FEATURE: Another Kylie Christmas: Why New Festive Music from the Pop Icon Is Such a Gift

FEATURE:

 

 

Another Kylie Christmas

Why New Festive Music from the Pop Icon Is Such a Gift

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THIS year has and will see…

modern artists release Christmas music. It is a bit of a risk in terms of commercial success. It is a seasonal thing and many people do not like Christmas music. It can be hard to compete the classics and, with so narrow a focus and potential in terms of themes and lyrics, it can be a challenge. I raised this in another feature. One artist who has put out a fair deal of Christmas material is Kylie Minogue. In 2010, Let It Snow and Santa Baby came out. Kylie Christmas arrived in 2015. The following year, it was reissued as the Snow Queen Edition. Minogue co-wrote a few of the tracks, including Cried Out Christmas and Christmas Isn't Christmas 'Til You Get Here. Even though that album received some mixed reviews, I love what Kylie Minogue did with originals and some well-known Christmas songs. Her take on Winter Wonderland and Santa Baby are especially standout. I think people will always be a bit down on artists doing Christmas albums. As we have heard these standards and classics reworked time and time again. Kylie Minogue will also appear at the Capital FM’s Jingle Bell Ball 2025 on 6th and 7th December. Oddly, I do think there is something quintessentially Christmas about Kylie Minogue. Something in her voice that she can breath new life into older Christmas songs. It has been a bit of a gap since she has graced us with Christmas music. What she delivered in 2015 and 2016 was a real gift for fans - I shall keep thew Christmas puns and wordplay to a minimum! –, and I feel like Kylie Christmas should have got warmer reviews and something less Scrooge-like from critics! Maybe that sense of familiarity with the songs. However, as mentioned, some of the original works are really interesting - and they reignite that discussion about modern Christmas.

This takes us a recent development. An Amazon Music exclusive came out in the form of XMAS. “The track will be available digitally exclusively from Amazon Music as well as on CD, 7 inch gold vinyl, and 12 inch zoetrope vinyl – available to pre-order at Amazon and via Kylie’s official store“. It is the lead single from the Fully Wrapped reissue of Kylie Christmas. Marking a decade of that incredible album, we get this best of with some new tracks. You can tell how much Minogue genuinely loves Christmas! As I said, there is something Christmas-like about Kylie Minogue. She is bringing us some modern-day Xmas cheer. Official Charts reveal how Kylie Minogue is going to be entering the race for Christmas number one this year:

“Kylie Minogue enters the race for 2025's Official Christmas Number 1 single with brand-new tune XMAS, an Amazon Music Original.

The track (pronounced X-M-A-S, btw) is available to stream now exclusively on Amazon Music, and is also available to pre-order on CD, 7-inch gold vinyl and 12-inch zoetrope vinyl via Amazon and Kylie's official online store.

Kylie joins the likes of Ellie Goulding, Katy Perry, Sam Ryder and Tom Grennan as the latest artist to lend their voice to Amazon Music's festive Originals series, which have proven a force to be reckoned with in the iconic Christmas Number 1 race in recent years.

In 2023, Sam Ryder's Amazon Music Original You're Christmas To Me was just pipped to the post in a festive chart battle against WHAM!'s Last Christmas, landing at Number 2. Last year, Tom Grennan threw his hat in the ring with It Can't Be Christmas, which made Number 4 on the Official Christmas Singles Chart, before peaking at Number 3 a week later.

Could Kylie take XMAS all the way this year?

This comes alongside the announcement of a 'Fully Wrapped' reissue of Kylie's Kylie Christmas album, 10 years after its original 2015 release.

The record includes four brand-new tracks - Hot In December, This Time Of Year, Office Party and XMAS - and will be released on December 5.

Kylie posted: "I can’t wait to share this album with you, featuring four new songs and a little extra sparkle”.

Fully Wrapped is going to be really interesting. I think that it is not only reserved for Minogue fans. Her Lovers. This will follow from last year’s TENSION II. Minogue in a period of retrospection and reimagining. TENSION II, a companion piece to 2023’s incredible TENSION. Now, with Fully Wrapped, we get this companion piece or revisit to Kylie Christmas. It makes me think Minogue is clearing the way for new music. How she might grace us with another album maybe next year or in 2027. The Australian icon has definitely been busy the past couple of years. I hope that she gets top rest at home in Australia and there is time for some decompression and getting together with family. XMAS is a nice stocking filler. Actually, it is more than that! We have this amazing new song that will join new songs for the Fully Wrapped release. I am especially intrigued to hear what Hot In December is about. Maybe a racy and saucy Christmas song, we will get these contemporary Christmas takes alongside some classics. It is hard to get the balance right. If you attempt a new Christmas song, people will sniff at it and say it cannot compete with the greats. If you try and cover the classics, then people say that it is not a patch on the original. You can’t win, really! I said in a recent feature whether there is much purpose to releasing Christmas music now. It is reserved for a certain time of year and new Christmas songs now might not be played next year. There is a shorter shelf life compared to album tracks. I think Kylie Minogue is one of those exceptions. Artists that you associate with Christmas and always seem to bring something distinct. Even when she is adding her own stamp to some festive gems of the past. XMAS is a tantalising insight into the forthcoming reissue of Kylie Christmas. A present that fans around the world are…

KEEN to unwrap.

FEATURE: The Best Albums of 2025: Dave - The Boy Who Played the Harp

FEATURE:

 

 

The Best Albums of 2025

Dave - The Boy Who Played the Harp

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I am running…

a series of features trat explores the very best albums of the year. It is a subjective measure of course, though there are clear standouts from the year that need to be discussed. I am starting out this run by looking at a year-defining album that arrived on 24th October. I am going to end with reviews for The Boy Who Played the Harp, as it is a work of true vision and genius from the British rapper. The album acted as a follow-up to We're All Alone in This Together (2021), Dave’s second studio album, and Split Decision (2023), Dave's collaborative E.P. with Central Cee. The oy Who Played the Harp It features guest appearances from James Blake, Jim Legxacy, Kano, Tems, and Nicole Blakk. In terms of the title and its derivation, it is a reference to the Book of Samuel (1 Samuel 16:14–23), where Saul summoned a young, brave shepherd, David, to play the harp to soothe him as he was being troubled by evil spirits. Whereas other albums in this run will include words from the artists who made them, I have not seen any published interviews with Dave. It does make it harder to get some personal interpretation and perspective. However, there are features and reviews around the album that I will spotlight. I want to start with a review from NPR and their opinion on The Boy Who Played the Harp:

“Of all the epic heroes to be namechecked in hip-hop lyrics, few are invoked more often than the shepherd David. The appeal of the Old Testament figure who conquered Jerusalem and felled Goliath could scarcely be more obvious: Rappers love warriors and kings, and he is both. He rose from the runt of the litter, faced long odds, silenced his haters and toppled a behemoth, literally becoming the stuff of legend. "If David could go against Goliath with a stone / I could go at Nas and Jigga both for the throne," 50 Cent once rapped. David is not just an underdog for the ages — perhaps the underdog — but a symbol of faith moving the immovable object out of one's path. And yet, there is much more to the Bethlemite's character than giant-killing.

The set-dressing around the big showdown in 1 Samuel is less fit for the rap theme of overcoming struggle to become a champion, but it is the primary fixation of the exceptional British rapper born David Orobosa Michael Omoregie. Dave, as he is known mononymously, is more concerned with what happened before David faced Goliath: As the story goes, the king Saul disobeyed God, and the prophet Samuel anointed David to rule in his stead. In the wake of his defiance, Saul was plagued by evil spirits, and a servant suggested he call David in to play the harp for him as a means of relief; David did so, and the spirits vanished. These are the Biblical verses that shape the rap verses on The Boy Who Played the Harp, Dave's third album, the first in four years — and his esteemed discography's crown jewel.

Since 2018, Dave has been the U.K.'s most decorated lyricist, scoring an Ivor Novello Award, a Mercury Prize and an album of the year win at the Brit Awards. But trophies pale in comparison to a higher calling, and on his latest work the rapper embraces not just his scriptural namesake but 1 Samuel's 16th chapter, in which David is anointed and plays his harp to pacify the phantoms. It could be said that London's top boy has spent the better part of an illustrious career soothing evil spirits, ancestral meditations girding his songs about being a traumatized Black yute in Streatham who grew into a generational voice. But the load of that responsibility is clearly weighing on him. He has ascended to a position of meaningful power; how best to use it?

Now 27, the rapper narrates the new album as though stricken by the contradictions of his chosen profession and sucked into the bog of its self-sustaining stress cycle: His artistic self-immolations have brought him popularity, which leads to class insulation, which in turn induces the shame and survivor's guilt that lead to further immolation. "How can I explain that I don't want to heal 'cause my identity is pain?" he pleads on "My 27th Birthday," before adding, "I wanna be a good man, but I wanna be myself too / And I don't think that I can do both." The personal reflections from inside his quarter-life crisis lead him not only to a philosophical breakthrough but to his sharpest music, expanding the theater of his solemn, elegant sound into a baroque cathedral. The Boy Who Played the Harp is as majestic as it is sturdily built. Across its 10 songs, Dave reevaluates what he owes his listeners, his forebears (in both rap and activism), his protégés (in the game and the streets), his community (at local, cultural and racial levels) and himself. "Ten years I been in the game and I won't lie, it's gettin' difficult," he raps. "This s*** used to be spiritual." The album is breathtaking in both its clarity of thought and purpose, as it walks all who bear witness through a career reckoning turned spirit awakening”.

Never has this knack been put to greater use than on "Fairchild," a gripping six-minute opus that details the sexual assault of a fictional 24-year-old woman named Tamah. Men in hip-hop have yet to meaningfully engage with rape culture, or acknowledge the ways rap culture has fed it, but Dave (who has never shied aways from stories of abuse) takes this moment of messy self-examination to consider his involvement — as party thrower and bystander — and to amplify the accounts of survivors. As he raps, he shifts in and out of phase with the artist Nicole Blakk, warping the perspectives of narrator and listener. Their voices echo out over each other until he finally slingshots into the foreground with a call to action, a muffled synth blaring like a siren in the distance. It is a powerful, determined bit of portraiture that reveals just how elaborate his orchestration has become”.

I will move to a take from Atwood Magazine. For anyone who does not own Dave’s The Boy Who Played the Harp, I would urge you to go and get it. It is one of many masterpieces from this year. It is one of the most affecting listening experiences of the year. I think the last time I sat down with a Dave album was 2019’s PYSCHODRAMA. I think that this is the best thing that he has ever released:

“It’s hard to conceptualize The Boy Who Played the Harp without discussing “Fairchild.” Akin to Adolescence, Dave brings light one of the most harrowing aspects of our modern times, how individually easy it is for men to cause extreme societal damage. The prior 30 minutes has Dave on his hands and knees, pleading for guidance or a relief of our societal pressures. Underneath all the weight, the album’s penultimate tune has a two-minute delivery from Nicole Blakk outlining an assault, the cultural behaviors that empower men to sexually harass women, and the self-preservations women go through to simply exist. It’s a haunting listen. The song is five minutes long. It feels like forever, it will never end. Seconds feel like minutes, minutes feel like hours. By the time you’re welcomed to the conclusion, Dave bravely asks,

“Am I one of them?”

It’s intrinsic, it’s the work thousands of young boys are demanded of themselves. To close out the emotional climax, Dave issues his ultimatum:

“Can’t sit on the fence,
that’s hardly an option.
You either part of the solution
or part of the problem.”

Change is possible, it can happen, and it’s demanded the individual starts it.

The title track ends the record. It’s a barrage of political and cultural grievances past and present. Words fail to summarize the topics succinctly: [military drafts, survival instincts, societal martyrs, white adoption of black music, the occupation of Palestine, the Palestinian Genocide, artistic risk to discuss topical issues, illegal occupation of stolen land, the rape and pillage of Africa, failure of African leaders to share wealth, continued generational protests for civil rights, affluent partying while the poor struggle, and biblical expectations of the name David] are packed into the 4:37 long conclusion. Somehow landing optimistic, the grand struggles we all face will one day be stories of progress. Change never starts on the grandest scale, progress is always painfully incremental, yet a new world is continually and optimistically possible. Dave ends the album with:

“My ancestors, my ancestors
told me that my life is prophecy
And it’s not just me,
it’s a whole generation of people
gradually makin’ change
There ain’t a greater task
Shift that, make a name, make a start”

It’s exceptionally heavy. Reading the lyrics or discussing them is difficult. You’re challenging yourself, your own comforts, and your own patterns. For many, it won’t be a pleasant listen. For some, the presentation and packaging of The Boy Who Played the Harp will be one of the most memorable listening experiences of the year.

Underneath the depth and topical lyrics, the production is sublime. It’s mostly self-produced by Dave himself, leveraging watery chords and numerous vocal chops. It never feels claustrophobic despite the content. It’s contrived innit, welcoming instrumentals allowing yourself to be vulnerable enough for the lyrical themes. James Blake is featured twice, on the opener and on the aforementioned “Selfish.” A few tunes were written to be more welcoming, “175 Months” or “No Weapons,” yet even those demand the listener to confront racism-infused violence, and the biblical path of life.

The Boy Who Played the Harp is a monumental release, and shows the progress of Dave as a rapper, artist, and producer.

In a post-Blonde, To Pimp a Butterfly, and Sometimes I Might Be Introvert world, Dave’s introduced the newest culturally charged opus that demands listener growth. We’re forced to hear the cultural atrocities we accept and also understand the societal expectations we place on ourselves and others. Can you accept yourself for your shortcomings? Can you forgive your neighbor for the crimes in their name? Do you strive for a better self? For a better other? If you can’t answer those questions, that’s fine. It’s a perfunctory question from Dave, rather than confessing your own answers. You’re the only on that can confront those answers, when you’re ready”.

There are a couple of other reviews that I want to bring in. Stereogum took us deep inside one of 2025’s best albums. I do love this album and it has really stayed with me. I am thinking of personal highlights. I think Fairchild or maybe History. You revisit the album and something hits you the next time you pass through:

“He turns that self-analysis outward with tracks like “Fairchild” and “Marvellous,” mildly didactic but necessary tales of a world filled with creepy men and toxic masculinity. For the former, Dave provides a real-time accounting of a woman’s sexual assault, sifting through uncomfortable mundanities that preceded the attack. He ends by examining his own complicity in a sexist world, resulting in a track that’s emotionally immediate enough to cancel out its heavy handedness.

The album is a serious one, but not everything here is so dire. The Kano-featuring “Chapter 16” is a chill bro reunion that’s touching, thoughtful, and realistic; the details and conversational ease of it all make you feel like you’re sitting at OXO Tower as the two catch up on the things that changed and the things that can’t. When Dave decides to get romantic as he does on the TEMS-assisted “Raindance,” he grafts a mellow afrobeat with convincing sincerity Drake misplaced sometime around 2015: “We can get into it or we can get intimate/ The shower when you sing in it/ Better than Beyoncé, I like the sound of fiancée/ You know, it’s got a little ring to it.” The shift between charm and searing introspection helps keep the album from total monotony. Unfortunately, the hooks themselves do not. She can sing her ass off, but the “Raindance” hook has all the creativity of ChatGPT prompt for “How to make the most forgettable love song you’ve ever heard”: “It’s the way my mind fallin’ away/ In my heart, I know/ You feel the same when you’re with me/ You know I’m all you need/ You’re where I wanna be/ My darling, can’t you see?”

A similar lack of distinction impacts the album’s production. Dave’s raps remain sharp, and his self-perception is commendable, but competent as they are, the beats feel flavorless. The tepid strings and piano keys are great soundtracks for contemplation. But swirled with Dave’s less-than-aerodynamic vocals, they envelop you in a monotonous fog; I needed to jump to NBA Youngboy in between a few tracks. The hooks themselves don’t do much to elevate Dave, either. Parts of the James Blake and TEMS collabs are fun, but I barely remember a word either of them sing. Their placements here aim for prestige, but the choruses feel like placeholders.

The potency of Dave’s message is generally enough to make you appreciate the Good Word. Part confession, part sermon, he takes you to church. But unlike the most dynamic preachers, he doesn’t always make you forget you’re stuck there”.

I am going to finish off with The Guardian and their five-star assessment of Dave’s The Boy Who Played the Harp. Saluting what a skilled rapper he is, this is going to be included in a lot of year-end lists. The best of 2025. One of our greatest artists, do go and listen to Dave’s latest album. I am curious where he heads next and what his next chapter will be. Seemingly growing in stature and brilliance with each album, what does the future hold? Before he considers his next musical step, he has a string of tour dates next year:

“The Boy Who Played the Harp is a very muted-sounding album indeed, big on sparse arrangements, gentle piano figures and subtle pleasures: the unsettled, skittering beats and helium vocal samples that open 175 Months, the quietly eerie harmony vocals that appear midway through My 27th Birthday. Several of its tracks run over the six minute mark, while even its poppiest moments – No Weapons, which reunites him with Sprinter producer Jim Legxacy, and Raindance, a collaboration with Nigerian singer Tems – feel understated. And once the opening verses of History are out of the way, it’s an album noticeably light on self-aggrandising swagger: to judge by the rest of the lyrics, Dave has spent a significant proportion of the last couple of years consumed by a series of existential crises. “Why don’t you post pictures, or why don’t you drop music?” he admonishes himself at one point. “Or why not do something but sitting and stressing yourself?”

Some of his issues are universal, the kind of thoughts that tend to plague people in their late 20s, that weird period in life where you realise that you’re incontrovertibly an adult, whether you feel like one or not. He spends a lot of The Boy Who Played the Harp thrashing over the pros and cons of settling down, unable to work out whether it’s something he is emotionally capable of or not: “You should have had kids … don’t you feel like you’re behind?” he frets on the crestfallen Selfish. The brilliant Chapter 16 is styled as a lengthy dialogue between Dave and Kano, the latter now a patriarchal figure in UK rap, whose career began when Dave was at primary school. It shifts suddenly from discussing the music industry and the impact of sudden fame on your friends to Dave petitioning Kano, a contented family man, for relationship advice: the latter hymns the pleasure of swapping “a silver Porsche” for “leather Max-Cosi baby seats in the SUV”.

But he also seems conflicted about his career, worrying aloud about whether his lyrics are sufficiently socially aware, and whether they have any impact even if they are, working himself up into such a state on My 27th Birthday that he ends up questioning whether the world actually needs to hear anyone rapping at all: “We don’t need no commentators, we can leave that to the sports / Just listen to the music, why’d you need somebody’s thoughts?”

The irony is that he has already answered that question. An album full of self-examination by a rich and successful pop star might seem like a schlep on paper, but Dave is a fantastically smart, sharp lyricist, more than capable of making it work – The Boy With the Harp feels fascinating, rather than self-indulgent – just as he’s technically skilled enough to make the album’s muted sound a bonus: it focuses attention on his voice and exemplary flow.

It’s a point underlined when he finally shifts his gaze outwards on Marvellous and Fairchild, two tracks that emphasise his brilliance as a storyteller: the former tracks a 17-year-old’s progress from drugs to violence to jail, while the latter slowly details a sexual assault, shifting from Dave’s voice to that of female rapper Nicole Blakk, before exploding into a burst of rage that variously takes in “incels”, the murder of Sarah Everard, and hip-hop’s objectification of women: “I’m complicit, no better than you”. It’s harrowing, gripping and powerful: all the evidence you need that Dave’s doubts about himself are unfounded”.

A truly wonderful album that will leave impression on everyone who listens to it, it is no surprise that it has garnered such incredible praise. It is a shame there are no interviews where Dave speaks about The Boy Who Played the Harp. Maybe that means we are not guided and can interpret songs as we feel fit. Dave has given so much of himself with the album, anyway. It is wonderful and awe-inspiring to hear…

A master at the top of his game.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: The ZYN Rolling Stone UK Awards Nominees 202

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IMAGE CREDITS: Rolling Stone UK 

The ZYN Rolling Stone UK Awards Nominees 2025

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THERE are a fair few…

music award ceremonies each year. The GRAMMY Awards in the U.S. is perhaps the biggest of the calendar. In the U.K., we have the BRIT Awards. I think that the most credible and coolest are NME’s award ceremony and Rolling Stone UK’s. Official the ZYN Rolling Stone UK Awards, I wanted to compile a mixtape of the nominees that have been announced. I am featuring a few of the categories from Rolling Stone UK. I am including nominees in The Song Award, The Album Award, The Play Next Award. There is also The Live Award , The Artist Award, and The Breakthrough Award. Let’s not forget The Group Awards. There is that mix of contemporary legends and stars of tomorrow. Blending together in a playlist. The Rolling Stone UK Awards 2025 will be held on Thursday, 20th November at the Roundhouse in London. It is going to be an amazing evening. Never gaining the same plaudits and attention at the BRITs, I do hope there is coverage for this great award ceremony. You may know some of these artists in the mix below, though there are going to be others that are new. I am excited to see who walks about with awards in two weeks. It will be an amazing event, so do make sure you follow it and check the social media feed of Rolling Stone UK. Hosted by Danny Dyer, it is going to be epic! Take a listen to the prestigious and awesome nominees who are going to make the Rolling Stone UK Awards 2025…

ONE of the very best.

FEATURE: Where Love Lives: In Reaction to This Year’s John Lewis Christmas Advert

FEATURE:

 

 

Where Love Lives

IN THIS PHOTO: Alison Limerick holds a vinyl copy of her iconic 1990 single, Where Love lives, which is the central focus of this year’s acclaimed John Lewis Christmas advert (and has been reworked by artist/producer, Labrinth). Limerick said (of the honour): “I squealed when I heard that Where Loves Lives would be in the advert – literally squealed like an excited child”)/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

In Reaction to This Year’s John Lewis Christmas Advert

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IT is a bit of an event each year…

PHOTO CREDIT: John Lewis/PA/iStock/The Independent

when we start seeing the Christmas adverts on T.V. Starting about now, all the major supermarkets put theirs out. Although not as utilitarian or ‘grounded’ as other chains, John Lewis are more upmarket. However, that is not to dimmish the importance of their Christmas adverts. There have been some great ones through the years. I am not sure whether it brings more people into one of their stores. However, it always provokes reaction and conversation. You can see every John Lewis Christmas advert aired. You can find a rankings list here. I am going to start out with some critical reaction to this year’s advert. One that I think is their very best in years. I am not really a fan of Christmas adverts and rarely succumb to the tear-jerking charm and allure. However, this year’s offering not only hits all the right emotional buttons. It shows positive masculinity between a father and son. It also, importantly, gets the music choice just right. One of the downsides of John Lewis Christmas adverts is how there are often syrupy and quite characterless cover version of well-known songs. If the foreground and film itself is superb, I feel like the musical choice is often a little drippy and a bit too sickly-sweet. That cliché of Pop versions of classics washes out the colour and purpose of the original. However, this year brings Alison Limerick’s Where Love Lives into focus. John Lewis members can actually buy a limit edition version of the single on vinyl. All profits generated from its sale will support the John Lewis Partnership’s Building Happier Futures programme, which aids individuals who have grown up in care. That is something you want to support! The moment that the dad received a vinyl copy of this song – clearly one that means a lot to him – is simple but effective. You can see the advert below.

The reaction to the advert has, for the most part, being positive. For someone like me – who grew up listening to amazing music like Where Love Lives and it is my sort of era (well, I was a child when it came out but it was a song I played a lot and love to this day) -, I can connect with the song and its meaning. It is that thoughtful gift and moment. Good Housekeeping noted in their review:

“Well, you can get the baubles out because the ad has landed and it's a celebration of music – namely, the 1990s club ‘banger’, Where Love Lives by Alison Limerick, which provides the soundtrack, and transforms into a new, slowed-down version by Labrinth.

It's also a tribute to father/son relationships.

Whereas last year's ad focused on two sisters, the stars of the John Lewis Christmas ad 2025 are a father and his teenage son. At the start, you see the dad tidying up under the tree and discovering a present that was missed in all the Christmas chaos.

His son watches anxiously as he unwraps his gift – a vinyl record – which immediately transports the dad back to his clubbing days. We then see snippets of his relationship with his son over the years (the shots of the boy as a baby and toddler running to his dad are real tearjerkers, as is the hug at the end).

PHOTO CREDIT: John Lewis/PA/iStock

The story of a son looking forward to his dad's reaction to his gift also feels like a bit of a throwback to many people's favourite John Lewis ad ever, The Long Wait – the one with the little boy who just can't wait to give his present on Christmas Day.

The message? If you can't quite find the words, choosing just the right gift will say it for you. The theme was inspired by research that found we struggle as a nation to say what we really mean, but Christmas is a time when we try to reconnect.

This year's ad also reflects the the fact that 1990s and 2000s children have grown up and now have families of their own, so we're now seeing the Millennial Christmas, with all the traditions and tunes that come with that.

This one goes out to the 90s club kids”.

Even though I bemoaned the slowed-down version of classics before, usually a piano version that is quite a lot to take in, we do get that happening in this year’s advert. Actually, last year’s advert featured Richard Ashcroft’s Sonnet. Look at the songs used in all of their adverts, and there have been a lot of more ‘saccharine’ (others might find a more appropriate word) versions of well-known songs. A hallmark for John Lewis, I guess they have to keep with traditional and speak to their customers. The Guardian were a bit more cynical with their opinion of John Lewis’s new Christmas advert. One that came out early than last year’s:

“Meanwhile, the advert perfectly captures a very common moment of fatherhood. I’m talking, of course, about the time you decide to go clubbing, only to realise that since having a child you’ve become horrifically old and decrepit and that, to all the young people around you, you now basically represent the creeping spectre of death, and you’re suddenly hit by the realisation of how ancient you are, and you go home depressed and never attempt anything fun or exciting again until you die.

And then anyone under the age of 20 will take something else from the advert. That is: what the hell does any of this mean? It’s a film about someone buying a vinyl record from a bricks and mortar shop, that’s being shown on linear broadcast television? Why? Why go to all this bother? Why doesn’t the son just play him the song on Spotify? Why doesn’t he type ‘Where Love Lives’ into TikTok and give his dad the gift of an algorithmically generated feed of some Russian children lip-syncing to it? Wouldn’t that be easier?

PHOTO CREDIT: John Lewis/PA/iStock

Honestly, to Gen Z or younger, this whole thing must be like watching a highly commended entry from an obsolete technology competition. You know what? Next year, why not go even further? Why not release the John Lewis advert as a phénakisticope about a farmer trading a goat for a sack of stubble turnips? It couldn’t possibly be any more of an anachronism than this.

But maybe I’m being cynical. There’s still a romance to clinging on to traditions that are no longer useful. A tangible record will always be more special than an online stream. Visiting a shop will always be more special than clicking an object on a website. There’s something reassuring in the way that we’re still discussing a television commercial. And we’re doing it via the medium of print journalism, the most obsolescent technology of them all. Merry Christmas everyone!”.

The version of Where Love Lives is reimagined by Labrinth this year. It will give attention to that version but, more than anything, it will draw a different and younger generation to the original. Missing out on the song the first time around – it was released in 1990 -, it will compel parents to discuss the song with their children. The Independent shared the products featured in the John Lewis advert and lauded its sentiment. At its best this year, I have seen so much positive reaction:

“The UK’s equivalent to Hallmark movies, the John Lewis Christmas TV advert has finally arrived – officially marking the start of the festive period. After last year’s lukewarm reception, the stalwart is back to form with a tearjerking tale of a father and son bond, set to a nostalgic soundtrack.

The advert has introduced us to plenty of memorable characters over the years (including Buster the bouncing dog and Edgar the excitable dragon), but the 2025 addition has a more grown-up feel. On Christmas Day, a dad walk sadly past his son who has headphones in. While cleaning up the discarded wrapping under the tree, he discovers a gift from his son addressed to him.

Inside, it’s a vinyl of a nineties dance track that floods him with memories of his youth spent clubbing. Across the dance floor, he spots his son who transforms into a toddler, then a newborn baby in his arms. Marking the passing of time and the power of music, the heartwarming ending sees father and son embracing by the Christmas tree.

The songs in John Lewis’ Christmas advert always make the music charts (see Lily Allen cover Keane’s Somewhere Only We Know and Elton John singing Your Song). This year, the 1990s dance icon Alison Limerick’s Where Love Lives is reimagined by Labrinth”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Labrinth remarked how being involved in the John Lewis Christmas advert is a ‘big deal’/PHOTO CREDIT: Ian West/PA Media Assignments/PA Wire

Alison Limerick revealed that her iconic song was never intended for release. Even though I am not completely taken by Labrinth’s cover version of the song, it is not used in a lot of the album and is actually one of the best (or least forgettable and annoying) cover versions in recent years. I have hears cover version of Where Love Lives, and it is good to slow the song down and reveal more emotional layers. However, maybe the fade from the hypotonic and dancefloor-uniting smash into the ballad-y and Folk-Pop (if that is the right genre-melt?) is quite abrupt and does not quite hit the landing! However, it is amazing that John Lewis have featured this thirty-five-year-old smash that is still widely played to this day but might not be known to children and teens. The advert is shot brilliantly, and I love the cut between the dad unwrapping the gift and then being transported into the club as his older self and dancing alongside younger club-goers. Words do not have to be spoken between the father and son. It is a tender moment that says enough on its own. Many have noted how it promotes positive masculinity. In a landscape where toxic masculinity and male violence dominates, it is a much-needed dose of positivity. Some might say it not so huge, given John Lewis adds are often very sensitive, family-based and have that warmth. Something feels more urgent and different this year. The advert sees the dad holding his son as a baby and toddler, and then we see him (the son) coming down the stairs, and the two sharing a look before embracing.

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It is an intriguing advert! At the very start, the son has headphones on and looks quite nervous, as the dad finds the present (as the rest have been opened and cleared up) and the sister looks on. I wonder how the son knew about that track and why it means a lot to his dad. Many have noted how hard it is to get a copy of Where Love Lives on vinyl! Maybe there was this evening where the father was discussing his younger days when he was in clubs in the early-1990s and fell for this song. Perhaps not always an open and easy relationship between the two; the music itself and the memories it holds (for the dad) broke a barrier and evoked a happier time. Content with his family, it was a blast of nostalgia that will resonate with people like me. That idea of the power of music from our childhood and youth and how it not only remains in our hearts but never ages. I want to finish with an interview with Alison Limerick from almost exactly a decade ago. Limerick was asked about her relationship with a song that, at this point was a quarter-century old:

“Latti Kronlund wrote ‘Where Love Lives’ and famously picked you to record it – why you?

At the time I was involved with this glorified fashion show at the ICA in London which involved singers, jugglers and other performers rather than models. I sang ‘God Bless The Child’ [Billie Holiday’s 1941 classic] and Latti was in the audience. He apparently told people afterwards that he absolutely had to work with me but it took him six months to connect because the ICA, being security-minded, wouldn’t give him my number. We worked on three or four songs which, to be honest, were really odd and abstract, and then he disappeared off to Sweden for ages. Latti eventually returned with another five songs, one of which was ‘Where Love Lives’. He told me that that was my song to sing because it required someone with a big two-octave range, and I had it.

Do you keep in touch with Latti?

I do and we have something really special planned for [21] January. He’ll be playing Ronnie Scott’s in London with his ‘big band’ Brooklyn Funk Essentials, and he’s asked me to join him for a one-off twist on ‘Where Love Lives’. It’ll be the first time we’ve ever performed the track live together, and after all these years. It’s a fantastic song…such an amazing shock to see what it has become.

It’s become your life in so many respects – truly, what’s your relationship with it like these days?

There was one point a few years ago where I was upset about it; upset that it would define me regardless of whatever else I did. But ‘Where Love Lives’ turned me into a focused artist after years spent as a jobbing singer, dancer and actress. And when I see people reacting to it that’s always genuinely amazing. More so now, when those people are not just of the older club generations but the new ones too…the twenty-somethings. When you’re live they are always new ways to sing a classic song like that and keep it fresh. A few years ago I was probably playing around with it too much and taking it too far away from what the fans recognised. So now I keep it a little more controlled and enjoy the atmosphere I’m creating. I hear a few DJs have been playing it at Glitterbox to some great reactions this summer. I’m really looking forward to performing the classic version there in person soon. Can’t wait!”.

If some have been bah humbug or ho-hum about this year’s John Lewis Christmas advert, most have been very positive. Often seen as the best Christmas adverts on T.V., there is this high standard to uphold. However, Jonh Lewis have hit all the right notes and made a step forward. I think the slightly less overt stripping back of a slowed-down and syrupy cover is a necessary move. That choice of story and central song is inspired, timely and not obvious. They could have gone with an Oasis song or cashed in and played it safe. However, by going slightly more underground – or at least embraced a genre they have not before -, it has captured attention and greater discussion. Great music, memories, father-son bond and positivity to the fore. Something as primitive and simple as a musical memory, it incredibly powerful and resonates with everyone. The Guardian asked their readers what Dance track they would gift to their teenager. We can identify with that advert in some form and all have songs and time periods we flash back to and cherish. It will bring attention to Alison Limerick’s Where Love Lives, but also record players and headphones. Basically, as there are music items involved, I was keen to cover the advert for that reason alone. If some feel the new advert is a bit corny, I think John Lewis have achieved a…

PERFECT blend and balance.

FEATURE: More Than a ‘Muse’ The Unheralded and Underexplored Women on Classic Album Covers

FEATURE:

 

 

More Than a ‘Muse’

The Unheralded and Underexplored Women on Classic Album Covers

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I have been thinking about…

some of the classic albums that feature women on the cover. Not famous and well-known faces. Many bands and artists did it as a way of either keeping themselves off of the cover or creating some sort of allure or sexiness. Whether designed to provoke some sort of reaction or a stylistic choice, we do not really know about these women. Of course, in some cases, the women used on the covers are not consulted with and then take the artist/band to task. One such example is the cover star of Vampire Weekend’s Contra. The press always refer to women on covers as ‘muses’. It seems like such an insulting and dehumanising word. These women help the artist to sell records and make the cover what it is. As Vanity Fair wrote about the woman on the cover of Contra: “Ever since she was 23, people have been using Ann Kirsten Kennis’s image to sell their products. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, she appeared in magazine advertisements, catalogue pages, and television commercials for a long list of recognizable brands, among them L’Oréal, Revlon, Fabergé, Parliament, Cuervo, Jordache, and Vaseline. She did looker ads and lingerie ads and bathing-suit ads too”. In 2011, The Guardian reported how Vampire Weekend settled with Kristen Kennis: “Vampire Weekend have settled their legal dispute with Ann Kirsten Kennis, the model who discovered her photo on the cover of the band's album Contra. Kennis won an undisclosed settlement from the band and their label, XL Records, while her photographer remains locked in ongoing litigation. Contra was already on sale when Kennis's teenage daughter spotted her mum's face on the cover. "I was like, 'Yeah, that's strange. That's me, many years ago,'" Kennis told Vanity Fair in 2010. The Polaroid was almost 30 years old, and Kennis didn't remember posing for it. Although a photographer called Tod Brody claimed she signed a release form in 2009, Kennis, now in her early 50s, denied this. She took them all to court, seeking $2m (£1.3m) in damages. Vampire Weekend and XL always claimed they followed proper steps to license the photograph, blaming Brody for any wrongdoing. Yet even if the photographer misled them, the court could still have found that they did not exercise sufficient due diligence, paying Brody $5,000 but not researching the photo's provenance. By settling with Kennis, the case against Vampire Weekend has been dismissed, Photo District News reports”.

It is a shame that the first example resulted in an unfortunate lawsuit. However, there is no denying that this photo helps make Contra’s cover one of the greatest of that generation. It is striking. It also afford us an opportunity to pay credit to the woman whose image was used. Not a muse. She is, instead, this incredible talent and amazing human whose story and work has been acknowledged and explored more – even if it was as a result of a lawsuit and backlash. Not only making such all legalities are followed, I do think artists should acknowledge this iconic and incredible women on covers. In terms of featuring women on album covers, Roxy Music are notable. Not in an exploitative way. Eight studio albums feature women. A decision the band made, it was almost like selling a work of art or a beauty magazine. Engaging listeners with this beautiful or sexy image. An idea of perhaps what the album would sound like. This article explores the women featured on Roxy Music album covers. I am going to include four examples. If their earlier albums featured unknown women on their covers (including fans), they had grown by the time 1975’s Siren arrived. Whether a famous supermodel or not, these women are part of music history. Part of some of the most iconic album covers ever:

“Roxy Music (1972)

Cornwall-born Kari-Ann Muller was a former Bond girl (she appeared in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) paid a scant £20 to appear on the cover of Roxy Music – a steal for the then-unknown band, whose debut album would go on to define 70s art-rock. Evoking classic glamour shots of the 40s and 50s, the Roxy Music artwork set the template for all future Roxy Music album covers, though Muller would retire from modeling in order to become a yoga teacher. She retains ties to the rock world, however, as she married Chris Jagger, whose brother has fronted a popular beat combo since the 60s.

Siren (1975)

A sign of how Roxy Music’s status had grown in just three years, they were able to encourage globally recognized supermodel Jerry Hall to pose as a mermaid for the cover of their fifth studio album. Ever the charmer, Bryan Ferry is said to have held an umbrella over Hall during the shoot, to ensure that her blue body paint did not wash off. Smitten, Hall was engaged to Ferry by early 1976, though she would leave him the following year for Mick Jagger, subsequently inspiring the Stones’ song, “Miss You,” and becoming the third Roxy Music album covers model to connect the band to Jagger and co.

Manifesto (1979)

Perhaps finding it hard to top Jerry Hall, when Roxy Music returned after a four-year hiatus they threw a fake party with a collection of mannequins – some apparently designed with the original Roxy Music cover star, Kari-Ann Muller, in mind. Look carefully in the background and you can see two human models: a pair of twins who were long-term fans of the band.

Flesh + Blood (1980)

Roxy Music went for gold with Flesh + Blood, which hit the top spot in the UK charts in June 1980. The models, staged to look like high-school athletes competing in a sports day javelin contest, were picked and photographed by Peter Saville, best known for his design for work for Factory Records”.

In some cases there is a bit of, well, controversy to the cover star. When it came to blink-182’s cover for Enema of the State (1999) and the nurse, they photographed Janine Lindemulder. An adult film actress, often credited mononymously as Janine. She is a member of the AVN Hall of Fame and the XRCO Hall of Fame. In that case, it was very much the band trying to be proactive and perhaps aim squarely at their target audience (teenage boys and those in their early-twenties). Even so, that is not me throwing shade. It is a phenomenal album cover and, rather than it being this mysterious image where the woman is uncredited, shining a light on Lindemulder means she joins the cannon of women who help define incredible album covers. Giving them a story and props. This interesting article introduced us to amazing women on phenomenal covers. Two all-time classic albums are defined by the women on them. Whether accompanying the greatest lyricist ever or a front and centre on a landmark 1990s album, it is their presence, image and gravitas that not only makes the cover timeless. We also get to discover more about them:

“Then there’s Suze Rotolo, immortalized on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), walking arm-in-arm with the Bard of 4th Street down a snowy Greenwich Village avenue. Unlike our other cover stars, Rotolo wasn’t a model but Dylan’s girlfriend and, more importantly, his cultural compass.

This daughter of Communist Party members introduced the Minnesota boy to modern art, poetry, and civil rights politics. She inspired the acerbic classic balled “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and showed Dylan there was more to life than scratchy old Woody Guthrie records. The cover shot, by Don Hunstein, captured young love in its natural habitat – though if you look closely, you can tell they’re freezing their artistic asses off.

The relationship between Dylan and Rotolo was more than just another swinging sixties fling. She opened his eyes to a world beyond folk music, taking him to see Picasso’s “Guernica” and French New Wave films. After hearing her talk about the murder of Emmett Till, Dylan wrote one of his first protest songs. Their love story ended after three years, but Rotolo’s influence on Dylan’s artistry was permanent. She kept quiet about their relationship for decades, finally breaking her silence for Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary, No Direction Home, followed by her own memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time. Suze passed away in 2011 from lung cancer.

Fast forward to 1994, and we meet Leilani Bishop on Hole’s Live Through This. Photographer Ellen von Unwerth recalls Courtney Love calling her with a vision: recreate the prom queen scene from the horror movie Carrie. The 17-year-old Bishop nailed the beauty-queen-gone-wrong look, complete with smeared mascara and that slightly unhinged smile. Apparently, the iconic pig blood was out of stock at the prop store.

The timing proved eerily prophetic – the album was released just seven days after Kurt Cobain’s death, with Bishop’s emotional expression capturing the turmoil surrounding the band and its frontwoman.

Von Unwerth and Love clicked immediately, bonding over drinks the night before the shoot while Love wore her signature schoolgirl dress. Though the photographer hadn’t heard the album yet (it was still being recorded), she trusted that “Kurt’s girls would produce something equally cool [as anything by Nirvana].” The shoot proved to be perfectly timed lightning in a bottle – and Billboard later ranked it #12 on their “50 Greatest Album Covers of All Time.” Bishop is now a podcaster and conservationist”.

I have been thinking that there should be a collection or exhibition of album covers with these amazing and diverse women. There are so many I will forget. Modern examples that have nothing written about them. However, this article lists a few I have already covered. However, they also let us know about the woman featured on the phenomenal cover for Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain:

“Along with George Clinton’s other band The Parliaments – who would later go on to become the fully-fledged Parliament – Funkadelic helped to pioneer the iconic funk sound of the American 70s. Their third album, Maggot Brain, was the last in a run of albums, before the group expanded into a funk collective, that were also heavily influenced by psychedelia. Its cover was the perfect blend of the two genres, showing a woman’s head screaming (in either pleasure or pain) sticking out of bare earth covered in roots. All very trippy. The woman in question, though, was the African-American model Barbara Cheeseborough, known for her Afrocentric image – and a symbol of the black culture that is inextricable from funk and soul music”.

Actor Tamarah Park was the model for REO Speedwagon's best-selling 1980 album, Hi Infidelity. Nataliya Medvedeva: A model, singer, and writer featured on the cover of The Cars' 1978 album, The Cars. Also, and an album cover I remember well, was Maroon 5’s Hands All Over. That featured Rosie Hardy: as a 19-year-old photographer, she took the photo of herself.

I guess there was a traditional for Glam Rock and Hard Rock bands to feature women on the covers. In many cases, we will never know who they are. I guess the motivation was, again, to create sex appeal or sell records that way. It does make me wish we knew more about these women. How many of them were ever named or given their dues? In some cases, a provocative or sexy image can be very artistic and classy. The woman on Pixies' Surfer Rosa album cover is not a single person, but the name Rosa comes from a lyric and the cover's concept was a flamenco dancer posing as a surfer girl. The image was created by photographer Simon Larbalestier and his friend, Rosa, who was the girlfriend of a friend of the band. At a time when so many album covers are bland and forgettable, it did turn my mind to the anonymous or under-discussed women who we know by looks but not by name. Learning more about them, I feel, gives extra depth to albums. Many people will have examples of their own. It would be good to know. From Roxy Music to Bob Dylan through to The Cars, Vampire Weekend and Hole, some of the all-time best albums have these incredible women on the covers. More than mere muses or cover stars, they are part of music history and tapestry. I still think there should be a documentary, exhibition or something that explores these women. It would be wonderful to…

KNOW more about them.

FEATURE: How to Be Human: Why Next Year Needs to Be One Where the Industry Prioritises the Mental Health of Its Artists

FEATURE:

 

 

How to Be Human

Why Next Year Needs to Be One Where the Industry Prioritises the Mental Health of Its Artists

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MAYBE there is something appropriate…

when we consider the title of Cat Burns’s latest album, How to Be Human. One of our finest artists, the album received some wonderful reviews. I will come to one of them soon enough. Burns was due to tour the album soon. However, due to an intense build-up and promotional period, coupled with how much of herself Cat Burns gave to the album, she has had to make the decision to step back for now and reschedule the tour dates. NME explain more in their recent article:

“The singer, who has also found a new wave of fans by starring on the latest season of Celebrity Traitors, shared on social media that she made the difficult decision to postpone her upcoming ‘How To Be Human’ tour dates following an “intense” period.

The dates were set to kick off on November 10 at the O2 Academy in Glasgow, and continue with shows in Manchester, Brighton, Wolverhampton, Newcastle, Bournemouth and Bristol throughout the month, before ending with a slot at the Brixton O2 Academy in London on November 30. They all come in support of her new album of the same name.

Beginning her update, Burns said: “This album and tour mean the world to me. It’s been a massive journey getting ready to share ‘How To Be Human’ with you. I can’t believe it’s nearly here!! But unfortunately the build-up has been a lot more intense than any of us expected, so myself and my team have made the difficult decision to move the How To Be Human Tour to April 2026.”

The singer added that all tickets will remain valid for the rescheduled dates in April, but added that Wolverhampton has been unable to be rebooked, so a new gig in Birmingham will be taking its place.

“Touring is incredibly demanding mentally and physically, and I want to make sure I’m taking care of my wellbeing so I’m in the right headspace to give you the show you deserve. When I step on stage, I really want to feel my best and give you a night that feels worth every moment of waiting,” she added.

Also on Instagram Stories, Cat confirmed that the scheduled shows at record stores will be going ahead as planned, and thanked fans for their “patience, kindness, and understanding through this”.

“These decisions are never easy and I don’t take your support for granted,” she concluded. “I can’t wait to see you soon and make these shows everything they should be.”

Burns’ new album ‘How To Be Human’ arrived today (Friday October 31), and marked the follow-up to her 2024 Mercury Prize shortlisted record ‘Early Twenties’.

Sharing another post celebrating the release, Burns said: “I left a very big piece of me on this project, going through grief and heartbreak at the same time really re wired my brain chemistry, and I noticed when people try and give uplifting messages about getting through the hard times they never really go into detail about how they got to the end of the tunnel or even what the tunnel looked like, so I REALLY wanted to do that with this album and document the trenches of processing your emotions.”

She continued: “It’s very honest and it’s very vulnerable (perhaps too vulnerable with the voice memos of me crying) but I truly believe art should cost us something so the fact that I’m so nervous putting this out means it’s gonna hopefully resonate with you all.

“I could only have written such a personal project with my nearest and dearest writers who just always make our sessions such a safe space, it’s literally like therapy for me and I’m so grateful to you all for helping me bring this album to life”.

A few things struck me when reading that article. I think many artists want to make albums as personal as possible. So that they are honest and stand out. So it is distinct and feels real. This year has seen so many artists put everything they have inside them into albums. That in itself much be extremely demanding. It is incredible that they have the strength and courage to do this. They then share this with the public. After an album like that has been written and is ready to be released, there is that demand from the industry to promote and make sure people know about it. There is still this emphasis on content and remaining engaged. A promotional build-up that is so intense. Given how hard it is for artists to stand out and to make a career at a time when there are so many other artists and they can only make money from touring and merchandise, there is this emphasis on getting an album out and as many people as possible knowing about it. Having to be across multiple social media platforms and posting teasers videos, photos, reels, stories and so much to ensure that fans are engaged and there is this constant impression and interaction, artists also have to engage in interviews and do live dates even before they announce big tours. That alone can be enough to drain an artist. Venues have limited availability and I think there is this desire for artists to tour new albums as soon as they can. Not leave too much of a gap unless any momentum drops. It may not be true for all artists, though one feels that there cannot be too long a wait between album release and touring. Between the release of an album and that first date, there are interviews that are still being conducted. There is promotion of the tour – right after the album promotion – and artists having to prepare themselves to go on the road.

If artists have to tour internationally, then it adds a whole new layer of pressure. However, even if someone like Cat Burns is touring the U.K., there is the drain of travel together with the gig itself. Moving between towns and cities and having to reveal so much of herself every night, you do wonder how any artists can manage to do it! Burns still is doing record store dates and these smaller gigs. The task of having to step from that promotional treadmill after being lost in an album from so long and then holding crowds in huge venues in your hand, together with all the social media engagement, it is a challenging balancing act. Artists want to give everything to albums and their fans. This often means that they do not have enough left to give to themselves. So much of their emotional and physical goes into the recording that it can be overwhelming. Cat Burns’s decision to take care of her wellbeing is commendable. She could have toured now and burned out, which would have damaged her career and it would have been a big physical and psychological sacrifice. Of course, we do not know the exact circumstances of why Cat Burns needs to reschedule dates, though it is a familiar story. So many artists making the same decision. It makes me wonder about the industry and whether too much is expected. Mental health care is available for artists but, as so many artists are treating songwriting like therapy and being so naked, there does need to be intervention and checks at the writing and recording stage.

There is this wonderful book that “is written directly for the music industry and aims to help musicians and those working in live music to identify, process and manage the physical and psychological difficulties that can occur on the road or as a result of touring. Inside, you’ll find guidance on mental and physical health issues, relationship challenges, preparing for performance, media training and much more”. It is important that artists on the road are taken care of. That demand for them to perform is something that is natural, though few can realise the effort and reality of being on the road and everything that is required to perform a string of gigs and be on top form every date. Do we look before that and how artists are treated before touring? They can change tour dates, though it is a last resort for most. We do not really talk enough about the demands on artists when it comes to promoting albums. How writing an album can be as straining and demanding as touring. I think next year should be one where mental health is one of the top priorities for the music industry. They are already doing a lot in terms of providing support and addressing the issues, though you feel there is still too much demand on artists. What they have to do to stand out, or promote and album and then take it all tour. Put all of this together and it can be devastating and take its toll. Cat Burns will be back fully on the road soon enough but, with a terrific album out there, I wanted to finish with a review of it:

“Cat Burns’ storytelling lyricism is at the forefront of her latest album, ‘How To Be Human’, a tale of loss, heartbreak and love. Despite showing incredible prowess in deceit on BBC’s The Celebrity Traitors, her sophomore album is a truthful insight into recent moments of pain and healing since her ‘Early Twenties’.

In this vulnerable outpouring, Cat shared wanting to “document the trenches of processing your emotions” in this album. The opening track, ‘Come Home’, is introduced by a voicenote from her grandad; “thank you, Catrina, god bless you, love you lots”. Accompanied by melodic piano and strings, her grandad’s passing in 2024 serves as the topic of the ballads. One of the few tracks that balances her first-hand account with another voice, an imagined call “from God”. Setting the tone for the album, there is a pride in which Burns writes about his life; “To hold a family together / You braved the British weather / worked mornings, nights, wherever”. ‘Come Home’ introduces us to an artist who is simultaneously grieving, healing, and coming to peace.

‘Can Time Move Faster’ investigates the popular idiom of “time is a great healer”- an unglamourised reality check of post-breakup healing. The voice of Cat, “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this”, is answered in the later track ‘Today’, where we meet someone able to absorb the joy surrounding them; “I’m not the same / thank god I’ve changed”.

‘I Hope It’s Me’ is a duality between wanting the best for someone, “There’s a whole world for you to see”, and hoping they come back to you; “In the end / When you love again / I hope it’s me”. Burns’ balladic writing is at her very best; this song yearns for a lifetime’s love, even if paths change along the journey, a theme returned to in ‘I Love You, But’.

A carefully sculpted tracklist meets a turning point in track five, but by ‘Gemini’, the mood is lifted and the possibilities are endless. Flirtatious ‘GIRLS!’ follows, released back in January, a sapphic anthem that gives way to ‘There’s Just Something About Her’. Talking to girls becomes having a crush on one, by ‘Lavender’, previously heartbroken Cat Burns is firmly in love, skipping through lavender fields in the visualiser.

The final single to be released from the album, ‘Please Don’t Hate Me’, provides closure to the story told throughout ‘How To Be Human’. No longer lonely, Burns is joined by a choir of harmonious voices, as, instead of waiting for the ex in ‘I Hope It’s Me’, she is loving “somebody new”. ‘I Wish You Well’ has a beat impossible not to dance along with, a final gesture to previous lovers before giving way to the penultimate ballad from the album, ‘When I’m With You’. A giddy love song about a newfound, post-healing connection: “I think I’m worrying less / I’m getting close to my best”.

Moving away from romance and grief, the title and final track, ‘How To Be Human’, sheds light on Cat Burns’ experience with neurodivergence. Often speaking out about the impact of her autism and ADHD, most recently on national television, the track unpacks the reality of learning to mask and survive in a world tailored to neurotypical people, “Am I hiding it well / I wonder if they can tell / that I’m not like them”.

Sophomore album, ‘How To Be Human’ opens Cat Burns’ diary to her ever-growing audience, with a lightly acoustic sonic atmosphere which leaves no space to hide for her introspective lyricism. Cat offers listeners sixteen tracks of catharsis for anyone who has experienced loss, and proof that it really does get better”.

It is a shame Cat Burns has had to move tour dates back, though she needs to take care of her wellbeing and ensure that she is able to fulfil the dates and be at her best. It made me think, not only about what artists are expected to do when it comes to promoting an album, but how much writing and recording such a personal and revealing album can be. And the way artists then have to tour it and how much extra weight and fatigue that adds. How the mental health and wellbeing of artists is a paramount priority. Organisations like Music Minds Matter support the mental health of everyone working in music. Their incredible work and similar bodies needs to be highlighted. I do worry about artists and how hard it is for them. In terms of support and focusing on their collective wellbeing, we all hope that this is a major focus…

IN 2026.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Áine Rose Daly

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Áine Rose Daly

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THIS is a bit of a strange one for me…

PHOTO CREDIT: Fay Summerfield Photography

as I usually highlight artists in Spotlight who have new music coming out or have recently put something out. Most of the artists are rising and coming through, though there are some that are established but maybe not known by all. I always look for fairly recent interviews. Hopefully no longer than a year old, I sling everything together to give you an idea of what the artist is about and why you need to follow them. There have been occasions when I have featured actors that are also musicians. Apart from posting to Instagram why Florence Pugh should record some music and put it out, I have never written a feature in the hope that someone will see it and put more music out. Áine Rose Daly is a wonderful actor you may recognise from BBC’s Boiling Point. However, she is also a wonderful artist. Her most recent single, Reprise, was released last year. The music video came out at the start of this year. I am checking out her Instagram, and I have not seen any announcement that Áine Rose Daly is releasing a new track before the end of the year. Maybe a Christmas cover or plans for an E.P. or album. Of course, by the time this feature is actually shared, she may well have announced that we are going to get a new song very soon – or at the start of 2026. The reason I am jumping the gun in a way is making people aware of the music that she has already put out. I tend to find a lot of actors coming into music had music as their first love. It is a natural move for them. You can feel music runs through Áine Rose Daly’s blood. Something that resonated and connected with her as a child, you can feel the passion and love in her songs. So many new artists tend to sound like existing artists. Daly is definitely distinct and you can hear her own voice. The Jersey-born actor was raised by Irish parents. It is intriguing, as I have not heard of another artist with this mix of heritage/background.

Turning twenty-three on 11th December, Áine Rose Daly turns twenty-three. She is still incredible young, so there is no rush getting new music from her. However, I really love Reprise. I am also a fan of The One and her live cover of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Otherside. Her videos are amazing too. As an actor, she brings so much of those dynamics into music. I have said this repeatedly. Actors bring a certain conviction and physically into their music. It means also that they really shine in music videos. It is hard going from acting to music or balancing the two. I am not sure if Florence Pugh will get round to putting out some music, but like her, Áine Rose Daly is pretty busy. However, you know there is a song or two in her head – and maybe on paper! I get the feeling we may see something from her next year. However, go and check out what she has done already, as she has a wonderful voice and her music really stays with you. She definitely stands out from so many new artists. Would you class her as Pop? Maybe that is at the foundation, yet there is something deeper, more soulful and interesting in the mix. A wonderful range of colours and levels in her voice. This emotional range that means she is such a versatile songwriter and singer. I normally do not feature artists where there are very few interviews out there, as you do not get to know much about them. However, I am going to being one in that I discovered, before ending with a personal pitch and plea to Áine Rose Daly.

I know 2020’s Miles was her debut single. However, 2021’s Places was the first single that really caught the eyes and ears of journalists and fans. I know she has a tribe of music fans that want new music from her. Like Swiftries, does Áine Rose Daly have a term for her followers? Anyway, 2021 was a scary year. Lockdown and COVID-19, it was a strange time. Artists releasing music because there was nothing else to do, but knowing they could not promote it a lot or perform it. However, it must have been challenging trying to find energy and motivation to make music. Places really resonates. Its video is tremendous too. Urbanista spoke with Áine Rose Daly in 2021 about her powerful new release. A song personal to her would have given such strength to others. It is a song I can identify with:

“Speaking about the new release, she said, “I wrote this song a long time ago about my struggles with my mental health and how, at the time, I felt like it was holding me back from doing what I wanted to do with my life.”

Áine Daly is a London-based actor/singer/songwriter. Born and raised in Jersey, Channel Islands to Irish parents and coming from a long lineage of musicians and creatives, Áine has always been surrounded by music and arts.

The last few years have seen Áine’s acting career flourish, having been cast in multiple feature length films and most notably playing a series regular in Amazon Prime’s “HANNA”. Outside of her acting career however, Aine has always maintained her love for songwriting and considers it a major creative outlet for herself.

Having had some space to write more frequently during lockdown and whilst filming for another series of Hanna, Áine has put together a handful of beautifully crafted alternative pop songs and is ready to bring them out of the living room studio they were recorded in and into the world. Aine’s next release will see her join her older brother, singer/songwriter, Tadhg Daly in the list of Jersey born artists stamping their name on the London music scene”.

I am going to come to another 2021 interview in a minute. I want to go off on a bit of a tangent. I adore Áine Rose Daly’s acting work. She is one of these actors who deserves a massive film role. She is so talented and you are drawn to her in a way you are not with other actors. My favourite film ever is Frances Ha. Widely released in 2013, I love that film as Greta Gerwig, as the title character, is so compelling. Someone you feel sympathy and affection for, in spite of her flaws and child-like demeanour. That film hit me hard! I feel like Áine Rose Daly is an actor who could be in a film like this and have a similar impact. That may sound strange, but she is someone you fall in love with but also are awed by. A definite rising star, I hope that film and T.V. directors are knocking down her doors. Not only someone with great dramatic skill and that ability to make you shed tears, I also see this comedic side. I hope one that is exploited more. There is plenty of time ahead, though I feel Daly is going to blow up and appear in huge U.S. T.V. series and a range of films; from big-budget thrillers to more quirky or independent films. I can see her in a music biopic too, but I won’t say which artist I think she reminds me of, as it is sort of trying to manifest something or play this virtual agent. My point is that she has this incredible potential. Also a musical voice that extends beyond Alternative Pop. I sort of feel she has the dexterity to explore other genres. Songs more stripped down and jazzy. Allowing something more emphatic and soulful to come out. Maybe a direction she may consider in years to come. But this is me highlighting the great work Áine Rose Daly has already done. This takes me to another interview worth highlighting.

It is another one back in 2021. There were a few interviews around Places, though I am going to bring stuff more up to date. Noctis chatted with an amazing artist just starting out. During the pandemic, we were all looking around to music to provide comfort and direction. I know many people would have gained strength and solace from Áine Rose Daly. Places is a magnificent song that must have been challenging to write. However, I listen to the song now and it really does move you. The effect it has on listeners is amazing:

“In recent years you’ve built a rather successful acting career, most recently as Sandy Phillips in HANNA. How do the aspects of acting and music compare in your life?

For me, acting and music feel very far apart from each other. I have a lot more confidence when it comes to acting. Maybe that’s just due to having more experience in that area but it definitely comes easier than the music stuff. I’ve had to work a lot on building my confidence up surrounding my own music. It’s always been a massive part of my life but for some reason it feels harder to share that. It’s so personal and makes you feel on display in a way that I never experience with acting. It’s always been a toss up for me on whether I wanted to pursue acting or music but every time I would focus too much on one, I would miss the other. I feel like I need them both in the forefront of my life as that’s when I’m happiest, so here I am, trying to do both and I don’t see myself ever stopping either.

The release also tells the story of a difficult moment in your life where your mental health was becoming a monumental challenge. How natural did it feel to tell the world such a personal story?

It felt pretty natural to tell this particular story to the world really. For the past few years now I’ve become very open about a lot of my mental health struggles and it feels so good to share all this stuff. It’s sounds so lame and cliché, but it really is a case of wanting to talk about all the things I wish I had heard people talking about when I was growing up. Sometimes I think back and feel like maybe it would have made a difference and maybe I wouldn’t have had such a hard time with it all if people talked more about mental health issues and all that encompasses when I was younger. So if I can be a person that makes someone else feel a bit better about what they are going through, or be someone that they can relate to, I’ll absolutely take that role on.

You’re just one of many artists from Jersey stamping your name into London’s music scene. Why do you think the area creates so many talented artists?

I think growing up on an island as small as Jersey is a very strange thing to experience. I see this especially since moving to London and seeing how different it is here. I think this definitely gives people a unique creative perspective which can help the birth of amazing art. I would say a big thing is also the scenery in Jersey. It’s an extremely beautiful place and therefore very inspiring.

Your brother Tadhg Daly is also a music artist, do you think a collaboration would be on the cards at any point in the future?

I would absolutely LOVE to collaborate with Tadhg. It’s definitely inevitable. He is one of my best friends and we spend a lot of time together and run in the same creative circle but an official collab is definitely on the cards, it’s just a case of picking the right moment!

What can we expect to come next from you?

Expect more acting and more music! I’ve still got a lot going on with season 3 of Hanna as well as the release of the film Boiling Point coming very soon so hopefully you’ll be seeing a lot of me! I’m working towards an EP at the moment which means a lot more music coming from me too! I’m so excited about everything that’s going on, it’s all very cool stuff!”.

It is great when we get to look at artists who are from outside of London. Parts of the country not usually discussed. The Isle of Wight has been in focus the past few years due to bands like Wet Leg and Coach Party coming from there and succeeding. Jersey has given us Nerina Pallot, though I think there are other artists from the island that are waiting to come through. Now Áine Rose Daly would put fresh eyes on Jersey. A place I visited as a child and really love. As part of the filmmaking duo, Syvret Rose, alongside Jordan Cox, Áine Rose Daly released the short crime thriller, More Than It Hurts You. The film “tackles complex and often misunderstood experience of living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), drawing deeply from personal experience, particularly Áine’s, who has lived with the condition since childhood”. Maybe she is geared towards filmmaking and acting at the moment. As I said before, she is this remarkable actor and one with a massive and busy future ahead. Genuine success in the U.S. and so many great roles you can see her slaying. A life as a director and someone who I feel is going to have such a multi-disciplined career. I cannot find any newer interviews where Áine Rose Daly discusses new music. I hope it is on her mind for 2026. I am aware she probably will not see this feature either, so it may all be moot! However, I did want to put her name out there in the context of her extraordinary music (and for anyone looking to make a new/alternative to Frances Ha, cast her as she would be bloody brilliant!). Reprise is the most recent chapter from one of our best young artists. Four or five songs under her belt, she could put out an E.P., or record some new tracks and release an album; infuse the older with the new. It would be amazing to hear some new music from Áine Rose Daly. It may be at the back of her mind right now, though I – and many others too – do live in hope that it…

COMES to fruition.

________________

Follow Áine Rose Daly

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@ainerosedaly

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/ainerosedaly

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@ainerosedaly2220

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/AineDalyMusic/

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/7i3kD2ZevBC6U2Y1WNJ4OE?si=B70hxc3OT4eKSZ3DH1Scvw

FEATURE: Silent Night: The Difficulty of Releasing New Christmas Songs and Rivalling Nostalgic Classics

FEATURE:

 

 

Silent Night

PHOTO CREDIT: RDNE Stock project/Pexels

The Difficulty of Releasing New Christmas Songs and Rivalling Nostalgic Classics

__________

I guess overexposure…

PHOTO CREDIT: George Dolgikh/Pexels

gives us a bit of an antipathy to Christmas songs. I have not heard many played at the time of writing this feature (2nd November), though by the time we get to late-November, shops are playing all the classics. I am forty-two, and a lot of the Christmas classics that are played at this time of the year were ones I grew up on. You can look back at those from the likes of Slade, Mud and Wham! Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody was released in 1973. Wizard’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday was also released that year. Wham! released Last Christmas in 1984. Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You came out in 1994. So I got some Christmas songs that were released a decade before I was born. That Wham! classic came out when I was one. Mariah Carey’s when I was ten. So, when I was ten, I pretty much had heard all of the best and most-played Christmas songs. Of course, every year brings us new Christmas songs. We will soon see this year’s come through. Of course, I think Christmas songs are a generational thing. In terms of people of my age grew up listening to the very best. Songs older than that, from the 1950s and 1960s, are ones my parents heard but are not played as much. I think there is a sweet spot in terms of time period. Maybe from the 1970s to the 1990s. Of course, you do hear shops play Brenda Lee's Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree (1958), White Christmas by Bing Crosby (1942) and, ah yes, I forgot to mention 1987’s Fairytale of New York by The Pogues (feat. Kirsty MacColl).

Whilst some of the much older Christmas songs will remain, I think we are starting to see them fade out. Last year, I did not hear them played as much as I did years previous. There is a reliance on that time period I mentioned. I do think that, in a few years’ time, those classics of the 1950s and 1960s might die altogether. It also is bad news for new Christmas songs. I would advise people to buy Annie Zaleski’s wonderful This Is Christmas, Song by Song: The Stories Behind 100 Holiday Hits, as it takes you inside some of the most cherished Christmas songs. I have written before how it is hard to release a new Christmas song. Not only are these tracks seasonal. They are unlikely to get much airplay at all. Maybe some shops will play them, though most will go with the reliable classics. Familiarity means that people will stay shopping and in the shop. However, there is also that risk every year that, as we hear the same songs over and over, it just drives people nuts. In general, it is a risk releasing music in December. It is a quiet period for albums, as people are geared for Christmas and the music press slows. Of course, there is that chance to exploit the Christmas window, though artists tend to get their albums release before December. In terms of Christmas music, physical singles aren’t a thing anymore and the likelihood of most artists getting good streaming numbers for a Christmas song is low. Unless you a major artist like Taylor Swift who has released a Christmas song – 2019’s Christmas Tree Farm -, then it might be waste of time. However, it is interesting hearing new releases.

What angle they take and whether they go for the more traditional route in terms of themes and imagery or go a bit off piste. I do like something more alternative, as it is rarer and you can get bored of artists saying the same thing. It is important that we have new Christmas songs so that they can sit with the tried and tested. However, it is such a gamble for artists. Also, a lot of the best Christmas songs have been around so long that they have worn into our brains. It is harder to make that same impact now. I also feel like Christmas songs lack a certain purpose. Sure, they do remind us of the big day is coming. Beyond that and their use at parties and on T.V., do most of us sit around listening to Christmas songs in December? They seem more for background and when you are shopping. I am always less inclined to make Christmas playlists, though I am pleased when I hear my favourite Christmas song, Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody – which I have heard hundreds of time and do tire of! I do sympathise with artists who put out a Christmas track now, knowing it will be popular (or not) for such a brief time and is a bit of a gamble. Artists releasing albums of Christmas covers. You hear interesting interpretations through, as I say, most of us come back to the songs we heard as children. Even for children now, I feel like they will be more exposed to the songs I heard and, when they are my age, these tracks will still be in their mind. It is interesting to think it Christmas songs will even be played in a few decades. I can imagine that they will be less rare, as more people will shop online.

Rather than Being down on Christmas music, I wanted to examine it in the modern day. The psychology behind the Christmas songs we gravitate towards. If there is a formula that exists. I would say that the songs need a big chorus and a feelgood vibe. That sounds obvious, but some of the more mournful or slower Christmas songs are becoming less popular. Shops playing them earlier and earlier each year is meant to compel us to shop for Christmas goods, but it can be irksome. A challenge for artists wanting to release their own Christmas song. At best, artists can release them for fun and add their name to the list if Christmas tracks. They have to know that there is limited upside in terms of exposure, airplay and financial reward. I think that generational thing is true. Christmas songs from the past couple of decades rarely played. Those from the 1960s and before will start to fade and become less demanded, aside from the odd few which you do need. That will leave a smaller number of seasonable regulars that you are likely to hear now if you go out. The joy of Christmas music is nostalgia. The fact Wham! were the Christmas number one last year emphasises that. This feature explores why Christmas music isn’t timeless anymore. How artists have a very high bar to reach to when it comes to releasing their own songs. Some of the obstacles they face:

“The Challenge of Modern Holiday Music

Artists still put out new Christmas songs every year, but they often struggle to find the right balance between tradition and innovation. A classic Christmas song doesn’t just reflect the musical style of the time—it embodies the mood and sentiment of the holiday itself. Modern Christmas music tends to lean heavily on reinterpreting existing Christmas standards, with a few new additions each year. Artists like Kelly Clarkson, Ariana Grande, and Michael Bublé are more likely to release albums full of covers and reimagined classics rather than trying to craft something brand-new that could join the ranks of “Jingle Bells” or “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

And while there’s nothing wrong with a great cover—Clarkson’s “Underneath the Tree” is a holiday bop that has definitely earned its place on holiday playlists—there’s something about a fresh, original holiday tune that carries a lot of weight when it becomes part of our tradition. But writing a song that has the ability to capture that elusive sense of holiday magic? Now that’s the tricky part.

It’s All About Timing and Luck

You also can’t underestimate how much luck and timing play a role in a song becoming a classic. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” wasn’t a chart-topper the moment it was released in 1994. It took several years for the song to gain the cultural traction it needed, but now it’s arguably the most enduring modern Christmas song of all time. The timing was right, the song captured the magic of Christmas in a fresh way, and it resonated with millions of listeners—eventually becoming a holiday anthem.

This is why it’s so hard to predict what will become the next big Christmas hit. It requires more than just a catchy melody—it requires something that connects with the spirit of the season in a way that feels both new and timeless at the same time. And while a few artists may create songs that could become future classics, there’s no guaranteed formula for success.

In the end, the reason we don’t see new Christmas classics every year is because it’s hard to capture lightning in a bottle. We may get a few newer songs that rise to prominence (and some even become holiday favorites), but truly joining the ranks of the all-time greats? That’s a much rarer feat. Christmas classics are built over time, through cultural moments, memories, and a kind of magic that’s difficult to predict. And for now, the old standards are likely to continue reigning supreme”.

Have we reached a point where we genuinely do not need new Christmas songs? If the same ones are played every year, artists face releasing their music into the void. The pull of nostalgia is one that applies to people of my age and those who grew up listening to the all-time best. I don’t think it will apply to younger generations. Their nostalgia is going to be the same as mine, which is quite weird! Although, if it is hard to write a Christmas original that stands the test of time, there are artists who put their stamp on existing Christmas songs that provide a pleasing alternative. This article goes into more detail:

“According to Berklee College of Music’s forensic musicologist Joe Bennett, it’s all about the nostalgia. In 2017, he analyzed the elements of holiday music that bring in the most monetary and commercial success, including Spotify-charting hits during the week of Dec. 25. From a lyrical standpoint, they all had an element related to “the home, being in love, lost love, parties, Santa or reindeers, snow or coldness, religion, and peace on Earth.”

It is clear most people desire songs that are comforting, transporting listeners to an idealized version of Christmas past with universal themes of joy and warmth. New releases are not meeting this mark and cannot deliver the kind of warm nostalgia that a Bing Crosby tune executes so well.

In his iconic song “White Christmas,” Crosby longs to return to a simpler, more idyllic time: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas / Just like the ones I used to know / Where the treetops glisten and children listen / To hear sleigh bells in the snow.” With its fluttering flute and gentle piano, the song evokes a warm fireplace and fall of snow.

However, one artist who I think does not fall into this category of failed contemporary Christmas is Laufey, an Icelandic jazz singer. She delivers covers of classics with beautiful accuracy of the original songs while bringing a fresh new production. Having been classically trained in violin and piano, she has a deeper understanding and implementation of the older sound we have grown to love. Her background in jazz and Norah Jones-inspired style distinguishes her from the many pop singers attempting to stake their claim in the niche of holiday music.

Ultimately, we do not need more Christmas tunes from today’s musicians. The nostalgic charm and fond memories tied to the past bring an unmatched element of ambience to these songs that new releases lack. For those who want to enjoy such classic Christmas music, I would suggest turning to the greats of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Ella Fitzgerald. For a taste of the holiday spirit with a modern twist, I would recommend Laufey’s newest EP, “A Very Laufey Holiday”.

It is a tricky thing! I would love to discover a modern-day Christmas song that rivals the best, though I think we are predisposed to the ones we already know and are a bit blinkered. I would say to people to check out new Christmas songs, even if you are only adding them to a playlist. It adds variety and freshens things up. However, it is difficult to penetrate the market and rial the best with such a narrow lyrical framework. All the traditional and clinches imagery has been mined and taken. Artists need to look beyond that, which can alienate people who prefer their Christmas songs more traditional. That may, in turn, put artists off releasing Christmas songs at all. Which would be a shame. It just goes to show that those Christmas gems we have heard for decades and listen to every year…

ARE impossible to rival.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Moments of Pleasure at Thirty-Two: A Song Underrated and Overlooked in Spite of Its Beauty

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Moments of Pleasure at Thirty-Two

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993

A Song Underrated and Overlooked in Spite of Its Beauty

__________

I have written…

about Moments of Pleasure a few times. It was released as a single on 15th November, 1993. The third single from Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes, it reached twenty-six in the U.K. I love that the single had some really interesting B-sides. The 12-imnch featured an instrumental version of Moments of Pleasure and Home for Christmas. The C.D. featured Show a Little Devotion, December Will Be Magic Again, and Experiment IV. In addition to marking its thirty-second anniversary, I wanted to react to some critical assessment. Before I get there, it is worth bringing in some background from Kate Bush. What this incredibly moving song was about and how it came to her:

“I think the problem is that during [the recording of] that album there were a lot of unhappy things going on in my life, but when the songs were written none of that had really happened yet. I think a lot of people presume that particularly that song was written after my mother had died for instance, which wasn’t so at all. There’s a line in there that mentions a phrase that she used to say, ‘every old sock meets an old shoe’, and when I recorded it and played it to her she just thought it was hilarious! She couldn’t stop laughing, she just thought it was so funny that I’d put it into this song. So I don’t see it as a sad song. I think there’s a sort of reflective quality, but I guess I think of it more as a celebration of life.

Interview with Ken Bruce, BBC Radio 2, 9 May 2011”.

Whereas it might not be an ignored song, I feel like some of the critical reaction in 1989 was a bit odd. I wrote about this song earlier in the year. Rather than repeat what I published then, I wanted to approach the song from a different angle. Although there was positive reaction to Moments of Pleasure, there was one comment in a review that caught my eye. Let’s take a look at some of the reactions. Music & Media noted, "For most singers a ballad is just a slow song, but for Bush it seems like it has to be an emotional confrontation which classic composers would like to be credited for". Terry Staunton from NME commented, "Her personal exorcisms reach new heights on 'Moments of Pleasure', a deceptively simple ballad with a swooping chorus and a coda where she namechecks the people who've been important to her over years. It's a song that may baffle the world at large, but it wasn't written for us; Kate's just decided to share it”. It is that final line about Moments of Pleasure not being written for us. Whilst many applauded the beauty and swell of the song, there was also a whiff of sexism or condescension. I know NME were probably not attuned to more emotional and personally revealing music in 1989, yet you get the sense that there was this dismissal of women who put out heartfelt or personal songs. True, there are personal elements. Kate Bush name-checking friends lost. She sings about her mother (who died in February 1992). There is a lot of loss. Raw and evocative, there is also hope and strength. It is a song that swells and builds like this choral piece. Bush never saw it a sad song, thought that reflective quality gives it some sadder undertones.

Reapproaching it for 2011’s Director’s Cut, I do love both versions. I feel there was some sense of dismissal. Even if Moments of Pleasure meant something to Kate Bush, it was very much for everyone. I don’t think a whiff of sexism was reserved to magazines like NME. It is great that Moments of Pleasure was appreciated by others. Even so, I do feel like it remains underrated. Streamed over four million times on Spotify, it has done well but not nearly as good as other Kate Bush singles. She never really ever got the approval of all critics. Melody Maker wrote how “Moments of Pleasure' is The Big Literary Effort, Kate at her very tremble-inducing, vocal-range-like-the-Pyrenees best”. The Independent only had this to say: “A smile and a tear from the Welling siren”. Music Week, in spite of its positive take wrote of the “off-her-trolley lyrics”. That insulting and dismissive attitude. Was it just Kate Bush that was receiving this kind of sexism in 1993? Not by a long way! One could say, at a time when British music was embracing the early signs of Britpop and Moments of Pleasure was detached from that, I feel like successful and original women were viewed with cynicism and misogyny. Moments of Pleasure is an extraordinary and arresting song that is filled with stunning imagery and soul-baring sentiments. Especially touching is where Bush names people at the end of the song. Bill Duffield, a lighting technician who tragically died after the warm-up show for Bush’s The Tour of Life in 1979, still very much in her heart.

A song that should have got this rapture and genuine praise seems to have been laced with something sour and sniffy. Maybe if Bush had produced a stonking Rock song or uplifting Pop number than she would have been given an easier ride. However, in 1993, we were eight years past Hounds of Love. The scene had shifted and maybe it was felt that she was out of step with modern music. Not forward-thinking and as innovative as before. This is unfair. The Red Shoes is a fantastic album with some of Kate Bush’s best music in it. I love Moments of Pleasure and wanted to mark its thirty-second anniversary (15th November). However, some of the critical reception baffled and annoyed me. Some of Kate Bush’s most striking and affecting lyrics. “Just let us try/To give these moments back/To those we love/To those who will survive” is an example. If men of the music press were not particularly fond or sold by Moments of Pleasure, I do think that others have taken it to heart. That says, it is still an underrated song. The Red Shoes is an album not as streamed and discussed as others. Go and hear this magnificent song. Thirty-two years after its release and it still has lost none of its wonder. I heard it many years ago and was transfixed then. I play it now and feel the same. A track that deserved more genuine love than it got, Moments of Pleasure is a gem that everyone should listen to. One of the standout songs from…

KATE Bush’s seventh studio album.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s This Woman’s Work at Thirty-Six: How Come It Has Not Enjoyed the Same Resurgence as Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)?

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s This Woman’s Work at Thirty-Six

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

How Come It Has Not Enjoyed the Same Resurgence as Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)?

__________

PERHAPS most new Kate Bush fans…

discovered her through Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) and its use in Stranger Things back in 2022. I have talked about this endlessly, so I am not going to go into it too much more. However, that song really exploded and experienced this resurgence. Partly because the track is a classic and has this warm and propulsive sound. Maybe because how it was used in Stranger Things. Scoring especially powerful images, a lot of fans connected with it. Since then, the track topped the charts and is Kate Bush’s most-streamed song. That is not the only song of hers that has experienced some recent popularity. If the Hounds of Love cut is her biggest success, Never for Ever’s Army Dreamers is not too bad in comparison. Rather than it being used in a film or T.V. show, it did get this focus on TikTok. Lots of videos had that song playing in the background. Because of the atrocities and violence we are seeing in countries like Ukraine, a new significance to a track that calls outs the futility of warfare and how it sacrifices young men. You can easily see why these two tracks are especially potent and popular. I have no doubt that we will get another Kate Bush moment. Where a track of hers gains the same sort of success as Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) did a few years ago. Maybe Army Dreamers is going to be that song. It seems like it could be used to devastating effect. There is one song that has been used a few times in film but has not really gained the life that Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) did.

This Woman’s Work was the second single from 1989’s The Sensual Word. It turns thirty-six on 20th November. It is unique in the sense that it started life in a film. In 1988, it was used in John Hughes’s She’s Having a Baby. It was then included on The Sensual World. One could say it already received its flowers back in 1988. However, what I am talking about is that modern-day revival. Bringing a song back into consciousness. I am going to get to some background to the track. But I wanted to ask why, in spite of the fact this song has appeared in films in recent years, it has not ignited in a big way. Many feeling it has been overused. First, this is what Kate Bush said when it came to the inspiration for This Woman’s Work:

“There’s a film called ‘She’s Having A Baby’. And John Hughes, the director, rung up and said that he had a sequence in the film that he really wanted a song written to be with. And I’d only worked the once before on the ‘Castaway’ film – where I’d really enjoyed that – so I was extremely tempted by the offer. And when he sent the piece of film that the song was going to be part of, I just thought it was wonderful, it was so moving, a very moving piece of film. And in a way, there was a sense that the whole film built up to this moment. And it was a very easy song to write. It was very quick. And just kind of came, like a lot of songs do. Even if you struggle for months, in the end, they just kind of go – BLAH! – You know. [Laughs]. So that was the first song that I wrote for ‘The Sensual World’ album. In fact at the time we weren’t even sure whether to put it on the album or not. And I must say that Del was very instrumental in saying that I should put it on the album, and I’m very glad I did. Because I had the most fantastic response – in some ways, maybe the greatest response – to this song. And I was really – I was absolutely thrilled, that you felt that way about it.

Kate Bush Con, 1990”.

Thirty-six years after its release as a single, I do wonder if the song has been overused. I say ‘overused’, though it has been used in  The Mother (2023) and M3GAN 2.0 (2025). The former, you feel, was misplaced. A song about motherhood perhaps, but more to do with this expectant father having to step up. Perhaps not the most appropriate song for the Jennifer Lopez film. In the latter, it was used more to comedic effect. Perhaps it is about the context. I would love to see This Woman’s Work used in a film but in this really cool scene. As it has been used in a film already, you could not repeat that. However, so many people do not know about this track. It is the sixth-most streamed song of hers on Spotify. Though popular, there has not been a lot of conversation around it. Is the fact Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) has this energy and sense of energy mean it is a more natural success than a song that is more emotive and downbeat? In a modern age, where most of the more popular Pop music does have this fizz and dynamic, can a song that is slower and sadder succeed? It opens up discussions around tastes and whether we are naturally drawn to songs that provoke physical reaction and happiness rather than contemplation or tears. This article from 2023 explains how This Woman’s Work has been used beyond film. It has appeared in T.V. series. If some feel the song is an emotional shortcut or a lazy and cliched way of trying to evoke emotional responses, I feel like it has been misused and not given its dues. It is not going to get the same sort of explosion and life as Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Though it seems odd that, given the song has been used quite a bit in film and T.V., that it has not gained a bigger life. This Woman’s Work is a classic, yet it might be a song more cherished and memorable in private moments, rather than being seen as this big screen triumph. Something that has touched a new generation of fans. Regardless, I do feel it is an important song. As 20th November marks thirty-six years since it was released as a single, I did want to revisit one of Kate Bush’s greatest works. Whether it will be used again in film and T.V. remains to be seen. There is no getting around the fact that the song means a lot to people. I think it has this reputation as being used lazily as a go-to when we want to summon up an emotional response. However, it used in a different or new way, I see no reason why This Woman’s Work couldn’t reach new fans and finds its way…

BACK on the charts.

FEATURE: Bringing Opera and Classical to the Mainstream: Why ROSALÍA’s Berghain Is Such a Revelation

FEATURE:

 

 

Bringing Opera and Classical to the Mainstream

PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Maggio

Why ROSALÍA’s Berghain Is Such a Revelation

__________

THERE is no doubting the fact…

ROSALÍA’s Berghain is one of this year’s best singles. It is also one of the most revelatory and different. One of the greatest artists in the world, maybe you define her music as Experimental Pop or Alternative Reggaeton. Her third album, Motomami, was released in 2022. Her upcoming fourth studio album comes out on Friday. LUX is going to be among this year’s best albums. Its lead single features Björk and Yves Tumor. I am picking up on something The Guardian posted. Whether Berghain is Opera. It is this dramatic, bombastic, string-filled and mesmeric song that features a series of German verses "Seine Angst ist meine Angst, Seine Wut ist meine Wut, Seine Liebe ist meine Liebe, Sein Blut ist mein Blut". In English: 'His fear is my fear, His anger is my anger, His love is my love, His blood is my blood”. The fact that the song brings together a Spanish superstar, an Icelandic icon and a wonderful American artist (you can guess who is who!), coupled with the German lyrics, makes this a song that is so different to what is in the Pop mainstream. There are few artists singing in different languages. You do get some artists singing in Spanish. Maybe there are additions of other languages as an effect or a gimmick almost. Artists like Gwenno singing in Cornish or Welsh is more natural and authentic. However, what ROSALÍA has done with Berghain is unique:

“Since her breakout album El Mal Querer in 2018, the 33-year-old musician and producer born Rosalía Vila Tobella has made her name on visionary avant garde mutations of the flamenco she studied at a prestigious music school. She has also attracted praise and controversy for exploring Caribbean and Latin sounds on her 2022 album Motomami.

Her new record centres her classical training: the LSO is featured throughout – directed by Daníel Bjarnason – alongside fado and flamenco singers. “It is thrilling to watch this woman grow,” Björk wrote in an approving tweet. “Congratulations to her with this incredible album, switching genre kung-fu style. This concept is fierce!”

With its thunderous strings and Wagnerian vocals, the lead track is in parts more Radio 3 than Spotify hit, but pop fans seem delighted by the star’s return. As one posted on TikTok of the evident heartbreak on Berghain: “I love whatever is wrong with Rosalía, this song is actually INSANE.”

Perhaps predictably, it’s classical music fans who seem more divided. It piqued the attention of Classic FM, which asked on its website: “Why does Rosalía’s song Berghain feature a symphony orchestra and German opera?”

On TikTok, the classical music influencer Daria Challah called it “probably the most important thing that’s happened to classical music this year … Finally an artist has delivered something that will really change the way people see this tradition of music.”

Classical critic Hugh Morris disagreed, calling it “new musical kitsch”. He accused Rosalía of perpetuating the “genrefication” of classical music and using “pre-digested musical gestures as a shortcut to depth or emotional power”. Others have pointed out that despite her technical prowess as a singer, the amplification and effects mean the song cannot be considered opera.

New York City-based opera singer Sarah Khan, who went viral for her traditional operatic rendition of Berghain on TikTok, praised Rosalía’s genre-crossing.

“I immediately heard opera, but she also trained in the vocal art of cante flamenco, and you can tell she’s done a lot of study to perfect this song,” Khan said. She also praised Rosalía for singing in another language.

“German is difficult to sing if it’s not your first language,” she said. “Part of classical opera training is learning how to manoeuvre your resonance and your tone through languages that you’re not familiar with. She did it really beautifully.”

Khan, 26, also said she connected with the rare, distinctly feminine perspective of the song – about being overwhelmed by a male partner’s fear and anger, and dissolving like “a sugar cube” – in comparison with the male perspective of most operas.

In most male-written librettos, she said, “there’s a hero, a direct peak and climax. But in this storyline, you can tell she’s wrestling with her broken heart as the music gets louder and softer. It’s not like she breaks through and then doesn’t have a broken heart any more; she’s going in and out of it. That pulls the storyline to a very feminine, human place.”

For Khan, whether or not Berghain technically constitutes opera is immaterial. “The way that opera connects with a person is very subjective, which I think is beautiful,” she said. “Having opera come to the mainstream inspires more people to sing it, maybe to learn it and appreciate it and to want to go and see an opera”.

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A post shared by LA ROSALÍA (@rosalia.vt)

It is no surprise that the song has confounded some people. I have recently written how there is this melding of modern Pop and Classical. How artists are performing with orchestras. St. Vincent, Little Simz and Dua Lipa are examples of artists whose music has been elevated and transformed by partnering with orchestras or string quartets. Maybe there is still snobbery from purists. Orchestras and Classical being seen as pure and maybe adding something as commercial as Pop weakens or waters it down. However, the clash leads to spectacular results! ROSALÍA is a hugely innovative artist who has created this operatic song. From a feminine viewpoint, this is something new in Opera. By bringing a song like Berghain more into the mainstream, it will help bring more attention to Opera. A style and art that some turn their noses up to. See as inaccessible or overwrought. ROSALÍA is one of the most extraordinary vocalists in the world. How she can naturally inhabit the spirit of an acclaimed and professional Opera singer. It is a wonderful song! I do feel like a lot of Pop music is quite stale and unnatural in terms of sound. Maybe you would not define ROSALÍA as ‘Pop’. Though she is a commercial artist, yet she is making music that differs from a lot of the more bland Pop being offered. Vigorous, thrilling, dramatic and evocative, Berghain is this revelation. We can argue whether it is Opera or not. Classical music has remained somewhat distant from Pop and the mainstream. Even if artists do collaborate with orchestras, there is rarely any real integration. I still think there is dubiousness and elitism when it comes to Classical music. How some have asked why ROSALÍA would step into this world.

There have been reviews of Berghain. This is what Pitchfork wrote: “Berghain” feels as ambitious as Lux’s supposed four-movement structure, cantering from violin fireworks à la Vivaldi’s “Winter” to a pummeling Rite of Spring grand finale. Yves Tumor is here—to usher us into the final act—as is Björk, whose own gale force presence threatens to knock the song on its side like a two-dimensional façade. Then there’s the matter of the titular Berlin nightclub. Last year, French Lebanese DJ Arabian Panther accused Berghain of cancelling a scheduled performance due to his pro-Palestine views. Controversy is built in with Rosalía—a Catalonian who sang in an Andalusian accent on 2018’s El Mal Querer and became a superstar making reggaeton—but “Berghain” never quite earns its provocation”. The Face were more positive: “Rosalía’s first single off her hotly-anticipated album, Lux is nothing short of epic. Accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra, the Spanish artist takes on opera, merging German, Spanish and English in a devotional love song that borders on dangerous obsession. Singing in German, a choir emphasises in the chorus: ​“His fear is my fear/​His anger is my anger/​His love is my love/​His blood is my blood,” before Rosalía joins them in a towering falsetto. Björk, who last collaborated with Rosalía on the 2023 one-off single Oral, belts out a chorus and Yves Tumor barks ​“I’ll fuck you till you love me” through a wall of distortion. This truly theatrical comeback is blowing up the internet, in part thanks to the strange and absorbing music video that feels like the trailer to a Lanthimos film. It’s safe to say I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of Lux. TL”.

Even though the article does not criticise ROSALÍA, the fact Classic FM wrote about Berghain means there is a certain amount of judgment. Their headline is “Why does Rosalía’s song ‘Berghain’ feature a symphony orchestra and German opera?”. That seems to suggest judgement. Why are we still at the point when artists who try something different is questioned. Especially if you are a woman. If fans of other genres are more accepting and less questioning, there does still seem to be a degree or elitism. Speaking with Linton Stephens, host of the Southbank Centre’s new podcast, So, Hear Me Out, CRACK asked for a breakdown of ROSALÍA’s incredible new track. The fact that it draws from Classical pieces means that it not only brings a new urgency and gravitas to Pop and the mainstream. It will hopefully draw those not overly-familiar of Classical to the genre:

“Which era of classical music do you think Rosalía’s Berghain draws from most strongly?

It instantly transported me to the sound world of Vivaldi’s concerti or the orchestral music of Rameau. The vibrant textures and rhythmic vitality are characteristic of the Italian Baroque.

Are there any particular classical works that Berghain reminds you of?

The arpeggiated opening reminds me of Vivaldi’s most famous Bassoon Concerto in E Minor, but when the choir enters, it also evokes the grandeur and richness found in Bach’s sacred works – or even Handel’s oratorios, as well as more modern choral music.

For listeners drawn to the classical elements in Berghain, what pieces or composers should they explore next?

Definitely seek out the instrumental works (especially concerti) of Vivaldi. If it’s the choral elements, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana has moments that offer that same kind of compelling raw emotion of massed voices.

How do you see Rosalía’s formal classical training background shaping her approach to composition and vocal performance on the track?

You can hear that the foundation of this work is rooted in classical traditions and built up from that. What’s unique is how Rosalía then brings in her own style and influence. She drops down the octave, and the genres begin to morph from traditional to modern. That’s what innovation is all about.

Do you think we’re entering a moment where more pop artists are engaging seriously with classical music? In your opinion, what might be driving that trend?

Not necessarily classical music, but live, instrumental and orchestral music, yes. I think it’s a way of adding some robustness and gravitas to live performances and recordings of genres that are generally more pared back. Also, I think with the introduction of AI, instrumental collaboration from the orchestral world reminds us that it’s authentically human-made”.

It is important that music, Pop or otherwise, evolves and keeps fresh. If ROSALÍA had released a single that sounded like her last, then there would be no bother. However, it does seem like there is still this risk of criticism or judgement if you step into Classical or Opera. Maybe it is not as accomplished as professional Opera. However, it is this remarkable modern-day operetta. This wonderful and sense-altering explosion that brings together the London Symphony Orchestra, Björk and Yves Tumor. I hope it is a sign of things to come from LUX. The innovative, sensational and hugely consistent ROSALÍA has released a single that has divided some. However, it has raised a larger conversation about marrying Opera, Classical and genres of music seen as more conventional and popular. How Berghain will open conversations around Pop artists working more with Classic artists and orchestras. If some have raised questions about why ROSALÍA would sing in German, create something operatic and step into the Classical world, the thrilling and monumental Berghain is nothing but…

A positive thing.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: What’s My Age Again? blink-182’s Tom DeLonge at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Anna Lee Media

What’s My Age Again? blink-182’s Tom DeLonge at Fifty

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I wanted to mark…

the fiftieth birthday of Tom DeLonge. The guitarist and vocalist of Blink-182 celebrates his birthday on 13th December. The band released their ninth studio album, One More Time..., in 2023. There was a period when DeLonge was not in the band. Departing in 2015, he was prompted to return after bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2021. After a meeting between DeLonge and his former bandmates, the trio overcame lingering disputes, which later led to DeLonge's return. It is great that he is back in the fold. I am going to celebrate his fiftieth birthday by combining some of the best blink-182 songs. Before getting there, I am coming to some biography from AllMusic:

“As the singer/songwriter fronting blink-182, Tom DeLonge was one of the biggest punk rock stars at the turn of the millennium. He parlayed that success into the spacier project Angels & Airwaves, a group heavily indebted to the college rock of U2 and the Cure, which DeLonge formed while blink was on hiatus in the back half of the 2000s. For a while, he kept both a reunited blink-182 and Angels & Airwaves afloat, but after the blink reunion collapsed in 2015, he launched a solo career with the clearinghouse demo To the Stars.

To the Stars appeared two decades after blink-182's 1995 debut Cheshire Cat, but that wasn't the start of DeLonge's musical career. A native of the San Diego suburb Poway, the teenage DeLonge loved skateboarding and punk, learning how to play guitar in his early teens. In his late teens, he formed a group with drummer Scott Raynor and bassist Mark Hoppus, flying through a variety of names before landing on blink-182. They cut a demo called Flyswatter in 1993 and another called Buddha in 1994, signing with Cargo Records later that year. Cheshire Cat, their official debut, arrived in 1995, supported by heavy touring, all of which helped the group take the leap to the major-label MCA in 1996. Dude Ranch, their major debut, came out in 1997 and the single "Dammit," along with the group's slot on the inaugural Warped Tour, helped raise the their profile. Raynor left the band in 1998, replaced by former Aquabats drummer Travis Barker. This new lineup recorded 1999's Enema of the State, the album that turned blink-182 into crossover stars thanks to the hits "All the Small Things" and "What's My Age Again?" Over the next few years, blink-182 was the reigning pop-punk band, with their 2001 album, Take Off Your Pants & Jacket, sustaining the group's momentum.

Despite this success, tensions started to surface in the band when DeLonge cut the 2002 side project Box Car Racer with Barker but not Hoppus. A full-band effort, the eponymous blink-182 came out in 2003, and its darker, artier sound didn't satisfy some of the band's fans. Then came further fractures in the band's relations, highlighted by Travis Barker's decision to film a reality show for MTV called Keeping Up with the Barkers and DeLonge's desire to slow down their schedule so he could spend time with his family. All this led to blink's breakup in 2005.

DeLonge resurfaced in 2006 with a new band called Angels & Airwaves, an ambitious outfit inspired by '80s college rock icons the Cure and U2. A&A released their debut, We Don't Need to Whisper, in 2006, quickly followed by I-Empire in 2007. The next year, DeLonge decided to reunite blink-182 in the wake of Barker surviving a plane crash. A full tour followed in 2009 but the reunion album, Neighborhoods, didn't surface until 2011; during this down time, DeLonge recorded the ambitious, multi-part A&A project, Love Album, Pts. 1 & 2. Neighborhoods performed respectably but softly, leading the band to part from their major label -- now Interscope, after several corporate consolidations -- in October 2012. An indie EP called Dogs Eating Dogs showed up at the end of 2012, then DeLonge turned his attention back to Angels & Airwaves, recording the 2014 album The Dream Walker. Next up was another blink-182 album, but the band fell apart again in early 2015. DeLonge rallied by releasing his first solo album, To the Stars -- a collection split between blink demos and ideas for A&A -- that April”.

Sharing the lead vocals with Mark Hoppus, I am including blink-182 songs that feature either his incredible guitar or vocal work. Maybe you have not heard of the band or are a minor fan. I feel it is important to mark his fiftieth birthday on 13th December. Below is a mixtape of wonderful tracks from the district and…

SIMPLY brilliant blink-182.

FEATURE: She Loves You: Why We Need to Give Proper Respect and Credit to the Women Who Defined and Shaped The Beatles’ Lives

FEATURE:

 

 

She Loves You

IN THIS PHOTO: Anna Sawai will portray Yoko Ono in the 2028-due Beatles films from director Sam Mendes/PHOTO CREDIT: Andie Jane for Vanity Fair

Why We Need to Give Proper Respect and Credit to the Women Who Defined and Shaped The Beatles’ Lives

__________

IT is exciting learning…

IN THIS PHOTO: Saoirse Ronan will play the exceptional Linda Eastman in Sam Mendes’s Beatles films/PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Winkelmeyer/WireImage/Getty Images

about some important casting for Sam Mendes’s new Beatles films coming in 2028. We know who will play each of the Beatles, but we also know who has been cast as some hugely significant women in the band’s life. What has troubled me is how articles refer to them as ‘Beatles wives’ or reducing them to supporting cast. Not important as the band members. Almost like afterthoughts. Whilst many might think of Yoko Ono, Patti Boyd, Maureen Cox and Linda Eastman as the wives/partners of John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, they are so much more than inspiration, muses or lovers. Not only did the band write timeless songs about them. They are as important regarding their career and success as female fans. The screaming and impassioned girls who were devoted to the band. I shall come to that later. Even though there were darker times (fans getting too attached and possessive; fans screaming so loud The Beatles couldn’t hear themselves play), they are unsung heroines and crucial people in the legacy and importance of The Beatles. As are the compelling, fascinating, strong and wonderful women who have just been cast. Let’s hope that they get plenty of screentime and they are explored and as big a part of the dialogue as The Beatles’ members:

“Sam Mendes’ ambitious four-part Beatles film has confirmed the casting of four main female roles.

Sony Pictures officially announced that Mia McKenna-Bruce will play Maureen Cox, with Saoirse Ronan as Linda Eastman, Anna Sawai as Yoko Ono and Aimee Lou Wood as Pattie Boyd. All four had been strongly rumoured to have been in line for their parts, but only now has their participation been confirmed.

Each of the four real-life women played significant roles in the Beatles’ story. Cox met drummer Ringo Starr as a 15-year-old trainee hairdresser in 1962, when the band were still regulars at Liverpool’s Cavern club; they married in 1965 but were divorced 10 years later. Eastman was a photographer who met Paul McCartney in 1967; they married in 1969 and she joined his post-Beatles band Wings and performed regularly with him until her death in 1998. Ono, an artist and musician, met John Lennon in 1966; they were married in 1969 after Lennon divorced his first wife, Cynthia, and they remained together until Lennon’s death in 1980. Boyd, a successful fashion model, met George Harrison in 1964 on the set of the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night; they were married in 1966 and divorced in 1977 after she had become the object of attentions from Harrison’s friend Eric Clapton, who co-wrote the 1970 song Layla about her.

IN THIS PHOTO: Mia McKenna-Bruce has been cast as Maureen Starkey (née Cox) in The Beatles (the working/current title of Sam Mendes’s four films)/PHOTO CREDIT: Iona Wolff

Mendes said in a statement: “Maureen, Linda, Yoko and Pattie are four fascinating and unique figures in their own right – and I’m thrilled that we’ve managed to persuade four of the most talented women working in film today to join this amazing adventure.”

Currently titled The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event, Mendes’ project was first announced in 2024 with the aim of making four separate fiction films, one for each member of the band. In April, the band members’ casting was announced – Paul Mescal as McCartney, Harris Dickinson as Lennon, Barry Keoghan as Starr and Joseph Quinn as Harrison – and in May reports emerged that award-winning writers Jez Butterworth, Peter Straughan and Jack Thorne had been hired to work on the films”.

The casting news is great! Amazing actors will bring to life some incredible women. When we read books about the band and see documentaries  concerning The Beatles, how much of their story is told? In terms of recognising their importance and the role they played in the success of The Beatles. People have reacted to the casting news and asked why we are not going to see Jane Asher (Paul McCartney’s former girlfriend) and Cynthia Lennon (John Lennon’s ex-wife) portrayed. Two incredibly important women, why are they being side-lined? I do hope that Sam Mendes ensures that Mia McKenna-Bruce, Saoirse Ronan, Anna Sawai and Aimee Lou Wood will be given big roles and they are not merely there to fill parts and have minimal dialogue or interaction. It made me wonder how much time we spend discussing the women behind The Beatles. At a time when their husbands and boyfriends were in the middle of a global media storm and being mobbed by fans, they often had to deal with attacks from the press, jealousy from fans and being overlooked. How lonely and isolating it must have been for these women a lot of the time.

IN THIS PHOTO: Aimee Lou Wood is going to play Patti Boyd in the forthcoming Beatles films/PHOTO CREDIT: Lulu McArdle for ELLE

However, these women had their own careers and lives. Fascinating, intelligent and supportive partners who have never really received their dues. I do worry that they are going to be side players in the films about The Beatles. Of course, people want to see the band and the films are going to be about The Beatles. However, you cannot ignore just how crucial Yoko Ono, Maureen Cox, Linda Eastman and Patti Boyd are. Ono and Boyd are still with us, so I will be interested to see how they react to the films. Patti Boyd said, when Aimee Lou Wood was rumoured to play her, how pleased she was. I am curious about Yoko Ono. In terms of the way she was treated and what she faced, her experiences were possibly the hardest and worse of any of the women! Not to say it was especially easy for the others, you do feel that Yoko Ono was especially villainised and affected. I want to bring in this article  from 2022, that was published in response to the publication of Christine Barrett-Feldman’s book, A Women’s History of the Beatles. Whilst academics, authors and experts of The Beatles, in the past, were male-heavy, there are more women discussing the band and offering new perspectives. Critically, they are talking about how women shaped The Beatles! Highlighting the importance of their largely female fanbase, through to the wives of the band members, there are these great podcasters and authors who are shining lights on the girls and women who helped make and define The Beatles:

“I’ve been reading books about the Beatles for over a half-century but none have spoken to me like Christine Barrett-Feldman’s A Women’s History of the Beatles. This much-needed book shows us the mission-critical role of women in transforming four talented and ambitious young men into the Beatles, and the myriad ways the Beatles have, in turn, inspired and transformed the lives of women across three generations.

Feldman-Barrett, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Australia’s Griffith University, is a self-described “aca-fan”—an academic who studies a cultural phenomenon of which they’re a fan. Yet you won’t find the pretentious, obfuscating prose often found in academic books on fandom. It’s well-written, respectful of the reader, and acknowledges that fandom is joyful. Focusing on female perspectives gives the book a different kind of energy that is hard to describe.

Similarly refreshing is that the book is authoritative without the attitudes of expertise or ownership that characterize much academic and popular writing about the Beatles. Despite more women of all ages participating in Beatles scholarship and commentary in recent years, Boomer men shaped the discourse and still predominate. In my 2014 book, Beatleness, I described Beatles scholarship as a conversation among male observers, and offered a sociocultural analysis of first-gen Beatles fandom that broadened the conversation; others are broadening it as well.

Scholars such as Katie Kapurch, Holly Tessler, Kit O’Toole, and Erin Weber bring new perspectives, and podcasts such as bc the Beatles and Another Kind of Mind—hosted by millennial women—expand the conversation in that medium. But A Women’s History of the Beatles does something different.

By centering women in the Beatles story, which Feldman-Barrett likens to a fairy tale, it becomes clear how the surround and support of women—fans, friends, and family—made the Beatles possible, and shows us three generations of women—musicians, journalists, academics, fashion designers, ethnomusicologists, tour guides, visual artists, DJs, and TikTok stars— whose Beatles fandom inspired a range of personal and professional pursuits.

A Women’s History of the Beatles is organized thematically rather than chronologically, though it does begin at the beginning, with the foundational support of mothers and aunties, and the unfailing devotion of female fans in Liverpool and throughout Merseyside—to whom the world owes an enormous debt of gratitude.

Feldman-Barrett suggests the Beatles’ rapport with their fans—locally and then globally—was a natural extension of their relationships with the strong, supportive women in their families who “served as role models and mentors.” Indeed, despite prevailing attitudes toward women in their Northern, working-class milieu and tales of sexual adventure on the Reeperbahn and on tour, A Women’s History of the Beatles shows that the Beatles’ “interactions with women were varied, multidimensional, and contextual.”

Many observers say there would have been no Beatles without Brian Epstein; others say George Martin was the sine que non. But after reading this book, it’s clear that Mona Best and Astrid Kirchherr come before either of them. Pete’s Mom provided a venue—even after the unceremonious sacking of her son—that positioned the band to continually expand and energize their loyal local fan base which, in turn, fueled their confidence and determination. This created a positive feedback loop that propelled them to Hamburg and their transformative residencies.

It was during a 1960 residency that the Beatles befriended Kirchherr, whose friend Klaus Voormann persuaded her to go with him to the red light district to see and hear them “mach schau.” Six years later Voormann would design the cover of Revolver, and three years after that would play bass in the Plastic Ono Band. But none of that would have happened were it not for the alluring and enigmatic Astrid, the educated, middle-class girl who wore leather and a Jean Seberg pixie cut. A musician and photographer who says Kirchherr was one of her biggest influences aptly described her as “a woman who went where she wasn’t supposed to go.”

According to Feldman-Barrett, Astrid played the role of fairy godmother in the Beatles’ fairy tale, the kindly, knowing figure who ensures good things will happen. Using her camera as a magic wand, she was the first person to take composed photos of the band; the first person to whom this idea occurred! Her female gaze showed these “Cinderlads” who they were and the Prince Charmings they would eventually be.

Feldman-Barrett writes: “Kirchherr was able to fully identify, document—and then further shape—the Beatles’ magnetic appeal. It is through her black-and-white photographs of the band that we first see the Beatles as objects of desire and Kirchherr as the ‘desiring subject.’” Even readers familiar with the story will come away with a new appreciation for Kirchherr—and gratitude for Voormann’s persuasive ability that October night in 1960.

We’ve heard hundreds of male musicians from David Crosby to David Grohl talk about how the Beatles inspired them. A Women’s History of the Beatles shows us female musicians—some famous, some not—who have been similarly inspired, and corrects the persistent narrative about girl fans liking the Beatles primarily because “they’re cute.” Readers will be surprised to learn about the Liverbirds, the four Cavern girls who started a band and opened for the Kinks, and the Rolling Stones on their early UK tours. (Check out Feldman-Barrett’s A Women’s History of the Beatles playlist here.)

Yoko, who Feldman-Barret says is the preeminent female figure in the Beatles fairy tale, “was not widely received as a virtuous maiden worthy of a princely reward. Instead, she was presented and viewed as a cunning sorceress who had Lennon spellbound.”  She was also a “godmother of punk” whose influence can be heard in numerous punk, post-punk, and riot grrrl bands.

Other important contributions of A Women’s History of the Beatles are the overlooked voices of lesbian fans—who found the Beatles attractive “irrespective of their sexual orientation”—and black fans, like the woman from the south side of Chicago who moved to the UK because of them. Another black fan recalled, “There’s something about how [the Beatles] talk about the world that has always made me feel comfortable in my own skin and made me feel like it’s okay to like what I like and be who I am.”

Beatle wives and girlfriends— Cynthia, Pattie, Jane, Maureen, Yoko, and Linda — are presented as significant figures in their own right. But Feldman-Barrett also zooms out and puts their Beatle relationships in a broader context, showing how they were role models for fans as well as exemplars of changing gender dynamics throughout the decade”.

Other articles like this observe how “There is a cultural tendency to link mainstream music with women, specifically young girls and teenagers. Burdened by societal levies on age and femininity, teenage girls are a scarily undermined social sector. As both women and popular music are deemed simple, female fans are positioned as the appropriate counterpart. One of the most culturally significant bands of the modern era, The Beatles, is a prime example of this undervaluation. The Beatles were fandom-less, unknown and non-credible until teenage girls started paying attention to their art”. In terms of the casting of The Beatles’ wives, let’s explore their influence (this word is going to repeated a lot, so apologies, but I think it is necessary and accurate). Last year, Women’s Weekly paid tribute to the feminist forces behind the greatest and most influential band ever. Patti Boyd had a huge impact:

“English model and actress Pattie Boyd first met her soon-to-be husband, George Harrison, on the set of the 1964 promotional film, A Hard Day’s Night.

“On first impressions, John seemed more cynical and brash than the others, Ringo the most endearing, Paul was cute, and George, with velvet-brown eyes and dark chestnut hair, was the best-looking man I had ever seen. At a break for lunch, I found myself sitting next to him. Being close to him was electrifying,” Pattie would later recall of the fateful meeting.

Whilst Pattie eventually became George’s wife, inspiring songs like Something and I Need You (as well as an infamous rock love triangle with Eric Clapton), one of her biggest contributions to The Beatles is often overlooked.

It’s no secret that LSD played an integral role in The Beatles’ discography, but it was Pattie Boyd’s dentist, John Riley, who first introduced the band to it. The unassuming dentist laced John, Cynthia, Pattie and George’s coffees with the psychedelic during a dinner party in 1965.

“We were just insane… we were just out of our heads… we all thought there was a fire in the lift, but it was just a little red light, and we were all screaming, all hot and hysterical!” John recalled of the night.

Meanwhile George said of the experience: “I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass,” he said. “It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours.”

Pattie also was responsible for The Beatles’ introduction and deep interest in Hinduism and Indian culture. She had been previously introduced to Transcendental Meditation by her sister, and convinced the band to join her to watch a lecture by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1967. This interaction sparked the famous trip to India the following year which had a monumental impact on the band’s music and direction”.

Linda McCartney/Eastman was massively crucial. Not only in terms of what she gave to The Beatles. The solo work of Paul McCartney, and her role in Wings. She was someone who had a profound effect on McCartney. Let’s hope that Saoirse Ronan is given the chance to fulfil the multiple sides and the sheer brilliance of this incredible woman:

“Though Paul and his long-term girlfriend, Jane Asher, broke up in 1968, the Beatle wasn’t single for long because he quickly met the love of his life, Linda Eastman. The pair met at the Bag O’Nails nightclub in London in May 1967 and again for the launch of The Beatles’ latest record, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

From the moment they got together, Paul and Linda became an inseparable force. Though Linda only saw the last few years of The Beatles, she’s credited with guiding Paul through the emotionally tumultuous breakup of the band and the ugly ensuing legal battles that followed.

With a trusty Nikon camera by her side, Linda snapped some of the band’s most candid and authentic moments in the final years of their time as a group. She continued to photograph Paul through his solo career and in the Wings era giving Beatles fans a comprehensive visual narrative to pore over for years to come”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney and Linda Eastman at a press launch of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, held at Brian Epstein’s house at 24 Chapel Street, London on 19th May, 1967 (Eastman and McCartney first met four days earlier at the Bag O’Nails club. They would marry on 12th March, 1969)/PHOTO COURTESY OF: The Paul McCartney Project

Yoko Ono is the most maligned and vilified of The Beatles’ wives. Still recording today, you would hope more than anyone, her importance is brought into brilliant focus! I am sure that Anna Sawai will do a phenomenal job. She is an extraordinary actor and it is only right that she is given proper flowers and space. That these amazing actors portraying these often forgotten women are not reduced to a few lines or being at the back. How they impacted The Beatles and the legacy they leave is as vital, I think, as the band’s:

“When a married John Lennon step foot into the Indica Gallery in 1966, he wasn’t aware that the woman he was about to meet would irreparably set The Beatles on a different musical path. Yoko Ono’s avant-garde approach to art quickly spilled into John’s creative processes, which undeniably exasperated tensions within the group, but ultimately pushed John to create some of The Beatles’ best music.

“She wanted more, do it more, do it double, be more daring, take all your clothes off,” Paul explained during an interview with Barry Miles for his book Many Years from Now. “She always pushed him, which he liked. Nobody had ever pushed him. Nobody had ever pushed him like that. We all thought we were far-out boys, but we kind of understood that we’d never get quite that far out.”

Paul and John had both previously experimented with tape loops and other sound engineering marvels in songs like I’m Only Sleeping and Strawberry Fields Forever. However, the White Album saw John’s experimentalism reach new heights on songs like Revolution 9 which, thanks to Yoko’s influence, is eight straight minutes of unbridled cacophonous mayhem. Unlike John, who was a self-taught musician, Yoko was classically trained which also saw her lend a hand to composing songs like Because and The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.

Though Yoko is often unfairly cast as the villain who broke up The Beatles, it’s well-documented by the band themselves that factors like Brian Epstein’s death and the ravages of fame and time had eaten away at their comradery long before Yoko entered the picture. But what Yoko did do was open John’s mind to endless musical possibilities which made for boundary-pushing art and music”.

I am being pretty liberal when taking from this feature, though it is pertinent and very relevant. I will bring in sections about two women not included (as yet) in Sam Mendes’s films and why their omission would be an oversight. Maureen Starkey is someone who many overlook and do not see as important:

“Maureen Starkey was the most enduring feminine force behind The Beatles. She met Ringo back in 1962 and stayed married to him through Beatlemania, the breakup of The Beatles all the way through to 1975 when the pair divorced.

As a 15-year-old trainee hairdresser in Liverpool, Maureen was a regular at the Cavern Club where she quickly became acquainted with The Beatles and other skiffle groups. It was here where she met Ringo as he was standing on the precipice of unprecedented fame and adoration.

“Richy was just the drummer at the time,” Maureen recalled in a 1988 interview with the French magazine Le Chroniqueur. “I don’t remember when he first asked me out on a date, but he did just after he left the Hurricanes and joined the Beatles.”

Maureen and Ringo became a couple as The Beatles fame soared and the pair married in 1965 after learning they were pregnant with their first child. Along with the other Beatles and their partners, Maureen joined Ringo in India in 1968 where their musical prowess was opened up to unlimited bounds. Though she didn’t directly inspire any officially released Beatles tunes, that’s not to say she wasn’t a muse.

George Harrison, who would later have an affair with Maureen to the horror of his other bandmates, once sang a pointed song titled ‘Maureen’ during the 1969 Get Back sessions. Though he claimed the track was penned by his pal Bob Dylan, sceptics and die-hard Beatles fans argue otherwise. Ringo also commissioned Frank Sinatra to sing a special rendition of The Lady is a Tramp for Maureen’s birthday in 1968 with the song title being changed to ‘The Lady is a Champ’.

Besides this, Maureen was arguably the most die-hard Beatles fan who was present for every stage of the band’s lifespan from Cavern Club rockers to global music phenomenon. Her unwavering adoration is best seen in the Get Back documentary where she can be seen head-banging and cheering on the band during their rooftop performance”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Maureen Starkey

Maybe Jane Asher did not want to be included in the films. She has never spoken about her time with Paul McCartney, and she has remained private. However, her role cannot be diminished: “Some of Paul’s greatest love songs including And I Love Her and Here, There and Everywhere were inspired by his whirlwind relationship with Jane. The pair also had quite the tumultuous relationship which saw Paul pen some of The Beatles’ best melancholy tracks like You Won’t See Me and I’m Looking Through You. But Jane’s impact wasn’t just being a muse, her high-profile career and London abode introduced Paul to a range of new experiences including the theatre – which may have played a part in Paul’s burgeoning interest in fusing operatic orchestras with his rock music”. The same goes for Cynthia Lennon. Often discarded and abused, would it be too troubling, dark and problematic focusing on a woman who was often mistreated horribly by John Lennon?! It would be very harsh if she were left out: “As other girlfriends and wives entered and exited the tightknit foursome, Cynthia proved to be a grounding force that helped them adjust into the fold. Often to the detriment of her happiness and wellbeing, Cynthia also stoically braved loneliness, affairs, single-handedly raising a child, and at times, violence, as John and The Beatles’ career flourished. Eventually, it was John’s spiral into LSD that caused a rift between the pair. “John needed to escape his reality. I understood completely but I couldn’t go along with him.” Cynthia later said of John’s experimenting with drugs. She and Julian Lennon directly and indirectly inspired many great Beatles tracks including You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, Across The Universe, Hey Jude and Julia”.

We must not overlook also the role women in music played on The Beatles and their own music. It is wonderful that such a strong quartet of actors are filing the shoes of women who were more than just ‘Beatles wives’. Instead, these women had incredible influence and were instrumental when it came to growth. Inspiring so many incredible and enduring songs, behind closed doors, I think their importance in keeping The Beatles grounded is pivotal. Although articles have been written about the women behind The Beatles and there are great podcasts out there, a lot of books and recent articles do not cover that. In light of Sam Mendes releasing new Beatles films in 2028, I hope that provided impetus for journalists, writers and fans to discuss the significance of women in The Beatles’ story. Not just their wives. The adoring and loyal fans. Women in music who compelled The Beatles. Without these women, then the band would undoubtedly not be as enduring, successful and important as they are. My concern is that the films might not delve too deeply regarding the lives and multiple sides of these fascinating women. We cannot underestimate the role of these women. This article argues why The Beatles’ screaming fans mattered: “The teens who shrieked for John, Paul, George, or Ringo were learning that their desires could matter on a public scale, and later in the sixties that would start changing gender dynamics in ways we’re still adjusting to”. The Beatlemania fandom and teenage hysteria provided a chance for revolution and expression: “If you were a girl, especially one on the cusp of adolescence, Beatles fandom possessed an additional frisson. The critic Barbara Ehrenreich noted in a 1992 essay that while mainstream culture was increasingly sexualised (paging Philip Larkin), teenage girls were still expected to be paragons of purity. "To abandon control – to scream, faint, dash about in mobs – was, in form if not in conscious intent, to protest the sexual repressiveness, the rigid double standard of female teen culture," wrote Ehrenreich. "It was the first and most dramatic uprising of women's sexual revolution”.

Maybe I am going slightly off the main track: that which concerns The Beatles’ wives. However, they form part of a discussion that needs to be reignited and continue. How compelling and influential these people were! We often talk about women like Patti Boyd and Yoko Ono in terms of the songs they provoked. That rather sexist idea of ‘the muse’. Instead, they were these independent and extraordinary women whose roles and significance is much deeper. How they almost had to remain under the radar because of press and fan intrusion. Stabilising, inspiring, evocative, talented, and superlative, there almost should be a film about them. Or a documentary. A perfect opportunity to emphasis and recontextualise their role, I am hopeful Sam Mendes’s casting reflects this desire. By casting these multifarious and multitalented actors who, between them, have appeared in some extraordinary films and T.V. shows, he is preparing to explore the incredible lives of The Beatles’ wives. They are more than that. The Beatles’ She Loves You contains these lyrics: “Yes, she loves you/And you know you should be glad”. That seems insincere and too little when we think of Yoko Ono, Maureen Starkey, Patti Boyd and Linda Eastman (and the other women in The Beatles lives that may never make it to the screen). These are the phenomenal women whose roles and importance is…

BIGGER than you can imagine!

FEATURE: Girlbands Forever: The Highs, Middles and Lows: Saluting the Icons, and Looking Ahead to the New Crop

FEATURE:

 

 

Girlbands Forever: The Highs, Middles and Lows

 IN THIS PHOTO: Eternal

Saluting the Icons, and Looking Ahead to the New Crop

__________

I would urge everyone…

IN THIS PHOTO: Little Mix/PHOTO CREDIT: Gareth Cattermole/MTV 2018/Getty Images

to check out a new BBC series, Girlbands Forever. The three episodes available on BBC iPlayer are extraordinary. Featuring an incredible range of contributors, including members of All Saints, Atomic Kitten and Sugababes, we get a real insight into the realities of being a girlband in the 1990s and 2000s. Although we might think of all the highs and success, there were some real lows and grim realities. Starting with the 1990s, this was a decade when All Saints, Eternal and the Spice Girls did battle for chart success. But what was the real cost?! What was happening behind the scenes?! Some of the first words spoken in that episode mentioned how it was all “smoke and mirrors”. The misogyny and male dominance. How harsh and imbalanced it was. I will end this feature by looking at a crop of incredible girlbands who are coming through. I do wonder whether labelling these awesome artists as ‘girl groups’ or ‘girl bands’ was in any way demeaning or infantilising. However, the more I watched of this series, the fuller picture I got. It changed my understanding of what girlbands had to face and what their lives were like.

These hugely powerful and inspiring women perhaps not getting their due. Whilst the BBC series does chart the high and glorious moments, there is an unmasking of what it was really like. I want to start out by highlighting some observations from the women who contributed to the series. I will select four women who were part of incredible girlbands. Those who have left a legacy and inspired so many girls and young women. From this BBC article, we can glean a sense of what it was like. Sugababes’ Heidi Range shared her experiences:

“Not long after you joined the group, the band had their first number one hit. What was it like being catapulted into the limelight?

I grew up singing my entire life and dreaming that one day I would ‘make it’. It was only a matter of weeks from first joining the band, I was standing on stage at the MTV Awards in Frankfurt, presenting Eminem with an award. It was mind blowing how my life had changed overnight. Cut to a few months later and our first single together, Freak Like Me went in straight at Number 1! It was everything I’d ever dreamt of and more.

The lineup changed several times during your time, how did that impact your experience in the group?

Each lineup change happened for different reasons and each time it was difficult to deal with. I was part of the group for almost 11 years and I guess it’s inevitable that within any job over that period of time, people, their circumstances and their needs change and there’s nothing you can do about it if someone chooses that they want something else.

When you look back at your time in the band, what moment stands out as the highlight?

Looking back now, it was all a highlight really. I spent my twenties travelling the world, writing and performing music with so many incredible artists. I am really proud of what we achieved together.

One performance that really stands out for me though was performing at Nelson Mandela’s 90th Birthday in Hyde Park. The night before the concert, all the artists were invited to take a guest to a pre-show dinner with him and I took my Nan. I asked our glam team to do her hair and makeup, she wore a fabulous dress and then we went to the dinner together. It was the most incredible evening and I’ll never forget spending that special time with her.

Another stand out moment was being the first girl band to play the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury in 2003. We were terrified and there was a debate taking place on the radio about whether a pop band should be allowed to perform there as we were driving to the site. We thought we might get bottles of pee thrown at us, but it was absolutely mega. As soon as we came off stage, we all wanted to go straight back on and do it all again.

Kelle Bryan of Eternal was asked what her experiences were. A lot of these girlbands were pitched against one another. Although they all had their own sound and personality, I think there was this temptation to lump them together or be reductive. Even though these women reflect on proud moments, there would have been moments of burnout, sexism, misogyny and the blackness of fame at that time that was hugely detrimental and damaging. Something that one hopes would not exist today for girlbands. Though I suspect some of that poison and misogyny still can be felt:

“Eternal were pioneers for UK girlbands, especially as an interracial group, how did that shape your experience?

It shaped the experience the whole way through, from beginning to end. At the beginning I was quite naive to the knock on effects, because Louise was my friend from school, so I never really thought about her as anything other than just my mate. There was a disparity of interest towards Louise as opposed to us.

On stage, Louise was properly lit, we weren't. They would have makeup for Louise but not for us. Those kinds of disparities were very evident. But on the flip side, when we went to America, there were times where they would focus on the rest of us. The whole way through, it was peppered with all kinds of nuances and difficulties, racism and unconscious bias.

Musically, what set Eternal apart from the other girlbands at the time?

When we started there wasn't anyone before us. It was Bananarama, and Mel and Kim were on the scene. At the time, we proved that girlbands could be successful. Then a whole plethora of groups came after us. In the States, there were SWV and En Vogue, we met them when we started doing promotion in America.

It was quite a strange time, because you're not realising that you’re driving things forward for women, you're just doing the best you can to keep sane and keep working. The schedule was brutal, but you don't realise you're starting a trend, making history or starting a legacy. You're too busy working, because it was lots of hard work!

What legacy did Eternal leave on the girlband scene?

So there's an artist called Laura Mvula and she's amazing. It sounds weird but, for whatever reason she's inspired by what I did in my career, and she attributes some of her success to us. She invited me to go see her when she was doing a live performance for BBC Radio 2 at Symphony Hall and I went with my kids. I've never witnessed anything quite so outstanding as her performance. I can't tell you how incredible she is. I left her a message thanking her so much for the tickets, and she sent me a beautiful and heartfelt voice message back which really affected me.

Another person who does that kind of thing is Emeli Sandé, and Jessie J did just the other day. I can't bear the compliments because it feels surreal. Back in the day, we were just getting on with it, I was in the trenches. I really wasn't thinking about anyone other than get up, don't cry. When it was at its peak you’re thinking ‘I can’t sleep in this bed because though it's not my bed’ and the jet lag was so hard, we were just surviving.

When you hear kind stuff like that from Laura, you're just like, ‘what?’. I think it's because there weren't very many people like us around at the time, and we had gospel roots and sang harmonies, and the music was very R&B led, and you just couldn’t break through the charts with that kind of music back in the 90s”.

All Saints’ Melanie Blatt and Atomic Kitten’s Natasha Hamilton talked about their time in two of the biggest British girlbands ever. Whilst there would have been these moments of sisterhood and commercial highs that they would have dreamed of, Girlbands Forever gives a more balanced view of the actual realities. Not looking through rose-tinted glasses. Lessons that hopefully have been learned. Ones we cannot forget or overlook:

“How did you shape the All Saints’ sound and what made you stand out?

The All Saints sound grew very organically. We were listening to a lot of Hip-hop and R&B from the states, so that was always going to be a huge influence. Shaz and I also grew up listening to all sorts of music from Reggae to Funk to Jungle. Shaz has an amazing talent for writing, and once we met K-Gee, who we spent almost two years in the studio with before we got signed to London Records, it was a match made in heaven and with him we created that All Saints sound.

What’s something from your girlband years that you’re really proud of?

I’m proud of what we achieved without really having a game plan. We loved making music fundamentally and that led to a few years of craziness which changed our lives forever. We didn’t really play the game and I suppose that makes me proud!”.

You became a mother during your time in Atomic Kitten, what are your thoughts on how the music industry deals with motherhood?

I can't really comment on how it deals with it now, because I don't know. I'm hoping people have learned from back then that to keep a young woman away from their baby, is probably not going to end in a very positive way. It's going to end in resentment, postnatal depression, and I'd like to think the duty of care towards women within the industry in general is now a lot more caring and understanding. It’s a multi-billion dollar business, but you're also working with human beings, so let's put the human first before the money.

What was the biggest misconception about Atomic Kitten?

That we were always fighting and there was a lot of bitchiness going on. I was on tour with my sisters. Yes, we argued. Who doesn't argue with their siblings? It came from a place of love and a place of being in each other's pockets 24/7, you're going to annoy each other. You need a bit of space, but you don't get it, so you're going to end up sniping. We always made up with each other, so it wasn't as bitchy as people thought. We were very much sisters.

Looking back, what are you most proud of from your girlband years?

Honestly, that I can still sit here in one piece and be a fully functioning person, because there was a time where I thought, ‘Will I ever recover from this?’. Physically and mentally it is really intense and it's overwhelming, but it just makes you more robust, and now I've come full circle. I've launched my own record label. I'm going to be looking after the next generation of young UK pop acts. I wouldn’t be able to do it properly if it weren’t for the experiences I’ve had. The duty of care is huge for me”.

I was a big fan of girlbands in the 1990s and 2000s. All Saints, Spice Girls, TLC, Destiny’s Child were some of my favourites. Little Mix, Atomic Kitten, Sugarbabes and Mis-Teeq are pioneering and important. I will look at a review for the new series. However, there are some fascinating takeaways from the episodes. How Kerry Katona talked about how hard it was. Melanie Blatt reveals how proud she is of the legacy of what she did with All Saints. Though there was all this toxicity and trauma. How there needed to be this sisterhood to survive. I guess, for people like me, we were looking at things from the outside. What the music press were telling us. It was incredible, seemingly. Although a lot of the language used is problematic and definitely misogynistic, and so much of the imagery and photoshoots exploitative, there was this feeling that everything was perfect and the girlbands were having the time of their lives. We can’t forget about the incredible music and how impactful it was. Bands that have endured to this day and changed so many lives. The U.S. bands like SWV and En Vogue shaped how British bands such as All Saints presented themselves. Melanie Blatt discussing how she looked to the U.S. bands and wanted to do what they did. I think what is common and obvious is how ambitious girlbands were. Even if they came from different musical traditions, there was this desire to make it and fulfil their dreams. You do wonder what the experiences for these girls would have been like if they had been mostly managed by women. Female producers and women calling the shots. It seems like the most positive moments and strength came from within the groups. Although you smile hearing members of All Saints and Eternal discuss their path and the kinship within the groups, there was this bleaker side. Girlbands being marketed on their looks. Told to lose weight to conform to ideals of the press and male gaze. In the process, sending out a bad message to girls who followed the group! Signing contracts and seemingly embarking on this wonderful ride. However, the deeper they get into their careers, that is when cracks appear.

Eternal reached number four with Stay. That was seen as a disappointing chart position. The pressure of bands like this to get to number one. Or they were not relevant and important. How detrimental and demoralising that would have been. If boybands were put under less pressure, there were these other standards for girlbands. Listening to male producers sharing their memories of the time and there are moments that make you wince. Like they have not learned anything themselves. Hearing about how punishing things were. Girlbands being punished to the limit to get to number one. Travelling endlessly, out on diets, told to dress in a certain way and being put on this brutal treadmill that involved endless promotion and personal sacrifice. Louise leaving Eternal because of the pressures and the strain of being in such a high-profile band. When Eternal became a trio, they came under the spotlight in terms of their appearance and weight. Sent to a place in the countryside, where the trio were told what to eat and controlled! That experience was shared by other girlbands. Such a horrible misogyny that many did not know about. Constantly under the spotlight. Everything they did and everywhere they went, they were under this lens. Broadcaster Sara Cox talking about how Britain was rebranding and revitalising in the 1990s under a Labour government. Britpop and the cool bands coming through. Spice Girls the best-known and most popular girlband of that time. Every other girlband having to rival them. I can only imagine what it was like behind closed doors when it came to expectations and workload. Discussion around Girl Power and how that term seemed a little hollow. Eternal pre-dated Spice Girls and perhaps coined that term. Though Kelle Bryan was happy as long as women were getting props and respect!

Before providing further reflections on the three episodes, I want to come to The Guardian and their impressions of the extraordinary Girlbands Forever. Whether you were around in the 1990s and 2000s and grew up with these girlbands, or are approaching them new, it is a must-watch series that takes us inside the highs, middles and lows. Showing the glory, guts and the awful realities. An aspect we do not really talk about as much as we should:

“Of course we want the gossip, fallouts and scandals. Band members interviewed for the three-part series are happy to supply. Kelle Bryan from Eternal reveals they were sent to a facility in the countryside and put on controlled diets to manage their weight (though the head of EMI UK denies all knowledge). Kerry Katona tells how a journalist turned up at her mother’s house with a bag of cocaine to get her to sell a story. Melanie Blatt of All Saints says that when she discovered she was pregnant, she was told to abort.

Girlbands Forever could have been a cynical exercise: see who’s desperate enough to want to be in this, dredge up their worst moments while viewers make assessments about which of them has the nicest house. Instead, it has sensitivity and scope, as interested in charting the social mores these artists created, were crucified by, or changed in some way.

I’m not sure things have improved. Attractive celebrities once took pains to hide their relationships, to maintain an illusion of being sexually available. These days, we’ve exploded the notion of privacy, and realised relationships can be cannibalised on social media for cachet. Progress! Black artists once worked five times as hard for a 20th of the attention. Imagine. The show is refreshingly unequivocal that the addition of a slender, blond, white woman could transform a band’s fortune. While our pop culture lens has widened, it’s hardly pointing in a different direction.

It’s the old footage that breaks your heart. They are such vibrantly talented children. Look at Atomic Kitten meeting Westlife for the first time, all teenage flirtation. Check out the “steely, non-choreography” of the early, surly Sugababes. There is adorable footage of Mutya on a Michael Barrymore show, in which she appears to literally be a baby. I’m glad the doc gets into the Sugababes’ revolving door policy. One of the funniest things to happen in music this century, it’s also a living manifestation of the Ship of Theseus philosophical paradox. Let’s not get into that.

Spice Girls are the silverbacks in the ring, who came from nowhere and conquered the globe with their debut single. None feature here, yet it’s interesting to hear from established artists who floundered in the wake of the Jenny-come-latelies. Some profess to being underwhelmed by Wannabe, while their five-way demographic appeal is presented as a triumph of marketing. “Girl Power? That was EMI power,” scoffs producer Pete Waterman.

The music industry comes out of this badly (though Piers Morgan comes out of it worse than anyone). A repeating pattern we’re shown is that when band members get pregnant, the sentence handed down from male management is the same: you’ve destroyed the band. In this context, seeing Blatt perform at Party in the Park with her pronounced baby bump showing, sexy and defiant as ever, is a punk-rock, sea-change vision. Still the coolest person in the room, she had reservations about appearing here at all. “Hello, I’m Mel from the 90s” is how she introduces herself. Oh, she dope.

Another repeating pattern: talented but frustrated girls break ties with their Henry Higgins founders and succeed in their own way. No matter how these bands started, what they become is up to them. Without always feeling empowered, they were avatars of it for younger generations. They represented the joy of being in a gang of girls, often working-class, travelling the world and living a dream. The world needs that. Plus you can’t go wrong with a TV soundtrack of songs including Never Ever, Sounds of the Underground and Scandalous. You know what to do. Push the button”.

I am going to get to an article from Stylist. They react to the BBC documentary and how girlbands were chewed up and spat out. We learn how All Saints were objectified and subject to tabloid attention. Nicole and Natalie Appleton getting the brunt of that press intrusion. How women were judged and condemned, whereas men in the industry – and men in film – were not subjected to this kind of sexism. Sara Cox talking about how there was this small window of celebration for women and bands like Spice Girls and All Saints. Tabloids turning on them. Commentators from the time like Noel Gallagher and Vivienne Westwood discussing girlbands in disparaging and insulting terms. How they lacked talent and it was all about marketing. How deflating it would have been for these women who worked tirelessly and had incredible talent – only to be cut down and stabbed in the back! Girlbands becoming public property. The press had so much power. A hate campaign launched against Spice Girls. How that impacted the mental health of bands like Spice Girls. By the early-'00s, tastes and trends changed. How girlbands like All Saints split because of tensions and differences. The group fell out and they parted ways. You have to think that the press and industry pushed them to that point. Private lives of celebrities scrutinised more in the 2000s. Girlbands subjected to that. Gossip magazines adding to the bile. Such a toxic decade. There were definite high moments within girlbands. The chemistry and friendship. Enjoying the highs. However, as the 2000s offered up so many girlbands, there was this crowded scene. Bands like Girl Thing fizzled out. Lacking authenticity, they were too similar to Spice Girls. It was a brutal machine! Mis-Teeq offered something real and different. It was interesting seeing the evolution. Girlbands taking influence from Garage and other genres. The reality was the same in the 2000s as it was in the 1990s. Signing a record label was the start of a punishing and unglamorous life. Being sexualised and controlled. Manipulated and almost trapped. Traveling the world and it being this ecstatic high. The loneliness that came with quiet moments. That led to excess and drinking too much.

Gatekeepers in the industry comparing girlbands to others. Especially problematic was Mis-Teeq being compared to Destiny’s Child because they were Black. They were not given the same opportunities as white girlbands. Magazines not putting them on the cover. Labels wary of fan jealousy when a member of a girlband would date a member of a rival boyband. Atomic Kitten’s Kerry Katona warned off of dating Westlife’s Brian McFadden. The tabloids harassing the girlbands and their families. Friends and families selling out and these scandalous and untrue stories being printed. How horrifying that was for women. Mis-Teeq’s label, Telestar, went bust. Atomic Kitten’s Jenny Frost (who replaced Kerry Katona in Atomic Kitten) revealed how she went for success and how her and Kerry Katona had no bad blood. The 2010s saw a change in how girlbands came together and made it. Rather than it being music executives, it was talent shows like The X Factor. Was it better for women?! Quite brutal and competitive, there was this public scrutiny and exposure. However, there was this raft of talent coming through that people could see on the screens and were not hidden. Little Mix the standout success from The X Factor in terms of girlbands. They were the first band to win the competition. Sugababes another prominent band from the 2010s. Overload was a video that was a breakthrough. So different to other videos from girlbands. Perhaps less about high choreography and confidence from singing and not exerting, there was this change. Sugababes more real than a lot of manufactured girlbands who came before. They were not told to smile and be extroverted. They were real but, with that, they were seen as moody and difficult. Labelled as being troublesome or outsiders!

Heidi Range – who replaced Siobhán Donaghy – talking about how Sugababes wanted to be the biggest girlband. How this was their dream. Natasha Hamilton of Atomic Kitten was diagnosed with postnatal depression and her doctor said she needed six to eight months off. She was given two weeks! She was absolutely crippled by that. How she could not wait to get off stage. Women were not allowed a career if they had children. Has that changed at all today?! The expectation that women either had to be childless or, if they did have a child, continue their career and not take any time off. Record labels do not come off well through Girlbands Forever. How they drove women out of girlbands and forced bands to quit and break up. Mutya Buena left Sugababes because she suffered from mental health issues. The fact that she was replaced the following day by Amelle Berrabah. That lack of sympathy and any sort of dignity. It was all a machine. Red Dress originally had Buena’s vocals on it but they were replaced by Berrabah’s. How it was cut-throat. All about sales and keeping momentum going! No consideration towards the personal lives, happiness and health of the women. Berrabah revealed how Sugababes were told to keep moody and not smile because that was their image. They were not allowed to smile and be free. Treated more like puppets than people! Jade Ewen instantly replaced Keisha Buchanan. How gut-wrenching and insulting that would have been for Buchanan! Sugababes lost their original members. It was almost like this rotating line-up. Now, Keisha Buchanan, Mutya Buena, and Siobhán Donaghy are back as Sugababes. This reformation is amazing, though you feel that is because they are maybe not subjected to the same intensity and scrutiny as the first time around. Able to record and perform together without any backstabbing, label machinations and this tabloid poison. Broadcaster Scott Mills talked about how a girlband like Little Mix had to engage with social media all the time. Something girlbands of the 1990s and 2000s did not really have to do, there was this pressure to keep connecting with fans and keep the hits coming! Perrie Edwards dated One Direction’s Zayn Malik. Fans of One Direction picking Edwards apart. Like girlbands before, them being public property. Torn to shreds and subjected to attacks. They called off their engagement (he dumped her by text). Shout Out to My Ex is a shout-out/hit-back to Zayn Malik. Perrie Edwards emotionally talked about performing in Las Vegas. How exhausted she was. She experienced panic attacks but felt like she had to go on. No sense of care or protection for her. She was taken to hospital and on a drip. Little Mix had to go on without her. The sense of (unfair) guilt that Edwards felt. She said how there was this group dynamic, there was this feeling that you could not let the team down. The upside is that they had each other, though you wonder whether there was any concern or sense of help from the label and management.

Little Mix released Strip. A reaction to the abuse women faced online, it was this empowering statement. Clara Amfo stating how this was a natural thing and really incredible video. Piers Morgan mocking the video. Amfo saying how the video was not for him and how he was being patronising. Little Mix hit back and their fans were unified. Trolls still took their toll. Jesy Nelson left the band because of the trolls. The positives is a lot of these girlbands reforming and performing again after, as Melanie Blatt said, “the first blush of success”. Spice Girls returned to the stage. All Saints recorded new albums. Little Mix found their way back together. Atomic Kitten got back together, as did Sugababes’ original line-up. After all the sh*t they experienced the first time around, the love for each other and those bonds shone through! Final thoughts shared sort of makes me wonder whether the same concerns apply to modern girlbands. How they were too young and inexperienced to know how things would play out. That they didn’t have control and were exploited. How labels would take advantage and did not really look after their best interests. Bands breaking up because they felt they could not continue. Girlbands are vital, as Eternal’s Kelle Bryan said. Misogyny still raging, so that sense of visibility, empowerment and solidarity more needed than ever! Misogyny and violence towards women much more widespread now than back decades ago. How we need to encourage a new wave of brilliant women. Before coming to that, Stylist reacted to Girlbands Forever and what they took away from it:

“Honestly, every clip in this documentary is a reminder of how the music industry chewed women up and spat them out in the name of empowerment. Men assumed control of these young women and issued ominous warnings (“one day, success is going to go away”), and even at the height of ‘girl power’, female autonomy was seen as a business risk. Indeed, no secret is made of how the Spice Girls were – inspired by the success of the TV show Friends – built to be more “universally appealing” than the R&B stylings of Eternal.

Translation? Music industry moguls wanted something whiter, safer and easier to sell.

While some had to fight tooth and nail for every success and others immediately landed a No. 1 hit, it’s little wonder that competition began to simmer between the groups. And it wasn’t helped by the fact that feuds were manufactured and nurtured by the press for column inches.

“We were pretty used to the tabloids being c**ts in general,” says Melanie Blatt frankly.

It’s all too easy to assume that things have got better as time has marched on. That the press has grown more enlightened, that women are no longer demonised for breaking outside the narrow boxes that society assigns them. Sadly, though, nothing could be further from the truth.

Nelly Furtado has stepped back from performing after relentless body-shaming attacks. Jesy Nelson left Little Mix (who appear in a later episode of the docuseries) after years of comparison and online abuse. Taylor Swift and Charli xcx have been plagued by feud rumours since 2018. Lily Allen recently said that she always feels “like I am fighting against a tabloid version of myself”. And just weeks ago, Chappell Roan told The Face she might quit music altogether if the harassment aimed at her and those around her doesn’t stop.

It’s the same poison, albeit administered via a different delivery system. The screaming headlines of the 90s haven’t gone away; they’ve merely been digitised. And, honestly, the damage that was done to women in the public eye by a paparazzi zoom lens? Well, social media now does it faster, louder and so much more personally. Step one foot outside the line, and the mob will be waiting with TikTok reels and cruel Instagram comments.

It’s the same poison, but administered differently

I suppose what Girlbands Forever really shows us is that the problem was never the music: it was how we expected – and still expect – women to behave while making it. They were silently urged to stick to the boringly inoffensive roles that society (ie the patriarchy) has given us. To smile. To be funny, but not funnier than the men in the room. To be ambitious, but apologise for it constantly. To be (and I’m borrowing from Britney Spears here) not a girl, but not yet a woman. And when female artists push back – when they get angry, gain weight, fall pregnant or dare to do something as villainous as visibly age – they are branded a problem to be dealt with.

Every decade, the faces change, but the crime stays the same: being a woman who refuses to shrink herself for comfort. And Girlbands Forever (despite being billed as “a celebration of a time of very special music and talent” by executive producer Louis Theroux) goes out of its way to highlight the pain behind the pop-perfect façade. Because maybe that’s the real legacy of the 90s: not girl power, but girl pressure. A generation of women who were told they could have it all, as long as they stayed within the frame.

Sadly, as Chappell Roan, Nelly Furtado and every woman who’s ever been called “too loud”, “too old” or “too much” knows all too well, the frame hasn’t moved an inch”.

The sisterhood and that sense of girlbands giving voice and solidarity to girls and women. Perrie Edwards (Little Mix) among those who hoped girlbands would live forever. Today, although there is not the same sort of wave of girlbands, there is hope for a revival. British groups like FLO and Say Now burning bright. There is so much to take from Girlbands Forever. Open and revealing, the women who were part of these phenomenal girlbands told their truths. It was so refreshing but also shocking! Positives emerge. How glorious the music was and how there was this sisterhood. I think groups like Say Now and FLO are going to inspire so many other girlbands. FLO released their debut album, Access All Areas, last year. Hugely promising, they look to be girlband legends of the future. Offering a mix of genres and shining and burning with authenticity and power, they are leading a charge. Similarly, Say Now are releasing incredible single after incredible single! I agree that we will always need girlbands. I grew up listening to them and still do today. Girlbands Forever was a wonderful reminder of all the amazing women who released this timeless music against all the odds. From press harassment to misogyny and reductive and demoralising attitudes from labels. Attacked on social media and almost pitted again one another. Women who should have combined and boosted each other were almost baited by the press to go against their sisters. However, the fact that so many of the original queens are back together – whether for a few live dates and nothing more or an album or two -, that is giving inspiration and strength to women who want to form bands and follow their idols. There is probably more stock given to other types of bands now. How girlbands are not as natural and in vogue as once they were, I feel the tide will change. They offer something familiar but alternative. Few bands focus on harmonies and the incredible anthems girlbands produced in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. We can step back a bit and also take strides forward. Girlbands who can take elements from those who came before but add their own personalities and voices into the mix. When you think of all that girlbands have given to music, you have hope that, when it comes to keeping the flame burning and welcoming in the new generation this empire can be built back up…

BRICK by brick.

FEATURE: The Ballad of Houidini and Rosabel: A Kate Bush-Themed Charity Idea for CRISIS and War Child

FEATURE:

 

 

The Ballad of Houidini and Rosabel

IMAGE CREDIT: The Vermilion

A Kate Bush-Themed Charity Idea for CRISIS and War Child

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I have been thinking about…

doing something for charity based around Kate Bush’s music. Two particular charities that Kate Bush is close to and has raised funds for, CRISIS and War Child, are in my mind. You can donate to Crisis here. At this time of year, as we are close to Christmas, you cannot help but think about those who have no home. Those who have to live on the streets. It is such a hard time for those who do not have same luxuries as us. Things that we take for granted. Also, War Child is a very important charity. You can donate here. Kate Bush has recently raised funds for War Child. She released the video for Little Shrew (Snowflake) last year, inspired by images of children displaced asnd affected by the invasion of Ukraine. Recently, Bush has invited fifty-two artists to create art based around lyrics from 1985’s Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) for a charity auction. On several occasions, Kate Bush has been involved with CRISIS. When there was a Kate Bush pop-up shop in King’s Cross in 2018, Bush announced that £61,000 has been raised. There is charity fundraising related to Kate Bush. Earlier this month, The Sensual World – A Kate Bush Celebration raised money for Cancer vs Cabaret. It was organised by HomeGround and KateBushNews.com. I have been thinking of organising something that would raise money for a couple of charities that Bush has spoken about and raised money for. Where people could donate, though there would be this interactive element. People selecting their favourite Kate Bush song or the one most important to them. It would draw attention to that track and her work in a wider sense, then they could share the post with a link to donate to each charity. Each person who took part would donate to each charity – suggested minimum would be £10 total, though there is no upper limit.

Kate Bush’s constant charity work and commitment is inspiring. Other people starting charity events because of her. I have been thinking about CRISIS and the great work they do. How important it is to donate to them to ensure that they can help give shelter and hope to those who are experiencing homelessness. Trying to affect long-term change. War Child are crucial at a time when many children in Ukraine and Palestine have been devastated by genocide and violence. Not just those two countries. At the moment, we are seeing multiple nations affected by conflict. It is the children that are impacted the most. I think that both charities are so worthy. There would be a hashtag for the endeavour, #KateBushCrisisWarChild, and you would post a link to the Kate Bush song. In terms of words, the person would say why the song is so important to them and then paste the links to War Child and CRISIS, where people can donate. Rather than it being an organised event that is limited to a certain amount of people, the hope is that this could spread further and wider. The idea being that you think about a Kate Bush song that means a lot to you and share it with others. Many might ask what this has to do with the charities. The idea is to raise funds and awareness of them. As Kate Bush has done with her own work and compelling artists to create paintings around her lyrics, this would be a simple way of getting people involved, though with an element of creativity and thought. Although this song is not the most important Kate Bush song to me, it is my favourite. One that I have a lot of thought around. I guess, if I were to start a ball rolling and say why this is so important, I would say the following: “Kate Bush at her vocal, production and lyrical high. A peerless and hugely original song from The Dreaming, I adore Houdini”. It is brief but gives explanation as to why the song sticks in my mind.

I have written about Houidini before. I would say Wuthering Heights and Them Heavy People are more important and affecting. I have a longer relationship with those songs. However, Houidini is my favourite Kate Bush song. In 1982, Kate Bush was pushing her sound and experimentation. The Dreaming is a stunningly ambitious and layered album. Producing solo for the first time, you can hear how much effort and time she put into the album. The penultimate song on The Dreaming, Houidini is classic Kate Bush. In terms of the lyrics, it could only have come from her mind! Here, Kate Bush talks about the inspiration behind the song:

“The side most people know of Houdini is that of the escapologist, but he spent many years of his life exposing mediums and seances as frauds. His mother had died, and in trying to make contact through such spiritual people, he realized how much pain was being inflicted on people already in sorrow, people who would part with money just for the chance of a few words from a past loved one. I feel he must have believed in the possibility of contact after death, and perhaps in his own way, by weeding out the frauds, he hoped to find just one that could not be proven to be a fake. He and his wife made a decision that if one of them should die and try to make contact, the other would know it was truly them through a code that only the two of them knew.
His wife would often help him with his escapes. Before he was bound up and sealed away inside a tank or some dark box, she would give him a parting kiss, and as their lips met, she would pass him the key which he would later use to unlock the padlocks that chained him. After he died, Mrs. Houdini did visit many mediums, and tried to make contact for years, with no luck – until one day a medium called Mr. Ford informed her that Houdini had come through. She visited him and he told her that he had a message for her from Houdini, and he spoke the only words that meant for her the proof of her husband’s presence. She was so convinced that she released an official statement to the fact that he had made contact with her through the medium, Ford.
It is such a beautiful and strange story that I thought I had very little to do, other than tell it like it was. But in fact it proved to be the most difficult lyric of all the songs and the most emotionally demanding. I was so aware of trying to do justice to the beauty of the subject, and trying to understand what it must have been like to have been in love with such an extraordinary man, and to have been loved by him. I worked for two or three nights just to find one line that was right. There were so many alternatives, but only a few were right for the song. Gradually it grew and began to piece together, and I found myself wrapped up in the feelings of the song – almost pining for Houdini. Singing the lead vocal was a matter of conjuring up that feeling again and as the clock whirrs and the song flashes back in time to when she watched him through the glass, he’s on the other side under water, and she hangs on to his every breath. We both wait.

Kate Bush Club newsletter, October 1982”.

I love how, to get the mucus/gravelled vocal sound, Bush drank milk and ate chocolate to get that sort of phlegm. This is something that is not advised, though she wanted to get this almost ghostly or demonic growl. You can hear this intensified on the final track from The Dreaminmg, Get Out of My House. Bush’s vocals goes from whispered and quivering to this intense and almost frightening shout in the chorus. The imagery throughout is fascinating. So unconventional and original, few artists around Bush were writing about this sort of thing. Her production on the song is superb. The gorgeous and sweeping strings were written and arranged by Dave Lawson and Andrew Powell. We get brief vocal from Gordon Farrell, who says “Houidini”; Del Palmer says “Rosabel believe”. Standout drums from Stuart Elliott. One of the standouts from an album still underrated and misunderstood, I think few songs can match the beauty and potency of Houidini. I do want to get something together where money can be raised for CRISIS and War Child that would involve Kate Bush’s music. I do not have a tonne of followers, so I worry that it might not get that much traction. However, if the charities themselves collaborated, then it could get wider attention and awareness. Kate Bush fans getting a chance to share that standout Kate Bush and say why. For me, I would have to go with my favourite: the spectral and…

SPECTACULAR Houdini.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Anna von Hausswolff

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Philip Svensson

Anna von Hausswolff

__________

THIS is someone whose music…

PHOTO CREDIT: Ines Sebalj

I have loved for years, and I compelled to come back to her. I have included her in features before, though I have never spotlighted her. As her extraordinary new album, ICONOCLASTS, is out and is one of the best-reviewed of the year, I want to shine a light on Anna von Hausswolff. I am going to end this feature with a review for ICONOCLASTS. Before that, there are a couple of interviews from recently that I want to introduce. I want to start out with an interview from Interview, where Iggy Pop (who is a guest on ICONOCLASTS) chatted with Anna von Hausswolff. It was a really interesting interview. A lot of mutual respect and curiosity. I have chosen a few segments from their conversation here:

“POP: Oh, that’s beautiful. I’m curious about Iconoclasts, the name of the record you made. How did you come up with that name?

VON HAUSSWOLFF: One of the first songs that I wrote for the album is “The Iconoclast,” and that song became the starting point. The album is about questioning something and breaking out from something. It could be an illusion, a system, a relationship. I wanted the title to just represent the questioning and the breaking out of worship, worship of a lifestyle, worship of thought, and finding something new.

POP: There must be something in the stars right now because that’s happening up and down levels of society. The boundaries and nationalities right now are often very silly.

VON HAUSSWOLFF: I think worship can be such a beautiful thing. It can give you so much hope and inspiration. Worship of love, worship of certain people. But when it comes to people in general, you have to be very careful because it could so easily lean over to something extreme, something that is not grounded in who your true self is. We have such a tendency to become obsessed with things or obsessed with people.

POP: It’s becoming evident, probably through social media, that there are certain people who seem to be doing so well. Meaning, if you count up the numbers or look at the size of the yacht or how many jets or how much they can influence a government. And then there are people who just aren’t getting anywhere and they feel that way. I am an old git who loves very, very much the mid-60s to 1970s, which was titled loosely to the free jazz movement. And the first cut on the record, “Struggle With the Beast,” reminds me of the period where John Coltrane would take a Broadway show tune like “My Favorite Things,” and elevate it with very beautiful music. I’d never heard you work with saxophones or anything like that. How was that recorded? Who are the saxophonists?

VON HAUSSWOLFF: For the whole album, and that track in particular, I collaborated with the saxophonist called Otis Sandsjö.

POP: That’s a good player, really.

VON HAUSSWOLFF: He is brilliant. And like almost everyone I work with, he’s someone that I know from my past, from school or my childhood. Before I made this album, I wrote music for a theater play in Stockholm called The Lower Depths, a play by Maxim Gorky. It was the first time I arranged for Woodwind.

POP: You can read music?

VON HAUSSWOLFF: Very badly, but I know the basics, and I think it’s very convenient to work in Logic. Logic has so many tools where you can work intuitively with a MIDI synth and you can play directly. And then you can add layers and it will convert it into notes.

POP: It’s a killer. There are several times, I think, on Facing Atlas—and then on the one we did, “The Whole Woman,” but also on “Young Aging Women”—where suddenly there are melodies that are very close to certain kinds of pop ballads, trying to lift the chorus and everything. You can write that stuff. Hats off.

VON HAUSSWOLFF: I think I wanted, with this album, to stay a little bit true to who I was at the beginning of my musical career and what sort of music I was interested in, aside from all of the rock and experimental music. When I started playing music, it started with me and my sister and our friend. We were singing together. It was a lot of R&B, a lot of soul, a lot of pop. And we were also dancing hip-hop. So, I wanted to bring in more movement, and I wanted to have these very clear, simple pop lines that would just stem directly from the heart somehow. I would not give it too much thought or intellectualize it too much.

POP: For a listener, it’s pretty rare to hear those sorts of things without being accompanied by some horrible productions beating you over the head. On “The Whole Woman,” my favorite lines are when you say, “I’m not afraid to go down to the harbor” and “See you again to tell you the whole truth.” Do you go down to the harbor?

VON HAUSSWOLFF: Yeah, I do a lot. Whenever I need to air out some emotions, the harbor is my place. The ocean is my go-to spot when I need to calm myself or when I need to get out of my own head. I think the harbor is also, for this song, a place to say farewell at the same time, to clean yourself from your past”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Fredrik Bengtsson

A slight detour, perhaps, I did like this feature from The Quietus, where Anna von Hausswolff chose a selection of albums that were important to her. Her favourites. Why these albums are important to her. I have chosen a few to highlight here, as I feel you can detect a bit of each of them in ICONOCLASTS:

“Nils Frahm - Spaces

I became familiar with Nils Frahm through the label Kning Disk, who released my Singing From The Grave and Ceremony records. Kning Disk’s Mattias Nilsson had released The Bells by Nils. That is a very minimalistic classical piano record. When I heard his music for the first time, I fell in love instantly. I had just finished high school, where I had studied classical piano. The classical music world can be really restrained and pretentious. You are supposed to play in a certain way and it is not supposed to be too simple. Simplicity is not anything that you should strive to achieve – or at least that was my impression when I had studied classical music at school.

So, it was a relief to hear The Bells by Nils Frahm. He had a background in classical music but he still allowed himself to play these simple patterns over and over again. He would let the music breath and have a lot of space between each note. At the time, that was very inspiring to hear for me. I then followed him and heard Spaces, which was released in 2013. I heard it when I was touring and was surprised by how much he had progressed, in going from those really simple songs to these huge, grand compositions with a lot of electronic beats. He has took his own way of writing classical music and has combined it with electronics in a very organic way. It felt very new and very special.

I think there are some field recordings and some live recordings on the album. It’s interesting, because all of the songs fit beautifully together. What I am extremely impressed by is his way of making everything sound so organic, even though he is processing sounds through lots of effects pedals or is playing synthesisers on a programmed arpeggio song. That is rare for people who are working with electronics, in the way that he does.

I was his support act for a show in Amsterdam and we have kept in contact by email. He told me a while ago that he built a ‘touring organ’. I was very jealous. I wonder if he treasures his touring organ. I need to steal his touring organ. I then saw him play a show in Paris with his touring organ and he played songs from Spaces, but then he played many new songs on the organ. The new songs were even better. Therefore, his next album may knock Spaces out of this list.

Nico - Desertshore

I got this record from my dad as a birthday gift, but before that I had heard it via my sister. My sister presented this record to me when I was 16 or 17 and then I got it from my dad in my 20s. It was nice to get again from him as I had forgotten how good it was. I remember listening to it a lot when I was 16, but I wasn’t mesmerised in the way I was when I heard it when older.

Nico is probably one of the most influential songwriters for me, when it comes to vocal delivery. She is very brave in the way that she uses her voice and, of course, I am very impressed by the depth of her voice. It is raw, honest, and very authentic. It doesn’t feel like she is putting on a costume and I believe in every single word she is singing. I think it takes a very musical person to deliver such honesty in such complex pop songs. Even though there is complexity to this album, it still feels quite accessible. In addition, there is a very intriguing ambience to this record with lots of interesting sounds. I think it was co-produced by John Cale.

Nico is without doubt one of my most important role models, alongside Diamanda Galás. Diamanda Galás isn’t on this list because I prefer her in a live format than I do on record. With Nico, I love how she delivers her lyrics and I like the rawness in her. She seemed to be a very uncompromising person.

Paul Giovanni & Magnet – The Wicker Man

I have never made a score for a film, but I like to think I am doing a score for a film when I make an album. With a film soundtrack, the artist has to think more of how the pieces are connected to each other and how the album evolves dynamically throughout each song, instead of each song having its own disconnected and separate dynamic from the other songs like a typical pop record. I think that’s why I like to put soundtracks on my favourite album list, because as a whole they are amazing as opposed to an album with five amazing songs and then the rest could be kind of crap.

For The Wicker Man, the music is by Paul Giovanni and Magnet. I think this version of the band Magnet was created for this album. I don’t know if Magnet exist or made anything else apart from this soundtrack. The music is inspired by Scottish, English and Irish tunes and, for me, overshadows the film in its greatness. I like the film as well – it is a very eccentric horror film and at times it almost becomes a musical. I like how the music is so entwined with the film, so they become as one.

I like the record so much because it connects to the places, culture and the people in The Wicker Man. Magnet and Giovanni have taken something old and made something personal and new from it. I like how music traditions can be passed from one generation to another and be changed a little by each transmittance. I realise that now that film is quite old, but for me it still feels contemporary”.

I want to come to an interview from The Line of Best Fit from last month. The Swedish musician and composer talked about her new album. We also learned more about a frightening experience four years ago where von Hausswolff was in a church in Nantes and, outside, there was protest from right-wing Catholic fundamentalists who had barricaded fans away from her gig. When it comes to ICONOCLASTS, Anna von Hausswolff “found kindred spirits in rebels and disruptors to create her most urgent work yet”:

“In a break from von Hausswolff’s own tradition, ICONOCLASTS wears its central themes close to its turbulent surface rather than letting them linger in the depths. “A lot of these songs are about love, in various ways, but I wanted the album to feel like a battle cry,” she says, clenching a fist in her lap. “It felt urgent to me to express a sense of wanting things to change and actually taking steps towards that change. It’s so easy to say what you believe but then not really live by those beliefs or follow those rules. For me, I know I have my morals and my ethics, but I don’t always act by them.”

In a way, it's a continuation of a lifetime’s effort to try and unlearn the habit of people pleasing, which she says is still a constant struggle – but it’s bigger than that, too. ICONOCLASTS is a call for greater agency on every level: passivity is out and breaking free of structures and bonds that no longer serve us is very much in. On “Facing Atlas”, a song about the perils of committing too fully to one viewpoint or side, she invokes the hapless Greek Titan condemned to forever hold up the sky as a symbol of what not to become. “The foolish hope of great eternal beauty,” she sings, as if taunting herself. “This shit breaks my heart.” She’s sorry, too, on eco-banger “Stardust”, which sings of a life “vaporised into the sky” and vehemently howls “it’s time to make mistakes” – or time at least to care enough to try.

“I’m not an activist. I’m not a politician. I’m a musician, an artist, and I think that art should be allowed to not always play by the rules of what’s correct and what’s not correct,” she says, so long as it comes from a place of considered intention. At an hour and a quarter long, von Hausswolff’s sixth album is a lot to digest but not a moment of it goes to waste. Even when “The Iconoclast” screams its way into a void part-way through its 11-minute runtime, those few beats of silence carry just as much weight and speak just as loudly.

These days, von Hausswolff has made peace with the fact that she’s sometimes a little pitchy when she sings. After all, it’s seldom through perfection that our real truths our told, but through the heat and charge of the moment. Few people know that better than ‘godfather of punk’ Iggy Pop, who lends his bombed-out vibrato to pop ballad “The Whole Woman”, ICONOCLASTS’ most outwardly straightforward love song. “He felt like a dad to me,” she says, remembering their first meeting years ago. “He had an energy about him that felt like family.” And while the song was originally written as a conversation between lovers, von Hausswolff sees it now as something much more open. Still a love song, but not necessarily a romantic love. Perhaps a conversation between two sides of the same person, even. There’s an almost ritualistic feel to it, as if calling on the power of the sea to wash away the pettiness of life and find new common ground.

This idea of rising above the daily circus of bullshit is one she returns to a few times throughout our conversation, and it all comes back to hip hop, specifically Kendrick Lamar. “I feel like he’s one of those artists who’s so good at not dwelling in the darkness but rising above it, putting a spotlight on problems and openly encouraging change,” she explains, crediting the rapper for inspiring her to want to be a bigger, grander version of herself, and to stand her ground in the process. “He might actually have been the most important artist for ICONOCLASTS, even if you can’t hear it in the music.”

When it comes to world building and musical horror, few have done it better in recent years than Ethel Cain, who joins von Hausswolff on “Aging Young Women”, ICONOCLASTS’ second luminous ballad, a song about the chances that slip away with time and the angst that comes with their passing. Introduced to Cain’s music by her sister Maria, von Hausswolff says she didn’t fully click with it at first. She wasn’t in the right emotional space to receive it. But then came the breakup, and suddenly everything fell into place. “Once I started really listening it felt very genuine to me and I fell in love,” she says. “Something about Ethel really resonated with me, emotionally, musically, and artistically. Her music felt healing, and the music I was writing was also a way of healing, so I wanted to honour her and have her on this song.”

“I’m always drawn to female artists who use dark aesthetics but aren’t afraid to balance that darkness with a little bit of light, to show both sides. Artists like Chelsea Wolfe, Pharmakon, and Emma Ruth Rundle. I can’t listen to their music all the time because it needs a certain time and space. But, like with Ethel's music, once you find that time and space, it's going to be beautiful”.

I am going to end with a five-star review from The Guardian for ICONOCLASTS. Featuring incredible guests spots from Iggy Pop and Ethel Cain, this spectacular album “pivots from drones to spectacular pop melodies”. It is clear that Anne von Hausswolff is a truly mesmerising artist. I have known about her music  for years and she has not dropped a step. Her sixth studio album, her latest work, might well be her very best. An artist that seemingly gets better with every release:

“Iconoclasts is a long album – it lasts the best part of an hour and a quarter – but it still feels crammed with sound. There are heaving synthesised drones that, in their intensity, occasionally evoke the sound of Fuck Buttons’ 2009 masterpiece Tarot Sport; explosions of fizzing noise; cinematic orchestrations; and drum patterns that marry a ritualistic-sounding thunder to rhythms that variously recall the pulse of dance music, the glitterbeat stomp of glam, and even reggae. Von Hausswolff is less inclined to erupt into shrieks and ululations than she once was, but her singing still has a blazing forcefulness that cuts through the echo she is frequently doused in.

It’s music that feels as if it’s in constant motion, amplified by the fact that the melodies, rich and beautiful as they are, seldom adhere to any standard verse-chorus structure: the songs here usually end up somewhere very different from the place they started. Indeed, its maximalism might be too overwhelming to take in one long sitting.

But if it is too much, it’s too much of a good thing: with their sense of movement, their twists and turns, their radiant tunes, their emotive power, these songs are exhausting because they’re exhilarating. For an album with a worldview summed up by a striking line from Facing Atlas that declares life on Earth “full of shit and full of evil”, that ponders ageing and paralysing depression, and on which it is frequently unclear whether the songs are dealing with something personal or with current events (“the sky is crashing down upon the ships of freedom … the life we had has vaporised into the sky”), its overall mood is a kind of frazzled euphoria. The songs surge and build, the bursts of noise feel cathartic. It’s as if the music is fighting against the tone of the lyrics, urgently pressing forward despite everything. “I’m breaking up with language,” Von Hauswolff sings on Stardust, “in search of something bigger.” In the strange, unique, expansive, impassioned and experimental take on pop presented on Iconoclasts, she seems to have found it”.

I am going to wrap up there. I am surprised that I have not spotlighted Anna von Hauswolff yet. I have included her for Modern-Day Queens, as she is one of the greatest musicians in the world. A phenomenal composer and a hugely consistent songwriter, you can check out her tour dates here. She has a couple of U.K. dates in January, so catch her if you can. ICONOCLASTS is a masterpiece that everyone needs to hear. Her music is so atmospheric and evocative. You put it on, close your eyes, and let it carry you…

INTO this extraordinary place.

___________

Follow Anna von Hausswolff

PHOTO CREDIT: Philip Svensson

Official:

https://www.annavonhausswolff.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/annavonhausswolff

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/AnnavonHausswolff

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/1eiXrvua27VlWgZ9kiaIn6?si=3Mv3VzzTTSOOPm5n0QV-kA

FEATURE: Spotlight: Oklou

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Furmaan Ahmed for NME

Oklou

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THIS is a brilliant French artist…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Steph Wilson

who I have included I a feature recently, though I have not spotlighted her yet. Oklou (Marylou Mayniel) released her debut studio album, choke enough, earlier in the year. Despite the fact that she has been recording music for over a decade, I do think that now is a time when Oklou is getting a lot more attention and reaching new people. I am going to get to some recent interviews with her. Even though I am not keen on the format of this one from Stereogum - rather than it being a string of questions and answers, it is a bit random and hard to make sense of as there are questions and answers and headers and answers - there is some interesting information that I want to include:

“From the art she puts out as Oklou, it’d be easy to imagine Marylou Mayniel as a forest nymph casting surreal enchantments on classic pop songs or a cupid studying romance’s metamorphosis. She embodied the former, alongside collaborator Casey MQ, while making 2017’s For The Beasts EP, and the latter on 2020’s Galore mixtape. In between, she released 2018’s The Rite Of May EP, a holographic fusion of found sound, trip-hop, classical, and daydreamy synth-pop. It’s no surprise she’s opened for fellow pop folklorist Caroline Polachek and worked alongside innovative artists from NUXXE Collective and PC Music. Each adventure has further solidified her as a modern day mythmaker, conjuring a new realm with experimental electronic and pop music.

On her debut, Mayniel masters playfulness with looming unease. “Forces in everything/ Speak louder than me,” she earnestly sings during the chorus on “Obvious.” Over cherubic horns and a reggaeton-inspired beat, she watches flowers grow and submits to the greater powers at play that feel beyond human comprehension. It exemplifies how Choke Enough feels simultaneously like the manic spiral of an existential crisis and opening a small door to another world that you discovered in the back of a closet, while spring-cleaning.

I’m curious about the differences in escapism of what you’re exploring on Choke Enough versus Galore?

OKLOU: Yeah, the two are totally different. There’s been this need for me in these recent years, without even talking about music, to get closer to real life and what’s happening around me. I don’t know how much of it’s related to me growing up or or also just a post-Galore effect. Because indeed, as you said, Galore, the story that I wanted to tell [she makes a soaring sound] I had to go very far in the universe. I enjoyed it, but I choose to tell the story in a certain way. I was like, Okay, I want to tell this story in the most beautiful way I can even if some aspect of the experience I’m relating to is not beautiful at all. So I have this like a hyper-romantic prism on what I had experienced at the time in the context of a relationship.

Then after that, my life changed. I met someone new as well. My focus changed. The conversations with my friends also changed. It felt like a new movement, a new way to look at things and to get involved in things. It impacted me a lot, especially on my capacity to use my imagination. I was a bit torn actually, because I was so interested in these real life subjects, sometimes very political as well. And then I was going to the studio, and I was like, “Oh yeah, let’s make magic.’ It’s really hard when you think about real life stuff.

It could be easy, I guess, sometimes to actually use art in that regard. But I find it hard for myself to disconnect and reconnect and disconnect. I chose to stay connected to my social life and spiritual, not in the way of beliefs, but what was interesting to me.

It resulted in hours of discussions with Casey, which is my main collaborator. Hours of discussion. It was almost funny, because at some point for each track we’re talking about the concept of the lyrics, etc, for like an hour, two hours, and then at the end of the conversation, we were almost systematically in a dead end of the conversation. We were turning in circles, provoking questions and realizing that there’s no answer at all. [Laughs] So that was really special. It was actually kind of tiring. It’s what happened. It’s really part of the creative process. So it’s, I think, relevant to mention.

How did thoughts on motherhood and family impact the conceptualization of the album?

OKLOU: As far as the thoughts on motherhood, when I wrote the lyrics to “family and friends,” first of all the pregnancy was a total surprise. I had the album to release and the tour to do.

It’s a different kind of birth.

OKLOU: Exactly. But my evocation of motherhood in the context of “family and friends” illustrates, in my opinion, the moments where I’ve been thinking about, why do I feel like I’m necessarily gonna have kids one day? I think, like a lot of women, our age and our generation, are asking themselves these questions — what do I really want to experience? I’ve been growing up in a family where every woman is a mother, and there’s no question about that. And every father is doing the barbecue on Sunday. You know, everything is very like women and men and family driven. It’s great, because my family is good people, and everybody’s saying I have this chance to have a functional [family] having grown up in a functional and loving environment.

But what was not there though was questioning everybody’s posture in the family. I think I’ve become more and more aware of how conditioned we were as women in my family.

It’s been a few years that there’s been this pretty natural conversation in myself regarding the path I want to take in my life, and how much I actually want to be a mother just because all these women before me have done that.

“family and friends,” the chorus is me wondering if it’s even worth asking myself all of these questions. It’s very schizophrenic in that sense. I keep going back and forth between thinking too much if I feel good and enjoying my life as it is, how much you know you have to put yourself in this discomfort of actually questioning everything. What good does that really make for yourself and for people around you?

Your relationship with time is more about marinating and incubating ideas? Or is that delay in a project about perfectionism, wanting to have something fully realized before you put it out?

OKLOU: This is very important, actually, because it’s something also that is dysfunctional, in my opinion, within the industry and what you’re being asked to do. There is so much content, so much information, and so many things being shared. Often I find myself like, I really want this thing that I share to be worth it, to be beautiful, to be incarnated, because I feel, especially in hard times, it’s overwhelming, and things are being shared for the wrong reasons. Many things that are not actually art-focused enough. For me, it’s a shame. I feel bad when I do things in that regard, to run after a result. It’s incompatible with the concept of the industry, obviously, but it’s what’s been at stake recently for me. It’s all about the choices you make at the end of the day”.

I am going to move to an interview from FADER. Oklou’s latest album might be her best asnd most personal. Answering life’s big questions on choke enough, I do wonder how she follows this album. Such an accomplished work, choke enough is one of the best albums of this year. One that everyone should listen to:

“Was starting a family something you'd generally been thinking about?

It's not so much about starting a family, but [the song] definitely holds thoughts around the options that are being presented to me as a human being, as a woman, as an artist. It holds a lot of questioning. I start the song by talking about a very precise memory I have of a conversation with a teacher that was around what you wanna do in life and what you're supposed to do in life and what it means to use your qualities. I use this as a jumping off point for the rest of the track.

When you get older, these questions you asked yourself when you were younger gain so much more weight.

To be fair, my spirit when I was younger felt more free from these questions than these last few years for me. I felt more the weight of these options recently in my life, than when I was 19. After my last project, which was emotionally draining, very intense, very focused, very precise, there's many things in my life that have changed. I think for a natural reason just because I'm a growing up human. But, eventually I had to write lyrics and I can only talk about my life. So if my experiences are the inspiration, what is my experience at this moment? I was trying to answer that question in this album.

Are you listening to classical music often?

I have to admit ever since I started working on the album, I've been listening to very few music actually. There's one playlist I've been listening to on Spotify which is mainly just '70s music of Japanese composers doing new age stuff. I really like that.

How did you know you wanted Bladee to be on the record?

It's been a while actually that I wanted to do something with either him or Ecco2K, who I've been a big fan of also for a while. We actually met a few times and you know, quick exchanges, "Ah, we can do something together." When I was writing the album in Los Angeles, [Casey MQ and I] we went to see a show of Drain Gang. I was really touched by the commitment of the fans. I think it gave me the impulse to actually write to [Bladee and Ecco2k]. But Benjamin was the one to answer my proposition.

What's coming up for you this year? Obviously you have this other project you're working on…

Two releases this year! [laughs] Well, the album is the first big thing which I'm very excited about. And then [I’ll] focus on how I'm gonna share this music with people. I work with a stylist, his name is Pierre, and we've been working on my character for this new album. I think I wanted to get back to something a bit more real in the aesthetic than what I've been exploring in these last years. [Galore] was really fantastic and witchy. I need to get back on Earth a little bit, and putting my vision on, “What is actually going on?” I'm [in my] 30s”.

Last month, Pitchfork spoke with Oklou around the release of the Deluxe Edition of choke enough. They note how “In the afterglow of her magnificent album, choke enough, and the birth of her first child, Marylou Mayniel decamps to the southwest of France”. If you have not heard Oklou and her incredible music, then make sure that you listen to her now, as she is simply phenomenal:

“Mayniel and her elder brother, Clovis, each played piano from a young age; she remembers hearing him practice while she played Barbies, and going to her first lessons at a local music teacher’s home. “She used to have animals in the garden,” she says. Later, she studied cello and piano at conservatory school, and taught herself to play her brother’s guitar with tab sheets printed from the internet. (The siblings also have two older half-sisters.) As a teenager in Poitiers, Mayniel gravitated to Le Confort Moderne, part of a network of government-­supported cultural venues called SMAC (scène de musiques actuelles), where she met like-­minded friends and saw touring bands perform—memorably, the obliteratingly loud Sunn O))).

Around 2013 she began recording and uploading music of her own, much of which remains online: a beat tape, Avril, and assorted features on chill-out house tracks credited to her old alias, Loumar; a SoundCloud account under Avril Alvarez, a pseudonym based on her birth month, April. In 2014 she moved to Paris, where she became a founding member of a women’s DJ crew, These Girls Are on Fiyah. This is the period when the Oklou discography properly begins, with For the Beasts, and a second EP, The Rite of May, released in 2018, during what became a two-year stay in London, where Mayniel collaborated with the artist Malibu, along with NUXXE collective cofounders Sega Bodega and Shygirl.

A lot of artists in her position, I point out, would’ve wiped their early 2010s internet presence by now. “I just love archives,” she replies. “And I could put it private, but….” She trails off to reflect. “I don’t see why I should take it [down]. Some of it is not good, but it’s normal. It’s part of the process. I’m not ashamed of it.” The matter-of-fact rebuff feels very French, very Oklou.

Unlike Galore, much of which can be played on piano—the song “rosebud” is “literally like a Bach style”—Mayniel perceives choke enough as being synthetic. She rooted her concept of each track in the sonorities of a particular synth chord. “The sound I used to start the creation is gonna tell me which notes I should play, you know?” she explains. “When I play from a guitar or piano, the sound is really always the same, and it’s a great sound, but I’m interested in the texture of sounds that I cannot just stick to.”

She also reoriented her production style around loops, editing and resurfacing sounds and rhythms culled from her files, from Casey’s files, and from professional beat packs until nearly every song developed its own collection of character motifs. The first sound on the album is a lonely, irregular pulse, like a line of Morse code: a drum pattern that she filtered almost beyond recognition. “Me and her both have a similar kind of relationship to drums,” explains Harle, “which is like, we’d prefer them to not be there, but if they have to be there, they might as well have a note in them.” (He hints they have a heap of unreleased work together, including one new song coming soon.)

Mayniel’s favorite choke enough song, coproduced with Casey MQ and another friend, French DJ Lucien Krampf, is the title track. She landed on the word choke, she explains, in the same way as many of her lyrics, which she writes in English: based on the gibberish syllables she invents to model melodies on demos. The rest of the song was harder, because its muted hybrid of pop and electronic conventions doesn’t build up or drop; instead it scrolls by, like a video game background. “I struggled a lot making my point” with the production, she says. “I knew that I didn’t want to take that path of like, club music, but also without saying too much, I was kind of being pressured by people I worked with, being like, Oh, you should…. I was questioning my intuition: Oh, maybe I’m wasting the potential of the track. And so it took me years before I finally felt confident enough to be like, No, I should just follow my gut.”

True Panther’s Bein recalls a point about a year and a half into the recording process, when, conscious of passing time, he asked Mayniel how the label could help her get the songs finished. “She said, ‘You know, for me, in order to finish this, I have to reach a level of loneliness that is really difficult for me to summon, and I don’t actually know when it is that I’m gonna summon it,’ ” he recalls. The album took another year, but Mayniel tells me later that she’s not sure she found true loneliness; eventually, she just had to call it.

Part of why choke enough feels so uncannily familiar, I believe, is that it succeeds at bringing real-life existentialism into the paradoxical condition of feeling permanently online. “Obsessed with living in the present,” Underscores mutters on “harvest sky,” a song inspired by Mayniel’s memories of bonfire celebrations for la Fête de la Saint-Jean, the feast of Saint John the Baptist, which traditionally falls around the summer solstice. What else but the loop, the complete cycle, the refresh, to take us back to ourselves?

Yet if you don’t know what to look for, each song is a sleek, self-contained whole; like Apple used to boast of its tech products, “it just works,” straight out of the box. Months later, I’m still unlocking new features: foggy background samples, pregnant pauses, birdlike screeches that underline the drama of the moment, in much the same way, I notice, as the birds in The Plague Dogs, the film.

These birds were never real, though. The keening tone heard on an interlude, and again on “forces,” is man-made, some kind of equipment that Mayniel recorded in her neighborhood. And “blade bird,” choke enough’s elegiac, acoustic closer, adapts the concept of a Basque-­language poem and folk song, “Txoria Txori” (“The Bird’s a Bird”), which laments a love that cannot be possessed. Mayniel first encountered the poem in a novel, Les Gens de Bilbao Naissent Où Ils Veulent, by Spanish writer and filmmaker María Larrea. “When I read the translation, it really resonated a lot with me, and I guess with the history of my parents,” she says.

“I thought it was beautifully placed, that feeling of falling in love with people because they’re beautiful, because they’re so free, but then they’re so free that you can’t have them, really.” At first I pictured a little bird pierced by a dagger, like a traditional tattoo, but months later, I pictured a bird made of blades, wings cycling like the thin, muscular arms of a wind turbine—a loop.

In the back rooms of the internet there used to be all kinds of amateur splendor: hand-curated YouTube music channels, niche Tumblr art archives, strangers’ Flickr galleries, pseudonymous SoundClouds. The underground pop of the 2010s used to get so excited about being online, using shrinky-dink artifice to delight in poking fun at a culture that could feel shallow and strange but also organic and endlessly renewable. Turns out the internet isn’t really forever. Mayniel spends less time on all forms of social media these days: “I’m bored. I don’t know how to use it anymore.” Touch grass, they say: choke enough is an online album looking for the ground.

The ground looks a little different under each of us. A week later, I call Mayniel back to check some details and get a glimpse of hers: Home in a comfy chair, holding baby Zakaria, who’s nursing while Mayniel talks. The heat wave’s finally broken, and the sun’s shining in”.

The French musician has been releasing music for years now, though I thought it was the right time to spotlight her. Oklou is hitting a peak at the moment and she is not widely known. Not in the U.K. anyway. One of these artists who will continue to grow and put out amazing albums, go and follow Oklou. She is someone who is not going away…

ANYTIME soon.

______________

Follow Oklou

PHOTO CREDIT: Gil Gharbi

Official:

https://oklou.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/oklou_/

Twitter:

https://x.com/oklou_

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@oklou__

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/6fFcUOFcbjeIuEomuUthkw?si=GSiNpIxlRkCGakJlso1Faw

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPmfaXPGbC03r30Q5eR5atw

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Oklou93/

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Marvin Gaye

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

Marvin Gaye

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IN this The Great American Songbook…

PHOTO CREDIT: George Rose/Los Angeles Times

I am going to compile a mixtape featuring twenty songs from one of the all-time best singers. Marvin Gaye had the nicknames ‘Prince of Motown’ and ‘Prince of Soul’. An incredible artist who helped shape the sound of Motown, I am going to come to their biography of the great Marvin Gaye. Born in Washington D.C. in 1939, artists influenced by him or who have cited him as an inspiration include D'Angelo, John Legend, Alicia Keys, Outkast, Musiq Soulchild, Maxwell, Drake, and Tyler, the Creator. Here is Motown’s biography of a true great:

“Marvin Gaye broke the rules. Sure, Berry Gordy Jr set them, and sometimes – in the 1960s, often – the singer fell into line. But the enigmatic and headstrong “Prince of Motown” constantly sought to chart his own course, even when plagued by a divided soul. Marvin’s ultimate legacy is one of the most socially conscious, celebrated and timeless works of 20th century popular art: his 1971 album, What’s Going On.

FAST FACTS

First Hit: “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”

Biggest Hit: “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”

Top Album: What’s Going On

Career Highlight: Asserting an independent voice within the machine, to make the masterwork that is What’s Going On

Born Marvin Pentz Gay Jr. in Washington, D.C., in 1939, he sings in church as a child, becoming a soloist in the choir and learning to play piano and drums. In 1955, at odds with his father and unhappy at home, he quits high school and joins the Air Force. A subsequent honorable discharge notes that Marvin is unable to adjust to “regimentation and authority.”

Marvin loves the sound and ethos of doo-wop singing. Back in his hometown, he forms a group, the Marquees, to exult in the harmonies of the genre. (He also adds an “e” to his name.) Good fortune brings them into the orbit of a successful combo, the Moonglows, led by the man who is to be Marvin’s lifetime musical mentor, Harvey Fuqua. Marvin becomes one of the Moonglows, then finds himself at Motown in 1960 through Harvey’s closeness with Berry Gordy’s sister, Gwen.

Alongside duties as a drummer for the Miracles, Marvin begins recording in the style of the Sinatra-style crooner he longs to be. Berry Gordy produces The Soulful Moods Of Marvin Gaye, his debut album; it is not a commercial success. “I had a game plan that wasn’t working,” Marvin tells author David Ritz. He adapts to commercial demands, and co-writes his first – and autobiographical – hit, “Stubborn Kind Of Fellow.”

Marvin begins a consistent occupancy of the R&B and pop charts of the 1960s with hits penned by others, such as “Can I Get A Witness” and “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” from the Holland/Dozier/Holland team, and “I’ll Be Doggone” and “Ain’t That Peculiar” from Smokey Robinson. He also proves to be an ideal partner, climbing the best-sellers by way of disc duets with Mary Wells, Kim Weston and Tammi Terrell.

At Motown, Marvin’s popularity helps to offset his stubborn tendencies, especially when he proves to have the perfect voice for a mystical re-rendering of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine,” produced by Norman Whitfield. The song has already been a hit for Gladys Knight & the Pips, but Norman – who could be headstrong himself – wants Marvin’s interpretation to be heard. When airplay finally forces its release in November 1968, this becomes Motown’s single greatest hit of the decade, a seven-week chart-topper ablaze with the white heat of Marvin’s voice, the voodoo rhythms of the Funk Brothers, and the vindicated wisdom of Norman Whitfield.

As the ’70s dawn, Marvin no longer bows to Motown’s commercial imperatives. He wants to make music to reflect troubled times: a divisive Asian war, the disillusion of a generation of young people, and the continuing struggle by millions of Americans for racial justice. Marvin pours this and more into the melting pot that is What’s Going On, collaborating with others and drawing together the finest of Motown musicians. After the album’s release in May 1971, its huge success elevates expectations for Marvin. Berry Gordy did not favour his star’s provocative dissent, but acknowledges that he was wrong.The 1970s see Marvin build on his creative freedom, with a film score (Trouble Man), more duets (with Diana Ross) and a pair of sexually charged albums, Let’s Get It On and I Want You, which are commercial home runs as well as personal diaries of a conflicted man, torn between carnality and faith. There are also two in-concert LPs, including Live At The London Palladium, which is augmented by a definitive dance smash, the studio-sculpted “Got To Give It Up” in 1977.

Marvin continues to make his personal life public through song, never more evident than in 1978’s Here, My Dear, a sprawling double-album chronicling his divorce from Anna. His alienation from Motown is the undercurrent of 1981’s deeply philosophical In Our Lifetime, by which time Marvin’s woes – with the IRS, among other pursuers – see him relocate to Europe.

Refreshed by exile in Belgium, Marvin returns to prominence (and to his homeland) with 1982’s Midnight Love, the first album for his new label, Columbia. It is prefaced by “Sexual Healing,” a chart-busting and Grammy® -winning single. Marvin tours amid this renewed appetite for his talents, and scores a televised coup in early ’83 with a magnetic performance of the national anthem at the NBA’s All-Star Game in Los Angeles. Yet on April 1, 1984 – one day before his 45th birthday – the superstar is shot to death by his father in the aftermath of a heated argument. Following a star-studded funeral, his ashes are scattered in the Pacific Ocean”.

This feature celebrates great American artists whose catalogue is among the best in music. I could not leave Marvin Gaye out! A hugely influential singer and songwriter, Gaye’s legacy and impact will remain and spread for generations to come. There is no doubting the fact that he is one of the most important artists…

IN music history.

FEATURE: New Director Cuts: The ‘Missed’ Singles and Potential Short Films

FEATURE:

 

 

New Director Cuts

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989

The ‘Missed’ Singles and Potential Short Films

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AS Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with Miranda Richardson in the 1993 short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve

recently turned thirty-two, I have been thinking about the short film that was released around the album, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. That was a short that Bush wrote, directed and starred in that drew in songs from The Red Shoes. Arguably, it was the first visual album. Something that no doubt inspired artists who followed. We can see Kate Bush as the first female artist at least to release something close to a visual album. It makes me wonder about other albums and short films that could have come from them. Also, there are a couple of songs from The Red Shoes that should have come out as single. It is inevitable that fans have their own theorises regarding ‘missed’ singles. Those that would have worked. I have written about this before. The first three albums from Bush have that opportunity. She did bring The Kick Inside and Lionheart’s tracks to life for 1979’s The Tour of Life, and numbers from Never for Ever were also included, in addition to appearing on 1980’s Never for Ever. Even though I don’t think you could have improved on The Tour of Life or made a short film from songs on The Kick Inside and Lionheart (1978), there were songs on each album that begged to be singles. Ones that could have had these remarkable videos that rank alongside the best Kate Bush videos. Moving, Them Heavy People and The Kick Inside all had live performances. Kate Bush recorded videos for them in that context. I am not sure that the budget was for her videos on her debut but, as effective and distinct as Wuthering Heights and The Man with the Child in His Eyes are, there was scope for something a bit more cinematic or different. Moving was released as a single in Japan but no official video. Them Heavy People was released as a single and had a live video accompanying it, whilst Moving has its live performances.

I highlighted these songs as it would be amazing to see fuller stories for them. Moving, this dreamy and beautiful song was brought to life on the stage, though I think that it could have made as successful U.K. single. One that would have charted high and could have been released after The Man with the Child in His Eyes. In terms of international singles, The Kick Inside would have been interesting. I am not sure what form the video would have taken, though I feel releasing it in Europe would have been a good commercial move and could have got the album more focus there. Them Heavy People was a single  A live recording of this song was the lead track on the On Stage E.P. which reached number ten in the UK Singles Chart in 1979. The live video is great, though this song deserved to be released as a U.K. single in 1978 and had a video where Bush brought the lyrics to life. Maybe teachers, philosophers and ‘heavy people’ surrounding her. Bush immersed in books in this fantasy. I think, if Them Heavy People was released in 1978, it could have perfectly fitted with Moving, The Man with the Child in His Eyes and Wuthering Heights. I am not sure if EMI limited Bush to two U.K. singles and wanted to put more emphasis on the album rather than single. Lionheart has three songs not released as singles that could have had this amazing videos: Fullhouse, Kashka from Baghdad and Coffee Homeground. Hammer Horror and Wow were released as U.K. singles, though there should have been a third. In terms of potential, Coffee Homegropund would have been the most successful. Set in a café and involving this fascinating cast of characters where Bush sings “Pictures of Crippin/Lipstick-smeared/Torn wallpaper/Have the walls got ears here?/Well, you won't get me with your Belladonna/In the coffee “. You could have this incredible visual. Maybe the mixed critical reaction to Lionheart might have meant an additional singles would be a waste, though I do feel that a third U.K. single could have boosted the album sales and also highlighted one of the more underrated tracks from it.

Never for Ever not only has a couple of ‘missed’ singles. It also begs for a short film. Delius (Song of Summer) and The Wedding List were not released as singles. The former weas performed live on T.V. and Bush recorded the latter for her 1979 Christmas special. I love the video for The Wedding List and feel like it could have formed part of a short film. One that follows a woman and her relationship,. Babooshka being about a wife accusing her husband of deceit and trying to trick him. The Wedding List where she gets remarried and the groom is shot down. Maybe a revenge kill? The two songs could link. All We Ever Look For this reflective and philosophical point before The Wedding List. The night before the wedding. Breathing, where the bride was made pregnant and is trying to keep her foetus safe where there is nuclear war and threat around. That would be a four-song short film. There is potential for a larger plot and having a concept that starts with Delius (Song of Summer), we move to Babooshka, then end with Night Scented Stock. Breathing before that. How about 1982’s The Dreaming? An album never brought to the stage or with any numbers included in a Christmas special, I have said before how Houdini and Get Out of My House could have been singles. They would have been more successful that There Goes a Tenner, The Dreaming and Night of the Swallow (released in Ireland). The Dreaming and Hounds of Love are the two albums that seem to have the most cinematic potential. In terms of a plot for The Dreaming, it could be a mix of fantasy and reality. A woman, at the start, searching for knowledge and looking at regrets, it would end with her descending into madness. All the Love feeding into Sat in Your Lap. Then we move into Suspended in Gaffa. The heroine then caught in a dream state as we get Leave It Open, Houidini and Night of the Swallow being played out and representing her turmoil and heartbreak. She would break out of sleep but then descend into paranoia as we end with Get Out of My House.

Of course, it would need to be fleshed out a bit more, though there are links between songs and potential on all of her albums. You might feel that the fact music videos were made for several of the songs means a short film would be redundant. However, I feel something similar to The Line, the Cross and the Curve could have happened for several of her albums. Maybe not for Hounds of Love, as its second side, The Ninth Wave, is in itself a short film and cinematic. I have written about how this should have been released as a short film. I don’t think you could have released any more singles from the album. That is not true of 1989’s The Sensual World. An album where Bush wanted to write more from a woman’s perfective and wanted a more feminine album, a film plot around that could have been fascinating. The Sensual World, The Fog, Deeper Understanding, Rocket’s Tail and This Woman’s Work could have been woven together into a short film. I do think that The Fog would have been a great single. Also, Rocket’s Tail would have been a commercial success. Maybe harder to put together in a cohesive story, I do like the idea that The Sensual World gets this wider exposure. The Red Shoes has had its short film, but I have written before how Lily would have been a better single than the album’s final single, And So Is Love. 2005’s Aerial has A Sky of Honey as its second disc. I am writing about this a lot as Aerial turned twenty on 7th November. I have said how that suite should be made into a short film. Or something visual that brings the songs to life. Bush did perform A Sky of Honey for Before the Dawn (her 2014 residency), though most of us will never see that. Also, when we think of 2011’s 50 Words for Snow, there is a short film there.

You could have all seven tracks put together in this story, though the album is sixty-five minuets long, so you would need shorter edits. Either that or putting together four songs form the album, say, Snowflake, Lake Tahoe, Snowed In at Wheeler Street and Among Angels. I do think it would be more satisfying having all the songs together, just cutting them down so that everything could be included within about thirty/thirty-five minutes. In terms of their length, Kate Bush did not have many options for singles. Wild Man was released, though I think Misty and Among Angels would have been popular, albeit edited down. In any case, 50 Words for Snow definitely has a terrific short film in it. So do many of Kate Bush’s albums! I have been thinking about this as The Red Shoes turned thirty-two on 1st November. Remembering the short film that was premiered on 13th November, 1993 but has a wider release on 6th May, 1994, it made me wonder, and my mind wander, regarding other short films. How Bush writes in this cinematic way. You can see plots and stories. Weaving songs together and getting something new. Maybe people will have their own views, though I think some of my suggestions could fit. The cinematic power of Kate Bush as this amazing writer and producer. It goes to show that there are…

NO limits to her brilliance.

FEATURE: One for the Record Collection! Essential November Releases

FEATURE:

 

 

One for the Record Collection!

IN THIS PHOTO: Mavis Staples releases Sad and Beautiful World on 7th November/PHOTO CREDIT: Elizabeth De La Piedra

Essential November Releases

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EVEN though…

IN THIS PHOTO: The cover for Jessie J’s Don’t Tease Me with a Good Time, due for release on 28th November

November and December are quieter when it comes to new album releases, there are a few really interesting ones out this month I want to guide people to. I am going to take guidance from this website when it comes to releases and dates. There are ones that I am not going to mention that you will want to seek out. 7th November is the busiest week. Let’s start out with Hatchie’s Liquorice. You can pre-order the album here. I am a fan of this Australian artist, so I am curious to see what Liquorice offers:

“The cover of Liquorice, the third album from Australian indie pop artist Hatchie, features a closely cropped portrait of Harriette Pilbeam laughing, her smudged red lipstick suggesting the glorious aftermath of a kiss. Captured during a spontaneous backyard photo shoot using a dinky digital camera, the image encapsulates a record that is rough around the edges and joyfully undone with themes of longing, lust, and regret. Pilbeam began writing Liquorice in earnest while living in Brisbane over 2022-2023, and later at a home shared with Agius in Melbourne, ultimately completing the demos in mid-2024. As a musician who has previously worn her influences on her sleeve, Pilbeam strove to write from scratch without any specific musical influences in mind; allowing songs to breathe for weeks, rather than rushing ideas.

She found herself drawn to the melodic simplicity of her early songs and embraced her musical insecurities: “I wanted to see my limitations as strengths that inform my style.” After working with producers Jorge Elbrecht (Caroline Polachek, Japanese Breakfast, Sky Ferreira) and Dan Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan) on Giving the World Away, Pilbeam wanted to complete Liquorice with a single collaborator, ideally a non-male producer who also fronts their own musical project. In September 2024, Pilbeam and Agius returned to Los Angeles to work with Melina Duterte, who records indie rock under the name Jay Som and has production credits on an assortment of projects including the Grammy-winning boygenius album the record. “My last album ended up being really dark and introspective and that is one part of me, but there was this whole other side that I felt like I wasn't expressing,” Pilbeam says. “I’m a hopeless romantic and a very silly person, sometimes to a fault.” Now 32 and married, Pilbeam found that “eternal feelings” of yearning and heartache quickly rushed back as she reflected on her experiences as a younger woman.

At the same time, she channeled her fondness for tragic romance movies where the characters do not necessarily find a happy ending together. Liquorice is preoccupied with the finite forever. These songs capture the overwhelming, exhilarating, and transforming side-effects of infatuation, even if the entirety of the love story only lasts for one magical night. Like the rich flavors of the twisty, titular candy - sweet, salty, and bitter all in one bite—Liquorice validates how longing and obsession are intertwined in the self-discovery of young womanhood”.

Mavis Staples’s Sad and Beautiful World is available to pre-order. There is not a lot of information about this album, so I am going to source a recent interview from The Guardian, where readers posted questions for Staples. In a career that has lasted over seventy-five years, this is an artist that is still so powerful and relevant. Do go and order her new album, as it is going to be one of the most important and moving of this year:

“Can you speak about the array of songs and artists on your new record? What kind of message and lyrics do you want to sing at this point in your life? steve_bayley

The first song I got for the album was Human Mind, written by Hozier and Allison Russell, and that really set the tone for the entire record. It starts: “I deal in love baby, in good words from above … and I ain’t giving up.” I cried when I was trying to sing it for the first time. Then the next song was Beautiful Strangers by Kevin Morby. All the songs are part of me and what I’ve been singing about my whole life. There’s some about war, fighting, love … some about hard times, like the farmer whose losing his farm. Things that are going on in the world today, so Sad and Beautiful World is the perfect title.

You were influential in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Do we need another civil rights movement now, 50 years later? AD2023

When I did my album of freedom songs with Ry Cooder [We’ll Never Turn Back, 2007] we sang a song called 99 and 1/2. You know, 99 and a half won’t do … we gotta make a hundred. We gotta keep on pushing because the struggle is still alive.

In my mind Stax Records was a true band of sisters and brothers pushing boundaries and creating magic, with a shared vision of art, liberty and righteousness. Is that the reality? Mr_202

It was a pleasure working at Stax because they had all these great people such as David Porter and Isaac Hayes. We called Otis Redding “the footballer” because he was so huge, but he was one beautiful spirit. They had a mixed [race] band in Booker T and the MG’s. In the early 60s, two white guys and two black guys working together was not supposed to happen, but in Stax no one looked at colour. Anybody could walk into your session and sit and listen. It was like a family and, now they’ve got a museum, a lot of teenyboppers can see Stax today.

Is this the darkest time you’ve lived through or am I foolish to believe it is? babylonfalling

It is pretty dark. There are some things going on in the US that are not pleasing to me, but I keep my head up. I turn on a light, you know, I don’t dwell on it. If someone needs me out there, I’ll be out there, but I leave that darkness out of my home and out of my life. You can’t let them bring you down”.

Midlake’s A Bridge Too Far is also out on 7th November. You can pre-order the album here. If you have not heard of this legendary American band, then do go back and check out their incredible catalogue. Their latest album is set to be one of their best. Rough Trade have provided a bit of information about A Bridge Too Far. I am intrigued to see what we get with this album:

“Beloved for their cinematic songwriting and atmospheric blend of folk, rock, and psychedelia, Midlake returns with their sixth studio album, A Bridge To Far -- a sweeping, soul-stirring meditation on resilience and hope.

Lead singer Eric Pulido describes the record as a reminder that, regardless of circumstance, there is a place -- "not made of stone" -- where one can find solace and strength. It's a call to persevere, to "go bravely arm in arm and climb upon," inviting listeners to transcend the darkness through connection and belief. This is Midlake at their most inspired and intentional, weaving together mythic storytelling and emotional clarity with the signature textures that have made them a touchstone in modern independent music.

Recorded in the band's hometown of Denton, TX at The Echo Lab with acclaimed producer and mixer Sam Evian, A Bridge To Far captures the warmth and wildness of the band's earliest recordings while pushing into luminous new territory. The first single, "The Ghouls," arrives as a haunting and propulsive introduction to the record's themes--equal parts spectral and cathartic”.

About four more albums from 7th November before I move to the following week. One that you will definitely want to get is ROSALÍA’s Lux. Pre-order the album here. This NME article tells how this new album is going to be multilingual. It is really fascinating. One of the biggest artists in the world always doing something different. ROSALÍA definitely is in a league of her own. If you have not heard her music either, then I would urge you to check her out, as she is a brilliant artist:

“Rosalía has revealed that she sings in 13 different languages on her new album, ‘Lux’.In a new interview with the New York Times, the musician revealed that she spent two years learning how to write and sing convincingly in other languages. The album features Rosalía’s native Spanish but also Catalan, English, Latin, Sicilian, Ukrainian, Arabic, German and more.

Fans were expecting something completely different to her last after Rosalía shared in August that her next album would not sound like her last LP. She told ELLE: “The rhythm [of the music industry] is so fast. And the sacrifice, the price to pay, is so high. The driving force that leads you to continue making music, to continue creating, has to come from a place of purity.”

Details of the new album emerged earlier this month (October 21), when Rosalía confirmed her new project, ‘LUX’, would be released in November, the follow-up to 2022’s ‘Motomami’. The album – her fourth studio record – will be released on November 7 via Columbia Records, and you can pre-order/pre-save it here.

Speaking about her multi-lingual approach to the album, the musician told the New York Times: “It’s a lot of trying to understand how other languages work…it’s a lot of intuition and trying to be like, ‘I’m going to just write and let’s see how these will sound in another language.’”

She told the publication she had spent a lot of time on Google translate as well as speaking with professional translators — “If I rhyme this with this, does this make sense?” — she said she would ask them. She also worked with teachers who coached her phonetically on how to pronounce words and phrases.

Speaking about her desire to understand new cultures through the language learning on the album, she explained: “I love traveling, I love learning from other humans. Why would I not try to learn another language and try to sing in another language and expand the way I can be a singer or a musician or an artist? The world is so connected.”

PHOTO CREDIT: The Lede Company

The orchestral ‘Berghain’– taking its name from the iconic techno club in Berlin – has lyrics in German, Spanish and English and heavy classical influences.

Rosalía’s voice is at the forefront in the first half as she sings in German and Spanish over dramatic strings. About halfway through, Björk – who Rosalía also worked with on the 2023 charity single ‘Oral’ – comes in singing, “The only way to save us is through divine intervention,” and Yves Tumor takes over for the outro, repeating, “I’ll fuck you till you love me.”

The German lyrics sung by the choir, “Seine Angst ist meine Angst, Seine Wut ist meine Wut, Seine Liebe ist meine Liebe, Sein Blut ist mein Blut,” translate to “His fear is my fear, his rage is my rage, his love is my love, his blood is my blood.”

In her interview with the New York Times, Rosalía also opened up about working with Björk on the song, saying: “She is my favourite woman and artist. I think we met through Pablo, El Guincho [Rosalía’s former producing partner]. We went to have some tapas in Barcelona. And I thought that she was the most fascinating human I’ve ever met because her train of thought was so different than I’ve ever seen before. It was just an instant crush of admiration.

“We stayed in touch and I just felt like with this album, if this was such a strong, demanding musical exercise, if I was doing it good enough, maybe, I would send it to her, and if it was in the right level, maybe then she couldn’t say no.”

In the three years since she released ‘Motomami’, her third album, Rosalía shared a collaborative EP with Rauw Alejandro – her then-fiancé – and released the standalone single ‘Tuya’ in 2023, and worked with artists including Ralphie Choo and BLACKPINK’s Lisa.

The singer, who had a cameo in the 2019 movie Pain And Glory, is also set to venture into acting by joining the cast of HBO’s Euphoria for its upcoming third season. She said earlier this year, “This is my first job, eh? Well, I’m learning, I’m figuring it out. I’m trying not to forget my lines, but it’s been really inspiring being beside these amazing actors and actresses. My first time, figuring it out, trying to have fun with it, play around, improvise.”

NME gave ‘Motomami’ five stars, writing: “Rosalía isn’t so much carving out her own lane as building her own ultra-modern, super-bendy sonic motorway. It’s one you’ll want to hurtle down again and again”.

Go and pre-order Stella Donnelly’s Love and Fortune. This is an artist that you may not be familiar with. I would say go and hear her. She is remarkable. The Guardian recently spoke with her about Love and Fortune. An album that captures the pain of being rejected by a friend, this album is also one where Stella Donnelly reconnected with music. Rekindling that passion and love. I have been following her for a while, and this album sounds like it will be incredible:

“We have a language for coping with romantic heartbreak, learned from movies and songs – but there are fewer mirrors in art for coping with the end of platonic bonds. On her third album, Love and Fortune, Donnelly has captured the dull ache of being rejected by a friend who once knew her best of all. It might become the record ghosted friends turn to when they find a person they knew intimately for years no longer wants to hear from them.

When it happened to her, Donnelly felt powerless, realising “no amount of questioning or reaching out is going to work. I’d never come up against that in my life.” Any tensions in other friendships she’d had previously could be talked through; this time, she was having a conversation with herself.

“It’s so heavy and, for me, never resolved,” she says. “Ever.”

As much as the 33-year-old tried not to write about it, it sprang up each time she touched an instrument. She writes of letters left unsent on the track Friends, hiding herself away and not showing up to gigs she thinks her friend might also go to on Ghosts. “It’s as much an offering as it is a journal, in a way,” Donnelly says of the album.

We’re chatting over kombucha in the garden of Ceres, a farm and nursery in Melbourne’s East Brunswick. Around us flit magpies and other species that Donnelly, a keen ornithologist, notes by name. Birds are a symbol for evolution on the record: over plaintive, soft keys on Please Everyone, she recalls birdwatching with her former friend as sweet recorded chirps arrive on the track. “Wherever you may be, I hope it’s kind to you,” she sings. By the time we get to the album closer, Laying Low, she’s calmer, singing of the feathers left behind when someone flies away. By then, she’s learned, trying to grab them would be a fool’s errand.

PHOTO CREDIT: Nick McKinlay

Donnelly is quick, eager and delightful in conversation, but she has been struggling in interviews, she says, “because I’m so busy trying to protect the other person in all of this. But then I have gone and written this record.” When a freak sun shower prompts us to scurry away for cover, it also gives her respite from having to tiptoe around her words. When we settle again out of the rain, she apologises for “giving politician answers”, explaining the last thing she wants to do is twist a knife in someone else’s side with a more uncensored version of events.

After writing her past two records on tour and on deadline, Donnelly wrote Love and Fortune in her head and on her bike around Melbourne’s northern suburbs.

Six months ago, after being diagnosed as neurodivergent, she learned what self-care looks like for a person with a sensitive mind. “It’s just understanding that I need a little extra help here and there with things, and that a motorcycle riding past really loudly on the street can be a day-ruiner for me. I’m just a lot kinder to myself now, about everything.”

“Take back my little life … I set myself on fire for someone else’s game,” she sings on W.A.L.K, a song about caring for herself like she would a beloved pet. Tending to her most basic needs became a new daily devotion.

“I think, up until this year, I’d been really hard on myself because I was just like, ‘Why can everyone else do this and I can’t? Why can everyone else cope with life?’” she says.

She now has “hindsight kindness” for the past versions of her. The ones that couldn’t cope as well, who pushed through the discomfort of touring and sat in bed waiting for a text back – then chastised herself for doing it. “Finally allowing myself to just write a whole fucking album about this big thing that had happened to me made me accept that that’s kind of who I am: I’m this annoying person that writes songs about their personal life. I had to reconcile with the fact that that’s who I am, and grow to love that person”.

I will move to The Mountain Goats’ Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan. I can’t find too much online about this album, so I will have to rely on Rough Trade and what they have published about Mountain Goats’ new album. I have heard a couple of songs from it and it is one of those albums that needs to be in the collection. Even if you have not heard of the group, I think you should dive in and explore an album that is going to be one of those under-reviewed gems:

“The Mountain Goats, led by singer-songwriter John Darnielle, have built a prolific and influential career in indie music since the early 1990s.

Known for their vast discography of storytelling and literary lyricism, Darnielle is regarded as one of the most distinctive voices in modern songwriting. Their work has a deep emotional resonance with their avid and loyal fanbase, built over the past 30 years. Today, we find Darnielle awoken from a dream where he titled an album Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan, with no sense of sonic direction in the dream, then proceeded to write the entire album based off of this arbitrary title.

Produced by the Mountain Goats’ multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas, who also co-wrote several songs, the record is embracing, inviting, and overflowing with melody and orchestration that extends far beyond the boundaries of their past work”.

Whitney’s Small Talk seems like it is going to be among this year’s est. You can pre-order it here. New Music City spoke with Max Kakacek, a founding member and guitarist of Whitney, ahead of the release of Small Talk. It sounds like it is a masterpiece, so an album that you will want to pre-order and ensure you do not miss out on:

“Three years ago, Whitney released their third record, “Spark” (2022), an album that left fans and critics bemused and, at times, downright cruel. (Hello, Reddit.) The record was created mainly in isolation during lockdown, a period in which both Julien Ehrlich (drums and vocals) and Max Kakacek (guitar) were navigating painful breakups. The pair had grown disillusioned with their chosen instruments and felt experimentation would render inspiration. “Spark” represents a more pop-adjacent exercise by the soft-rock duo, and it’s a decent experiment. But this proposition did not sit well with many Whitney loyalists who, like me, had been so enchanted by “Light Upon the Lake” back in 2016, with its inventive blend of indie soft rock and folk backed by orchestral textures akin to micro-chamber music. “Candid” (2020) and “Forever Turned Around” (2019) are good albums, but the bar had been set so high with “Light Upon the Lake” that fans have eagerly, and perhaps impatiently, been seeking a follow-up that tickles the itch that Whitney’s first record unveiled. As Kakacek says of the “Spark” era: “We felt really boxed in by our instruments… So we completely shifted focus. In hindsight… It didn’t really capture the soulfulness of the project.”

Three years on from “Spark,” “Small Talk” has already generated pre-release buzz, and with good reason: It is phenomenal. Of their four studio albums, it is the clear tour de force and, upon release, could join Chicago’s canon of indie music in the same breath as Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” (2002)—a profound, persistently revered and proud patch of Chicago’s soft-rock fabric. It is fast and slow at once, clocking in at thirty-six minutes and eleven songs. The opening track, “Silent Exchange,” is stunning. Beginning with meandering, isolated yet purposeful piano, Ehrlich’s gently piercing vocals enter with “Write my name / in a line of gas… bite my tongue / and they ask how I’ve been / ’cause I can’t talk / without crying again.” Kakacek’s guitar is gently introduced before a characteristic violin and horn section builds the track into something beautifully melancholic and grand. It is a mesmerizing start. “Silent Exchange” is followed, logically, by “Won’t You Speak Your Mind,” a faster track that leans on Kakacek’s guitar a bit sooner, leading into Whitney’s horn section quicker, with more capriccio. Themes of desperate, painfully disconnected communication associated with collapses of intimacy and love are clear throughout the record.

While prereleased tracks like “Damage,” “Dandelions” and “Darling”—likely the hit of the record—continue to dissect the pain of post-relationship chaos, “In the Saddle” offers a slightly psychedelic and redemptive arc to the record. It’s a song to which Julian Ehrlich’s previous work with Unknown Mortal Orchestra can clearly be connected. Thematically, “Back to the Wind” further substantiates themes of defiant hope within the album with simple poetic dexterity: “Back to the wind now feel so strong / No reflection in the glass babe I’m gone… swept in the wind turning brown / floating through the street upside down.” It’s not laureate-level prose—it’s accessible, clever and quick, and for me, it initiated an interesting meditation: Wind does not exist without that which it displaces. You cannot hear it without the rustling of trees or the buffeting of ears. You cannot see it without the leaves it carries. But there it always is, powerfully, if recklessly, forcing progress. “Back to the Wind” posits embracing the painful winds of change in a clear, hopeful way.

In the process of producing “Small Talk,” Whitney embraced first-instinct energy. “It was more like, trust your intuition immediately,” Kakacek says. “The first iteration of each song would eventually be the final product.” That openness bled into a pattern of retaining several “happy accidents.” “On ‘Islands,’ I layered a mono-synth part four times live—some notes were ‘wrong,’ but the tension felt desperate and sad,” Kakacek says. “We tried to redo it once and stopped immediately. Whatever happened that night wasn’t repeatable.” The approach also felt cyclical for the band, a return to the group’s roots. “It felt like we were coming back to a home base… letting the weird nuances of being a little naive in our recording process be a part of the songs again [as they were in 2016]”.

There are two albums from 14th November I want to cover off. Austra’s Chin Up Buttercup is the first. This is an artist that I am relatively new to, but I do love the sound of what the album will deliver and I would advise others to investigate it. You can pre-order it and check out an album that is going to be terrific:

“I’m so chaotic in love,” sings Katie Austra Stelmanis on “Amnesia,” the cinematic opening track of Chin Up Buttercup, the fifth album by her alter ego and longtime pop project Austra. You know Austra’s astonishing voice – singular and operatic, it betrays a fearlessness and sophistication. She’s the woman you’d be afraid to approach in a bar. Her voice draws you like a siren to the dance floor as the beats build toward the hypnotic chorus of “my life is not the same without you in my arms.” Listen closely and you’ll hear a vulnerability that sets this album apart from her earlier work. This is a grief album you can dance to. 
Stelmanis and co-producer Kieran Adams shared a mutual love of pop divas, Eurodance and hard-to-find techno. Madonna’s 1998 album Ray of Light, produced by William Orbit, was a key influence in the later stages of album making: “Ray of Light was produced almost entirely on a Juno-106 and a Korg MS-20 which we’d been using, so the reference point was aligned,” says Stelmanis. The album sounds like a mix of hypnotic dance floor anthems and elegant melodies to soothe your broken heart”.

I am actually going to now move to Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover’s What of Our Nature. You can pre-order it here. That comes out on 21st November. Not too much available about this album, so I am going to come to The Line of Best Fit and their feature from on 15th October. A little more insight regarding what the album is about and the artists involved. These are artists I am also fairly new to, so I am curious to hear what comes from What of Our Nature:

“The announcement comes alongside Haley Heynderickx's signing with Fat Possum Records, with the collection being the result of shared songwriting duties between Heynderickx and Max García Conover.

On new single "Fluorescent Light", Heynderickx offers a critique of commercialism, while on "Boar", García Conover chronicles the pair's first time meeting. What Of Our Nature follows Among Horses III (Fifth Edition), which Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover released in 2023.

What of Our Nature was developed over the course of a year, with Heynderickx and García Conover exchanging songs with one another from across the US while reading the work of Woody Guthrie. The album was produced by Sahil Ansari, recorded to tape across five days while in a barn in Vermont.

Tracklist:

Song for Alicia
Mr. Marketer
Boars
Cowboying
In Bulosan’s Words
This Morning I Am Born Again
Fluorescent Light
Buffalo, 1981
to each their dot
Red River Dry”.

Two more albums to get to. On 21st November, Keaton Henson’s Parader is released. You can pre-order it here. An extraordinary songwriter from London. He is a hugely prolific artist. His previous album, Somnambulant Cycles, was released last year. Such an amazing talent who is consistently brilliant, I feel Parader will offer so many gems and memorable moments:

“Keaton Henson is shedding the “quiet boy” persona that has defined much of his career. Embracing the grunge-infused sounds of his youth on new album Parader, the elusive songwriter melds emotional darkness, melancholy, and seething frustration as he reckons with the hauntings of his past: “I was nervous about being too loud, but then it sort of just came out.”

What unravels across Parader’s 12 tracks is an introspective autopsy of time as it distorts and folds to inhabit the songwriter’s present. “There are these disjointed snapshots,” he shares, “memories across time popping up amongst this collection of thoughts about what it feels like to be this age and a musician.”

“Parader has legitimate confidence, it’s not me pretending to be anything I’m not,” Henson admits. “It’s maybe just me accepting that part of me is this. It's louder and it has those bigger, louder, rasher sounds, but not from a performative point of view. Maybe I'm accepting that that is a part of me as well.” As the record closes out, final track ‘Performer’ brings us full circle to the question of the album’s title – the two intrinsically linked. As he sings, “I’ll show my scars to you no matter who you are,” Henson acknowledges the emotional pains of being a musician in the public eye, with the relentless march of time a grudging ally in delivering his stories: “I am the parader. The person who parades around showing their wounds for a living”.

One of the biggest albums of the year comes from Jessie J. It arrives on 28th November. Don't Tease Me With a Good Time. Go and pre-order the album. Following on from 2018’s This Christmas Day, it is exciting to hear a new album from Jessie J. At the moment, she is awaiting treatment for breast cancer, so it is a very challenging time. Some of these lows and challenges she has experienced will go into the album. It is going to be a very personal album, but one that mixes emotions:

“Jessie J’s sixth studio album Don’t Tease Me With A Good Time - her first in nearly eight years - is a bold kaleidoscope of emotions, capturing the raw highs and lows of the last decade. Recorded over the past five years in Los Angeles, the album is emotional, unfiltered, and unapologetic, it’s music that wears its heart on its sleeve and demands to be felt at full volume. Working with a close-knit group of collaborators, Jessie J teams up with Ryan Tedder (One Republic, Beyonce, Adele), Jesse Boykins III, Los Hendrix (SZA, Brent Faiyaz), Marty Maro (John Legend, Anitta) and more, to create a body of work that effortlessly blends old-skool alt-R&B, upfront pop, and contemporary R&B.

The 16-track album includes standout singles ‘Believe In Magic’, the deeply personal ‘No Secrets’, and the euphoric anthem ‘Living My Best Life’, teasing the album’s broad sound and subject matter. The album closes with the power-ballad ‘Award Goes To’, which Jessie J gave a showstopping live performance of earlier this year at the BAFTA Television Awards”.

These are some of the best albums out this month. There are others, though I wanted to highlight a few that I feel you should order. Ranging from Jessie J to Mavis Staples through to Midlake and ROSALÍA, it is a broad and interesting month for music! So many greats in there. Even though December is a quiet month for album, I am sure I will put together a feature that spotlights the best…

NEXT month.