is dedicated. Even before she played her first show as jasmine.4.t, “at a fundraiser for an incredible trans guy’s top surgery,” Cruickshank had around 30 songs written and demoed, capturing all the new sensations, superheated feelings, and heart-pounding crushes of the early months of her transition.

PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Grubb

An essential part of any new moon party is to set your intentions for the coming month(s), and intentions are something that Cruickshank says she takes quite seriously. As someone who has long been involved in grassroots activism and advocacy, particularly with Trans Mutual Aid Manchester, there was a worry that people in her community might feel like she was leaving them behind as her star began to rise. “I don’t ever want to not be paying my dues to my community at home,” she explains. “So my intentions were very much about making sure that this record was made in a way that could benefit the wider trans and queer community that has supported me up to this point. And I feel like we’ve stayed true to that.”

As well as working out ways in which the record release and merch sales could support Trans Mutual Aid Manchester, You Are The Morning features the Trans Chorus of LA – the first of its kind in America – who joined the Sound City sessions for the album’s closing choral piece. Arranged by Phoenix Rousiamanis, whose composing credits include the London Philharmonic Orchestra and trans opera Songs of Descent(“mind-blowing, literally phenomenal”), it begins in the closing minute of the terrific single “Elephant”, continues through the interlude “Transition”, and concludes with the spine-tingling affirmation of “Woman”, the first song written and released as jasmine.4.t.

“We were recording in Studio B, which is what we call the Punisher studio [after Bridgers’ second album], but it wasn’t available on the day that the Chorus was coming in,” she explains. “So we recorded them in Studio A instead, which is this massive, iconic live room that Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Nirvana’s Nevermind were recorded in. Thirty trans people in that historic room together? That had never happened before, clearly. Fucking hell. What a thing to be a part of. I feel so grateful to them. To hear that space filled with solely trans voices was a really incredible moment, and I think we all felt that. I have a video where I’m filming them and then pan around to Lucy Dacus next to me, and she’s just welling up.”

In fulfilling her own potential, Cruickshank says she’s often surprised by the depth of feeling her music seems to have stirred up. “I’ve been so overwhelmed with messages and comments from trans women and other queer people expressing gratitude and I’m a bit like, ‘Why are you grateful? I’m the one who’s reaping here,’” she says. “I didn’t expect that, because I’m just starting out here, but it’s so wonderful to know that my being a visible trans woman in the music industry has meant a lot to a lot of people already. It’s wonderful to wake up to all this wholesome shit in my Instagram notifications. I do get a lot of hate as well, but it’s massively outweighed by the amount of love.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Grubb

According to statistics gathered by Trans Day of Remembrance organisers, the past 10 years have seen more than 3800 trans people worldwide reported dead, with violence and suicide the two most common causes. That’s more than one trans person every day, and the increasingly fascist-leaning anti-trans rhetoric of the political class isn’t exactly inspiring confidence in brighter days ahead. It’s no wonder that other trans women and queer people are latching onto the jasmine.4.t vision of radical softness and unbending solidarity. Of being our own lights – and each other’s – in the face of loud injustice.

When the noise of negativity gets too much for Cruickshank to bear, she’s grateful for her chosen family like Han and another close friend Yulia, who will step in during the periodic pile-ons she endures to block, report, and delete if needed, to protect her from the worst. With the album coming out shortly, her excitement is mixed with some nervousness too. “I want it to go well but I’m still a bit on edge about the hatefulness that might come my way,” she says.

“However many lovely messages you get, the evil ones do stick in your head. Especially with what’s happening in America right now, it’s a fucking high stakes situation being a trans woman. So I need to be brave. It’s so important to not back down and to be visible and be fighting for trans rights and every other fucking thing that we need to be fighting for right now. It’s a long list.” 

As well as producing, playing, and singing backing vocals, each member of boygenius gets their own star turn on the album, with “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation” being Phoebe Bridgers’ moment, and it’s perfect for her breathy, deadpan warmth. Julien Baker blesses “Tall Girl” with her soft soprano, while Lucy Dacus adds some extra oomph to the moving and brilliant “New Shoes”, which Cruickshank originally recorded pre-transition for Worn Through.

It was actually Dacus who coaxed her into revisiting the song and bringing it into the benevolent world of You Are The Morning. The only hesitation was that she had originally written the song about her ex-spouse, early on in their relationship. “Recording it again after the divorce, with my chosen family singing ‘Let’s make a family,’ was both devastating and incredibly affirming of this new and joyful road that I’m on,” she says, her voice cracking slightly with emotion. She shakes her head. “Yeah, it was a lot.”

If you follow any trans advocacy accounts on social media, you might be familiar with a quote by non-binary trans writer Kai Cheng Thom that goes “Those who have survived the unthinkable are also those who know how to create a better world – because it’s ended for us before," and I think part of the blueprint for that world lies in You Are The Morning. Through confidently expressing her unbroken self, insecurities and all, Cruickshank is remade once again into a source of light and strength for us all.

“There has been turmoil, but it’s been beautiful too,” she says, summing up. “I feel like I’ve landed on my feet and it’s really getting emotional now. I wrote these songs at the worst possible time, when everything had gone to shit and no one was accepting me for who I was, so it’s been amazing to see other trans women getting hope from my journey and from this incredibly lucky life that I’m now living.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” she adds, grimacing. “It fucking sucks being a trans woman in the fascist state of the UK, but I have my incredible chosen family around me and I’m so, so happy”.

I am going to end with this review from last year. Even though there is not a lot of online material from jasmine.4.t online – I am writing this on 11th January -, what we do have available is sensational. Personal songs with kitchen sink realism, there is also this aroma of perfume and, as The Line of Best Fit wrote “candy-coloured joy and catharsis”:

“It’s not even out until January, but I’m calling it already: this thing of beauty will be one of 2025’s finest. Based in Manchester, Jasmine Cruickshank, who writes and records as Jasmine.4.t , makes music that disarms through its intimacy and hopeful, wistful intensity.

Produced by Boygenius, it shares sonic DNA with early Perfume Genius, Boygenius’ own Lucy Dacus, and Elliott Smith. It’s bedroom pop, but even more fully-formed. Her lyrics tackle looking for love when all seems lost, celebrating her trans identity, and moving forward in a new location.

Where ‘Elephant ‘ is zesty dream pop, ‘Roan’ and ‘Skin On Skin’ ache with desire. ‘Tall Girl’ flirts with a breezy, grungy country style, and the brilliantly titled ‘Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation ‘ is a mantra to existential despair in the frozen food aisles. We’ve all been there. The title track, underpinned by swooning strings and delicate finger picking, tackles the dizzying heights of new love.

Her soft, lovely vocals are sure to bring comfort and reassurance to the cold new year. These are vignettes that feel profound, finding beauty in unexpected places . All hail a unique new talent, enveloping us in the warm embrace of her songs”.

I am new to the music of jasmine.4.t but I am already intrigued and invested. An artist that you will be hearing a lot from through 2025, do go and follow her and listen to You Are the Morning. One of the most important debut albums of this year. We have in our midst…

A stunning artist with a long future ahead.

___________

Follow jasmine.4.t

 Official:

https://www.jasmine4t.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/jasmine.4.t/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@jasmine.4.t

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2mSYfudGtQzxNYHApMjZBm?si=kOL1aNCBSNS0P-t9inbLxA

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkT3ODAxmm8

FEATURE: These Prints of Our Feet, Lead Right Up to the Sea: The Balearic and Dance Influences on Kate Bush’s Aerial

FEATURE:

 

 

These Prints of Our Feet, Lead Right Up to the Sea

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

The Balearic and Dance Influences on Kate Bush’s Aerial

_________

I am not sure how many…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

Kate Bush fans picked up a copy of Disco Pogo, where Graeme Thomson brilliantly wrote about Kate Bush’s Aerial. I want to source from that. Thomson is the author of the brilliant biography, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. He reached some points that I never thought about before. When we consider Kate Bush, of course she is this innovator. The sounds she pioneered and the incredible music she leaves us with this rich and strong legacy. What will the future hold in terms of her career and new albums? 2005’s Aerial is rightly heralded as this masterpiece. Of course, we look at the album and can hear this domestic bliss. Bush, as a fairly recent mother (her son Albert was born in 1998), and responsibility. The details of the day. The joys of being a mother are in there, so too are reflections on her own mother. Her childhood. Domestic chores sitting alongside fantasy. What many people overlook is the rapture and energy heard through the latter stages of the second disc, A Sky of Honey. A song-cycle charting a summer day, it is the ‘night’ and breaking dawn that offers new sides to Kate Bush. Her tracks have been remixed by Dance acts and her music has been sampled. However, when we listening to songs on A Sky of Honey such as Aerial and Nocturn, they do reveal something under-discussed. How there is this strange but beautiful Balearic quality! Tracks and sounds that could feature at Café del Mar. This Ibiza landmark is not one that people would associate with Kate Bush. However, even though she is unlikely to have visited herself, the sort of ecstasy and beats you hear in the final phases of A Sky of Honey connects you to that place. The kind of sounds one might hear emanating from that space. It is interesting, so I wanted to dig deeper.

In his feature for Disco Pogo, Graeme Thomson notes how it would be a stretch to call Aerial a danceable album. One that is primed for the clubs. There are so many styles and different textures to be experienced. However, there is an ambience to be discovered. Kate Bush clearly has a connection with or at least an appreciation for Hip-Hop. Huge fans like Big Boi are in her life and she definitely has listened to Hip-Hop a bit. There are even Trip-Hop beats on Joanni. That song appears on the first disc of Aerial, A Sea of Honey. One might summon images of Portishead or Massive Attack. Think about the overall sound of 1993’s The Red Shoes. Perhaps a little over-produced and not natural-sounding, Aerial does sound more immersive, expansive, fresh and natural. Because of that, when you hear the beats on Joanni, the amazing musicianship and production allows the song to connect harder. The Massive Attack associations grow stronger listening to Somewhere in Between. It is surprising that Bush has never been asked to do a guest vocal for a group like Massive Attack. You could hear her providing an epic vocal for one of their songs. If many define Kate Bush’s sounds as piano-heavy or connected to the Fairlight CMI, it is clear that each album has its own skin and sound. The blend of Trip-Hop, Dance and Balearic colours. Thomson also notes how Aerial’s climax provides this arresting and phenomenal sensation. The final twenty-five minutes or so of Aerial see Bush take us down to the beach by the sea. Perhaps the distance sound of Balearic club music from a bar. She “understands the key tenets of dance music, the upward arc, the competing tensions of build and release”. In her mid-forties, the listener finds Kate Bush “blissed-out, ecstatic, rapturous, climbing to the top of the world”.

Following calmer waters and observations of nature and the wonder of seeing the light rise and a new day blossoming, one might feel the darkness and the following dawn might appear sleepy or more reserved. However, Bush takes us from an English garden to somewhere warmer and perhaps a little more exotic. In 1996, Bush demoed Aerial’s sole single, King of the Mountain. A year later she wrote An Architect’s Dream and Sunset. Albert born in 1998. Early motherhood shaped the way she would write and the perspective she would take. Domesticity and the simple pleasures of new life and responsibility weighing heavy. Bush understood that her son came first. She wrote in short bursts but it was the realisation of the songs and the recording that would take a very long time – a frustratingly long time. Bush was leasing a relatively normal and private life and she was very grateful for that. It meant that she could focus on motherhood but also channel that new inspiration and pleasure through an album. Aerial is perhaps her most uplifting and joyful album. That is especially true when we experience the building rapture through A Sky of Honey. The blending of the natural world of home and a beach and water somewhere far away. Maybe Ibiza. Kate Bush was planning on writing a song with Peter Gabriel called Ibiza many years ago. Perhaps that place has always been on her mind. I lover the images and energy of Aerial’s title track: “All of the birds are laughing/All of the birds are laughing/Come on let's all join in/Come on let's all join in/I feel I wanna be up on the roof/I wanna be up, up on the roof/Up high, high on the roof/I feel I gotta be up on the roof/I feel I need to be up on the roof/Up, up high on the roof/High, high on the roof/In the sun”. For Aerial, things started out with the core team of Kate Bush, her husband Dan McIntosh, Del Palmer (her engineer and former partner sadly died last year) and bass player John Giblin (who died in 2023). Towards the end of 2000, other musicians were parachuted in. A lot of secrecy around the album, so it was this gradually unveiling and creation.

Musicians would be invited to play on various songs and if things didn’t work out then there was no harm. The sessions were pretty informal. A lot of chat, pizza, tea and playing with Bush’s young son. Aerial’s second album was threaded through with birdsong. Kate Bush spoke to John Wilson in 2005 and said how she liked “these things that are different languages from words”. How birds are especially fascinating. The fact that they can mark the dawn with this beautiful chorus – “They seem to be very strongly connected with light”. A Sky of Honey does not specifically keep us in a single place in the same way as The Ninth Wave does on Hounds of Love (1985). That sees a heroine adrift in the water. The songs do move us to different places in the form of dreams, imaginations and the shift of perspective from in the water to above Earth. However, A Sky of Honey has this more itinerant feel. If we start out in a garden or modest paradise at the start, by the time we get to songs like Sunset (the fifth track on A Sky of Honey). There is, as Graeme Thomson notes, this “Balearic flamenco”. Nocturn starts out an ambient and chilled-out song. “We long for something more” Bush sings. Tiring of the city, there is this desire for a different sky. Maybe a beach or a wide open space. The busyness of the city and its clutter. Bush’s voice swells and swoops. The dreamers are waking and there is this sense of rebirth or revitalisation. Nocturn is this amazingly captivating song! It is almost Trance-like. I know artists like Björk are influenced by Kate Bush. I listen to a Björk song such as Big Time Sensuality and connect it to Kate Bush. Nocturn. Maybe not as giddy and high-octane, there are similarities. The lyrics are so compelling: “Could be in a dream/Our clothes are on the beach/These prints of our feet/Lead right up to the sea”.

Kate Bush has always been interested in Hip-Hop and its innovative spirit. Likening it to contemporary poetry, Bush herself has long been interested in new technology, rhythms and unusual sounds. D.J. and producer Ranj Kaler remixed Nocturn in 2021 to emphasise its Balearic and Café del Mar connections. Tony Wadsworth, the then-CEO of EMI, and David Munns were summoned to Bush’s Theale home to listen to the completed Aerial. Wadsworth was especially blown away by how Bush, in her forties, was still ahead of everyone else. Doing something genuinely new. How she was duetting with birds! When Bush brought Aerial’s second disc to life for Before the Dawn in 2014, everything was under her control. The power and beauty of the songs being brought to life. Thomson noted how, when see performed Nocturn and Aerial, “a new tension informed the music”. Bells, birds and this rich visual tapestry. The Flamenco climax of Sunset heightened and defined by Mino Cinélu’s percussion. Graeme Thomson wrote how Aerial’s A Sky of Honey didn’t so much as chart a single day as a whole lifetime. It packs so much in! It is the Balearic tones and moods that shake and snake their way through the soil and bones of tracks like Nocturn and Aerial. This euphoria and Café del Mar-inflected fire and bliss. I never really considered it before though, when passing back through A Sky of Honey, you feel and hear this building tension and joy! Whether Kate Bush had Café del Mar in her mind when writing some of the tracks on A Sky of Honey or not, her music definitely…

TAKES you there!

FEATURE: Bonnie and Clyde in the Spotlight: Are There Plans Around Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love for 2025?

FEATURE:

 

 

Bonnie and Clyde in the Spotlight

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in an outtake from the Hounds of Love album cover shoot in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Are There Plans Around Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love for 2025?

_________

I was going to hang off…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985

writing about Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love for a bit. The album was released on 16th September, 1985. I will write about its title track, as that was released as a single on 17th February, 1986. I want to mark its thirty-ninth anniversary. The fortieth anniversary of Hounds of Love happens in September. It will be massive. Of course, I am going to write about it a lot closer to the time. There are so many angles to approach. Unlike many major artists, Kate Bush does not reissue her albums when they celebrate big anniversaries. Expanded editions, unheard songs or extras. Giving them a new lease of life and uncovering gems that were not released on the original. However, Hounds of Love has been reissued a few times. It has been remastered and the special editions have been nominated for GRAMMYs. The Boxes of Lost at Sea edition and The Baskerville Edition. Bush and her son Albert have been nominated. If Bush wins then she will get her first GRAMMY. It is amazing that a career as long and successful as her has seen this absence. Plenty of awards in the U.K. but not really in the U.S. I am interested how people approach Hounds of Love ahead of its fortieth anniversary. I guess we will know what is planned around August. Maybe Bush will speak about the album. I have speculated as to how her 1985 masterpiece could expand for the screen. I have pitched a film, The Ninth Wave, that visualises the second side to the album. Maybe a reissue of the album that has extras. Maybe Under the Ivy, the B-side for Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Will there be podcasts, documentaries or tributes to the album? Is Bush going to conduct an interview around that album?

When I woke up yesterday (11th January), I was checking out the Kate Bush News Instagram feed. There was this excitable post that seems really intriguing. There will definitely be something out around the fortieth anniversary of Hounds of Love in September. However, Kate Bush News seem to suggest something is already brewing:

“2025 is the 40th anniversary of...dammit...these dogs just won't settle down...okay...bear with us...something is happening this year...well, at least she's still smiling....stay tuned in the months to come...we have a lot to unpack. Aaargh...now they're eating the purple tulle...where's the other dragon earring?.....ooof...break time!! Lets just exhaust them, take them for another walk...we'll try again in 20 minutes....no, Kate, it'll be fine...we're almost there....no, really...who are we kidding, this'll never work.....”.

People have speculated whether there will yet another reissue of Hounds of Love. I suppose we have had a few versions or attempts to get the album into the hands of new listeners. Might Bush actually open the archives and give us some demos or unreleased tracks?! there will be an exclusive interview with Kate Bush? Unfortunately, it is unlikely there will be a documentary or film around The Ninth Wave. Or the album itself. Perhaps BBC Radio 4 might commission something. It is all up in the air at the moment. Kate Bush News clearly have something planned or they have access to news. I don’t think they are using Hounds of Love to suggest Bush is releasing new music soon. It would seem inconsequential or weird. Their post must be related to Hounds of Love. Something special is happening.

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A post shared by katebushnews.com (@katebushnews)

I do think we will get an announcement later in the year that Kate Bush is releasing her long-awaited eleventh studio album. I would be surprised if we went through 2025 without new music. However, there is this massive album that has a big anniversary approaching. I want to do something to mark it too. However, Kate Bush News are excited! They want to tell us what is coming but have to be secretive at the moment! However, what can it be?! We will have to wait, though I am not sure whether they would have early access to a reissue of the album with demos, unreleased tracks or anything like that. I cannot see Bush wanting anything from the archives out into the world. She has done a lot of reissuing and retrospection so would she go down that path? Even so, she loves Hounds of Love so you cannot rule it out. I look at the iconic cover – shot by her brother John, featuring her dogs, Bonnie and Clyde – and I know fans would pay anything to get some gems. More around this iconic album. Perhaps there is a bigger project happening. A live event. I have thought that it would be good to see the entirety of Hounds of Love performed. She did perform most of the album for Before the Dawn in 2014. Maybe anniversary live dates. Bush has not dismissed the option of more live work in the future. A live show where people are chatting about Hounds of Love and there is are special guests coming together. This year is going to be an exciting one regarding all things Kate Bush, I can feel! Fans are already getting excited about what might come. In the coming months we will get clarity regarding this cryptic post. I for one cannot wait to see…

WHAT emerges.

FEATURE: Good Morning Good Morning: Reacting to Changes in the BBC Radio 6 Music Schedule

FEATURE:

 

 

Good Morning Good Morning

IN THIS PHOTO: Lauren Laverne/PHOTO CREDIT: BBC

Reacting to Changes in the BBC Radio 6 Music Schedule

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A big change is happening…

IN THIS PHOTO: Lauren Laverne with Nick Grimshaw/PHOTO CREDIT: BBC

on one of the nation’s best-loved radio stations: BBC Radio 6 Music. Since it first came to air in 2002, this station has always been the home of the best music. Maybe it was a bit Rock/Alternative-learning in the early years. In recent years, the station has evolved in terms of its musical spectrum. I find it is particularly fantastic when it comes to spotlighting the most original and interesting new artists. They do themed days. Yesterday (10th January) it was an all-‘90s day. Celebrating music from the decade. They have a great blend of presenters, many who have been there for years. It shows that the broadcasters love being at the station. We get used to the schedule being a certain way and it can be a shock or strange if things change. Until fairly recently, the breakfast show was presented by Lauren Laverne. She was then followed by Mary Anne Hobbs at 10:30. It is a dynamic partnership and bedrock of the morning schedule. It was a huge blow when Laverne was diagnosed with cancer last year. She understandably had to step back. Various presenters have covered for her. Most regularly and recently Nick Grimshaw. An experienced broadcaster and podcaster, he had some big shoes to fill but has done a fantastic job. Naturally slotting into the schedule, he has been rewarded by being named the new breakfast show host. Lauren Laverne is taking over the 10:30 slot. Mary Anne Hobbs is taking a sabbatical and will be back with a new show in the spring. It is an amazing that Lauren Laverne is back. No more early wake-up alarms. A new slot that she will add her stamp on, her breakfast show listeners will follow her. Nick Grimshaw will do fantastically on breakfast. It will be interesting to see what Mary Anne Hobbs does.

PHOTO CREDIT: BBC

The Guardian reacted to the news of a line-up shift and switch at BBC Radio 6 Music. Welcoming in a new face but also this exciting slot for Lauren Laverne. A big and happy return for one of its longest-standing and most adored voices. I cannot wait to hear the two of them side by side in the schedule:

“BBC presenter Lauren Laverne has announced that she will be stepping down as host of Radio 6 Music’s breakfast show. After six years of helming the morning show, she will be returning to her previous mid-morning slot.

She has not been presenting the show since August when she announced that she was undergoing treatment for a cancer diagnosis.

“As listeners will know, I had a really tough 2024 and worried at times that I wouldn’t be able to return to the station I love so much,” said Laverne. “It has been a huge honour – and so much fun – to host the breakfast show for six wonderful years, but it is time to pass the baton on, and to set my alarm a little later.”

“During my recovery I learned all over again about the power of music, the people you surround yourself with and the emotional support and joy radio can provide. I’m so grateful to be able to get back to doing what I love and sharing those things with our brilliant listeners every day.”

Laverne’s new weekday show will feature her regular features Desert Island Disco and People’s Playlist, as well as live sessions. Mary Anne Hobbs will be taking a sabbatical and will return to 6 Music later in the spring with a new show.

The new host of the 6 Music breakfast show will be Nick Grimshaw, who has been presenting in Laverne’s absence. “I’ve had the greatest four months covering for Lauren,” said Grimshaw. “6 Music is a precious place, a station I love. I’m honestly honoured to be asked to work there and can’t wait to continue supplying the best new music from the world’s most interesting artists.”

The changes will take place in February, with Nemone hosting the breakfast show from 13 January. Laverne’s return to 6 Music follows her receiving the all clear after treatment, having announced in November that she would be “back to work” soon”.

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After a scary moment last year when Lauren Laverne revealed her cancer diagnosis and we did not know whether you she would be back on the station, I can understand why she has stepped down from breakfast. After a gruelling past few months or so, she does need to readjust. This new morning slot will be perfect for her. Even though she has to say goodbye to her production team, she also knows that this is a big opportunity. Getting the all-clear from cancer – though she is obviously still not quite 100% yet -, Laverne will be welcomed back with open arms! This is what she said in an Instagram post from Thursday:

“Popped up on air @bbc6music with this handsome Dan today to announce that @nicholasgrimshaw will be the new 6Music breakfast show host, I will be moving to mid mornings and the wonderful @maryannehobbs_ will start a new show later this spring. These transitions are always more emotional than you’d imagine they might be, and for me that is very much about the incredible team in pic 2 - who made it such a joy to host the breakfast show every day for the past six years. It’s been a time of momentous change for me personally and we all went through a pandemic, during which we were on air for 4h every weekday. I can honestly say that no matter what life was throwing at us, it was truly a pleasure to go to work every single day. I always looked forward to seeing these faces, sharing brilliant music and hearing what our listeners had to say, and I will miss our team so much. I hope we made your mornings brighter and set you up for the day and I know Nick will continue doing that. As for mid mornings, I can’t wait to get started. Thank you for all the kind messages of encouragement and support today, and for listening to our station. We’re all so lucky and proud to be part of it”.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Mary Anne Hobbs/PHOTO CREDIT: Darren Skene

Although it has been a changing and often bleak time for Lauren Laverne, she has come out of the other end. After briefly returning to BBC Radio 6 Music to speak with Nick Grimshaw on Thursday (8th January), we got the news that Grimshaw is taking over the breakfast show and Laverne will follow him. Mary Anne Hobbs will be away for a while but will return with a new show. A hugely important radio station has undergone changes through the years. Some of them have been welcomed but a few of them have not. This line-up change has been met with largely positive reception. Nick Grimshaw has been greeted fondly by listeners and has been doing a fantastic job! Everyone is relieved and happy Lauren Laverne is back and will present the show previously hosted by Mary Anne Hobbs. Though she joked she would not miss the very early wake-ups, it is for the better. After her cancer diagnosis and treatment, she at least will be able to have a more normal sleep pattern. I am going to be really interested seeing how the shoes unfold and sound. Nick Grimshaw bringing his own dynamic to breakfast. How Lauren Laverne takes to a timeslot that she used to host. It will not be a shock for her but nor will it be a repeat of what she did before. A new chapter for BBC Radio 6 Music, whether you are a new convert or have been a listener for years, this is a positive step. A new voice on the station and perhaps a more suitable timeslot for one of its very best. Details are scares regarding Mary Anne Hobbs’s new show, though you know it is going to be amazing! I am looking forward to hearing Nick Grimshaw and Lauren Laverne stand alongside one another. A slightly new schedule that seems beneficial to all affected, BBC Radio 6 Music has seems to be going from…

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STRENGTH to strength.

FEATURE: Mrs Bartolozzi and the Moments of Pleasure: Kate Bush and the Work-Life Balance

FEATURE:

 

 

Mrs Bartolozzi and the Moments of Pleasure

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980

Kate Bush and the Work-Life Balance

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I have sort of touched…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

on this in other features. Kate Bush and that allusive work-life balance. Bush’s albums are characterised by long hours in the studio and barely any time free. Many might feel that she is all work and there was never any time for stepping away from the studio. I want to look at this in a bit more detail. Productivity has never been an issue with Kate Bush. She writes very quickly but the recording takes a long time. The words are two-dimensional and, although Bush does revise words and puts thought into it, the process of finalising lyrics is not as rigorous and layers as the sound and production. For 2011’s 50 Words for Snow, Bush completed two long pieces within a couple of days. Including Lake Tahoe. It was the power of water and the relationship she had with that. Water a common theme in Bush’s work. Where the hours start to climb is when you consider Bush realising her images in the studio. So vivid and cinematic is her music that it calls for a production sound that does justice to that. There is a definite shift from her perfectionist tendency – though she claims not to be a perfectionist – and a looser way of working. Especially on albums like The Dreaming and Hounds of Love, Kate Bush was making sure every song was as good as it could be. This often meant multiple takes or a lot of time in the studio. A couple of mistakes were left in 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. A wrong chord at the start of Among Angels was left in. Near the end of an eleven-minute take for Lake Tahoe, Bush’s fingers slipped from the (piano) keys and there was this moment of silence. As Graeme Thomson notes in his book, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush, this was because of embracing the mood and feel of the track. Making it sound more natural or fitting of the lyrics perhaps.

There were contrasts between Kate Bush in the 2010s and the 1980s. The latter period would have been about craft and precision. Not as free-forming or relaxed. Not that this was a bad thing. She worked at several studios for 1982’s The Dreaming. Hounds of Love, released in 1985, was quite a tough recording period. Not unhappy but just ambitious. Tracks like The Big Sky problematic and hard to crack. When producing Never for Ever (1980), there would be multiple musicians brought in and work would go through to the small hours. As a relatively new producer, Bush was throwing herself into things. When it came to an album such as 50 Words for Snow, it was more about office hours. A Monday-Friday routine and computer time in the evenings. Bush was and is a mother so her priorities shifted. She did not have to jump on the first ideas that came along. Her working method and headspace was different. However, I still think about that earlier period when she was working insane hours. If later albums have seen Bush’s free time dedicated to her son, Albert, and time with family watching films and relaxing, I think about how much Bush allowed herself to unwind in the 1980s and that recording era. She did spend a lot of 1983 gardening, being with her boyfriend (Del Palmer) and family. Going to films and putting work aside. Bush has been moving away from Pop music. Perhaps it was the constraints of the genre and the demands of commercial allure that means now Bush is not so beholden to chart positions and radio play. Her music has evolved and moved to the boundaries. Not that she puts less effort in. However, it is clear that there is a better work-life balance. Thinking about 1980-1989 (when she released The Sensual World). Kate Bush has said how she does not consider herself to be interesting. Maybe leading a boring life. Like many of her Pop contemporaries, Bush’s free time was not spent at parties or courting the spotlight

When Tracey Thorn wrote for The Spectator in 2014 are shared her thoughts on Kate Bush’s residency, Before the Dawn: “Kate Bush may have been semi-absent from our lives all these years, but it looks to me like she has been fully present in her own. And though we all fret about our work/life balance, in truth, it takes a lot of life to make work this good”. In retrospect, Bush might look at everything she has done and see it as essential and unavoidable. I wonder if there are any regrets over some of the albums in terms of how much time she put into the work. How her life could have turned out if there had been more of a balance. It was not as though Bush was in the studio constantly and only had time for sleep. She lived a normal life, though it is clear that from 1980 and even through to 1993, there was this real commitment to her work. Sometimes at the expense of her spare time and health. I have mentioned how Bush gardened or spent time with family. She had this small social circle and was busy travelling for work to have too many holidays abroad. As explained, 2011’s 50 Words for Snow was a shift in terms of how she approached songwriting and recording. A young son affecting how much time she spent working. Maybe the same with 2005’s Aerial. There needed to be a reset after 1993’s The Red Shoes; how hard Bush was pushing herself. However, consider the legacy of her work and how her albums are being discussed decades later. Maybe Kate Bush regrets some lost time and things she could have done differently. However, I am curious about the 1980s particularly. Whether her schedule and workload impacted her life in a positive or negative manner.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush whilst filming The Line, the Cross and the Curve in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

In a positive sense, the albums sound phenomenal and Bush established herself as a remarkable producer and singular talent. Also, this music is influencing people all these years later. On the negative side, could we blame the record label, the demands of the industry or a certain drive in Kate Bush to make her music that much more extraordinary and distinct? Bush’s life now is amazing and she has a loving family. I do wonder about her in the 1980s and whether she was allowed enough time to rest and break away. When her mother died in 1992, she was recording an album and maybe could not grieve properly. In terms of seeing the world more, spending more time on other projects or just enjoying the simple things in life, there is this sense a lot was missed and passed over. I do think there is a lot in that, under EMI, there were expectations. Maybe Kate Bush proving herself and knowing how much work she had to put in to achieve an album sufficiently different and better to the last. When she set up Fish People and was not beholden to the usual demands of a label, things definitely changed. Also, I guess you could apply Bush’s work-life balance to that of modern artists. Between touring, promoting and working, artists’ mental health and wellbeing suffers. Something else Tracey Thorn said. This time in 2015 when speaking to Jude Rogers for The Guardian: “Kate Bush seems to me like someone who has hit upon a work-life balance that works brilliantly for her. She’s had a family life where she clearly adores her child, and she’s carried on making music – she’s never stopped as far as I know. OK, she didn’t play live for 35 years, but big deal! There is a tendency to think of women artists as being a bit weird and witchy, unpredictable and mysterious. It’s daft”. It made me think about media perception and their attitudes towards women.

Whether part of Bush’s efforts and studio time was because of the way a lot of the media treated her early in her career. Maybe feeling watched and tabloid-fodder if she went out more. To plays, on holiday or parties. Getting to that position where Kate Bush had a family and this wonderful life and could also make music. But on her own terms. One cannot feel too hard about the 1980s and 1990s. It all led to where she is now. I do have this sadness or anxiety. Worrying about Kate Bush and whether her work-life balance was dictated as much by the media, label or her, as a woman, thinking she had to prove herself or do more than her male counterparts to be respected. Bush might say that she has no regrets and that is the sort of effort that she had to put in. That there were small sacrifices. I can respect that. I am really glad of how things have worked out. “Just being alive/It can really hurt/And these moments given/Are a gift from time/Just let us try/To give these moments back/To those we love/To those who will survive”. Those lyrics from 1989’s The Sensual World seemed to be about Bush dealing with loss and things slipping away. “I think about us lying/Lying on a beach somewhere”. That need for a normal life, time away from pressures - or merely a fantasy. At the end of a hectic decade, Bush revealing some torment or sadness. However, we cannot speculate. What happened behind closed doors. How much time Bush was free to socialise or merely detach from the studio and work. Whilst it took a long time to finally happen, it is clear that, for Kate Bush, a work-life balance was…

A hard balance to strike.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Winter Warmers and Chilled Vibes

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The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Stephen Leonardi/Pexels

Winter Warmers and Chilled Vibes

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IT is the time of year…

PHOTO CREDIT: Thought Catalog/Pexels

when we are leaving behind Christmas and the start of the year. It is cold and wet and people want the weather to warm up. In addition, there is quite a lot of stress around. Frustrated by the weather or finances or setting personal goals, January is not the nicest month. Although there are warmer and more relaxed days ahead, it is a point of the year when people are struggling to get into the mood. Because of that, I have put together a playlist that blends winter warmers and chilled vibes. Songs that warm the blood and some relaxing chill-out tunes that help with the stress. A warming and stress-easing concoction that hopefully will help lift the mood, it is designed to lift January blues and any stresses of the new year. If you are in need of some remedy, then I hope the mixtape here puts you in a…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Riccardo/Pexels

BETTER frame of mind.

FEATURE: Emerald and Gold: Kate Bush in the Motherland

FEATURE:

 

 

Emerald and Gold

Kate Bush in the Motherland

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I have written about…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

Kate Bush and her connection to Ireland. Her late mother Hannah was Irish and they had family there. In terms of musical and personal influence, Ireland was key right through her career. It became more obvious in her music on albums like The Dreaming (1982), Hounds of Love (1985) and The Sensual l World (1989). When she was in her mid-twenties and early-thirties, Bush drawing more from her ancestral home. People naturally assume Bush is this quintessential English artist. Though England has been key to her and made its way too into the music, we can’t overlook the importance of Ireland. Rather than return to the same topics I covered before, I wanted to explore something different. It is clear that certain albums demanded Bush worked rigorously at various studios. That was especially true of The Dreaming. This was a time when Bush was producing solo and really wanted to throw everything into the album. I see 1981 as an especially frantic and packed year in terms of hours logged in the studio. Not only ensuring her performances and that of her musicians were up to scratch, Bush was considering how her production would sound. Adding layers and new sounds to the mix. Maybe finding it hard to reign things in, one of the biggest advantages was that Bush had a connection to Ireland. Having visited as a child and been there a fair few times, she knew it offered this sense of comfort and peace. Also, in terms of the musicians she could work with there, it would change things. Although there are Irish sounds on Night of the Swallow (Liam O'Flynn – penny whistle and uilleann pipes; Seán Keane – fiddle; Dónal Lunny – bouzouki), it wasn’t until Hounds of Love where Bush found time to get to Ireland. I will come to the Irish sessions and the artists she worked with there. However, Bush also managed to spend some time unwinding. The first time she had been able to visit and spend quality time in Ireland since she was a girl.

People do not realise how important Ireland was in terms of Hounds of Love. The inspiration it provided and how vital it was for Bush to get her head clear and find some perspective. A good majority of the lyrics for Hounds of Love were completed in Ireland. Bush would use Ireland again for 1989’s The Sensual World. The title track is a classic example. Based around James Joyce’s Ulysess and the soliloquy from Molly Bloom, the motherland was never far from her heart. For Hounds of Love, she embraced the natural sounds and geography of the country to open her mind and colour her songs. Jig of Life boasts John Shehan’s fiddles; Liam O’Flynn’s uilleann pipes and Donal Lunny’s bodhrán beats. I love reading any article connecting Bush to Ireland. I will drop in one example soon. The whistle parts from Sheehan on And Dream of Sheep is especially affecting. Although Bush had family in Ireland and it was very much a second home, there was some resistance and reluctance from some at Windmill Lane Studios. Situated in Dublin, it was a space that would see laid down some of Hounds of Love’s finest moments. Maybe national wariness, the thought of an English pop star coming over was met with some frostiness. However, soon enough, Bush was welcomed with open arms and was taken to heart! Bush felt that familiar connection. Like she was meant to be there. An inspired decision to record in Ireland. The calmer setting and the stunning landscape meant Bush’s creative mind was freed in a way that it was not in London. She nodded to Ireland for The Sensual World. Touches to be found on The Red Shoes.

Not to suggest Hounds of Love is a relaxed and sunny album. Like The Dreaming, there are moments of fear and tension. If The Dreaming’s seemed more to be claustrophobia and anxiety from the point of characters’ perspectives – expect Get Out of My House, which seemed to be personal -, Hounds of Love seemed more personal to Bush. Some of her fears coming to the surface. However, there is never a sense of the music weighing on top of you. Of it being a hard listen. It is powerful and beautiful. After returning from Ireland, most of 1984 was dedicated to overdubs and technology. As Tom Doyle writes in his book, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush, Bush’s working methods were cemented and centred around technology. Perhaps that experience in Ireland and the free and often ecstatic spirit was a holiday. It was back to business when she came back to East Wickham Farm. This amazing programme from last year, Give Kate Bush Back to the Irish explores her songs and how Ireland is evident commonly and effectively. I want to bring in a bit of a 2014 article from the Irish Independent. It writes how Bush is proud of her Irish roots:

“A quiet and stable family life is important to Kate. Bush is married to guitarist Danny McIntosh, whom she met in 1992 while recording her seventh album, The Red Shoes. She told me that her mother was a massive source of inspiration to her, especially when she collaborated with legendary Irish traditional musician Dónal Lunny on a version of 'Mná na hÉireann'.

"Although she'd already passed away, I really felt that she was there helping me get it right," Bush said. "I loved singing it and I hope I did an okay job, because I never spoke or sung in Irish before."

"I'm incredibly proud of being half-Irish. I really wanted to get that Irish blood in me to come through, so I worked very hard on it."

Dónal Lunny confirms that Kate poured her heart and soul into the recording sessions. "She never told me that about her late Mother, but it clearly meant an awful lot to her," Lunny says.

"It was a joy to be in the studio with her. Kate is a very vivacious, happy and positive person. She is great fun to be around. I'm absolutely delighted that she is back playing concerts."

Bush performed on The Late Late Show in 1978. When she was briefly interviewed by Uncle Gaybo, a very shy Kate refused to reveal her mother's maiden name, claiming that her family would prefer anonymity as they were receiving a lot of unwelcome attention in the UK due to her increasing fame.

Despite her heritage and numerous collaborations with traditional musicians, this remains her only performance on Irish soil”.

The Sensual World also saw Bush record once more at Windmill Lane Studios, with Bill Whelan conducting the sessions there (he also conducted the Irish sessions for Hounds of Love). With Davy Spillane, John Shehan and Dónal Lunny  adding their magic to The Sensual World, Never Be Mine and The Fog, Bush knew how powerful it was reconnecting with these musicians. A chance also to give her heart to Ireland. Obviously, these wonderful musicians were a big reason why Bush travelled over there. She could also find great connection with the land and people. The friendliness and generosity of them. Though she got this in England, there was something different in Ireland! The views around her so much more evocative than back in England. I often felt most of Hounds of Love was written at East Wickham Farm. Though it was actually Ireland. I didn’t know there was this uncredited part of her most popular album! How crucial Ireland was. Not only for the studio and players. It is clear that the country dug into her soul and unlocked her best work. She was able to write and create in a new way. The same with The Sensual World, though not quite as extensively. I think Bush had a natural curiosity about Ireland because of her mother. Hannah Bush was born in 1918 in County Waterford. At such a terrible time, in a quite rural setting, it must have been strange for her. Born Hannah Daly, she grew up at a farm outside Dungarvan and was from a deeply musical family. Kate Bush taken to Ireland as a child by her family. Seeds planted and this history being written. I am going to end things there. This emerald island producing gold! A wonderful nation filled with wonderful people. We need to discuss Ireland more when we look at albums like Hounds of Love and The Sensual World. This verdant, incredible and spiritual motherland…

STANDS for comfort.